The Visual Image, Creativity, and the Role of Memory in Healing

Abstract

This theoretical and interdisciplinary dissertation explores the role that the visual image plays in emerging consciousness along with the importance of creativity as an essential component in the founding and recreation of the world. Creative activity can be understood as part of a larger pattern of on-going growth and transformation in human consciousness that seeks a mythical fulfillment of its own. Changes in consciousness are most easily observed in the creative expressions of a culture including its language structures that reveal an increasing awareness of the role that human beings have as co-creators of their environments. Individual and collective experiences fundamental to human growth and maturation are imprinted in the psyche as memory traces that arise as images. An inquiry into memory suggests that there is a connection between trauma and the visual image. Both memory and forgetting play significant roles in healing which can only occur when forgotten or repressed traumas are brought to light as images and worked with consciously. The heuristic and phenomenological aspects of this dissertation examine the symbolic nature of the image through personal experience in conjunction with four distinct lenses that include the philosophical, the psychoanalytical, the art historical, and the mythological. An inquiry into perception and creativity reveals that the image making-capacity is a complex phenomenon connected to both unconscious cultural factors as well as complex neurological processes. In addition, an awareness of the invisible shared field foundational to emerging consciousness enables us to suspend attachment to the known in favor of cultivating new possibilities in an imaginal realm where the solutions to life’s deepest challenges potentially lie hidden. Understanding the increasingly important role that the emergent image plays in deciphering the movement of the individual and collective psyche becomes crucial as we find ourselves in a fragmented state of consciousness due to the breakdown of culturally accepted paradigms that are giving way to expressions arising from a broader field of consciousness. Attention given to the emergent images in the global arena allows us to cultivate cultural narratives that support sustainability and the recreation of world as sacred cosmos.