C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: Art, therapy, and sources of creativity

An intimate relationship of Hermann Hesse to analytical psychology, based on his personal contact with C. G. Jung and his disciple J. B. Lang, belongs to the well-known topics from the history both of literature and of psychotherapy of the past century. The foregoing studies were, however, written in the time when Jung´s pivotal work, The Red Book, was not available to the public. The Book was written as a medieval manuscript where an important role is played not only by words but also by pictures which were painted by Jung himself. In this article I deal with the question how far it is possible to use Hesse´s texts, especially his novel Demian, for better understanding of Jung´s ideas, in particular his approach to images in the framework of the therapeutic process at the time when The Red Book was written. Besides, I will analyze the hypothetical pictorial sources which could have been used by Jung when writing The Red Book. These sources could have been the works of the Beuron school which could be known to Jung either from his own experience or from photos and postcards. The extensive visual culture of the time of the “print capitalism” could supply the visual inspiration both to Jung, and to Hesse.

Pavel Kalina, Faculty of Architecture CTU, Praha, The studio of art-therapy at the Paedagogical Faculty of South Bohemian University, České Budějovice, Czech Republic e-mail: kalina@fa.cvut.cz