Warren Colman, a supervising analyst in the SAP, has just published “Act and Image: The Emergence of Symbolic Imagination”
In this groundbreaking book, Warren provides a reformulation of archetypal symbols as emergent from humans’ engagement with their social and material environment.
Beginning with the oldest known figurative image in the world, the 40,000 year old Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, he traces the emergence of symbolic imagination through the origins of language, the growth of human sociality and cooperation, and the creative use of material objects from the earliest use of stone tools to the cave paintings and figurines of Upper Palaeolithic Europe.
This leads to a consideration of how the imaginal world of the spirit may have come into being, not as separate from the material world but through active participation within a world that is alive with meaning. Thus, the psychic, social, and physical aspects of our being are all part of one world which, for humans, is always a symbolic world.
