Gaëlle Abravanel (b. 1978, Paris, France)
The Day After
I undertook a "free waking dream" therapy from 2009 to 2011. In all, I had 50 dreams in which my mental images carried me into infinite spaces, dreamlike landscapes. The "free waking dream" reveals such and such a hidden part and leads to a clearer representation of certain stages of psychological development towards a unity that integrates complexity.
Six years after the end of these sessions, I wanted to create an artistic project based on this experience and my readings of Jung. He insisted on the common character of dream symbols, resulting from a shared culture. For him, there is a personal unconscious, the result of the subject's history, and an impersonal or collective unconscious, which carries the archetypes. This idea of a collective unconscious, he developed it with the help of Wolgang Pauli, one of the actors who contributed to the birth of modern physics. Through their correspondence, we see in the two researchers the idea that the psyche is neither psychic nor physical, but at the same time divinity.
With the archives of my 50 dreams written by my therapist, I both retraced my waking dreams and wanted to bring out the collective part of them that Jung was talking about, with its symbols of shapes and colours. At the end of this work, I noticed that my photographs had their own psychological temporality. Each photograph taken has as its title the symbolism of the dream on which the therapist stopped.
It is a mental device, a journey that makes visible the different stages of psychological "trans-form-actions" of these two years. If the flow of images released in "the free waking dream" is really a language and, perhaps, as E. Fromm, the only universal language, suggested, this therapy has brought me the individuation process described by Carl Gustav Jung: Finding the original unity, the return to the totality, the Self, lived in a now conscious way.
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