During the early decades of the twentieth century, when C.G. Jung was developing his psychological ideas and techniques, one of the most powerful stories gripping scientists, intellectuals, and the general culture in Europe was that the world had become disenchanted—stripped of genuine mystery, unrelated to any spiritual or divine reality, and lacking inherent meaning. In this book and series of lectures I examine various ways in which Jung’s work can be seen as a response, not always straightforward, to this dominant story of disenchantment.
In relation to the purported absence of mystery, I review Jung’s lifelong experience, observation, and study of paranormal phenomena, which raise question marks over narrow conceptions of empiricism and reason. In relation to the claimed unbridgeable separation between the world and any transcendent reality, I consider an implicit, psychologically disguised metaphysics identifiable in Jung’s work, which supports an intimate and mutually transformative relationship between the world and the divine. And in relation to the question of meaning, I examine Jung’s statements implying that meaning is not just subjectively projected onto a meaningless external reality but can be an inherent feature discoverable in, or creatively emergent from, the one reality which we also are.
Informing Jung’s engagements with disenchantment in each of these areas was his profound concern with psychological wholeness. I suggest in conclusion that Jung’s is a particularly rich and distinctive form of holistic thought, valuable not only for psychotherapy but also as a critical perspective on some of our current social, political, and environmental crises, insofar as these have roots in the still prevalent story of disenchantment.