Images, Meanings & Connections

The title of this book reflects the main themes from 50 years of Susan Bach's analytical work with spontaneous pictures and in her blue room. In working with spontaneous pictures and drawings, she perceived the expression of deep connections between psyche and soma and learned that it knows within us when either healing or death is imminent. Talking with Susan Bach about her work was inspiring and humbling and, drinking coffee as only she could make it, one felt deeply privileged to be studying with someone who brought so much intuition and intellectual understanding to the contemplation of the human psyche. The humbling part of the conversation came from wondering how to move one's own work towards the paths she was opening up. The purpose of this collection of essays is to show how the work of connecting and finding meaning continues and advances, whether through pictures, objects, dreams or other images and myths. The contributors have in common both a Jungian background and their having made distinguished contributions in their own specialties.

Susan Bach was born in 1902 in Berlin. She took up crystallography and submitted a prize-winning doctoral thesis in the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin. This scientific training underpinned her later systematic studies of spontaneous paintings and drawings, especially pictures produced by severely ill children. She had already begun work in psychoanalysis as the Nazification of Germany took hold in the 1930s and had come to the realization that spontaneous pictures were of tremendous significance. She and her husband, Hans Bach, traveled as refugees to London, where she was part of a pioneering development in the use of art with patients in mental hospitals. In 1947, she discovered that spontaneous pictures accurately reflect somatic as well as psychological states. Subsequently, Susan Bach established an analytical practice and consulted with C.G. Jung and Toni Wolff in Zurich, where she made lasting links with the staff of the Children's Hospital and collected drawings and paintings. This work culminated in the discovery of "inner knowingness", demonstrating empirically the reality of the collective unconscious.