ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 focuses on epistemology and methodology for Jungian arts-based research. Art is a material expression of spiritual value. It is therefore supported by C. G. Jung’s psychology of images as psychic manifestations materialized in painting, music, literature, sculpture, collage, dance, acting, film. Images can begin in dreams, intuition, bodily sensations, fantasy and imagination. Particularly significant are those images Jung called symbols, which are saturated with the collective unconscious. They therefore take arts-based research into a Dionysian and transdisciplinary epistemology and methodology. Symbols are animated in Jungian active imagination, amplification and myth into knowing. Patricia Leavy, and Barone and Eisner stress the role of empathy in arts-based research as a form of knowing. This can counter Jung’s distrust of aesthetics, even though he shows that art can manifest spontaneous intuitive knowing of what is previously unconscious in culture. Tacit knowing, as described by Michael Polyani, is also part of arts-based research and supported by Jungian individuation. Via intuition, Jungian symbols produce narrative in personal myth, the epistemological function of story, which is crucial for arts-based research. Alchemy and synchronicity are also intrinsically meaning generating; the chapter concludes with an example of Jungian arts-based research in alchemical mode by Cheri Steinkellner.
