Interesting thoughts, Mats. I haven't spent the amount of time on this subject that you have, and I don't really have a theory regarding mandalas, per se. I have mixed feelings about the Jungian use of art therapies and active imagination. But I identify as an artist primarily, and a serious artist's relationship with his or her creativity and inspiration is much more complex than the Jungian art therapy models allows.
For an artist, I think artistic expression can at times function as a kind of "spiritual discipline". The artist's work can be a vessel for many of the things Jungians reserve for the analyst's office . . . as well as for other transformations of personality that spirituality and meditative inner studies focus on. That's not to say that artists aren't equally subject to self-deception as psychotherapy patients and "enlightenment seekers" are. I have long felt, though, that the kinds of amateur creativity Jungian analysis has always encouraged suffer for lack of a certain level of discipline or outer purpose. They lack consequence . . . and I've found that the more pivotal psychological/spiritual issues require vessels of consequence that intersect with the gravity of the "real world".
Still, I think art therapies are generally worth encouraging. They are not in themselves harmful or delusional, and they can be extremely useful. In my opinion, these things make useful tools for self-analysis (or analysis by a professional). They can narrativize complexes, allowing for greater clarity and insight into the creator. They are less likely to be "curative" or offer solutions to problems.
What many Jungians (and other spiritual seekers) have demonstrated, though, is that these practices can fairly easily be used as delusional indulgences. And Jungianism has no readymade tools for differentiating the functional from the dysfunctional uses of these creative expressions and fantasies. Jungianism also has a weakness for divinations that I find dysfunctional. And art therapies can easily be used for that purpose where the creator is predisposed to value divination.
In general, I am suspicious of the Jungian push away from psychology and toward spiritualism . . . the way it so often looks for spiritual/mystical/supernatural explanations for things rather than more mundane psychological ones. That Jung and Jungians are interested in things spiritual doesn't in itself bother or alienate me, but I take issue with devaluing psychological explanations and the function of psychology itself while simultaneously claiming psychological credibility. Is it analytical
psychology or analytical
spiritualism?
I see it as an exercise in bad faith for Jungians to claim to be "psychologists" while ultimately preferring spiritual explanations for what can be more reasonably/less fantastically explained psychologically. There is a misuse of Occam's Razor in Jungian thought that derives from a spiritual hunger, a hunger to transcend the natural. That kind of spiritual hunger is potentially dangerous and volatile. Many Jungians blindly treat it as a good in itself, and this particular blindness and ambition is the root of so many Jungian errors and complexes. As far as I have been able to discern, this whole issue is not even really addressed by the Jungian community.
It's not that spiritual hunger and inflation are not recognized by Jungians, but when they are, they are only recognized in others. Jungians are not asking: "How does my spiritual ambition delude
me?" Sometimes it seems to me that they persist as they do because they have a very simplistic (and very "Catholic") concept of spirituality as faith or belief rather than as practice or obligation to others. That is, they can be less serious about or personally responsible for their spirituality in a way that allows them to skip out much of the time on the problems of spiritual ambition. Spiritual ambition and discipline always move toward self-reflection or self-reckoning. The spiritually disciplined person can't survive on faith alone and must eventually be confronted with the validity of her/his construction of God/Other. Is that construction wholly objective and valid or is it (in part or in all) a self-gratifying fantasy or projection?
Any serious spiritual discipline must arrive at this debate and treat it with enormous gravity. Because eventually, the only thing that stands between the individual and the God (the object of desire, love, devotion, etc.) is the individual. The spiritual quest, if it ever had any validity, is a quest to know and relate functionally to the Other. If, as a spiritually disciplined individual, I have manufactured my God or projected my personal fantasies and wish fulfillments onto it, then I have entirely failed in my spiritual discipline, in my love and devotion for the Other.
And that is what must be defended against . . . what so much spirituality defends against: how much "me" is in my construction of God/Other. I used to refer to this as the "self-deification taboo” (i.e., recognition of our self-deification is defended rigorously by a taboo . . . and the Christ myth is the quintessential story of this). To know and to believe become at odds with one another. This is one of the components in my turn to atheism. I didn't want to colonize the Other with my stray projections of selfhood. I felt I had to choose between the Other and my selfish spiritual desires. I sacrificed my spiritual desires and ideas . . . and with them, all of the “familiar certainty" about the Other that spiritual belief and languaging systems afford us.
Because to be a good believer is to believe in a God/Other that encourages good believers. We want to be reflected back positively for our faith and devotion. But in that common scenario, "God" is really working for us, working to preserve and promote a particular self-image. That allows us, in either small or large ways (depending on the individual) to do harmful things or hold harmful beliefs with "God's approval". I didn't want God or Self to work
for me . . . and to allow that, I had to give up the fantasy of my status as one of the faithful (let alone "the most faithful").
That was all a process I was deeply entangled in back when I was gorging myself on Jung in my early twenties. But these were opposing movements, and that took years to work out in a more or less manageable fashion. My Jungianism, despite its other benefits, was an afflicting disease that complicated and problematized my "spirituality". I find the Jungian spiritual system to be broken . . . the Jungian psychological system significantly less so.
Much of this assessment has to do with the fact that a psychological system can be revised based on further data collection and (re)analysis, but a spiritual system must be either right or wrong, as it deals in Truths.
This is all pretty far afield from mandalas, but that is my personal background on mandalas and Jungianism. That's the root of my personal crankiness. I guess I’m just getting in the Christmas spirit with the holiday approaching
.