[df-subtitle](with Spanish subtitles)[/df-subtitle]

In this lecture, Sonu Shamdasani will explore the relationship between Jung's analytical psychology and the avant-garde art of the first third of the 20th century, with a particular focus on Dadaism. Specifically, he will discuss the connections and personal relationships between Jung's circle and that of the Dadaist artists, as well as the reciprocal influences between them.

Jung's ambivalent views on avant-garde art will be analyzed. He found it suggestive because of its discovery of individual and collective unconscious processes, but he also found it poor—poorly artistic—because of its lack of order and meaning, an order that he did see reflected in a certain way in mandalas, representations of human psychic organization.

It will be shown how, at a time when it was fashionable to link avant-garde art with that of children, primitives, and the mentally ill, analytical psychologists and Dadaists themselves participated in the debate. This was the case with artists such as Picasso and Jean Arp, the latter of whom was also interested in Zen, Taoism, and mandalas.

Sonu Shamdasani is a professor at the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (University College London) and director of the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines. He is a co-founder of the Philemon Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing the complete works of C.G. Jung. A historian of psychology and psychiatry, his research follows two intersecting lines of thought: reconstructing the formation of modern psychological disciplines and therapies from the 19th century onward, and reconstructing Jung's work based on primary archival materials.

He is the author of Cult Fictions: CG Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology (London: Routledge 1998); Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge University Press 2003); Jung Stripped Bare by his Biographers, Even (London: Karnac Books 2004); CG Jung. A biography in Books (New York: WW Norton & Company 2012); The Freud Files: An inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 2012), with Mikkel Borcj-Jacobsen, and The Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung's Red Book (W. Norton, 2013), with James Hillman.

Presentation by Ramón del Castillo.