C. G. Jung - Psychology and the Occult

Psychology and the Occult_ from the Collected Works of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, published as part of the Bollingen Series of Princeton University Press, and translated by R. F. C. Hull, contains several important essays and lectures by Jung on the occult and parapsychology. Carl Jung, who was to come under the influence of Freud, maintained an interest in the occult throughout his life, beginning in his young adulthood. Jung, who wrote in a letter to Freud that he "dabbled in spookery", set out on a lifelong course to explain the occult and the "spirit world" in terms of the unconscious. While Jung may have believed in the reality of spirits, his writings take a more agnostic scientific/rationalist position as to their reality, while at the same time attempting to explain occult and spiritualistic phenomena in terms of the unconscious. Jung is perhaps most famous for his notion of the collective unconscious, the source of all inherited ancestral memories, and even within his dissertation for his medical doctorate the idea of the collective unconscious may be present. Indeed, Jung writes, "I waded through the occult literature so far as it pertained to this subject [the visions of Miss S. W.], and discovered a wealth of parallels with our gnostic system, dating from different centuries, but scattered about in all kinds of works, most of them quite inaccessible to the patient." Alternatively, at least initially Jung was to explain many of the statements of mediums in terms of hysteria and cryptomnesia (the coming into consciousness of unrecognized memory images). To understand Jung's fascination with the occult and spiritualism, one really must understand the sort of revival occultism and mysticism was undergoing at the time in continental Europe and America. The Romantic movement was underway and the writings of the Swedish seer, Swedenborg, were popular. In addition, a reaction was occurring against materialism, and this reaction provoked the sort of romanticism found behind spiritualism. Scientific investigations of occult phenomena were also sought as part of the Society for Psychical Research and research into the phenomena of parapsychology were being conducted at Duke University. In addition, new discoveries in theoretical physics regarding the nature of space and time, the dimensionality of the universe, and quantum phenomena were challenging preconceived notions. It is among this milieu that Carl Jung's ideas on the occult were to arise and have their greatest impact.

106 Pages
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