How does making art access the unconscious mind?

The question carries a pneumatic temptation built into it: the phrase "access the unconscious" already implies a kind of ascent-logic, as if the unconscious were a vault one unlocks with the right technique. Jung's actual account is more unsettling and more interesting than that. The unconscious is not accessed — it erupts, and art is one of the forms the eruption takes.

Jung's most direct statement on the matter comes from his description of how active imagination first disclosed itself to him clinically:

My most fundamental views and ideas derive from these experiences. First I made the observations and only then did I hammer out my views. And so it is with the hand that guides the crayon or brush, the foot that executes the dance-step, with the eye and the ear, with the word and the thought: a dark impulse is the ultimate arbiter of the pattern, an unconscious a priori precipitates itself into plastic form.

The phrase "dark impulse" is doing real work here. The hand does not translate a conscious intention into visible form; it is guided by something prior to intention. The art-making is not a vehicle for the unconscious — it is the unconscious becoming visible. Image and meaning, Jung insists in the same passage, are identical: "as the first takes shape, so the latter becomes clear." There is no gap between the symbol and what it means, no decoding step. The pattern portrays its own meaning.

This is why Hillman's insistence that "images don't stand for anything" is not mysticism but precision. In archetypal psychology, the image is not a representation of something else — not a symbol pointing toward a hidden referent — but the psyche itself in its imaginative visibility. As Hillman puts it: "it is in the dream that the dreamer himself performs as one image among others and where it can legitimately be shown that the dreamer is in the image rather than the image in the dreamer" (Hillman, 1983). The same logic applies to the painting, the clay figure, the dance. The maker is not expressing an interior state; the maker is entering an imaginal field that has its own autonomy.

What art-making provides, technically, is what Jung called the transcendent function — the capacity of the psyche to produce a third thing from the tension between conscious and unconscious. Joan Chodorow, drawing on Jung's own formulation, describes this as a product "influenced by both conscious and unconscious, embodying the striving of the unconscious for the light and the striving of the conscious for substance" (Chodorow, 1997, citing Jung 1916/58). The art object is not a record of the unconscious; it is the site where the two registers meet and produce something neither could generate alone.

The neuroscientific account of this process is less poetic but not incompatible. Alcaro and Carta (2019) argue that the psyche operates "bottom up" and "inside out" — from anoetic, objectless affective states through noetic endogenous image-formation toward autonoetic verbal consciousness. Art-making, on this account, creates the conditions for a productive regression: a relaxation of the autonoetic (self-reflective, verbal) mode that allows the noetic image-forming layer to surface. The art object gives the affect an imaginal shape it could not otherwise find. Without adequate imaginal containment, they write, affective states remain diffuse and are projected directly onto the external world — which is to say, they become symptoms rather than symbols.

Von Franz's clinical observation sharpens this. In her work with dreams, she notes how the unconscious produces artistic inspiration not from the ego but from what she calls the soul's "underground and mysterious world" — the image of the play-acting birds in her patient's dream, which "shows particularly well how our artistic inspirations ultimately arise from our unconscious nature, not from our ego, as we often imagine" (von Franz, 1993). The ego's interference — the "gssh!" that frightens the birds away — is precisely the critical, rationalizing function that art-making must suspend.

The practical implication is that the medium matters less than the quality of attention. Jung's patients drew, painted, modeled clay, danced, wrote. What distinguished active imagination from passive fantasy was not the medium but the ego's willingness to enter the imaginal event rather than observe it from a safe distance. As Tina Keller, one of Jung's early patients, described her experience of dancing an inner image: "This very freeing event was much more potent than the hours in which we only talked. This was a 'psychodrama' of an inner happening" (Keller, cited in Chodorow, 1997). The body took the active part — not as a vehicle for expression, but as the site where the unconscious became legible.

The soul-making register that Hillman draws from this tradition insists on one further point: the work is not therapeutic in the sense of producing recovery or resolution. It is craft — the making of psychic matter. "Work makes matter," Hillman writes, "and psychic work makes the psyche matter" (Hillman, 1979). The art does not heal by releasing tension; it builds the vessel that can hold more.

  • Active imagination — the method Jung developed for conscious engagement with unconscious imagery
  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology
  • The transcendent function — Jung's concept for the symbol-producing tension between conscious and unconscious
  • Soul-making — Hillman's reformulation of psychological work as craft rather than cure

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1955, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche
  • Jung, C.G., 1976, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life
  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology
  • Hillman, James, 1979, The Dream and the Underworld
  • Chodorow, Joan, 1997, Jung on Active Imagination
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1993, Psychotherapy
  • Alcaro, Antonio; Carta, Stefano, 2019, The 'Instinct' of Imagination