FROM THE DIARY OF A JUNGIAN COACH # 15

From a Diary of a Jungian Coach # 15

Holding a Jungian coaching point of view will often surprise you!

A Jungian coach recently posted this amazing drawing by Frederic Leighton to her Facebook page.

I was enchanted by the drawing and soon enough discovered that so many people before were magnetized by this “Flaming June” drawing.

Thomas Kirsch in his lovely book ‘The Jungians’ (2000) described Mrs. Olga Froebe-Kapteyn who “was encouraged by Jung to develop an archive of pictures portraying different archetypal symbols. She amassed a great number of pictures which eventually became the foundation for the archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism” (6). The ‘symbolic eye’ always stives to see beyond and underneath. Indeed, it is the alchemical eye which refuses to limit the observed to the obvious. It remains committed to the unconscious’ intention to implement a hidden message inside an innocent image which in turn “refuses” to reveal a divine hidden secret. This is the main principle of the Kabbala wisdom, not the obvious (Pshat in Hebrew), not the hint (Raz), not the interpreted (Drash) but rather the Secret (Sod) holds the deepest truth. See Goren-Bar, A. (2018) The secrets of Expressive Arts Therapy and Coaching, Amazon.

So, this is what I wrote spontaneously to my graduate student: “this drawing, in my opinion, is an amazing quantum phenomenon where the Feminine archetype is flipped into the Masculine one, where the most beautiful lying Anima figure hides under her flamed fabric golden orange dress a young adolescent, Animus, Puer Eternus, a young Adonis or Amor”. A Jungian coach must possess this capability to challenge the logical mind with crazy mythological ideas so that the coachee’s psyche would sense a faithful collaborator during the coaching session. First my association roamed to Salvador Dali’s 1954, “Two adolescents”, a drawing where the Feminine and Masculine genders were blurred to the point that the observer could not decipher whether he or she sees boys or girls in the drawing.

Then I started scanning the “Flaming June” and I realized few details which attracted my attention, validating my assumption that it is a young man/woman, meaning Animaus (M. Stein,1998), hidden in the resting nymph image: The legs, mostly the thighs seem too slim, the elbow too sharp, the breast too flat and… the hues of the redheaded hair are divided into two parts: a curly dark hue short brown hair of a man attached to the forehead versus a light brown artificial kind of a wig spread above the scalp:

At that point I decided I should inquire who was that painter whose Anima was so developed that it turned the Feminine into a Masculine. Wikipedia is often helpful and here are some facts I chose to quote: “Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, PRA (3 December 1830 – 25 January 1896), known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter. Leighton was born in Scarborough to Augusta Susan and Dr. Frederic Septimus Leighton. He had two sisters including Alexandra who was Robert Browning’s biographer. He received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. At age 17, in the summer of 1847, he met the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in Frankfurt and painted his portrait, in graphite and gouache on paper—the only known full-length study of Schopenhauer done from life. When he was 24 he was in Florence; he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and painted the procession of the Cimabue Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. From 1855 to 1859 he lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet. His 1877 sculpture, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, was considered at its time to inaugurate a renaissance in contemporary British sculpture, referred to as the New Sculpture.

I rushed to see that famous sculpture and to my surprise I started to trace the young adolescent who, to my observation, laid back there resting and duplicating the nymph.

Well, now I could identify the young man I had been searching for. Some would say it is my gay repressed projection which imposes a subjective reality on the poor painter. Perhaps it is purely my own shadow anxiety. On such a quest one must hold on to one’s own intuition, while containing one’s loneliness and fear of criticism. It is indeed quite challenging to explore the unknown truth versus the safe zone of ignorance. So I went on reading, ”Leighton remained a bachelor and rumors of his having an illegitimate child with one of his models in addition to the supposition that Leighton may have been homosexual continue to be debated today. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856. The older man showered Leighton in letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries, and his letters are telling in their lack of reference to his personal circumstances. No definite primary evidence has yet come to light that effectively dispels the secrecy that Leighton built up around himself, although it is clear that he did court a circle of younger men around his artistic studio.

Wikipedia further reveals:

Fay and Babbo

The Gay Love Letters of Henry Greville to Frederic, Lord Leighton

Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–96), the “Great Olympian” of Victorian art, became President of the Royal Academy in 1878. The enormous popularity of his paintings did much to promote the influence of art upon life, and to generally increase the remuneration paid to artists for their work. Widely suspected to have been gay, he led a thoroughly respectable life in England and spent his summers in Egypt and North Africa whose societies took a more realistic attitude to bodily pleasures. His paintings of large historical tableaux and female allegories, with almost prurient scenes of partially clad women in baths, generally conceal his real interests, though there survive several male nudes and also two powerfully homoerotic bronze statues, “The Sluggard” and “Athlete Struggling with a Python.” The model for the latter was Angelo Colarossi, who also posed nude for John Singer Sargent’s preparatory drawings for the Boston Public Library in 1890, in a private album that is obviously homoerotic.

I found Leighton observing Adonis on his bookshelf: now it is a slimmer version of the wrestler. I breathed and finally found the following drawing, the drawing where I could definitely find the existing hiding Adonis: the haircut, the same thighs, the same facial features, and in addition an admiring oriental male young figure whom the painter had to search for far away in oriental countries.

However, those of you who wish to simplify life by narrowing the human psyche, those of you who find it unbearable to contain polarities, those who fail to be courageous Jungian coaches, those might say, ”ok, big deal the guy was gay and yes, he reflected his gender preference in his artistic productions. To those I say, ”No. It is not and should not be as simple. Please read this: “Leighton was unmarried, left no diary, lived alone and always travelled alone, and has often been suspected of being secretly homosexual. However, later in life it is believed he may have loved his favorite female model, Dorothy Dene. Recently there was discovered some letters from the Italian painter Giovanni Costa, a friend of Leighton, to another English artist, in which Costa says that Leighton was “without his wife” at an exhibition, and later, “his wife keeps the reception rooms barred to us”. But Dene never lived with Leighton, and these references are confusing and may come from some sort of misunderstanding, or even playfulness. They do not suggest that Leighton himself referred to Dene as his “wife”.

yet funny enough, look at the lady’s face, her “Animus” glance, her firm breast, the strong neck and shoulders:

Isn’t she seeming just another version of the Animus-Anima psychic sides of our dear gifted artist Baron Sir Frederic Leighton?