Embodying Eros: A Jungian Arts-Based Research of the Erotic Imagination

Abstract

This production style dissertation includes the exploration of the relationship between women’s erotic imagination and their individuation journey through living inquiry, a practitioner-based research method marked by the creation of 20 original works of art. Bolstered by the philosophical underpinnings of a Jungian arts-based research (JABR) methodology, the artist–researcher approaches archetypal images of her erotic fantasies from the inside out by developing a procedural method that identifies psyche’s images, engages the body through gestural practice, and finally uses a creative medium, in this case, collage, to anchor emergent themes into a collective field. The transdisciplinary nature of the inquiry is supported by the JABR epistemology that counters a traditional hierarchy of knowledge with analytic, synthetic, critical activist, and improvisatory methods of meaning-making to challenge pathologizing and reductive narratives ascribed to women’s erotic fantasies and the potency of their erotic bodies. The themes explored in this inquiry traced an intuitive path through mythological and archetypal dimensions of women’s erotic imagination including menstrual consciousness, embodiment theory and practice, Dionysian dynamics of dismemberment and re-membering, the alchemical symbolism in the cycle of death and rebirth, the role of imagination in the development of women’s creative agency, and the connective force of Eros.