ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 explores the book’s aims to unite the psychology of C. G. Jung and the arts-based research new paradigm in the social sciences and the humanities. Moreover it links the resulting Jungian arts-based research to the transdisciplinarity of Basarab Nicolescu. The result is a new research methodology for the transdisciplinarity that surmounts the limitations of the subject/object split of classical science. Jung shows the psyche to be spontaneous, responsive, autonomous and improvisatory. Such psychic creativity includes what we are aware of in ourselves, the conscious mind, and what we are unaware of except in dreams and other indirect manifestations, the unconscious. Jung considered examples of art and the relationship of art and culture in ways that arguably anticipate arts-based research and provide support for practitioners. Also Chapter 1 presents arts-based research as theorized in publications from the 1990s onwards, including four types suggested by James Haywood Rolling Jnr.: analytic or thinking in materials, synthetic or re-weaving discourses, critical-activist and improvisatory. By introducing Jungian ideas and basic concepts, Jung’s four psychic functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition prove helpful. Jung’s own ambivalence over art and his famous dispute between art and nature are also examined.
