Carl Jung in Polzeath

I have a background in Psychology but had never even heard of Sandplay therapy until an Irishman at the end of the Camino trail told me about it in Santiago de Compostela. I've probably always believed there's value in just drawing on the beach and my Beach Art sessions offer a playful framework to explore Sacred Geometry and perhaps a little more.  Jung said, "Images and symbols are the language of the unconscious" and it's hard to argue that a sandy beach isn't a safe space to explore the "healing power of play".

The popular "Jung by the sea" international conference in Cornwall in 2023 was a fitting tribute to the centenary of Jung's Cornwall Seminars.  It highlighted the growing interest in how Polzeath had a lasting influence on Jung and all the analysts who followed him. So whether you're curious about Jung's North Cornwall connections or simply seeking a way to engage in creative self-discovery, you're welcome to contact me to try a Beach Art session on a beach that was so special to Jung.

The Polzeath Connection

Polzeath in 1923 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 encouraged Jung and his wife, Emma, and Toni Wolff, to come over from Zurich to address the growing number of British and American 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. Perhaps  he had shared many of his dreams with Jung while undergoing psychoanalysis and may have been partly the subject of the Sennen Seminar. Or perhaps just one of them. However, we will never know as no records were kept of the Sennen seminar and only 12 people attended and we don't know who they were.  

Baynes' English connections were to prove an important one for 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 as mentioned also known as ‘Peter’ Baynes , 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 become one of the great composers of his generation and one of Baynes' closest friends. He even 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 bringing people to Cornwall for Jung's July Polzeath seminar.  I can find no other reason why he might have come here to the Pentireglaze estate of 1924 (later renamed New Polzeath) although perhaps one of the many influential women who followed Jung also 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 arrangements that Baynes and Hankin made in Polzeath are uncertain but they had to find accommodation for 20 visitors and also somewhere to hold the seminars.   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 only Polzeath Lodge on the Trebetherick side (now redeveloped into houses and flats) or The Atlantic House Hotel overlooking the beach more directly in New Polzeath. Because there is no Polzeath village hall, and never has been, it is uncertain exactly where the seminars were held but it's possible that a house marked as Dr Godwin's on a 1924 map might have had something to do with it.    

In 1943, Baynes, at only 61, died before much of his work was done. 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 long and covers research into dreams, art and Jungian psychology.

His daughter, Diana Baynes Jansen, wrote his biography "Jung's Apprentice" but 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.