Symbolic Mental Representations in Arts and Mystical Experiences: Primordial Mental Activity and Archetypal Constellations(Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies)

Symbolic Mental Representations in Arts and Mystical Experiences explains how the individual’s conceptualization of reality is dependent on the development of their brain, body structure, and the experiences that are physiologically confronted, acted, or observed via learning and/or simulation, occurring in family or community settings. The book offers support for Jean Knox’s reinterpretation of Jung's archetypal hypothesis, exposing the fundamentality of the body – in its neurophysiological development, bodily-felt sensations, non-verbal interactions, affects, emotions, and actions – in the process of meaning-making. Using information from disciplines such as Affective Neuroscience, Embodied Cognition, Attachment Theory, and Cognitive Linguistics, it clarifies how the most refined experiences of symbolic imagination are rooted in somatopsychic patterns. This book will be of great interest for academics and researchers in the fields of Analytical Psychology, Affective Neuroscience, Linguistics, Anthropology of Consciousness, Art-therapy, and Mystical Experiences, as well as Jungian and post-Jungian scholars, philosophers, and teachers.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction to the understanding of archetypal constellations through the lens of Primordial Mental Activity. Part I How discussing the structure, affective charging, and functioning of the body within the occurrence of archetypal constellations can support the developmental view of archetypes. 2. Exploring the origins of symbolic thinking: the intelligibility of the sensing and feeling brain. 3. PMA (Primordial Mental Activity): The affective-somatic unconscious. 4. Archetypal imagery as mainly channelled by mental representations that mediate the here-now from partial simulations of the past, awakening or reliving the affectivity that marked it, and the background cognitive capacity that (by then) targeted its metabolisation. 5. Affects, sounds, images, and actions: addressing the developmental formation and activation of archetypes through the consideration of image-schemas and PMA. 6. The comparison of PMA to the fantasy-thinking mind. Conclusion to Part I. Part II – Impressions and expressions of the body’s mind in mystical experiences and Arts. 7. Proximities and distances between mental illness and mysticism. 8. Mystical experiences of the Ayahuasca consumption – the Brazilian Santo Daime doctrine and European neo-shamanism. 9. Witnessing PMA operations: the activation of archetypes in [neo]shamanic practices. 10. Arts and psychosis: Comprehending PMA expressions in their association. 11. Interpreting PMA in artistic creations: primary metaphors on canvases. Conclusion to Part II. Part III – Affects, image schematic compounds, and patterns of behaviour – Links between body, concept, and culture. 12. Conclusions: Understanding affective, non-verbal matrices of the making of meaning. 13. Further research.

About the Author :
Giselle Manica is a clinical psychologist, a graduate of the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Psychology, with an MSc in Social Psychology from the same university, an MA in Mysticism and Religious Experiences, from the University of Kent/UK, and a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex/UK