More than a century ago, Freud gathered colleagues for Wednesday meetings that opened the world of psychoanalysis to a wide range of powerful ideas. Psychosocial Wednesdays are modeled on those Wednesdays and on Jung´s meetings at the Psychological Club, and feature speakers from various psychoanalytic traditions, schools, and associated fields.
This talk will discuss Jung’s belief that his notion of the Self is comparable to the Ātman/Brahman of the Upaniṣads and the Puruṣa of the Yoga system of Patañjali. This comparison is controversial, and has been denied by some authors. As a possible bridge between Jung and the Upaniṣadic tradition, I suggest that Jung’s idea of the Self corresponds to the level of the divine with qualities known as Saguṇa Brahman or Iśhvara, which is the source of the numinous material that Jung valued. The comparison is limited, because Jung refused to relinquish the importance of the ego, and although there are nondual strands in his thought, he does not develop a fully non-dual model of the kind found in Upaniṣadic traditions such as Advaita Vedānta.