Flex Mentallo

And so before any of the great texts on psychology he later wrote, he created the Red Book, his "confrontation with the unconscious" a labor of some 16 years, on which all of his later work is founded.

And another:

Here is a mandala painted by one of his patients:

He came to the opinion that such dream images were really mandalas - symbols of the self, often manifest not when the dreamer is at one with the universe, but quite the reverse, when they are striving for that sense of completion and belonging in a time of crisis. He began to paint mandalas, of which this was the first:

He realized that this dream represented his own struggle for wholeness.

Haeckel's work made a lasting impression on Jung, who as a young man, recalled a vivid dream in which he saw a radiolaria three feet across.

They seemed like creatures from an unknown and alien world.

Many of these had never been viewed before, including remarkably accurate renditions of micrsoscopic radiolaria.

The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures.

His work is no less obsessive than Steffen’s. He was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and the kingdom Protista.

Just as Steffen obsessively documented the natural history of his inner world, revealing the alien nature of his fragmented self, so Ernst Haeckel created extraordinary images of natural life forms at the turn of the 20th century.

Yet Steffen was so prolific his sister feared the excess of stored works would incite a fire and destroyed most of them. To this day the only works by Steffen that remain were those crafted between 1989 and his death in 1995, of which there are over 2,000.

Throughout his lifetime Steffen created thousands of drawings, most of which he would roll up, tape and store in his basement.

His alien creatures all exist in a state of metamorphosis -- somewhere between infancy and old age, male and female, plant and animal.

When Steffen was released he continued his obsessive creations, drawing between one and three works a day, mostly on brown wrapping paper.

For the next 15 years Steffen lived in a mental hospital, undergoing electroshock therapy for schizophrenia while compulsively making art.

Before looking at the wonders of Jung's Red Book, here by way of contrast and comparison are the astonishing works of Charles Steffen, who was studying drawing, art history, and photography at the Illinois Institute of Technology when he suffered a mental breakdown in 1950.

Hence the various themes I've explored in Serendipity reach a convergence of sorts in these forthcoming posts.

I am an artist but I work in mental health, and I do not think we can. And I think the reason is that we are terrified at what mental illness represents. Yet how much everyday does stress in our daily lives increase? How close does each of us come on any given day to that point when we can no longer maintain the mask of conformity Society - any Society - requires of us?

In this agonized study Jung strove to come to grips with the reality of the modern world. Not in it's glittering surfaces, but it's inward experiences. He fought to come to terms with the contemporary experience of inner fragmentation, which he felt was born of the loss of God in favor of the discoveries of science. Arguably, he and Freud brought psychology into being to heal the split in the modern psyche. A split not commonly experienced by people living in supposedly primitive societies. And where if an individual falls mentally ill, they are not stigmatised or ostracized as all too commonly experienced in Western society. Where indeed the entire community gathers round to nurture and protect it's own. Could we say the same?

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Carl Jung's most seminal work is also a "Red Book"! It has been called the most important book on psychology ever written. And yet until a facsimile of this hand-created work was finally produced in 2009, it had been seen and read by barely a handful of people.

When I began this thread I thought to call it "Tales from the Island of Serendipity" little realizing how prescient this choice would prove to be. Insofar as I have been able, this has been an authentic journey with an unscheduled itinerary. The research for given themes has persistently carried me into unknown waters, sometimes, as now, dark and inchoate. I feel no more at home here than anyone. Nor did Carl Jung.

The search is also, in a certain sense, about abduction, in the way that Jodi Dean refers to it. Not as literal abduction by sci fi aliens born of popular culture, but as a dark and terrifying aspect of the world we create, think we control, but do not understand. And it is this widening gap the alien walks through. For the alien is within us all.

My everyman quests in search of transformation, in a world turned upside down.

The red book is something I began some 15 years ago. It is an unfinished book of small studies, hypothetically for larger paintings. Many of them are incomplete, or barely started.