Dreams After the End – A Jungian Take on Yves Tanguy’s Una y otra vez and Imaginary Numbers
- Brainz Magazine
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and a seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
I first saw Yves Tanguy in my high school art textbook, an enigmatic, otherworldly image printed in matte ink, half-faded by handling and time. The surreal landscape struck me as strange, distant, almost sterile, and yet somehow powerful. It felt like a message from another dimension, but one too small to hear clearly.
A few years later, in 1999, just over a month after the bombing of Yugoslavia, I found myself leaving Belgrade alone for the first time on a student exchange to Spain, a voyage that altered not only my geography but the structure of my inner life. I was young, stepping out of a country suspended in sanctions and historical stillness, and suddenly immersed in a different kind of time. And there, unexpectedly, I came face to face with a Tanguy again. Una y otra vez, less than a metre in front of me, enigmatic objects and a horizon I could not yet name.
This time, the painting was not small. It existed. And it shook something loose in me. Its landscape felt eerily familiar, like a dream remembered not from sleep, but from a parallel life lived beneath the weight of psychic isolation. The objects floated and stood in gray light, close and far, colorful and unreadable, just like the moods of that moment. There was no center, no myth to orient them, only a presence, vibrating. I didn’t have words for it then, only the sense that it was both mine and beyond me.
Now, over two decades later, I return to Tanguy not only as a viewer but as a Jungian psychotherapist. And I see differently. And again, I see the same.
In Una y otra vez (1942) and Imaginary Numbers (1954), both exhibited in the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, the viewer encounters two distinct yet continuous visions of the unconscious, rendered as surreal landscapes of archetypal fragmentation. These are not merely dreamscapes in the Freudian sense, but imaginal diagrams of what Jung called the collective unconscious, where archetypes, universal forms underlying psychic life, are no longer mediated by myth or symbol, but drift untethered in post-symbolic space (Jung, 1959/1968, CW 9i, ¶155). They were painted during and after the collapse of Europe’s mythic order in the mid-20th century. Now, in 2025, these works can be seen as prophetic images of a psyche overwhelmed by fragmentation, technological mediation, and the exhaustion of symbolic coherence.
In Una y otra vez, painted in the crucible of World War II, the year my father was born, the terrain is barren, alien, and densely populated by biomorphic entities that do not cohere into narrative or symbol. These are not mythic figures but the psychic residue of myth’s collapse, archetypal forms broken loose from the ego’s structuring function. Jung warned that when the ego loses its orienting capacity, the unconscious “breaks through in a pathological form” (Jung, 1953/1967, CW 11, ¶748), often as disjointed, threatening imagery. Here, what might once have been mythic figures, anima, trickster, shadow, now appear as estranged remnants, autonomous complexes, “splinter psyches” charged with affect but unable to integrate (Jung, 1934/1960, CW 8, ¶253).
The title, Una y otra vez, or “Time and Again,” echoes Jung’s concept of enantiodromia, the principle that any psychic extreme tends to produce its opposite (Jung, 1953/1967, CW 11, ¶709). In this case, the rationalistic hubris of the early modern ego gives way to a visual field of breakdown, a psychic terrain stripped of telos. For Hillman (1979), such moments reflect the “ruins of the imaginal,” when image loses its capacity to symbolize and instead becomes archaeological; we no longer inhabit myth, but remember it as a fossil. The fragmented beings of Una y otra vez are thus not surrealist playthings, but psychic detritus awaiting resymbolization.
Tanguy’s Imaginary Numbers, painted twelve years later and shortly before his death, offers a different yet related vision. The fluid figures of the earlier painting have now crystallized into angular, columnar forms, stone-like and architectural. The unconscious is no longer fluid but ossified, structured into a closed labyrinth. The repetition of motifs evokes not organic growth but mechanized stasis, like a fossilized schema of complexes that once moved but are now inert. Jung observed that when symbolic imagination fails, libido becomes stagnant, leading to neurosis and psychic rigidity (Jung, 1956/1967, CW 5, ¶344). Imaginary Numbers visualizes precisely such a damming, a psyche turned structural, rhythmic, and exhausted.
The mathematical reference in the title is not incidental. In mathematics, imaginary numbers lie outside the real number line yet are essential to complex equations. Likewise, the psychic forms in this painting exist outside empirical reality yet undergird the architecture of the unconscious. These are not representational images but operators, archetypal residues functioning as a kind of inner calculus. For Giegerich (1996), such imagery reflects the soul’s “logical life,” the psyche moving beyond poetic fluidity into formalized, post-imaginal systems. The result is not expression but exoskeleton.
In both paintings, the sky, traditionally a symbol of the Self or psychic totality (Jung, 1951/1956, CW 9ii, ¶44), is depersonalized. In Una y otra vez, it is luminous but mute; in Imaginary Numbers, it is blank and impenetrable. In neither case does it offer transcendence or symbolic ordering. Instead, the Self appears as a withdrawn principle, not absent, but inaccessible. This aligns with post-Jungian concerns about the fragmentation of symbolic life in late modernity. Hillman (1983) suggested that the modern psyche suffers not from repression but from “soullessness,” a condition in which symbols are flattened into signs, and depth is lost to surface.
Byung-Chul Han (2017) echoes this in sociological terms, describing contemporary culture as a “transparency society” in which everything is visible but nothing is meaningful. Similarly, Bauman’s (2000) concept of “liquid modernity” diagnoses a world where no structures endure long enough to ground the psyche. Tanguy’s paintings presciently reflect this; their figures are relationally vacant, their structures endlessly repeated but never symbolic. They are diagrams of psychic entropy, not only responding to the historical crises of the 20th century, but anticipating the symbolic exhaustion of the 21st.
In 2025, these images speak to the psychic consequences of life in algorithmic cultures. AI-generated intimacy, neural nets trained on human desires, and ecological grief have made the symbolic field increasingly technologized. The psyche, once mediated through myth and image, is now processed through data and simulation. Dreams are threatened to be outsourced to machines, and fantasy is curated by platforms. In this context, Imaginary Numbers resembles a neural network’s internal map, coherent but soulless. The biomorphic forms are avatars of a psyche that has become predictive rather than poetic.
And yet Jung insisted that even in collapse, the unconscious remains generative. Archetypes do not die; they become unrecognizable until reimagined. The challenge is to stay with the ruins, to amplify rather than interpret, to hold the image until it begins to speak again (Hillman, 1983). The repetition in Imaginary Numbers is not merely pathological; it may also be ritualistic, hinting at the return of structure. The “imaginary” in the title is not negation but potential, a reminder that the symbolic function still flickers within fossilized form.
Both paintings, then, serve as imaginal documents of the soul in transition. They neither console nor instruct, but mirror a psychic situation where meaning has become precarious. They are not Jungian illustrations but Jungian enactments, landscapes after the death of myth, before its rebirth. And for me, they mark a personal cartography as well, from the grey silence of 1999 to the layered gaze of 2025. Tanguy’s silence, once distant, now speaks, not with clarity, but with necessity. The image still waits. And I am still learning how to look.
Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and a seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, EMDR, and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslavian roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
References:
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity Press.
Giegerich, W. (1996). The soul’s logical life: Towards a rigorous notion of psychology. Peter Lang.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The transparency society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2012)
Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1983). Healing fiction. Spring Publications.
Jung, C. G. (1960). The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In Collected works (Vol. 8). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1934)
Jung, C. G. (1956). Symbols of transformation (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In Collected works (Vol. 5). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1912)
Jung, C. G. (1956). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the Self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In Collected works (Vol. 9ii). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)
Jung, C. G. (1967). Psychology and alchemy (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In Collected works (Vol. 12). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1944)
Jung, C. G. (1968). Archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In Collected works (Vol. 9i). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)
Tanguy, Y. (1942). Una y otra vez [Painting]. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Tanguy, Y. (1954). Imaginary Numbers [Painting]. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
