NARRATOR: A few years before he painted this work, Jackson Pollock started seeing a psychoanalyst. He was drawn to Carl Jung’s theories about the unconscious mind– and believed that images from his dreams and art were like windows into his deepest self.  

KATE DONOHUE: What Jung believed is that images and symbols can tell us more about our inner world sometimes than words.  

My name is Kate Donahue. I’m a licensed Ph.D psychologist with a Jungian expressive arts orientation.   Jung felt that we have a deeper level of the unconscious that he called the collective unconscious, that knows these symbols. That we hold in us all these potentials for universals that he called archetypes. 

I am struck by the layers. My eye first goes to the middle and there’s some kind of writing. What also strikes me is the play of dark and light.  The side images of these guardians give me a sense of stability. They seem grounded, they seem like they’re trying to hold something together and then underneath, there is this animal that seems like a dog but those ears could be almost rat-like. I see arrowheads, I see faces of fish, I see a skeleton. For me, there’s a way it almost feels like jazz — improvisational and you don’t know what’s going to come up next.  

NARRATOR: Pollock called this painting Guardians of The Secret. But he never explained what that secret might be.  

DONOHUE: I’m struck with the dog. Jung actually felt that animals held the secret of the archetypes and they held our secret nature. I also see the “secret” as being the mystery that Jung felt we never totally unravel. And I think the secret of Pollock’s life that he really was never able to totally unravel.