THE CREATIVE INSTINCT: ART THERAPY AND CREATING OUR OWN RED BOOK

C. G. Jung’s own lived experience of working with art materials
and active imagination was essential in his ability to understand its
impact on the psychic development of his patients and to encourage
their own image-making process. This program will explore how
the psyche spontaneously reveals itself with the ultimate aim of
facilitating wholeness. Rather than traditional picture interpretation,
the lecture/workshop will cultivate a relationship with the spontaneous
images that are expressions of the psyche that fertilize our
individuation process. We will consider complexes, archetypal
energy, and symbolic content that amplify and document content
for reflection. This is not about being an artist, but about our
willingness to open to the creative instinct and the objective psyche.

Creating our own images to understand a clinical case is an

effective and alternative approach that facilitates a lived experience
of our countertransference. The aim of this process is to engage with
unworded aspects of the therapeutic process, accessing an interstitial
or third space between the objective and subjective psyche that may
reveal aspects of a clinical situation that was previously unknown or
unknowable. Working individually and in the group, we will
use forms of active imagination such as writing and response art
to explore clinical material that has kept us stuck, frustrated,
or perhaps asleep.

NORA SWAN-FOSTER, MA, LPC, ATR-BC, NCPsyA is an analyst
member of The Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and has
taught workshops and clinical seminars on Jungian topics and art therapy.
She authored several professional articles and the books Jungian Art
Therapy and Art Therapy and Childbearing Issues (editor).
Nora is the current North American Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Journal
of Analytical Psychology.