ABSTRACT
This chapter problematises the closer than average proximity psychotic personalities have to archetypal themes and characters, explicating these individuals particular affective engagement with impersonal, collective, and cultural transitional objects. It explains the three different methodologies utilised to analyse the eight artworks selected in this book: (1) Jungian amplification, which circumambulated artistic images, showing how, in the development of consciousness, individuals recapitulate motifs that are fragments of the history of humanity, (2) a perspective that analysed PMA operations, which scrutinised images as concrete enactments of mental states and emotional background, embracing them as communicating affective, implicit, and procedural memories and symbolic thought, and (3) a hybrid of these first two methodologies, adding to their stance post-Jungian knowledge, and object-relational understanding. Finally, it argues how PMA’s and the Jungian perspective on psychic conflicts should dialogue, emphasising that, even though their stances focus on opposed poles of a same dynamic whole – the relationship of personal with impersonal aspects of experience – as the propeller of non-concious and unconscious contents, there must be a complementarity in approaching images as carriers of fantasies that communicate both the personal wounding or pride that moves individuals, and the collective imaginal reality that is partially signalised by these fantasies.
