Art and the Creative Unconscious by Erich Neumann (review)

Books 251 the world of cognitive psychology than there is at the moment. It is a confusion of the worst sort to describe the computer as a 'tool' when itis an ~nalogy of the same sort as previous technological artefacts-steam engine governors, cameras, telephone systems. The computer may be more complex, and hence more apt as an analogy for the complexity of human functioning, but in no way is it a 'tool'. It would have been betterifthis introductory book had been titled The Premise of Cognitive Psychology, and then had dealt with the problems rather than promises. Art and the Creative Unconscious. Erich Neumann, tr, Ralph Manheim. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974. 232 pp. Paper, $4.95. ISBN: 0-691-01773-5. Reviewed by Donald Brook* The publishing history ofthese four essays by Erich Neumann, who died twenty years ago, goes back to 1951. It was first published in English in 1959as a collection in the Bollingen series. The present volume contains 'Leonardo da Vinci and the Mother Archetype' (f.p. 1954); 'Art and Time' (f.p. 1951); 'A Note on Marc Chagall' (facts of publication not stated), and 'Creative Man and Transformation' (f.p. 1954). The bibliography now includes seventeen items dated after 1954, the latest being Hull's translation of Jung' Psychological Types (1971). There is a short biographical note. If a publishing effort has been made to give the book contemporary relevance in its present format, it manifestly does·· not succeed. References to the holocaust in Chagall's essay are the most recent matters of substance, and the 'modern' artists mentioned are nearly all dead. The book contains no significant recognition of movements in psychoanalytic theory over the last forty years, and the justification for this must be a putative continuing imerest in what might nowadays be called the 'classical' Jungian interpretation of art, artists and imaginative invention. Readers will perhaps divide rather sharply into those armed with the ap.p~ratus of psychoanalytic scholarship (for whom, in any case, the original sources will be more relevant) and those innocents who seek enlightenment about the true nature of art from any authoritative source. This second group will divide again into those who broadly understand and sympathize with the Jungian position and wish to see it expertly applied to art, and those who are desperate for any account of art that will make it seem less mysterious. This last group willcertainly be the most disappointed, for the present account is no less opaque and puzzling than the phenomena it purports to elucidate. Indeed, much of the exposition is pitched at a level of sustained metaphor that may well seem as darkly incantatory as any medieval magical formula. For example (in explanation of the depressing condition of life around 1950, in 'Art and Time,' p. 114): "And the dissonance characteristic of the contemporary world has not only carried its dark, negative content into our consciousness but has concurrently brought about a general disintegration ofform. Behind the archetype of Satan and the blackness surrounding him, at whose impact the crumbling world of the old cultural canon has collapsed, rises the devouring Terrible Great Mother, tearing and rending and bringing madness. And everywhere in modern art we see this dissolution in the breakdown and decay of form." Initiates into J ung's system will know, of course, that Satan and the Terrible Great Mother belong to an elaborate psychoanalytical mythology, and have not been invoked ad hoc by Neumann to frighten us. But within that mythology, what precisely is their role? Sometimes it seems as if the 'archetypes' have a sort of real autonomous life as direct causal agents in human affairs, like Greek gods. Sometimes they seem to be explanatory in an analogical way-as one 'explains' the phases of life on a model of the seasons of the year. Never does it seem that an ingenious and colourful story will be lacking, for any product or person, although half the population will be entitled to some sense of deprivation. "Here we speak of the boy", Neumann writes (in 'Creative Man and Transformation,' p. 182)"whose creativity is easier to understand than that of the girl ... ". And not only...