Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2014
"I know of no one who has so accurately portrayed the soul of modern humanity. A few decades from now when people talk about the twentieth century, they will think of Giger." This comment by legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone to consciousness researcher Stanislav Grof, initially struck Grof as extreme. After some reflection, however, he began to see the truth in this perception. In Grof's words, "No other artist has so powerfully captured the ills plaguing modern society - rampaging technology overshadowing human life, suicidal destruction of our planet's environment, violence reaching apocalyptic proportions, sexual excesses, mass consumption of tranquilizers and narcotic drugs, and the underlying alienation individuals experience in relation to their bodies, each other, and nature."
Many will remember Giger as the designer of the alien in Ridley Scott's classic sci-fi movie Alien, for which he was honored with an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1979. Giger's art, both widely admired and controversial, is often characterized by a fusion of machine-like and human elements, an amalgam often referred to as "biomechanoid." Head-crushing steel vices, compressing pistons, and mechanical cogwheels are featured abundantly in his paintings. On one level, these may be seen as reflecting the dangerous and oppressive intrusion of technology into human life. "The archetypal stories of Faust, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Golem, and Frankenstein have become the leading mythologies of our times," Grof writes. "Materialistic science, in its effort to understand control the world of matter, has engendered a monster that threatens the very survival of life on our planet. The human role has changed from that of demiurge to that of victim." It is interesting that this book's publication, as well as Giger's sudden death this spring, occurred in 2014, the centennial of the onset of World War I - the first mechanized war in which humanity's faith in technology, science, and rationality was deeply shaken by the mass slaughter of tens of millions by machine guns, artillery, and poison gas.
Giger's rich and intense paintings are also replete with demonic, sexual, scatological, and claustrophobic motifs as well as sexual organs and appendages, laboring naked women and stricken, aggressive fetuses. Grof's hypothesis is that these combinations of themes in Giger's work are, rather than a random juxtaposition of images such as those found in surrealism, reflections of a deep and consistent experiential logic which is meaningfully related to the psychological death-rebirth process. Giger's art depicts the kinds of "dark night of the soul" experiences that routinely occur during the process of inner psychospiritual transformation. Individuals engaged in deep and systematic forms of self-exploration, such as psychedelic therapy or holotropic breathwork, encounter the same elements portrayed in Giger's paintings at certain points in their inner journeys.
Grof termed this layer of the psyche perinatal (literally "surrounding birth"), a layer that has not yet been integrated in mainstream psychology, which tends to focus exclusively on postnatal events. Attempts to explain Giger's work in terms of his post-natal biography, however, have been less than convincing. Giger enjoyed a relatively peaceful childhood free of major traumas, including a warm and loving relationship with his mother and a satisfactory one with his father. Yet from an early age he displayed a highly engaged imagination and dream life, with both an attraction to and fear of passages, tunnels, trap doors and cellars - themes which could be logically related to the passage through the birth canal. Like many artists, Giger was deeply introspective and explicitly aware of the birth process as a powerful inspiration for his work. The cover image of this book, his "Homage to Samuel Beckett III" (1969), depicts an uncomfortable fetus in a narrow channel, squashed and pressed down by a hydraulic piston. Grof points out that the intensity of the contracting uterine walls, which press the frail head of the fetus down the narrow birth canal with 50 to 100 pounds of force, have for the fetus a relentlessly overpowering and machinelike quality.
His research further suggests that the perinatal layer of the psyche, so evocatively portrayed in Giger's art, is responsible for many emotional and psychosomatic problems in human life. "Our self-definition and attitudes toward the world in our postnatal life are heavily contaminated by this constant reminder of the vulnerability, inadequacy, and weakness that we experienced at birth. In a sense, although we have been born anatomically, we have not caught up with this fact emotionally."
These leftover energies, however, do not create problems only for individuals. Consciousness research suggests that material from the dynamic stage of labor - with its intense driving forces, life-threatening suffocation, and activation of biological energies reaching an emotional and instinctual inferno - is a deep source of many extreme forms of collective psychopathology, including wars, bloody revolutions, concentration camps, genocide, and terrorism. "Convincing evidence indicates also that unresolved material from this birth matrix engenders and feeds the atrocities of such societal plagues as Nazism, Communism, and religious fundamentalism." The perinatal layer of the psyche, though still beyond the vision of traditional psychotherapy, however, is not the deepest realm that emerges in self-exploration. Grof coined the term "transpersonal" to describe experiences in which people gain access to ancestral and racial memories from Jung's historical unconscious, to archetypal and mythological realms, an identification with specific animal or plant species, past-life experiences, or cosmic consciousness.
While unresolved perinatal and transpersonal material is responsible for many problems in the modern world, facing these leftovers in supported forms of self-exploration results in profound emotional and physical healing, creative breakthroughs, and spiritual awakening - transcendent experiences which Giger was able to touch on in his most sublime creations. In a sense, he has given to the realm of art a portion of what Grof has contributed to Western psychology and psychiatry. Giger's rich offerings, so gracefully interpreted by Grof, can be seen as alluring invitations to humanity for a deeper self-knowledge, calling us to face our disowned shadow material and, in doing so, reclaim the spiritual dimensions of existence. This foundational book, a collaboration by two masters, is a must-read for all serious students of art and the creative process, depth psychology and psychopathology, history, self-exploration, spirituality, and transcendent states.
