Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault
at least on principle, Warburg did not stand on a thoroughly different ground from Jung. The Swiss psychologist, in fact, always declared that the focus of his work and concerns was the psychological development of the individual, the process of «individuation»[1] being the ultimate scope of analytical psychology. Yet, where Warburg expressed concern and saw a blind surrendering to the chaos, a renunciation to the heroic labors of human reason, Jung recognized the emergence of creative potentialities yet to be addressed and guided. He looked at the resurgence of paganism as an authentically creative phenomenon, to endorse with enthusiasm, even when the new pagan mysteries of the Century were already being orchestrated like ritualistic mass phenomena by officials with high boots and a red-and-black swastika, pinned on a sleeve. Warburg, although he too was captivated by the primitive and exotic energy of paganism, instead looked with concern at the terrible power concealed by the maenad behind the sensuous appeal of the young nympha. To his eyes, the demonic side of Dionysus was always present like an ominous shadow, even where the bursting of life from the sweet elation of honey and wine was most appealing. Yet, to him, it was not the Apollinean face of the Antike dreamed by Winckelmann that would have saved modern man from the sudden shock of the uncanny encounter with Dionysus, because no calmness and serenity could ever match the fury of the maenad. The sophrosyne winning the space and time for man to think was rather to be found within the very same manic gesture, in the instant of its suspension able to activate the «energetic inversion» of the violence and therefore the redemption of the raging impulse[2].
2. The Gods Who Will Save Us
According to Jung, since the Enlightenment disposed of the gods as obsolete,
Christianity had become unable to accomplish through symbols and rites the
psychological and cultural sublimation of the unconscious animal libido, which can be
regarded as the very foundation of science, technology and language – of anything
distinctively human, really. In fact, the bond between the imaginary world of symbols
© Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466
- ↑ C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types, ed. by Gerhard Adler & R. F. C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 448 ff.
- ↑ When the archetypal homicidal mother stopped and contemplated herself like in an image, she saw the knife in her hand. In that small instant, for the furious maenadic Medea who in another life was still grieving her Pentheus, dwelled the possibility to become the depressed fluvial god. On Medea and the energetic inversion of homicidal fury see A. Warburg, Mnemosyne, cit., table 73.
