Inside This Catacomb

A house can hold a family’s history. A double can unsettle a character’s sense of self. A ghost can make absence present. We explore how such images acquire meaning within a particular work, and what happens when readers bring their own experiences into conversation with them.

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Symbols do not have to resolve into a single explanation. Their ambiguities can allow us to hold conflicting feelings, revisit an interpretation or recognise something for which we are still finding words.

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Jungian thought offers one way of approaching these encounters. We consider archetypal images alongside narrative form, cultural context and other readings, asking what each perspective illuminates and what it leaves out.

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Grief runs through this investigation as an experience that can unsettle language: what do we call a loss that others cannot see? How do we speak about what has ended but remains part of us?

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Stories can also restrict what we are able to imagine. We ask when familiar narratives make room for experience and when they require it to follow an accepted script.

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​Questions We Explore

• What can an image or a story express that a direct explanation leaves unresolved?

• How do personal experience and cultural context shape our interpretations?

• When does a symbolic reading open possibilities, and when does it impose a meaning?

• How do inherited stories influence what we believe we can feel, say or become?

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