The Ufology in the Version of C.G. Jung’s Psychoanalytical Thinking (original) (raw)
Related papers
2024
What follows is a collection of historical documents that relate to the misapprehensions in the 1950s surrounding Jung’s views on Flying Saucers. As early as 1946, Carl Jung began systematically collecting data on unidentified flying objects (UFOs). His collection included newspaper clippings, reports from specialized groups, statements from scientific, military, and government authorities, and letters from individuals worldwide. He also read extensively on the subject. Jung's published correspondence reveals a profound engagement with the phenomenon.
Sacred Skies UFOs and the Religious Function of the Psyche
Psychological Perspectives, 2023
With his publication of “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky,” the psychologist C. G. Jung boldly went where no psychologist had gone before, pos- tulating that enchantment with UFOs was indicative of a collective disturbance in the psyche. Like Jung’s, this essay likewise avoids any stance as to the factual nature of UFOs and chooses instead to view ufology through the lens of a fledgling mythol- ogy. It seems little has changed in the 60-plus years since Jung’s essay. This essay therefore attempts to modernize and update Jung’s approach through the work of past and present scholars such as William James, Lionel Corbett, and Jeffrey Kripal. By focusing specifically upon the paradoxical nature of the sacred—found within Jungian psychology, Christianity, and ufology—this essay suggests the archetypal current most at work here is the Trickster, who resides at the borders, transgresses norms, and embraces contradiction. Attention is paid to those areas of ufology in which materialism is championed—and how even those areas reveal a kind of Freudian return of the repressed; in this case the repressed being the sacred itself. My intention with this thesis is to show how mystical experiences, whether the result of religion or science fiction, might point us toward a new paradigm in which para- dox, contradiction, and even irreverence can be seen as manifestations of a newly- dominant archetype in the collective Western psyche.
C. G. Jung and intuition: from the mindscape of the paranormal to the heart of psychology
The Journal of analytical psychology, 2018
Intuition is central in the work, practice, and philosophical legacy of C. G. Jung. In this paper, I will first discuss the importance of intuition for Jung in the paradigm usually designated the 'paranormal'. Jung was attracted to intuition as an extra-ordinary gift or function in the traditional sense, and this is considered here in relation to his 1896-1899 Zofingia Lectures and 1902 On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena: A Psychiatric Study. A significant development then occurred in 1913, when esotericist intuitions were turned toward psychological use with Jung's Red Book. There, his personal and private use of intuition - and we know how extraordinarily intuitive he was - led Jung to fully incorporate intuition at the core of his psychology. Not only in his practice, in the crucial intuitive form of empathy, but as we will see, also at the very heart of his theory. In 1921, Jung wrote Psychological Types, where intuition became one - the fi...
This essay explores Carl Gustav Jung's approach to paranormal phenomena. It sets out by looking at two of Jung's personal experiences with ghostly phenomena and his explanations of them, followed by an overview of the most relevant aspects of Jung's life-long interest in the supernatural. Special attention is given to notions of sensitivity and pre-rational cognition in the context of Jung's struggle with the Cartesian worldview.
Jung, Jungians, and psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2002
The break between Freud and Jung-and the subsequent division between their followers-has had profound and continuing consequences for both parties. The Jungians have continued an ambivalent relationship to psychoanalysis, with the effects of internal conflicts and institutional schisms. Mainstream psychoanalysis, for its part, has used Jung, the primary and still most prominent "deviant," to inhibit developments in areas associated with his work. This article explores how the pressure to maintain solidarity and conformity in psychoanalysis has curtailed, in particular, thinking in 3 areas: symbolism, lifelong development, and paranormal experience. It concludes with observations about the opportunities and dangers associated with the move toward pluralism being considered in both camps. Ownership Who owns psychoanalysis? The question may seem absurd to us now, and yet the issue of proprietorship and control of the copyright has been an intricate and pervasive part of our history. In his "On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement," Freud (1914/1957a) asserted bluntly, psychoanalysis is my creation.. .. I consider myself justified in maintaining that even today no one can know better than I do what psychoanalysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely
C.G. Jung and I, Chapter 4, 2023
The Holy Wedding, coniunctio or hierosgamos corresponds to the archetypal event so intensively constellated today, which Christianity had repressed so incredibly strongly: The sexual union of God and Goddess, the causal creative superhuman principle with the hermetic anima mundi, the spontaneously, i.e., acausally creative world soul, the anima mundi. This union, which is always sexual, has the purpose of creating a new world that runs according to entirely new rules. The interpretation of the phenomenology of this archetype, which, I believe, will shape the 21st century—and therein lies the most essential content of chapter four—culminates in my interpretation of coniunctio as the union of the causal with a new, acausal (spontaneous) world. The feminine-divine principle, the World Soul or anima mundi, which has been increasingly displaced since the introduction of mathematics into natural science by Johannes Kepler in 1609 (in Astronomia nova), spontaneously (i.e. acausally) creates a new, completely revolutionary view of the world, which during the 21st century will unconsciously, but hopefully also consciously, assert itself in more and more people. The causal sequence of the laws of nature will suddenly be interrupted by a spontaneous, i.e., acausal quantum leap, which will be followed by a new, completely causal sequence, the content of which, however, is completely undetermined.
‘ The Falling Sky ’ : Jungian reflections on the shamanic alert by Davi Kopenawa
2020
This study brings some Jungian considerations on the ethnographic narrative entitled "The Falling Sky" that will be presented seeking to demonstrate through a comparative-reflective analysis of similarities between the views of the Yanomami shaman, Davi Kopenawa and the ideas of the Swiss Psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung. To this end, it is necessary to present some points of indigenous criticism about the way in which technological societies relate to nature-marked by the exploitation of natural resources and disrespect for indigenous culture, reflecting on the similarities between this native view, described in this study and in Complex Psychology, mainly due to the bias Jung called the psychoid archetype, in which the body-mind-world relationship is in resonance and in an intimate interdependent relationship. Thus, the main objective of this study is to elaborate a dialogue between original thinking and Jungian thinking, in the sense of observing how both perspectives point to intrinsic connections between nature and culture.
C.G. Jung and I, Summary of Chapter 6, The Night-Sea Jouney, 2024
Preliminary Note: During the revision of Chapter 6 of my manuscript “C.G. Jung and I”, I became increasingly aware of the serious problem that the depth psychologist has left us. It concerns the discrepancy between the neo-Platonic background of science and that of Hermetic magic. As I show in this manuscript, he always meandered back and forth between these two irreconcilable worldviews. While his depth-psychological theory is neo-Platonic – the good spirit is to be liberated from the ultimately evil matter – his deepest life experiences are hermetic, that is, bound to a magical worldview. This discrepancy, which became visible in all its depth in his “night-sea journey” of 1913, he was never able to overcome, so that his successors are faced with the task of solving this discrepancy. With my postulation of the empirically experiential internal quantum leap, in which an acausal event interrupts causal development, which then leads to a new causal but completely unpredictable continuation, I believe I have found the solution to this problem of contradiction. The alchemical model for this solution was the symbolic statement of the “coniunctio”, the sexual union of the male-divine with the female-divine principle. It led to the birth of the “infans solaris”, the lapis, the alchemical gold. Equivalent to this was the production of the “medicina catholica”, the Alexipharmakum (the antidote) for the healing of physical and psychological illnesses, which had already been postulated by Paracelsus. Another symbolic paraphrase of this solution is the “rotatio” of the “rotundum”, the Ouroboros, a problem with which the dreams of the transfer of the oscillation into the rotation of Wolfgang Pauli were concerned.
Abstract: The manuscript forms a biography, interwoven with an autobiography. Since the confrontation with C.G. Jung's work forced me to overcome his mixture of neo-Platonic and hermetic theory and to turn to Hermeticism, it became inevitable to interweave my point of view with that of Jung. In this way, a work has come into being which, in my opinion, represents a continuation of the work of the great depth psychologist. With this manuscript, I fulfill Marie-Louise von Franz's demand: "I cannot go beyond C.G. Jung--but you must!" Here is the Preface and Chapter 1. April 6, 2023