C.G. Jung Club of Orange County
Jung and Warburg:
Fragmentation and Individuation in Psychology and Art History
Presented by Glenn Harcourt, PhD
Sunday, 4 PM - 6 PM, November 15th, 2015
For both C.G. Jung and Aby Warburg, a German art historian and one of the principal founders of the discipline of cultural history, the period encompassing World War I and its run-up provoked deep psychological crises, which in Jung's case led to the production of the extraordinary Red Book or Liber Novus, and in Warburg's, to a period of institutionalization at Ludwig Binswanger's famous Bellevue Sanitarium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Looking primarily at the texts and illustrations of Jung's Red Book and Warburg's brilliant 1923 Kreuzlingen lecture, "Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America," we will survey the strategies developed by both men to mediate or resolve their sense of cultural crisis and personal fragmentation through the use of inner symbolic images. In this way, we hope to develop parallels between Jung's approach to understanding the process of personal individuation and Warburg's approach to understanding the place of the modern individual against the landscape of a deeply symbolic cultural history.
Glenn Harcourt received a PhD in the History of Art at UC, Berkeley. He has taught in the Art History Department at USC, and in humanities and social studies at the Oakwood School in North Hollywood. He publishes regularly on art and cultural criticism in the L.A.-based publications X-TRA and Artillery. He is currently preparing for publication a major paper delivered in Saint Louis at the symposium Vesalius and the Invention of the Modern Body in February 2015 and titled "Caetera Mortis Erunt: Everything Else Belongs to Death."
