Presented by
Society of Analytical Psychology
This talk, based on Warren Colman’s ground-breaking new book, is about how humans make symbols and symbols make us human. The starting point will be the lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel – the oldest figurative sculpture in the world (40,000 years) and the first visible evidence of the power of human imagination to create new ideas and forms that go beyond the material world, bringing into being the life of the psyche. The lion-man provides an illustrative motif for how symbolic imagination arises out of collective social activity in and through the world of material objects. This view updates Jung’s concept of ‘archetypes’ as pre-existent ideas in the mind with a view that makes symbols themselves constitutive of the human psyche. We cannot ‘think the spirit’ without a material world to think it with. How we do so is the subject of this talk.
