From affective images to cultures

This chapter deals with the nature of images as representations of affects, hence, as primary cognitive structures. The variability of images, and therefore, of symbolic structures, is referred to Jung’s principle of equivalence, for which the transformations of a symbol into another represents a transformation of an affective – libidinal – component. The cognitive nature of symbolic images protects the human mind from disintegration caused by the numinous effect of the affects arising from non-mentalized archetypal contents. The chapter discusses how symbolism and culture transform and shape (i.e., make psychologically workable, thinkable and shareable) such alien numinous irruptions, which correspond to those ancestral functional modules formed during evolutionary time – the archetypes – in connection to the symbolic fabric of culture. The relevance of Jung’s theory for the process of the generations of abductions and cultural discovery, studied by epistemologists and information technology researchers, is taken into consideration.