Chaz Gormley

The Return of the Primitive in Art

July 2006

The Return of the Primitive in Art

We live in a time of deep psychological crisis, a time when the collective myths and holy figures are dead. We search and experiment for ways to rebirth a reliable means of experiencing radiant, divine energies in a consistent manner, but frequently end more in despair than before. Previous cultures had reliable means for healing such soul crises, via achieving reconnection with the psychic energy alive in their myths and rituals. Creation myths worldwide included a Return to the Ancestral Beginnings as a means for personal and social regeneration in times of crises (Von Franz, 1995). As Jungian analyst and researcher Marie-Louise von Franz demonstrates in Creation Myths, this is an effective psychological process that activates inner archetypal energies of renewal. Every large growth in psychological development requires a destruction of the current level of consciousness, and a succeeding return to the primitive layer of the psyche, as a generative source for rebirth (Von Franz, 1995). Being in the imaginative time of the Beginning of the World with the founding ancestors of a culture, or re-experiencing one’s infant state, both symbolize an activation of the primitive psyche, can unleash forces that regenerate the psyche and the personality when experienced on a deep or ritual level. These energies express an independent, objective “other” that dwells within the unconscious psyche, an “other” that the ego must learn to relate to positively (Von Franz, 1975).

The archetypal emergence of the primitive level of the psyche is typically tied in with the personal or social experience of the Death of God (Von Franz, 1975). Historically, gods last about 1000 years (Jung, 1998), some longer, many shorter. At such times, the felt archetypal necessity of a Return to the Beginning manifests in the collective psyche of a group or society, or within an individual psyche through images and motifs of more primal life. Recent unconscious attempts to express this process again can be seen in such collective events as modern religious fundamentalism, the 1960s and 70s Return to the Land movement, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s 18th century notion of the noble savage and the Romantic movement’s celebration of such imagined pristine primitivity (Tarnas, 1991). The contemporary fascination with primitive energies, behaviors and motifs in painting, music film, and body art are more immediate examples. In any such pattern of group behavior, popularity can alter the initial largely unconscious-driven aspect of the behavior into a social fashion or fad, which is then pursued by the ego, thus limiting the psychological aspect and benefit.

The sudden and effective mass revival of primitive motifs in painting and sculpture, beginning in the early 20th century with Dadaism, Surrealism and Bauhaus exemplified this eruption of archetypal energies seeking a wiping out of modern rational consciousness, as it collectively expressed and imagined itself (for example, in the 19th century cult of rational perfectibility of person and society [Tarnas, 1991]), and replacing it with the return to a more immediate and powerful connection to living, primal energies of the psyche. Rock music, particularly aspects of punk rock, heavy metal, rap and hip hop, express elements of this fascination with crude behavior, with infantile grandiosity, with the still born, and with the divine child archetype (think Peter Pan or Harry Potter) – all while seeking some sort of desired rebirth or sense of connection to ancestral power, using irrational means of stylish blindness and violence to self and others. Movies such as the Lord of the Rings series, the Matrix series, Dances with Wolves, V for Vengeance, Whale Rider, Thelma and Louise and Fight Club demonstrate, at varying levels, the desire to wipe a wounded or dysfunctional state from existence and begin anew through a journey into darkness or primitive behavior, or a battle with the forces of a primitive morality. Politically, fantasies about, or work towards, Revolution expresses the desire for this archetypal event.

Modern tattooing and piercing in western societies (both typical of tribal initiatory behavior) also embody it in a very ancient manner. The body, functioning through an unconscious, organic life process, is intimately tied to primitive energies. Symbolically decorating the body with art, or physically altering it through tattoos, piercings, scarification, etc., is at least partly an attempt to contact primitive life energies, to experience, and to relate them more consciously and consistently to the ego. Such behavior is a use of contemporary means to try to psychologically re-experience a state of being that has always before been mythically and ritually accomplished. Past cultures lived in a regular contact with these divine and feeling-oriented energies, and sometimes expressed their connections in similar ways (i.e. tattoos, body mutilations, etc). The body was seen as a microcosm of the world – what happens in one reflects what is occurring in the other (Turner, 1987). Reaching for a way or articulating the feeling sense of the archetypal connection beyond Newtonian Rationalism, the artist Jean Dubuffet clearly expresses a modern artist’s primitive quest: “I like what is minimal, and also embryonic, poorly fashioned, imperfect, mixed. I prefer uncut diamonds, still in their matrix. And with their flaws” (Danchin, 2001, p. 34). This suggests an intuition that wholeness will be found via the not-yet-developed primitive.

This is not the Enlightenment quest for articulation and meaning through rational consciousness and well-articulated form. Living out T.S. Eliot’s early 20th century description of our contemporary Wasteland (Eliot, 1971), we are left to dwell in chaotic shards without an expectation that things might be ordered, meaningful, or even that they one can any longer feel fully alive:

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

(Eliot, 1971, p. 48).

Numbly racing through our cracked lives, people act out of undigested emotions seeking that pre-logical life which exists only in an imaginal language we no longer know. Our attempts to reach it appear childish or poorly formed and so prove mostly ineffective. It is precisely our highly developed one-sided scientific consciousness that constellates this breakdown in form and the compensatory appearance of irrational primitive energies (Hillman, 1979). We then try to convert these energies into pseudo-rational forms, resulting in violence and ugliness. People concretize the imaginal energy, and frequently confuse the experience of an essentially unconscious and invisible event flowing spontaneously through the psyche with an ego power move or desire. The ego then believes it controls the energy, and the results that arise spontaneously in the psyche.

Paradoxically, it is precisely the ego’s accepting its weakness, its wounded state, and living the pain of the longing for new life, that opens the ego to the powerful energies of the unconscious. As the founder of Archetypal Psychology, James Hillman (1979) says: “the prerequisite of renewal is acceptance of dependence and need (p. 39).” This need and longing is the psychological medicine that can bring one into a connection with the primal energies of the psyche. Through this contact with the primitive, both personal and social histories are psychologically redeemed and meaning again flows through life. At this point, the psychologically effective and the physically real reflect each other and each express the meaningfulness of life’s and nature’s essence. This mirroring expresses itself most dramatically in moments of synchronicity, i.e. coincidental events expressing psycho-physical meaningfulness (Von Franz, 1975). The ego’s contact with the archetypal primitive within the unconscious, and its surrender to this energy, is the necessary prequel to an inner rebirth of God, as well as the healing of our current social wounds (Hillman, 1979). So long as the ego fears the primitive, it will hold a magnetic fascination for us. This fear, when not worked through or when repressed, constellates primitive destructive behaviors, sometimes expressed via a variety of addictions: “drugs, food, sex, alcohol, spending money, whatever” (Woodman & Dickson, 1996, p. 25).

The ego’s woundedness leads to a search for a means of consistent contact with the primitive energies of the psyche; these unconscious processes can lead a person to artistic pursuits and, if the need is great enough, the irruption of primitive motifs in art. Sudden inspirations can be a significant part of this process. Archetypal energies can so seize a person that one feels like he or she is being ravished by a dark god or goddess. Art can be an effective way of working positively with these dark, primitive energies on an imaginal or symbolic level, marrying these invisible energies to concrete, articulated form. Perceiving the living process symbolically limits potential outer damage from the regression (that the constellated primitive represents) while opening the psyche more clearly to the progressive energies trying to manifest in the psyche. Concretizing and living out the Return to the Beginnings on an outer level only tends to be much more personally damaging. Current examples of myth-inspired concretizations that wound the psyche (some wound other people, as well) include religious fundamentalism and terrorism, holy war, an extreme interest in tribal or foreign religions, a back to basics educational approach that ignores critical thinking, dating an individual pronouncedly more primitive or inferior to oneself, etc. There are a number of associative behaviors that connect with this energy without directly accessing its mythical aspect: self-destructive and suicidal behavior, eating disorders (which are trying to return the body to an earlier, actual or fictional, state), addiction, violent crime, etc. The need for these concretizations can be eased or erased by an on-going connection to primitive energies. Art that explores primitive motifs can provide this connection.

Art represents a symbolic means to represent an essentially unconscious process that is exploring and channeling the primitive darkness trying to arise. When a person in contact with a living primitive level of the psyche, rational consciousness fades, or temporarily dies. This can be a very painful or damaging process, thus the terror felt about contacting the primitive. Art becomes, by necessity, the new means of proceeding through this endarkened world, replacing the lamp that reason provided in the everyday world of Newtonian mechanistic or positivistic thinking that cared only for the light. The one-sidedness of such a viewpoint easily constellates the primitive shadow and projects it onto the environment, which is one of the main reasons for the political and environmental destruction we see all around us. Art lives in and moves through the irrational and the chaotic, forming these energies into meaningful structures for the personality, and sometimes for the society. Examples of art profoundly shaping a society include Classical Greece, Renaissance Italy and Goethe’s Germany (Tarnas, 1991). Through its shaping of form and consciousness, art can transform the primitive darkness in the psyche into a new spiritual light to guide oneself and others towards wholeness and the feeling of liberation (Adler, 1979). Without such a lamp, an irrational destructive urge may take hold of the psyche – a primal revenge manifests for the centuries of rationality’s inflation. Art marries unconscious darkness to the light of ego conscious. In this marriage lies the regeneration of the psyche, society and life – this is the symbolic erection of the new world. The rebirth comes with a renewal of feeling and vitality, and a sense of being called to the work (Von Franz, 1975). Art can teach the ego how to differentiate between the essential and the superfluous, not according to rational strictures, but verified by lived experience. Once the ego has experienced the power of primitive energies to meaningfully shape life experience, the belief in scientific causality, as the only way to describe the world, is shaken forever (Woodman & Dickson, 1996). The primitive energies of the psyche, when functioning in a positive manner, move the focus of life back from machine to organism, from the soulless environment of rationalistic dogma to the individual as part of an organic life community. When functioning negatively, these primitive energies can transform the person into a pure mechanical automaton, with a tendency towards violence or exploitation of others. Essentially, as the ground level of the psyche, the primitive layer functions in a, non-causal, homeostatic, self-regulating manner (Adler, 1979), thus it can appear either positively or negatively. Its style of manifestation depends on the attitude, and the needs, of the ego or the social group. The primitive connects with “an order that emerges [from within the psyche] instead of being imposed [by outer rules or institutions]” (Woodman & Dickson, 1996, p. 39), and reflects the inner order alive in humans and all other life forms.

For primal art to function in a progressive manner, the ego must remember that

it is only the helper, the articulator of a dynamic that originates in, and is guided by, the unconscious Self (Adler, 1979). The ego is the eyes and hands of a divine energy. The directing mind lies in the Self. We must risk the descent into darkness to contact – to birth – the Self, but such a descent into the primitive is always precarious and life threatening because the archetypal part of the psyche is larger, more ancient, and more powerful than the recently created Western rational ego (Von Franz, 1975). Exploring primal energies and forms in art gives the ego a relatively contained means of accomplishing reconnection with the base energies of the psyche, which are irrational and cling to the darkness. If the descent is successful and the ego follows the art where it wants to take the person, rather than using the art to satisfy the ego’s inflationary or narcissistic trends, or what brings fashion or profit to the ego, than a new birth can take place. This process has been repeatedly envisioned and sought for throughout history by experimenters and seekers of depth experience. Using primitive motifs in art is a beginning stage in the magnum opus of self-rebirth. It is a modern version of the alchemist’s psycho-chemical attempts to create the philosopher stone through first enduring the nigredo (Von Franz, 1975), the religious mystic risking the dark night of the soul due to her loving desire for communion with god, and the primitive tribesman’s quest for a vision of a sacred animal or spirit through extreme privation, to name just a few. If one surrenders to the living psychic process, after connecting with the primitive darkness, the path may eventually ascend, like a midnight sun rising to bring forth a new, ambivalent day, into a life where both lightness and darkness, conscious and unconscious, modern and primitive, masculine and feminine energies are known, respected, and lived creatively. This is the archetypal promise of the Return of the primitive. This dangerous road is long with many pitfalls. Ego annihilation and the identification with primitive impulses are two of the greatest dangers. However, if one survives the exploration, the experience and the knowledge of primitive energies of the psyche and world, one has found a royal road to rebirth. One may then channel deep energies of the psyche into the world. Additionally, one may manifest the archetypal role of healer. An old saying clarifies this dynamic: only the wounded healer truly heals. That is, only those who have lived through the archetypal experience of the primitive darkness, and can work with it creatively, can guide others. The increasing use of primitive motifs in a variety of art forms, as well as the growing popularity of such art, clearly shows that more and more people are becoming acquainted with this irrational road to rebirth.

References

Adler, G. (1979). Dynamics of the Self. Boston, MA: Coventure, Ltd.

Danchin, L. (2001). Jean Dubuffet. Paris: Terrail.

Eliot, T. S. (1971). The complete poems and plays: 1909-1950. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, Publishers.

Hillman, J. (1979). “Senex and puer” in J. Hillman (ed.), Puer papers. Dallas, TX: Spring

Publications, Inc.

Jung, C. G. (1998). Jung’s seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, abridged edition.

(James L. Jarrett, Ed.). Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.

Tarnas, R. (1991). The passion of the Western mind: understanding the ideas that have

shaped our world view. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

Turner, V. (1979). “Betwixt and Between: the liminal period in rites of passage” in L. Mahdi, S. Foster

& M. Little (eds.), Betwixt and between: patterns of masculine and feminine initiation. La Salle,

IL: Open Court.

Von Franz, M. L. (1975). C. G. Jung: His myth in our time (William H. Kennedy, Trans.). Peru, IL:

Open Court (Original work published 1972).

Von Franz, M.L. (1995). Creation Myths (Rev. ed.). Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc.

(Original work published 1972).

Woodman, M. & Dickson, E. (1996). Dancing in the flames: The dark goddess in the transformation of consciousness. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc.

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