Overview

Written by James P Dowling, based on the work of Steve and Pauline Richards

In the words of Steve and Pauline Richards, creative writing, music and art are all responses to the human instinctive pressure to create. Although their surface structure representations differ, they all have one thing in common - they are superpositioned with a deep structure narrative. The Renaissance was a time, in which human potential unleashed itself, producing the most distilled representations of consciousness the world had hitherto ever seen. As we mentioned in Rebirth of the West, our world, today, is on the cusp on a new Renaissance - the necessary field-reversal to our cultural catabolism. The truth of who we are, has already been laid out, by the masters of our past: let us step back in time for a moment, to learn how we can re-orient, for the future...

In this video, Steve and Pauline Richards unpack the deep-structure representational psychodynamics behind three paintings by the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli - The Birth of Venus, Primavera and Pallas and the Centaur. The first two, lay claim to being amongst the most famous in history: truly 'fascinating' (to borrow a 'Mesmeric' word), to generation upon generation of critics and historians: and therein, lies the hint. To become arrested by an image - paralysed by projection - is to become trapped at a doorway. To pass through, is synonymous with understanding - to lay all personal complexes aside, and allow the superpositioned Platonic, to meet us, from within.

Everything in this video comes directly from the work of my mentors - Steve and Pauline Richards - and their 43 years (at the time of recording) of front-line clinical experience, each. All of the this video's content, derives from recent very high-level seminars Steve and Pauline presented, as part of their professional training course in Psycho-Systems Analysis.

Let us begin, with a introduction, covering all of the necessary theory to understand, before moving onto Steve and Pauline's dialectic unpacking of the meaning of the three painting.


The Psychodynamics of Creativity

Someone who is yet to encounter their own creativity, might believe that authentic art is carefully created by the ego. This, is not true. The ego certainly plays a role at the point of delivery, but the "form" is generated by the field of the person - that is, their so-called unconscious. Thus, to understand it, we need to approach it through appreciation of what Steve and Pauline have termed "representational psychodynamics". To use their metaphor, let us consider a work of art like Botticelli's Venus, as being like a dream: a visual narrative, in which nothing is hidden - everything is right in front of you - but, the meaning, is latent. Hence, it requires conscious unpacking, just as one would do with a dream. Rather than going straight to the representations within the painting, we should first begin, with the context: everything that is Superpositioned within the artist's field.

To state the obvious, Sandro Botticelli was a man - yet, this is a fact very often ignored, in much interpretation. He was a man, let it be said, who was born circa 1445, and spent the vast majority of his life in the Republic of Florence, during the Renaissance. Both of these facts - Botticelli's biology, and the times in which he lived - need to be considered, first.

The Platonic Field - the ontological, organising, in-forming field of superpositioning information - underlies the form of the genome, and, organises it's molecular and field-level relational dynamics. It's algorithmic intent, is the expression of Platonic information, through evolved psychobiology. Practically, this entails the ontogenetic unfolding of the anticipations of the lifespan, solving first the Freudian (instinctive) and Adlerian (psychosocial) imperatives of adaptation. Along the way, this inevitably involves the generation of complexes. Successfully navigating this, however - what Jung termed the task of the first half of life - is not synonymous with a ceasing in the development of the personality: the superpositioned Platonic pressure continually pushes towards the limits of it's telic completion in any one given person: that is, for the person to become as conscious as possible.

This, is the informational landscape - described in great detail in our Rebirth series on Jung To Live By - that informs the superpositioning of psychodynamics into creative representation.

So, right at the core, the Platonic Field organises the meta-instincts - including both molecular genomic and Sheldrakian-field-level representations - as the wellspring of the creative expression. This meta-instinctive information contains the superpositioned telic aim of the Platonic intentionality of the lifespan - thus, apperception of this can be gleaned by working through the surface-structure representations of, as per Botticelli, the paint-on-canvas. Steve and Pauline discuss exactly what the specific meta-instinctive representations in three paintings are, in the video, but, before we get there, we need to discuss something absolutely essential:


The role of Complexes in Creativity

Along the way of creative expression onto the canvas, that meta-instinctive, platonic information would have had to have passed through the field of complexes: both personal, and cultural, superpositioned together.

Although the Renaissance was a time of immense creative development, it was heavily presided-over by the Catholic Church. Artwork that was considered in any way to potentially entice one towards sin, was not allowed. It's believed, that Botticelli himself came under literal fire for this: it's reported that many of his mythological paintings were burned in the "Bonfire of the Vanities" of 1497. Botticelli, like many of his contemporary artists, would thus, have to have disguised what he was doing, under Darwinian survival pressure against the church. Hence, as is most obvious in Primavera, it's possible to see surface-structure features that were probably placed there as a nod to the cultural pressure of the time: Venus appearing at first glance to be "Mary"-like: the posture of her body; the gesture of her hand; the apparent halo behind her carved into the trees. It's just enough to encourage anyone raised in Catholicism, to immediately project such things into the painting - perhaps seeing the rest as just some kind of medieval-style allegory for sexual morality - and thus, preserving the deep-structure "uconscious" intentionality directing the creativity. The same nod must also have been given to any patronage, most notably, from the Medici family - the de facto rulers of Florence. In Primavera, one can see the presence of oranges in the composition - a symbol of the family - and it's been noted that the figure of Mercury might have been modelled after one of them. Similarly to the Catholicism of the time, Botticelli's creativity would have had to adapt, on the surface, to this powerful psychosocial force.

The meta-instinctive information would had to have passed through personal complexes, too. Fundamentally, this means personal learning and associations not distorting the deep-structure intentionality of the creativity. For example, Botticelli was more than likely familiar with the the account of the the Birth of the Venus from the ancient Homeric Greek tradition. This describes Venus as being blown to the seashore by the winds of Zephyrus, and, upon arrival, being clothed by the Horai. One can certainly see these elements in the painting, but, to presume Botticelli was somehow just illustrating a scene from myth necessarily causes one to suppress all other elements which are not present in the original story - who, for example, is the female figure on the left-hand side, subtly exhaling in contrast to Zephyrus' very clear "gust" of wind? The same is true, of Primavera: the sceario depicted on the right-hand side, and the presence of the Graces, appears to be directly lifted from the Roman poet Ovid: the nymph Chloris is abducted by Zephyrus, and, through their union, she is transformed into Flora, who lives in a magnificent garden of flowers. Again, however - what of the rest of the painting, as a clear narrative from right to left, not present in Ovid's story?

If we take all of this together, then the "activation chain" (to use a term) of his creativity would have followed this progression: the Platonic field organises the superpositioned information comprising the masculine meta-instincts, which moves towards ego, through the field of complexes. We can see that Botticelli certainly put his own complexes aside - only keeping in the bare minimum necessary, as an adaptive nod to his environment.

To get past any shallow interpretations of his work, we too, need to put any tendency for projection, to rest. The surface-structure is merely a gateway, to the representational psychodynamics: at core, the Platonic teleology of the development of consciousness, 'as such'.


Simonetta Vespucci: The Muse

One of the ways Botticelli succeeded in distilling-out the Platonic driver of his creativity, was to invoke his muse. Artists of all kinds, have always had muses: their inspiration, whom artists have always known, are the true so-called "source" of creativity. From a technical perspective, if a muse is a real-life woman, then, from the mans' perspective, she is an external anima psychopomp. Simultaneously, she instantiates and emits the Platonic Form of the Feminine, which is received by the man, and, the man projects his genome's own Platonic Form of the Feminine, onto her. To quote from Steve Richards:

"This instantiation of the Platonic form [from a woman] can manifest as a waveform, appear and disappear, leaving an otherwise ordinary canvas. This dip in the waveform can often invite a further projection from the man as his psyche, his genome and the contiguous field that that all men share, seeks to find the Platonic image on the surface of the canvas."

This field-resonance between the man's psyche, and the Platonic Form of the Feminine, acts to deliver pure, distilled information between inner, and outer: the anima, as the relating function, when working properly, as in such cases, brings ego and field into deep communion. In both Venus and Primavera, it's very likely that the likeness of Botticelli's muse - Simonetta Vespucci - is present: however, it is most likely that Vespucci passed away before either painting was completed. Thus we see, a clear consciousness, in Botticelli, of the difference between the Platonic Form, and a real-life woman: he would have been well aware that his creative relationship to her "form", was separate to her a person, and that her physicality was essential, for initially delivering the Platonic Form, into so-called material reality.


Summary of the Psychodynamics

Knowing this, let's flesh-out out previous schema, with more detail: the superpositioned creative wellspring of the meta-instincts formed itself a priori to ego consciousness, orchestrated by the Platonic Field. It initially travelled towards Botticelli's ego on the carrier-wave of intuition. Intuition, although capable of representing itself, to itself, it not capable of representing itself, to the ego: it must always collapse into a different qualia of representation. For Botticelli, this would have been both Sensory - as in, internal images - and affective. Thus, the initial drawings would have been completed - a plan, through imagination, as a waystation to the finished painting. Complexes, inevitably, would have tried to constellate through energetic innervation by intuition, but Botticelli was clearly careful to set them aside, essentially aided in this process, without a doubt, through the presence of his so-called positive anima, represented by internal sensory representation by the figure of his muse.

We know Botticelli was influenced by Neoplatonism - learning this, as it would be for anyone, would first of all have been cognitive. Yet, nothing is contrived or stereotypical in the finished painting. Thus we can infer, that whatever Botticelli learned via his Neoplatonism, acted as an external prompt, for a working through of inner 'knowing'.

Now, we're ready to move onto Steve and Pauline Richards' full exploration of the three paintings, starting with the Birth of Venus: