Crashing Out with Sylvian : Bowie and Jung a decade later…
Revisiting my thesis on the deep connection between Bowie and Jung developed from my lecture as artist in residence in 2012 at the Strange Fascinations symposium at Limerick University Ireland.
It was later published in 2015 before Bowie’s last work, and has been widely cited across the last decade as “Stark, T., Crashing Out with Sylvian: David Bowie, Carl Jung and the Unconscious in David Bowie; Critical Perspectives, Routledge Studies in Popular Music 2015. https://tanjastark.com/2015/06/22/crashing-out-with-sylvian-david-bowie-carl-jung-and-the-unconscious/
Exerpt One:
David Bowie inhabits Carl Jung’s world of archetypes, reading and speaking of the psychoanalyst with a passion.” Tony Oursler 2013
The haunting figure of an intubated, dystopian and alienated creature inhabiting ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1980) world of religious, sci-fi and industrial imagery, singing of Major Tom’s trajectory like some perpetually unconsummated rapture is a poignant image in David Bowie’s oeuvre. No longer worldly, not quite heavenly, but suspended in some purgatorial cursed space in between, it is hypnotic, erotic and somewhat psychotic.
Yet contained within the cryptic layers of ‘Ashes to Ashes’, with its alluring convergence of iconography, symbols, sound and vision, lie essential thematic concerns that repeatedly permeate Bowie’s prodigious output and have intrinsic parallels with ideas in Jungian psychology; a profound engagement with the Unconscious, a complex relationship with the Numinous [i], tension between opposing polarities (the celestial and the chthonic, visceral and cerebral, sarx and pneuma [ii]) and the ongoing spectre of a shadow that threatens to overwhelm and displace the ordered surface reality.
Indeed, Jungian concepts are so inextricably woven throughout Bowie’s multi-decadal tableau of creativity that in Bowie’s synthesis of mythopoeic themes of the Unconscious with the zeitgeist of pop culture, together with his palpable struggle for meaning, catharsis and knowledge, Bowie has become a poignant contemporary representation of Jung’s ‘visionary artist’, potentially illuminating his deep resonance in popular cultural consciousness.
This essay begins by revealing evidence of Bowie’s long-term fascination with Carl Jung, introduces some of Jung’s ideas and begins an exploration of some intriguing links between Bowie and Jung. Contrasting ideas found in Jung’s writings and his confrontation with the subterranean unconscious in the recently revealed Red Book (2009) with Bowie’s own creative expression uncovers significant parallels in thought and theme that illuminate core aspects of Bowie’s often cryptic, multi-layered work.
The territory is often conceptual and poetic, barely touching the nuances inherent in Jungian psychology but nonetheless compellingly suggests Jung has been a central influence upon (and compass for) Bowie as both men have navigated the mysterious, sometimes perilous, depths of the psyche.
Section Contents
- C.G. Jung the Foreman
- Something in the Air: Bowie and the Unconscious
- The Red Book: Dream Dystopia and Mystic Myth
- The Sound of Visions
- Changing Personas: Chameleons and Caricatures
- All the Jung Dudes
- Shadow Man
- I will be King and you will be Queen: Archetypal Anima and Alchemy
- The Self: The Man who Souled the World
- Approaching the Numinous
- Strung out in Heavens High
- Lacerating Entangled Brains
- Subterranean Labyrinths and the Chthonic Underground
- Flashing Swords and Bowie Knives
- The Last of the Dreamers
C.G. Jung the Foreman
When Bowie famously sung of ‘Jung the foreman’ on Aladdin Sane, with it’s iconic ‘lightning flash’ cover and word play on sanity, it seems the artist was heralding the pivotal resonance the psychiatrist’s ideas had upon his life. Forty years later, artist Tony Oursler, Bowie’s long-term friend and director of the ‘Where are We Now?’ (2013) film-clip, affirmed Bowie’s deep and abiding connection to Jung. “David Bowie inhabits Carl Jung’s world of archetypes, reading and speaking of the psychoanalyst with passion” revealed Oursler, who also accompanied Bowie to the first public exhibition of Jung’s Red Book in New York in 2009 (Duponchelle 2013).
Symbolic and specific references to Jung abound throughout Bowie’s career. Arguably beginning with his 1967 song ‘Shadow Man’ that poetically encapsulates a key Jungian concept, in 1987 Bowie tellingly described the Glass Spiders of ‘Never Let Me Down’ (1987) as “…Jungian figures, mother figures” around which he not only anchored a worldwide tour, but also created an enormous onstage effigy (Swayne 1987). Bowie acted in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) a story by Jung’s close friend and proponent of Jungian ideas, Laurens Van der Post (Van der Post, 1976), in Labyrinth (1986), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), films with archetypally Jungian shadow struggles, and expressed interest in a proposed Derek Jarman film based on Jung’s book Aion (Matthews 2009).
So who is Carl Jung and why is Bowie fascinated by him? Born in 1875, this highly intelligent, intuitive and internally conflicted Swiss psychiatrist was fascinated by the mytho-spiritual dimensions of the psyche in the context of emotional health and psychological integration.
Most popularly associated with the concepts of synchronicity, introversion, extroversion and with defining the psychological categories of sensation, intuition, feeling and thinking that underpin the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test in his book Psychological Types (Jung 1971), Jung extensively researched religion and esoteric spirituality, the occult, alchemy, mythology and even the UFO phenomenon in his quest to understand human behavior and mental illness. Indeed it was Jung’s fascination with these subjects that contributed to his split with Sigmund Freud.
A prolific writer, Jung’s theories are complex but at their core was an understanding of life as an ongoing process of Individuation, a psychological journey of emergence, transformation and centered integration of the psyche within a holistic Self through conscious awareness, engagement and balance with the energies of the Personal and Collective Unconscious. Jung held that subliminal essences and universal energies profoundly influenced the lives of individuals and societies and believed the recurring mythopoeic symbolism, imagery and narratives found across cultures in art, myth and religion drew from the powerful energies of this Collective Unconscious. Manifesting in ways such as dreams, visions, art, intuitions, spiritual experience and synchronicities, active attention to these expressions could provide pathways to greater integration and wholeness. In contrast, unhealthy repression, denial or unbalanced inflation of unconscious energies could result in pathology, illness, psychosis and psychological disintegration (Jung 1967: 391–402; Jung 1972: 203–210).
For Jung, expressions of the Unconscious often took form as Archetypal images: thematic ideas that pulsated through art, dream, myth and narrative, such as the Hero, the Savior, the Trickster and the Apocalypse. While archetypal expressions are unlimited, Jung placed recurring emphasis upon several primal images that emerged around the journey toward individuation that are evident in the work of Bowie; the Persona, the Anima/Animus, the Shadow and the Self (Jung 1968). As archetypes contain both light and dark aspects in the way pharmakon can be medicine or poison, they can be creative and life developing or stagnating and toxic. Importantly, Jung noted over-identification with archetypes could be problematic, a significant observation, as will be seen later, in relation to Bowie’s cascading series of personae and roles.
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Jung also emphasized the centrality of ‘Coniunctio Oppositorum’ — the conjunction of opposites — in the journey toward wholeness, believing synthesis of polarities could be psychologically transformational if inherent tensions could be creatively balanced [iii]. As Jung noted, “nothing promotes the growth of consciousness as inner confrontation of opposites” (Jung 1967: 345) — a tension that abounds throughout Bowie’s writing.
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Something in the Air: Bowie and the Unconscious
“Whether it’s fortunate or not I don’t know, but I’m absolutely and totally vulnerable by environment, and environment and circumstances affect my writing tremendously. To the point of absurdity sometimes” (Bowie cited in Jones 1977).
Amongst artists, Jung distinguished the ‘visionary artist’ as one whose creativity drew from primal impulses of the Unconscious (such as dreams), manifesting archetypal themes that resonate across cultures. Highly sensitive to energies within and around them, Jung believed these artists were acutely affected by emotional nuance and social turbulence, their art often expressing repressed energies and ideas that swirled beneath dominant paradigms. Jung wrote:
“…whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current… the work in process becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe[iv]… [primordial images] are activated–one might say, ‘instinctively’–and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers” (Jung 1933: 173).
Yet while this could create deeply resonant art, the process was often overwhelmingly destabilizing for artists. Jung wrote:
“Every creative person… is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes… Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument… There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire” (Jung 1933: 175).
Bowie overtly identified with Jung’s view of the creative process. In 1999 he described himself as “quite Jungian” in his belief in the pervasive influence of the unconscious dream state upon life and acknowledged his art reflected this synthesis between the unconscious and conscious, articulating Jung’s theoretical constructs and embodying the creative process of his ‘visionary artist’:
“Being imbued with a vividly active imagination, still, I have brilliantly Technicolor dreams. They’re very, very strong. The ‘what if?’ approach to life has always been such a part of my personal mythology, and it’s always been easy for me to fantasize a parallel existence… I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we’ve made of them, really. I’m quite Jungian about that. The dream state is a strong, active, potent force in our lives…the fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey. Combining the two, the place where the two worlds come together, has been important in some of the things I’ve written, yes” (Bowie in Roberts 1999).
Confirming what he had sung from the beginning: “Tell them I’m a dreaming kind of guy and I’m going to make my dream, tell them I will live my dream” (‘When I Live My Dream’ 1967), as Jung wrote, the gift had a price. ‘Time’ intimated how attachment to the ‘strong, active, potent force’ of the unconscious could be alienating:
Breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful, I had so many dreams, I had so many breakthroughs, But you, my love, were kind, but love has left you Dreamless, The door to dreams was closed… But all I had to give was the guilt for dreaming. Time, (1973)
Both Bowie and Jung shared a pervading, nebulous sense of memories and ‘nostalgia’ outside present time. Jung (1967:34) spoke of a strange sense of having lived in the past: “[as a boy] I could not understand this identity I felt with the eighteenth century…I was overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia”. Bowie expressed a similar sentiment: “It’s odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about ‘old and other times’ as though I had a lot of years behind me” (Bowie in Concert LiveWire 2002). Both Jung and Bowie were also intrigued by a strange familiarity around the future, Jung in his prophetic visions about a coming epoch, while Bowie described:
“…the sensibility that comes over is some feeling of nostalgia for a future. I’ve always been hung up on that; it creeps into everything I do, however far away I try to get from it … that’s obviously part of what I’m all about as an artist…The idea of having seen the future, of somewhere we’ve already been keeps coming back to me…I’ve often had that feeling very strongly with myself that …well, it’s like what Dylan said about the tunes are just in the air.” (McKinnon 1980: 37)
So it seems through this artistic openness to the unconscious, Bowie cryptically carved his symbolic iconography, infusing primal archetypal concepts that permeate philosophy, esoteric spirituality and literature — timeless undercurrents and anxieties of existence — into the metaphorically futuristic tongue of sexuality, psychology and spiritualized science fiction evident in his music.
The Red Book: Dream Dystopia and Mystic Myth
Jung himself was no stranger to the raw energies of the unconscious. Already an established therapist, during a period of personal and societal turbulence, Jung experienced an overwhelming flood of bizarre waking visions beginning in 1913 and continuing almost daily for many years. “I often had to cling to the table,” he wrote, “so as not to fall apart” (Corbett 2009: 34). Yet Jung believed by confronting and engaging with these visions he could discover wisdom and psychological integration, documenting this journey in calligraphically illustrated journals now known as the Red Book. While claiming this was the seminal experience upon which all his later work was drawn, Jung kept it unpublished during his lifetime for fear it “would look like madness” (Jung 1967: 19).
Finally published in 2009, the Red Book reveals Jung’s Dantean descent into the depths of the unconscious on a metaphorical soul quest. Throughout its pages Jung dialogues with a pantheon of mysterious archetypal figures who teach and torment him with strange visions and syncretic parables of darkness and light, the narrative weaving like a Shamanic mystery play through a psychedelic maze-world to final visions of personal enlightenment and gnosis [v]. And while Jung believed the process contained collective and personal archetypal images, he was emphatic that the content itself was unique to his own individuation process, and encouraged individuals to embark on their own process of engagement with the unconscious to discover their own myth (Jung 2009: 216).
Intriguingly, there seem to be a number of thematic convergences between Jung’s raw confrontation with the unconscious and Bowie’s oeuvre. While it is impossible to discern the extent to which Bowie’s expression is intentionally or subconsciously derivative of Jungian themes, or spontaneously and analogously synchronous, the answer might be a little of both, giving weight to Jung’s idea that the unconscious manifests in primal archetypal patterns and/or that the psyche of both men share some similar frameworks.
Oursler, once again, seems to confirm the link [vi], tellingly hinting that Jung’s Red Bookconfrontation with the unconscious provides perspective on Bowie’s recent work (Duponchelle 2013), while poet and essayist Norman Ball (2013) has written extensively on the inextricable wedding between these two men. This powerful association seems to have been evident, though largely overlooked, for decades.
The following section explores some of these Jungian references and archetypal ideas, from Bowie’s manifestation of Jung’s persona archetype, shadow explorations, expression of the anima/animusand the integrated Self, to Bowie’s approach to the Numinous and his struggle to integrate opposites, as exemplified by ‘Ashes to Ashes’. At times linking these aspects within the context of modern neurology and ancient esoterica, in the following sections I suggest Bowie is ‘torn between the light and dark’, his multi-layered, symbolic and complex dance with dark and mysterious chthonic energies simultaneously empowering and threatening to overwhelm in his creative quest. In this struggle, Bowie, the consummate dreamer, found a roadmap in the life of Jung.
Illustrations by David Bowie and Carl Jung, respectively.
The Sound of Visions
“Jung the foreman prayed at work /Neither hands nor limbs would burst / It’s hard enough to keep formation with this fall out saturation / Cursing at the Astronette / Who stands in steel by his cabinet / He’s crashing out with Sylvian / …With snorting head he gazes to the shore / Once had raged a sea that raged no more” Drive In Saturday’ (1973).
When Bowie sings of Jung in ‘Drive in Saturday’ (1973) with its post-apocalyptic themes, the verses seems to contain a compellingly cryptic allusion to Jung’s Red Book experiences, the therapist standing by his office cabinet facing a raging sea of visions finding it “hard enough to keep formation” and forced to “cling to a table” (as Jung confessed, above) in their saturating fall out. Jung’s recollection of the period, “My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me” is certainly consistent with Bowie’s lyrics (Jung 2009: back cover). This concept of Jung ‘clinging to the table’ in the face of a hallucinatory stream of images is also synchronistically reflected decades later in Bowie’s film clip for ‘Survive’ (1999), the singer clinging to a table as his grounded domestic reality merges with a space-like dream world and he begins to float strangely around his kitchen.
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https://youtu.be/L_YPiOBSWA4?si=kHbAwlJzuT4DosUC
Curiously, in a sublimely clever or incredibly synchronistic allusion in the context of Jung’s bizarre visions, the inclusion of “crashing out with Sylvian” could plausibly refer to the Sylvian Fissure in the brain, a region discovered to produce hallucinogenic visions and ‘paranormal’ perceptions when electrically stimulated and, presciently, in 2006, to generate what neurologists called an ‘illusory shadow person’ or doppelgänger phenomenon; themselves highly charged and recurring Bowie archetypes (Penfield 1955; Arzy et al., 2006 [vii]).
Bowie would also invoke Jung when discussing ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971) — “…look out my window what do I see / a crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me / all the nightmares came today / and it looks as if they’re here to stay” — a strange visionary intrusion seemingly alluding to Bowie’s half-brother’s hallucinations or, as Dogget (2012: 102) suggests, Bowie’s own. Jung advised patients with disturbing dreams and visions to express them in “beautifully bound journals” to help process their experience and free them from their power, suggesting:
“It is of great help …to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their ‘mythology.” (Jung 2009: 216)
Bowie seemed to internalise this advice, reflecting, “…according to Jung, to see cracks in the sky is not really quite on…I thought I’d write my problems out” (Doggett 2012: 102). But where Jung used paper and kept his strange visions relatively private, Bowie, as an artist, intuitively recorded his own ‘Red Book’ in spiral grooves of vinyl, adorned the sounds and visions of his dreams and fears with glitter and dye, and shared them with a youth hungering for new manifestations of old myths.
Fascinatingly, the nightmare inducing hallucinogenic hand reaching down from the cracked sky in Bowie’s lyrics darkly mirrors Michelangelo’s archetypal painting in the Sistine Chapel of The Creation of Adam with its crack in the sky and the hand of God reaching down to spark life into Adam, a metaphorical fusion of spirit (pnuema) and flesh (sarx), and the conscious and unconscious dimensions.
Intriguingly, the American Medical Journal reported that the portrait of God appears to conform deliberately to the neuro-anatomical shape of the brain, its Sylvian Fissure (associated with Jung in ‘Drive in Saturday’) clearly evident, suggesting Michelangelo, a student of mystic esoterica, may have intentionally conflated theology and neurology with the spark of consciousness, and adding further layer to the strange archetypal associations between Bowie, the brain and Jung’s idea of the spontaneous manifestation of the collective Unconscious (Meshberger 1990: 1837; Blech & Doliner 2008).
To be continued/…
