Schedule:
Exceptional Experiences in the Pauli-Jung Conjecture
In the mid 20th century, the Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the depth psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung proposed a then speculative concept which today helps us to clarify psycho-physical phenomena beyond their characterization in psychology or physics separately. Their conjecture, called dual-aspect monism, addresses both the mental and physical aspects of an underlying, neutral reality. This notion is subtler and more sophisticated than many other attempts to discuss the problem of how mind and matter are related to one another. My presentation will outline some characteristic features of this conjecture and discuss what it suggests for the nature of synchronicities and other exceptional experiences.
Bi-Modal Monism, Synchronicity and the Analytic Dyad
The questions surrounding a body-mind relationship or the mutual influence of consciousness and matter have been investigated by philosophy and physics but rarely in clinical settings. This paper will begin by making a bridge from physics to psychology and then look at synchronicity as the dynamic of this connection as developed by Jung. He proposed that the connecting point between the two vectors is meaning – we will explore what that means in terms of specific clinical interventions and the logic of how and when to approach a situation with empathy or abstraction, history or futurity, causation or telos.
Synchronicity, Creation, and the Physics of Meaning
For Jung, creation through meaning gave man a cosmogonic significance (as opposed to human consciousness as “millions of dreary little mirrors”). Synchronistic events are precisely those in which exo-physical events, those out there, share a meaning with endo-psychic event in the mind. Ultimately Jung believed that “latent meaning” in the world (independent of the mind) was needed to explain meaningfully coincident events. In this talk I consider parallel ideas in physics, in which a latent meaning appears to be borne out, so that humans engage as creators, rather than passively observers.
Reflections between Psyche and Soma
An especially moving and shaking genre of unconscious imagery in dreams reflect one’s psyche dealing with physical injury, disease and death. These may be seen as synchronistic phenomena between psyche and body, of correlates between psychological experience and somatic processes. These may be an extension into psyche of what contemporary neuroscientists call the monistic Mind-Body Continuum. My perspective on psychic metaphors and material realities emerges from a Jungian practice. It is informed by Jung’s attention to “the psychoid”, his focus on emotions and images which emerge from the continuous interactions of body and mind, and the implicit knowing carried in the body. Jung perceived that dreams are future oriented toward a telos. While not prophetic about what will be, they may aim toward preparing attitudes for the future as well as the present, even when one does not consciously know why the attitude will be needed.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
– Learn Jung’s notion of synchronicity as intersection between external event and inner image or memory through witnessing.
– Differentiate engagement with the synchronistic from superstition or magical thinking, as an agent, rather than passive object.
– Understand the neutral reality of mind functioning in a world of matter and wits expression in the theory of dual-aspect monism.
– Grasp the psychological valence of impactful observed and felt events that mirror internal images as reminders of human life as part of large networks of intersecting vectors and energies.
– Learn the links between synchronicity, dual a