To Our Readers

In 2006, I visited southern India with several friends. The country, its people, its culture and art so captured my heart that two years later I returned to explore the northern areas. Agra was on the itinerary, and the day we set out, I was filled with eager anticipation to see the Taj Mahal. My grandmother had traveled there in the early 1950s and her photos long ago during childhood had conjured my imagination. The Taj Mahal’s history as a testimony to love, built in the seventeenth century by a husband to commemorate the love for his wife, was part of the story she told me about the famous monument. That day I remember being part of a large group of tourists. We slowly ambled through a dark tunnel that led to the area secured around the majestic white building. Many things went through my mind—how far I was from home, had my grandmother walked these same steps; I wonder about what it would be like to see for myself what had only appeared to me as an image, what it might be like for each of these individuals around me. As I emerged from the tunnel, light seemed to explode around the magnificent structure. The magnitude of the experience, the contrast of having emerged from darkness, the overwhelming beauty of its whiteness against the cerulean sky—as all of these factors synergized, and I felt vibrating reverberation throughout my body—I burst into tears—literally overwhelmed by beauty. Reflecting on that experience brought to mind a quote that I had used as the epigraph for a paper I wrote about Medusa (Olivetti 2016).

The beauty of the gorgon being extremely powerful and affecting the very vitals of the soul, stunned its beholders and made them speechless, so that as the story has it and everyone says, they turned to stone in wonder.

Lucian, Roman author

Lucian’s words captured the essence of my experience, something that affected “the very vitals of the soul.” To my mind, this is what art does when we allow it to touch us. Art paralyzes us with its beauty.

This issue of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche is laden with art in many forms. The manifestation of the creative impulse reverberates through the pages. Not only are there images that touch us visually, but also so many of the contributors to this issue dip into how engaging with images, creating images, and experiencing images leads us to deeper parts of ourselves. Laurie Phillips takes individuals into the museum where she guides them in a process to find answers to personal questions. Pamela Eakins uses Tarot images created by her and her mother to delve into personal inquiry. Barbara Barry uses the creation of images to become unstuck and Bridget Mosher helps individuals enact dream images to carry a dream forward in psychodrama.

Suzanne Greenberg teaches imprisoned young women that writing poetry can help them express themselves and find a pathway to healing. Kathleen Russ writes about how she finds beauty in the restoration of a chandelier that once hung in the San Francisco Jung Institute when it was on Gough Street. Mary Wells Barron takes us on a journey of “red” that wends through grief and beauty and to enhance the experience recommends we read the paper while listening to Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. And the richness and magic of music and sound is captured by Nickie Amerius-Sargeant in her essay, “Music: Archetypal Sounds of Life, Healing, and Transformation.”

Pacia Sallomi shares her inspiring and inspired images of roundabouts (Irish Roundabout with Bonsai graces the cover of this issue) and gives us a sense of her process as an artist. The roundabout is a mandala-like shape that, like a wheel with many spokes, has a circular form at its center with possibilities for many directions to diverge from that center. It appears to me as an image that resonates with Jung’s idea of the Self, a central archetypal pattern from which so many aspects of individuality emanate. The notion of the core of personhood is deeply felt in Brooke Laufer’s second essay about mothers who commit infanticide. And Mary Ayers takes us into the dire moment of our time and outlines the need for the preservation of our democracy and how this depends on an ability to deal with polarized forces. As a visual image that depicts the difficult tensions of our world, Stacy Hassen’s article “Beyond Borders: Where Two Seas Meet” elaborates on a moving photograph by Ana Teresa Fernández.

Poetry editor Paul Watsky has arranged for four wonderful poems by Matthew Zapruder whose imagery is so rich and, at the same time, beautiful and whimsical, reverent and playful. Reviews editor Helen Marlo offers two timely reviews. Patrick Mahaffy reviews Dennis Patrick Slattery’s The Fictions in Our Convictions, a book intended to help us in these troubled times, and Vineet Gairola reviews The Spectre of the Other in Jungian Psychoanalysis, a collection of papers that grew from a 2017 International Association of Jungian Studies conference that focused on the enigmatic and multifaceted aspects of the Other.

In the pages of this issue beauty is all around us. Even in the direst moment there are representations of beauty. It is my hope for each reader that they will find some aspect of beauty that will touch “the very vitals of the soul.”

This issue will conclude my brief return to Jung Journal as its interim editor. During this turbulent time I especially wish to thank Laura Soble, Jung Journal Committee chair, and the members of the Jung Journal Committee (Betsy Cohen, Liza Ravitz, Janice Teece, Audrey Punnett, and Jane Hargrave) for their hard work; the editing group for the warm collegial learning environment; Paul Watsky and Helen Marlo for their abiding editorial support; and LeeAnn Pickrell for her endless dedication and loyalty and whose relentless efforts make publication possible. I welcome Audrey Punnett as the next editor and look forward to the fresh life she will breathe into our beloved publication.