Language of Memory

Language of Memory centres on Whitney McVeigh’s short film 'Birth’: Origins at the end of Life, recording six women’s experience of birth and existence, in the setting of St Christopher’s Hospice, London. The simple yet poignant film is enveloped by work in three other rooms that make up the Meadows Galleries, whilst the Corner Gallery’s sound installation 6857 Days provides a contemplative space in which McVeigh whispers the numbers following her daughter’s birth to the day she left school, aged eighteen. McVeigh’s subtle installations and hand-drawn and written works ruminate upon memory and childhood, referring to the meanders of life, delicately balancing the personal with the collective. Over a twenty-year period McVeigh has amassed a collection of ‘markers of time’ – found objects weighted by their unique patternations; tracing former lives and the once tangible relationship an individual may have had with the object. The artist acts as custodian of these ‘markers’. She isolates yet elevates the materials, entrusting them to reflect and spur philosophical understandings of history, time and memory - forming a shared language. McVeigh’s symbolic language is an incomplete outcome. Intuitive and uncertain, she collects and assembles, occasionally marks or draws, suggesting ownership yet emphasising, transforming and mapping the unknown. Her process traverses the temporal and infinite; exploring the acknowledged yet abstract components of life. McVeigh draws upon her poetic writings and the language of her objects to access lived experience, others’ lives and places, capturing and preserving the metaphorical properties of events whilst leaving space for the unanswered

Jung, Yoga and Affective Neuroscience: Towards a Contemporary Science of the Sacred

Materialist and fundamentalist reductive ideologies obscure our capacity to directly experience the numinous. Thus, importantly, given the weight of the observable and measurable in orthodox science, and oftentimes a dismissal of both the soul and the subjective, a viable means of reconciling science and religious experience has continued to elude us. As a counter-measure to this obscuration, Jungian-oriented depth psychology has developed as an empirical science of the unconscious, researching both subject and object and offering theories and practices that foster the psychospiritual development of the personality. Despite cultural and epochal differences, comparable evidence to Jung's process of psychospiritual development can be found in the Eastern liberatory tradition of Patañjali's Classical Yoga. However, given the elevated presence of neuroscience, no psychology, and especially no psychology that supports the soul, seems likely to survive much longer without finding an alliance with the objective measures of brain science. When considering the radically empirical measures of Jung and Patañjali, affective neuroscience may offer us a contemporary and objective means of languaging the bridge between the transcendent and immanent and fostering a contemporary science of the sacred

Innate and Emergent: Jung, Yoga and the Archetype of the Self Encounter the Objective Measures of Affective Neuroscience

Jung’s individuation process, the central process of human development, relies heavily on several core philosophical and psychological ideas including the unconscious, complexes, the archetype of the Self, and the religious function of the psyche. While working to find empirical evidence of the psyche’s religious function, Jung studied a variety of subjects including the Eastern liberatory traditions of Buddhism and Patañjali’s Classical Yoga. In these traditions, Jung found substantiation of his ideas on psychospiritual development. Although Jung’s career in soul work was lengthy, throughout, he aimed to steer clear of metaphysics. Patañjali’s metaphysics, on the other hand, are straightforward, and his ontological commitments are evident. Because Jung’s ontological commitments were not explicit, his theories, when seen through Patañjali’s lens, confuse ontological questions with epistemic issues. As a result, when comparing the Jungian and Patañjalian notions of the Self, Jung’s insightful ideas seem to be constructed upon a considerably shaky foundation. Yet, utilizing the exceptionally consistent ontological and epistemological commitments of Patañjali Yoga, as well as the objective measures of affective neuroscience, brings credence to the innate aspects and instinctual nature of Jung’s archetype of the Self, and assists in answering the question of whether the archetype is innate or emergent