Abstract
Elaine Padilla leads us into the depths of nature’s unconscious with her Jungian-based study of artist Myrna Baez’s El Mangle. The trees, whose entangled roots are immersed in Caribbean waters, exemplify Jung’s Philosophical Tree and a religious longing for a mystical harmony that has the potential to become actual through processes similar to entering a mother’s womb. Padilla makes use of the Caribbean philosophy of Edouard Glissant and Corrington’s ordinal psychoanalysis on melancholy to bring out the themes of the unconscious desire for mutually beneficial interconnectivity (the trees), melancholic expressions of nature, and the maternal as the womblike depth of nature that nurtures human awakening and creativity.