The heart's cry for image: Painting and depth psychology

This creative dissertation project concerns the exclusion of image and the imaginal realm from mainstream Western culture. It is an examination of both the necessity for and the cost of the loss of image and the imaginal from our world. The subject matter is examined from the personal and the collective levels. The literature review, therefore, is divided in two sections. First is the personal perspective, including a discussion of the negative mother complex and impediments to a move from potential to competence. The second section of the literature review concerns the cultural perspective and includes discussions of active imagination and individuation, individuation through creativity, image true and false, the imaginal realm, “imaginal” as a category of art, painting in the United States from 1950–2000, CE, art and the unconscious, a worldview that excludes—the fallacy of psyche as singular and internal, the negative feminine/female in a woman, identity issues and contemporary female experience, and individuation and women.;The method is heuristic. This method was both part of the creative process and the means through which the project was examined. For the creative element, 25 paintings were done in an attempt to break through a decades-old block in the writer's ability to move from potential to realization as a painter. On the personal level, this block was a result of a deep negative mother complex in the writer. On the cultural level, this block is a reflection of mainstream Western culture's rejection of the feminine, the female, and, hence, psyche and the imaginal.;The questions this work asks are as follows: what is it for a person, for a culture, to seek and find image (in this case in painting) and its source (the imaginal)? What does a return to the imaginal produce? The assertion of this project is that without the imaginal realm and its expression (image) one cannot live a full human life. Without image and the imaginal, the world in which one struggles to be human is a context increasingly disconnected from nature, from soul, and from life.