Patricia Llosa’s Duende is a short film that circumambulates the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s small masterpiece “The Theory and Play of the Duende,” an essay overflowing with insights and themes of relevance to every student of Carl Jung. Many cultural historians are familiar with duende but hitherto most psychologists are not.

“Duende,” an untranslatable word from Roma folk culture of Southern Spain, describes a small mythological figure, a powerful and mischievous imp or demon who slips in through cracks. At the same time, it means something like “soul,” as in our souls, but also as in “soul music,” an evocation not of the ghostly but the embodied artistic genius of oppressed people.

Lorca’s essay is a kind of rhapsodic catalog of the Duende, which he describes as a dynamic, a dark, possessing power that originates in the earth, a buried spirit of black sounds, an intimate of death. The highest possibility for an artist is to be possessed and struggle with the Duende; at that moment comes a smashing and transcendence of form, and the eruption of spontaneous creation.

PATRICIA LLOSA, M.F.A., L.P. (USA/PERU) is a Jungian analyst in private practice in New York City. She earned her undergraduate degree in archaeology and art history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and did graduate work at The School of Visual Arts.  For more than 20 years she worked as an administrator and educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  A graduate of Marion Woodman’s BodySoul Rhythms® Leadership Training Program, a Woodman Foundation Faculty and Board Member, she has taught workshops in Ecuador, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Peru and Spain. Presently, she serves on the boards of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis Gradiva Awards and The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism and is on the faculty of the Assisi Institute and the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association.