| This dissertation is a case study based on artwork created as soul-making during an acute personal crisis. The daily paintings and poems changed the face of the crisis, infusing the circumstances with depth, meaning, and a sense of the sacred. A narrative serves to put the paintings into context, in an attempt to portray the psychic field wherein the imaginal, timeless domain of the soul and the time-space reality of everyday life intermingle and inform each other.;The survey of pertinent Jungian literature identifies the artwork as a spontaneous form of Jung's method of active imagination through which the ego establishes contact and interacts with personified contents from the unconscious. When used over a period of time, this method makes visible and propels the transformative process of individuation implicit in the psyche. Jung closely related both method and process to alchemy. An alchemical hermeneutic, therefore, the understanding of the soul as an autochthonous domain of reality, is a presupposition of active imagination.;Research into the archetypal symbolism of the imagery traces the alchemical themes contained throughout this series of colorful paintings. The research also discovers and recovers the presence of the archetypal Divine Feminine (aspects of the Goddess) and the Divine Masculine (images of the Horned God). Holding both of these perspectives, the alchemical and that of a Jungian goddess feminism, opens a field of inquiry that invites further research. |
