[Marianne]

Hi Norland, and thank you for going into all the furthering(s) on your thoughts, including in regards to my response. I particularly like this that you wrote: “Although the personal aspect can play a positive role in the creative process, the very transcendent nature of art forces us to look beyond the dimensions of personal feeling, to open up our private selves to an archetypal realm of universal human experience.”  Perhaps it is that for great art to be great, it must have that archetypal element to it and not just the deliberate employment of all the right motifs and techniques inasmuch as it cannot have too strong a personal subjectivity that would prevent its universality, its gift that makes it resonate with others.  While our individual lives all have archetypal content, for art to be great en masse and not just to the artist him/herself, it cannot be so peculiar (subjective) to ourselves that it fails to reach the archetypal content with which others also resonate, for then it fails the universality and universal appeal.

On  “Carl Jung—who famously distinguished between the personal and collective unconscious as the difference between the subjective and objective psyche—also develops this general insight into the profoundly impersonal nature of art and its peculiar mode of transcendence.”  I do feel that the collective psyche can at times be subjective and not only objective or that the psychic pool can be affected by subjectivity, such as in a social or ethnic complex (re: Jung’s complex theory). By “objective” I see the collective as an “object” under which the personal unconscious is “sub” (as in “sub”-jective) or “submerged” or “under.” I see this object as an archetypal pool, so that when we take our selves, our persons, for a dip in the pool we are submerged in the watery pools of the Neptunian archetype. After all, when we are subjected to something we are made to experience the subject. So I see the subject matter if we have experience with it is something with which we can in a roundabout way have more subjectivity.

I tend to like the zest of the personal within the art world and some of the quirks that make things different; unless it is a painting in the genre of super-realism, for instance, it is the personal interpretation of the archetype which so often makes the work of art unique; it is as if we can then see an object through so many different eyes and hearts, yet there will be something archetypal within each still life painting of a bowl of pairs that that one pair of eyes or one heart will win the best film or what have you award, due to the largeness of the archetype. I tend to not take away from the value of the personal flair or eye for things. I could stand next to Dali and paint a clock and mine will not have the wonderful personal touch and flair his famous wilting clocks do. Even if I tried to make my clock wilt (now this is beginning to look/sound like a Dr. Suess book!) it will not wilt with such style. However, we are able to say that his type of genius may have came from the daimon and not from him personally, and so sometimes I see this as a matter of semantics. The daimon came through him — then we need to ask, is talent his or is it the daimon’s and is the daimon the guide assigned to his soul? I do not believe that Eros is often objective in the sense of intellectual objectivity. Maybe there is the love object Eros can sometimes be obsessed with–which is not very objective, but subjective. I like how you mention that Eros might be the force which runs through psyche–since Psyche loves Eros so as she struggles through so many obstacles to be with him she has him always on her mind!

I also see this also as a matter of semantics, then–because I also see what you are saying about not making it overly personal. I suppose that is what we have journals for–however, when people are famous, those get published also!

Thank you so much for an interesting read!