Living room with hardwood floor, bookshelf, window, navy green couch with striped pillows, a table lamp, a piano with sheet music, a cat sitting on the floor near an outlet, a chair, and sheets of paper with sketchnotes across the floor.

Book in progress:

The Visual Jung:

The Artist’s Journey Through Jungian Training

Logo with a profile of a woman and the text 'National Association for the Advancement of Psychiatric' and 'GRADIVA AWARD' around it.

An arts-based autoethnography of an artist training as a Jungian analyst in the years 2017-2026.

180+ pages of live lecture drawings captured during Jungian training in Boston and Zurich, as well as exercises, artwork, reflections, dreams and pedagogical commentary.

Justin Hamacher with glasses and a beard taking a selfie outdoors with a background of blue sky, clouds, and blooming trees.

Agent or publisher inquiries please use contact form. Analysts or AITs that would like to participate in research, please feel free to reach out as well.

Hand-drawn notes and illustrations.The notes include references to ancient symbols, archetypes of people who lead socially to isolated lives, and the symbolism of the ancients. There are sketches of people with spiritual and mythological significance, a diagram of a mysterious landscape, and small illustrations of a castle, death, an anchorite, and a 13-door gate. The notes also discuss concepts like unconsciousness, archetypes, atheism, and the limitations of modern Christianity.
Handwritten notes and sketches titled 'Dunbar Carpenter' with themes of psychology and spirituality. Includes diagrams of the mind, symbols, a graph showing emotional states, lit lanterns, and references to divinity, neurotoxins, and enlightenment.
Handwritten notes and sketches discussing Jung's work, including drawings of animals like a raccoon, raven, kestrel, and otter with attributes, notes on Freud, and diagrams related to Jung's ideas and concepts.
Hand-drawn notes and illustrations about symbols of transcendence, including psychology, mythology, spirituality, and personal development, with sketches of a horse, a man with a shield, India and Mars, a person with a guitar, and symbolic shapes.

Sample pages of live lecture notes from the training

Embodied live-lecture sketches, memoir, exercises, artwork, reflections, pedagogy

A pile of illustrated notes on a wooden table.

In the winter of 2018 I began my formal training as a Jungian analyst at The C.G. Jung Institute of New England. As I planted myself in the seat for the initial lecture that first day in Boston, I was ready, a major life shift had taken place to begin this training, I’d left the university where I was a professor and as I sat there, I was ready to pound out every word I could from the lectures furiously on my laptop. I would miss nothing, I would capture it all.

But, something happened in that moment - two roads materialized and a deeper part of me switched my path. It has made all the difference in my process of becoming an analyst…

By some good fortune I had my drawing supplies with me, and intuitively closing my note taking laptop, strangely I found myself drawing the first lecture in real time as the lecturer spoke… I hadn’t done that before and wasn’t sure exactly what would transpire on the page, but, I leaned in and released the thinking function, wandered in ink across the words and images that came from both the material world and the ether as the lecturer spoke. This was to become my path through training.

From that moment on I have drawn all my lectures in Boston and later in Zurich. This has led to a rather epic collection of 180+ large A4 size live lecture drawings (from some of the leading contemporary thinkers in the Jungian field) created in real time between 2018-2024.

These form the backbone of the book, with additional content being art-processing exercises, pedagogical commentary, reflections on the training itself, artwork, dreams and commentary on my life at the time. One could frame the whole process as autoethnography.

The drawings were done initially for my own learning, recollection and embodiment of the concepts, though once I shared them with Jungian analysts, other trainees, art fans, Jungian readers and friends energized support has come to encourage publication.

My hope is to model a pathway through training that is less thinking oriented, and at the same time more embodied and emotional than abstract. While there is some percolating aggregation of energy in containing knowledge to an esoteric realm, the tools available through Jungian work are simply too valuable to sequester and need to be shared outwardly in accessible and understandable ways. My public facing work in the analytical space is centered around crafting engaging ways the material can be encountered in a ‘living way’.

-Justin Hamacher

Gratitude to the Kristine Mann Library (C.G. Jung Institute New York / Analytical Psychology Club of New York) for their financial support of the book as part of the 2024 Kristine Mann Library Research Award. A boost in confidence around the unusual book.

Thanks to ARAS and my teammates Caterina Vezzoli, Linda Carter and Billy Brennan for our 2021 Gradiva Award winning work together as the Art and Psyche Working Group on the project: "Art in a Time of Global Crisis: Interconnection and Companionship". An important part of my learning around the healing power of images.

Book cover featuring a sketch of a fox holding a fish. The title of the book is 'Places We Left' by Jennifer Leigh Harrison.
A green cargo tricycle with a large wooden storage box parked on a paved path at the beach with grassy dunes and the ocean in the background. Tidelands Traveling Theater.
Group of people smiling and making peace signs at a dinner table in a cozy restaurant.
A collage of multiple pages of hand-drawn sketches and notes, featuring diagrams, illustrations, and text on various topics and ideas. Excerpts of pages from the book The Visual Jung: An artists Journey Through Jungian Training by Justin Hamacher.
City street in Manhattan during sunset with tall buildings, cars, and some pedestrians.
Collection of ink paintings on small paper sheets depicting animals and abstract designs, including a fox, a snake, a spider, and a bird, arranged on a wooden surface.
Three men standing together inside a workshop or construction site, smiling for the photo at the Kristine Mann Library in New York City.
A group of Jungian students meeting at the C.G. Jung Institute Zurich seated around two long tables facing each other. Donald Kalsched is presenting, some are taking notes, with a presentation board and large windows showing greenery outside.
A person wearing a blue cat mask and purple cape, holding a microphone and reading from a paper, standing next to a whiteboard with a drawing of an octopus, at an outdoor event with a sign that says 'Tidelands Traveling Theater' in the background.