Archetypal Art and the Unconscious: How Jungian Symbolism Shapes My Work

There's a word Jung used that I keep returning to: medium. Not in the formal sense — not séances or spirit boards — but in the older, more honest sense of the word. A go-between. A vessel through which something passes.

That's the closest I can get to describing what happens when I make a painting.

It Started Before I Had Words for It

Long before I read Carl Jung, I was already drawn to a particular kind of image. Dark, introspective, layered with something underneath the surface. I found it first in comic book art and in the work of book illustrators — artists working in ink and shadow, figures caught between worlds. Fine art came later, but the appetite was already there, already formed. I just didn't have language for what I was looking for.

When I eventually read Man and His Symbols, something clicked into place. Not because Jung introduced me to new ideas, but because he gave a name to something I had been doing intuitively. The unconscious as a messenger. The shadow not as villain but as counterweight. Darkness not as horror, but as the necessary half of balance.

That last part matters to me. Balance is something close to a philosophy in my life — a way of staying grounded in reality. And Jung's shadow, properly understood, is exactly that: not the evil lurking beneath the good, but the unacknowledged weight that keeps the whole thing upright. You don't banish the shadow. You recognize it. That recognition is what I'm after in the work.

The Subconscious Does the Work

I'll be honest about my process, even though it runs counter to what they teach you in school.

There's no rigid method. Sometimes I'll sketch ideas and refine them. But when I'm really working — really in it — there's no strategy to it. The drawing begins before the thinking does. The image leads; I follow.

This isn't mysticism for its own sake. It's a practical understanding of where the most honest images come from. Deliberate construction produces technically accomplished work — and there's real value in that. But it's not where I live. The images that feel true — that carry real weight — tend to come on their own terms. They rise from below the surface of intention, and my job is to stay out of the way long enough to catch them.

The Subject Chooses You

People ask me what kind of art I make — and the honest answer is more difficult to give than they expect. I've painted figures drawn from mythology, occultism, animal symbolism, and Jungian archetypes — Pazuzu, Odin, shadow entities, liminal presences.

More often I create the image first and identify it after. The figure emerges, and then I ask: what is this? What does this want to be called? The answer comes from mythology, from symbol dictionaries, from the archive of human storytelling — but the image arrived before any of that. It named itself.

What this means is harder to explain than it sounds. They manifest. They carry whatever the subconscious needs to work through at that point in time. I don't always understand what I was processing until I step back and look at what I've made. That gap between making and understanding is where the real work happens.

What I Want You to Find

I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a theorist. I don't make work to illustrate Jung's ideas or to educate anyone about the structure of the psyche.

What I want — the only thing I want — is for someone to find something of themselves in the image.

A discovery. A sign. A visitor from their own interior. Whatever it is that helps them on their own journey.

The subjective experience is just that — subjective, and different in all of us. We all seek validation, and there's nothing wrong with that. But an image can be more than validation. It can be a mirror, or a door, or a question you didn't know you were asking.

That's what archetypal art is, at its best: not a message from the artist, but a surface on which the viewer encounters something of their own unconscious. The symbol predates the painting. The painting just gives it a place to live.

And sometimes, if the work is honest enough, the person standing in front of it recognizes it — not as something foreign, but as something they've always known.

That moment — whenever it comes, for whoever it finds — is the whole reason any of it gets made.

Hank Yaghooti is a New Jersey–based artist and the creator of Jungian Eye, a body of work exploring archetypal symbolism through mixed media painting.