Book:
The Visual Jung:
The Artist’s Journey Through Jungian Training
A visual and written exploration of an artist training as a Jungian analyst in the years 2018-2024.
180 pages of live lecture drawings captured during Jungian training in Boston and Zurich, as well as exercises, artwork, reflections, dreams and pedagogical commentary.
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.
Embodied live lecture sketches, memoir, exercises, artwork, reflections, pedagogy
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 as part of the 2024 Kristine Mann Library Research Award.
