Origin and Features of Psychical Creations in an Ontopoietic Perspective

Abstract

In psychology of depth, the unconscious is often opposed to consciousness, as it is the place of what goes beyond rational thought, but at the same time – both in Freudian psychoanalysis and in Jungian analytical psychology – the unconscious is the first cause of consciousness, and also the unlimited memory of culture; in it we can find the numerous symbolic forms through which human thought can express itself. In fact, the productions of collective imagination can be considered an expression of the development of “forming spontaneity” which is rooted in the wide field of phenomenology of life, that is to say “the universe of human existence within the unity-of-everything–there-is-alive”; both the “inward givenness of the life progress common to all living beings” and “cognitive processes of human mind” (in other terms eidos and fact, logos and mythos) simultaneously spring from it. In fact, the logic of self-individualization of life can express itself in human creative actions, by referring to the pre-human; in such an outlook, consciousness and reason appear to be in a close relation to the “world-of-life”, as in the archaic periods of human history. We have to bear in mind that both dream phenomena and fantastic creations – associated by the original creativeness and by the transformer energy characterizing them – can be analysed and interpreted only through their stories; this explains the fundamental function of figurative (metaphorical and symbolic) language, which is used in them. According to psychoanalysis, symbols are visual representations of unconscious contents, a sort of phylogenetic heritage referring to ontogenesis; in analytical psychology they become real teleological factors, as the archetypes of the collective unconscious (“a priori” forms common to the whole human kind) can find expression above all through symbols.