Beach Art Play and Therapy

The word Synchronicity comes to mind when drawing on Polzeath beach. Maybe because Carl Jung was here in the summer of 1923 and he left his mark in more ways than one during his Cornwall Seminar sessions.

Later, the Jungian Sandplay method of therapy was developed by Dora Maria Kalff. Her fascinating story contains synchronicity with Jung's and there is much to gain from drawing on the beach.

My Psychology degree from Durham University gives me an interest, but no qualifications or expertise, in Sandplay therapy. However, my Beach Art sessions offer an easy frame to explore and record your own art and are a way to connect with the natural world and explore the unconscious mind. 

Carl Jung knew that, "Images and symbols are the language of the unconscious" and all about the "healing power of play".  The Beach is perhaps the best of places to explore those ideas and "Jung by the sea"  was a centenary celebration of Jung's Seminars in Cornwall. To find out more about Jung in North Cornwall, or Beach Art, then please contact me on wnbartlett@gmail.com for further details.

The Polzeath Connection

It's all connected and today, of course, it still is. 

1923 Polzeath seems a strange place to bring Carl Jung.  What was it about this isolated Cornish village that brought one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century to run a seminar? Most likely it was Dr H G Baynes, "Jung's Apprentice", who had rented a house in New Polzeath, that had arranged for Jung and his wife, Emma, and Toni Wolff, to come over from Zurich to address the growing number of British psychotherapists seeking something different to Freud. 

Jung had in fact run his first seminar in Sennen Cove, Cornwall in the summer of 1920 and its main subject was a book with the title "Peter Blobb's Dreams". Confusingly Peter was not actually Dr Baynes but from that time on he was known as "Peter" by his many Zurich connections and there is no doubt that he had shared many of his dreams with Jung while undergoing psychoanalysis with him and may have been partly the subject of the Sennen Seminar. We will never know as no records were kept of the Sennen seminar and only 12 people attended.  

Baynes' English connections were to prove a very important one to Jungian Psychology. In the previous two years Jung had been Baynes' therapist in Zurich and Baynes had translated Jung into English during this time. After the Polzeath seminar they went on to travel in East Africa together to find a tribe on Mount Elgon who had not been influenced by western ways and to study their dreams. 

Throughout Baynes' working life they remained close friends and Baynes helped develop Jung's ideas on psychotherapy for Britain and indeed, indirectly, the rest of the English speaking world. 

Dr Helton Godwin Baynes, but also known later as ‘Peter’ Baynes to his Zurich connections, was born in 1882 to a Quaker family who were unable to fund him through Cambridge University. He found generous sponsors though in the wealthy Bax family (also Quakers) who were impressed by what can only be described as "his love of life and larger than life personality" and funded him through Cambridge. He was an outstanding rower and swimmer and lived life to the full at Cambridge, where he also sang outstandingly well. He became the life and soul of an influential group that included poets, writers and free thinkers. 

Arnold Bax, one of his sponsor's sons, 1883–1953, went on to be become one of the great composers of his generation and one of Baynes' closest friends. He wrote Baynes' obituary in the Times in which he described him as "one of the most all-round men of his time". Although Bax had little interest in the value of psychotherapy it is possible that his inspiring 6 week trip to Tintagel in 1917 gave Baynes the idea of renting a big seaside house in Cornwall for Jung's July Polzeath seminar.  I can find no other reason why he might have come here to rent a house and the land behind it in the Pentireglaze estate of 1924 (later renamed New Polzeath) although perhaps one of the many influential women who followed Jung helped make the arrangements. 

There is no doubt that "the considerable help in the arrangements by Dr Hankin" acknowledged in the Polzeath Seminar notes of Esther Harding were important too in bringing Jung to Polzeath. Ernest Hankin (1865-1935) was another great mind of his time having worked in India as a bacteriologist but with interests in everything from Islamic geometric patterns, to the soaring flight of birds, to culture and its impact on education and business. In 1922, having returned from years in India, he wrote an article in Science Progress entitled "The Mental Ability of the Quakers". He spent winters in Newquay and Torquay and so to these warm West Country connections he would have been well placed to help arrange the seminars. There is every reason to suppose that he was there to support Jung and his shared interests in religions and the collective consciousness.  

The house that Baynes rented must certainly have been used to accommodate some of the 20 visitors to Jung's second Cornwall seminar and most likely his talks were held here too. Baynes' large rented house "Tristram" (and plot) is marked "Dr Godwin" on the 1924 Pentireglaze map (below) I found in the Cornwall archives. From Tristram there are still wonderfully uninterrupted views of the beach and across Padstow Bay to Stepper Point, Trevose lighthouse and beyond into the Atlantic. 

Reference is made to the Polzeath Seminar being held in "the village hall" and that people may have have stayed in one of the two local hotels. At this time they would have been Polzeath Lodge on the Trebetherick side (now redeveloped into houses and flats) or The Atlantic House Hotel, much closer by Tristram (knocked down and rebuilt recently and now The Atlantic Bar and Kitchen and Polzeath Beach House, a boutique hotel). As there was no Polzeath village hall, and never has been, it is uncertain exactly where the seminars were held but, as mentioned, Baynes' large rented house "Tristram" would have been the ideal location. 

Baynes, at only 61, died before much of his work was done but by 1943 he was exhausted from overwork bought on by the illness of his 4th wife, his house burning down and the pressures of the second world war, during which he continued to work as an analytical psychologist and author. His final book "The Mythology of the Soul" based on two schizophrenic case-histories, is over 900 pages and covers research into dreams, art and Jungian psychology.

His daughter, Diana Baynes Jansen, wrote his biography "Jung's Apprentice". In it she makes no connection between Baynes and Cornwall apart from a brief mention of the Cornwall seminars. The closest we get to Cornwall in her book is when, just before the second world war, Jung and Baynes, and their wives (Emma and Anne), took a holiday together to visit Glastonbury to follow Holy Grail connections. Although short lived, it was by all accounts a very happy road trip for them all.  There is every reason to believe that their visit to the Polzeath seminar was equally so.