A Jungian Approach to Engaging Our Creative Nature

Embracing our creative nature as the heritage of all, this book seeks to foster the creative imagination by nurturing a fertile relationship with its source. Robert Sandford offers an alternative approach, taking up Jungian theory as arising from and embodying this sort of relationship. In the middle ground of imagination, we can engage creativity’s source on its own terms in image, metaphor, symbol, myth and dream.

This book demonstrates how Jungian and archetypal psychologies, by treating image and imagination as central, can foster our creativity and bridge the gap between a Jungian understanding of art and creative processes. Created works incarnate the engaged, relational, imaginal acts that birthed them. This approach also yields invaluable insights for art therapy. Sandford seeks to heal the collective ailments that alienate us from our creative nature, such as the hegemony of literalism and our relationship with things, the body, the archetypal feminine, nature and cosmos. Uniquely, he brings together theory and practice by taking theorizing as a creative practice and, rather than offering procedures, opens an imaginal landscape where the creative impulse can arise and we can respond. Emphasizing the relational value of ideas, he draws from Jung and Hillman in a way that spans the work of both.

This unique and innovatively interdisciplinary book will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, creativity, expressive arts, embodied transformation, archetypal studies and arts therapies. It will be of immense interest to Jungian psychotherapists, analytical psychologist, Jungian art therapists and sandplay practitioners.