Jungian Psychology, Surrealist Art and Transport Planning

Writing in Christie's (the international auction house) Magazine last Summer, Robert Brown recounts :

"In 1926 the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung had a troubling but ultimately instructive dream about the Great War which awoke in him the realisation that 'the war, which in the outer world had taken place some years before, was not yet over, but was continuing to be fought within the
psyche'".

Brown continues :

"Such a revelation would not have been news to Max Ernst whose art throughout the 1920s is about as clear a manifestation of Jung's psychological discovery as one could wish for. 'La Horde' is one of the finest examples from a small series of strange and powerful paintings made with the newly-discovered grattage technique in which a band of nightmarish and violent struggling creatures emerge, as if in a dream, from a forest-like backgound of painted form and texture".

Jung's dream and Ernst's art may also be very "instructive" to the wars of our present time.

However, I want to focus here on the relevance of Jung's ideas and "La Horde" to the subject of planning, and in particular to transport planning.

I began my professional career in area development and regeneration in the mid-1980s when I was employed to co-ordinate the involvement of a coalition of community-based organisations at a planning inquiry, of nearly 18 months duration, into proposals for what could only be described as a potentially devastating - to built and natural environment - road scheme.

The scheme was never built, although a further planning inquiry took place in the early 1990s. This, and the threat of High Court action by some objectors, eventually led to the suspension of draft compulsory purchase orders for the most destructive stretch of the road proposal. However, the story was not yet over. A "war... was continuing to be fought within the psyche".

For nearly a year between June 2005 and May 2006, a truncated version of the road scheme again went through a planning inquiry. As I submitted evidence and attended this inquiry, I could not fail to be aware of the powerful psychic forces at work, as it were, behind the scenes. For "La Horde" in this case, I would argue, is modern "civilisation's" potentially catastrophic requirement for personal mobility, regardless of cost to the environment and society.

However, there is a further message in all this. Another psyhologist (whose name escapes me just now) spoke of "the dangers of conscious planning without unconscious process". Failure to recognise this is a core shortcoming of many, if not most, planning and planning-related professions. Let me therefore suggest that rather more human psycholgy and "cultural instruction" be included in their training and continuing professional development.