Psychosocial Wednesdays: Jung, Weber, and the ‘Unio mystica’

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.

"In this talk I shall argue that the experience of mystical union (unio mystica) is an unexpected meeting point of the thought of C. G. Jung and Max Weber, giving rise to the possibility of a form of enchanted psychosocial studies.  Focusing on Jung’s last major account of individuation in Mysterium Coniunctionis and on recent scholarship on Weber that has highlighted not only his interest in but his likely experience of mystical states, I shall argue that both thinkers saw the experience of mystical union as a way, perhaps the only way, of genuinely escaping the cultural condition of disenchantment.  Whereas Weber was pessimistic about the possibility of realising this escape, Jung’s life was arguably its charismatic expression and the institution of analytical psychology its routinization."