Quadrant: The Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation

Volume XXXIX, No. 2, Summer 2009

From the Editor — Kathryn Madden

Following forth from the past three issues of Quadrant, which were dedicated most eloquently to the life and work of Philip Zabriskie, we now are asking our readers to pick up the red thread of a topic that is ongoing in debate among Jungian circles — the question of the meaning of “archetype” in 21st century thought. It is not unusual practice to ask our readers to refer back to previous issues but, in the case of such meaningful subject matter, the relevance of this debate is certainly of continuing importance among postmodern and more traditional voices of Jungian thought. Revisiting Gray Kochhar-Lindgren’s essay “Gesamtdatenwerk: Peter Greenaway, New Media, and the Question of Archetypes” (Quadrant 2007), Francis V. O’Connor challenges Greenaway’s view in his essay, “Archetypal Numinosity.”

Beverly Bond Clarkson brings the archetype of compassion and collective care into a dialogue with shadow projections of violence, in her article, “On Care and Apathy,” in a sensitive exploration of how kinship might be located in the midst of acts of evil.

Venturing into the field of neurophysiology in relation to analytical psychology, psychiatrist and analyst Raffaella Ada Colombo continues the theme of exploring archetypes in her seminal piece, “Limbic System and Religious Experience: Is There Correlation With Analytical Psychology?” Graciously, for those less familiar with the field of neurophysiology, she offers a glossary of terms at the end of her essay, while contributing new and provocative insights into the relationship between mind, body, psyche, and spiritual experience. Her work offers profound research in this ever-unfolding field that illuminates our understanding of Jung’s empirical and theoretical observations on the nature of the psyche alongside the origins of the symbolic life in the neo-cortical development of the human brain.

Paul Ashton’s article, “The Void Reader: A Look at Recent Jungian and Psychoanalytic Writing About the Void in Both its Negative and Generative Aspects,” surveys yet another archetypal manifestation — that of the void or abyss of emptiness replete with its many paradoxes. Ashton does not attempt to cover all the literature on this subject but focuses upon articles and books post-2000 that relate to void-states from a diversity of perspectives. He considers void-states from the perspective of developmental psychology, analytical psychology, a medical model, mysticism and religious experience, all the while maintaining the possibility of traumatic submersion in contrast to integrative emergence and synthesis of the unknown. He draws from numerous clinicians and authors ranging from Winnicott to Bion, Neumann to Fordham, Grotstein to Eigen, Dourley to Madden, maintaining his central point of view: making the unconscious conscious is of ultimate import in linking mind, body, and psyche to spirit.

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