Sculpture occupies a surprisingly rich and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a therapeutic instrument, a window onto archaic religious consciousness, and a mirror of psychic structure. Otto Rank’s investigations in Art and Artist treat plastic art as the most primordial expression of the soul-concept: the human body preserved in stone answers the earliest immortality-ideology, and the figures that ‘grow out of’ granite echo birth-symbolism embedded in the stone itself. Jean-Pierre Vernant’s analysis of Greek statuary probes the kolossos—the uncarved stone double of the dead—as the paradigmatic religious sign, a device that must simultaneously inscribe absence in presence and mark the unbridgeable distance between the sacred and the human. McGilchrist reads Winckelmann’s rapturous encounter with Greek sculpture as evidence that the right hemisphere’s empathic, embodied mode of apprehension is the proper organ of aesthetic response. Papadopoulos documents Jung’s personal use of sculpture—both as a child and during the post-Freud crisis years—as a means of giving form to unconscious contents when language had not yet arrived. Dana and Porges appropriate the term for somatic therapy, deploying sculpting as a clinical technique in which autonomic states are externalised in bodily posture. The arc from archaic votive stone to polyvagal mannequin reveals the term’s dual valence: sculpture as the meeting-point of matter and invisible presence, and as a practical technology of psychic externalisation.
the problem is the same: by means of localization in an exact form and a well-determined place, how is it possible to give visual presence to those powers that come from the invisible and do not belong to the space here below on earth?
Vernant argues that sculpture’s defining problem—and religious function—is rendering the invisible visible, inscribing the otherworldly into determinate, earthly form.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
In Egyptian plastic art, and in ancient Chinese rock sculpture, the figure gradually grows out of the stone (‘stone birth’) as, for example, the granite statue to be found in the Berlin Museum of Senmut holding a princess; one sees only their heads projected from the mighty block of granite.
Rank interprets the figure emerging from stone as a literal enactment of birth symbolism, grounding the origins of sculpture in the primal trauma and the soul-concept.
, The Trauma of Birth, 1924thesis
plastic aims more at reality because it grows out of the desire to preserve the body as a whole; though all the same it does not reproduce an exact portrait of reality, because the belief in the soul permits, or rather demands, an abstract representation of the essential.
Rank distinguishes sculpture from painting by locating its root impulse in bodily preservation and soul-belief, which together mandate stylisation over naturalistic reproduction.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis
this book which is so important for the establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology is also an occasion for him to establish the theory of the use of painting, sculpture and dance … Their first outburst evidently came from Jung himself sculpting as a child, then from his experiences of calligraphy, drawing, and painting.
Papadopoulos traces Jung’s theoretical valorisation of sculpture to his own childhood practice and to its role in re-establishing contact with unconscious contents after the break with Freud.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis
A sculpture is a work of art that invites observation from multiple angles and perspectives. Sculpting autonomic states, either in a dyadic practice or with art mannequins, enables your client to bring an internal state to external physical form and safely explore the story of their states.
Dana appropriates sculpture as a clinical metaphor and method, using bodily sculpting to externalise and explore autonomic nervous system states in therapy.
, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018thesis
A sculpture is a work of art that invites observation from multiple angles and perspectives. Seeing the human form in a sculpture feels personal and familiar. Sculpting autonomic states … enables your client to bring an internal state to external physical form and safely explore the story of their states.
Porges’ polyvagal framework adopts sculpting as a somatic therapeutic technique exploiting the familiarity of the human form to facilitate safe internal exploration.
, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011supporting
Confronted by the genius of Greek sculpture, he is impassioned with a rapture somewhere between the erotic and the divine. The Apollo…
McGilchrist cites Winckelmann’s encounter with Greek sculpture as paradigmatic evidence that aesthetic response is an embodied, whole-hemispheric—and essentially erotic—apprehension of form.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
In the visual art of sculpture, by contrast with poetry and drama, we are specifically creating an image of something from the ‘outside’ – a degree of distance is of the essence, and hence we start to see empathy expressed there precisely in the other’s face.
McGilchrist differentiates sculpture from verbal arts by its constitutive exteriority, arguing this outward distance is precisely what permits empathy to register in the depicted face.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
In the form of an uncarved stone embedded in the ground in a wild landscape, the kolossos represents a manifestation of the power of the underworld in the eyes of the living.
Vernant analyses the kolossos—the unworked stone double—as the ur-form of sculpture, whose power resides not in likeness but in its function as a bridge between the living world and chthonic forces.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
the human body became perceptible to Greek eyes when it was in the flower of its youth, when it was like an image or a reflection of the divine. The first masculine statues in Greece are naked like the athlete in the field or palaestra.
Vernant inverts the usual anthropomorphism argument: Greek sculpture did not model gods on humans but revealed the human body as divine through athletic nakedness and sacred contest.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
The figures on the stela or the funerary kouros are erected on the tomb ‘in place of’ what the living person was, did, and merited. ‘In place of,’ anti, signifies that the figure is substituted for a person as his or her ‘equivalent.’
Vernant establishes the funerary kouros as a substitute-presence, the sculpture standing anti the living person as an equivalent that paradoxically affirms both the value of the life and the finality of its absence.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
Standing there without sight, speech, or movement (his legs are riveted together), Teiresias himself becomes a kind of kolossos, an image of death among the living.
Vernant shows how the immobilised, sightless Teiresias enacts the kolossos condition, collapsing the boundary between sculpture as object and the living body arrested by divine force.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
when he was entering his tenth decade, sculptor Henry Moore was asked how he could continue so richly and he replied that he had a passion so great that he could never chip it all away.
Hollis invokes Moore’s lifelong sculptural practice as a figure for vocation as inexhaustible passion, situating the sculptor as an exemplar of soul’s summons.
, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, 1993supporting
a prehistoric menhir—a rock that has been slightly carved into a female form (probably a mother goddess). Far right, a sculpture by Max Ernst (born 1891) has also-hardly altered the natural shape of the stone.
Jung juxtaposes prehistoric menhir-carving with Max Ernst to show how minimally-altered stone marks the threshold between natural object and sacred sculpture across millennia.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting
the richly complex plastic modelling of the face sinks into something symmetrical, regular, crystalline, ‘just as the plastic articulation of the building struct…’
McGilchrist reads late-antique sculptural portraiture’s shift from lifelike asymmetry to crystalline rigidity as a symptom of left-hemisphere dominance eclipsing embodied, empathic perception.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
the shadow parts that we cannot fail to encounter ourselves when we let ourselves be led entirely by the hands that draw, paint or sculpt.
Papadopoulos notes that Jung’s commentary on Oriental art stresses how sculpting, like drawing and painting, inevitably confronts the practitioner with shadow contents of the unconscious.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006aside