This workshop will describe how Jung’s approach to the psyche and to psychotherapy arises out of his philosophical commitments. I will show how his is a philosophy of idealism, and how he does not see the psyche as merely a product of the brain. I will discuss Jung’s rejection of metaphysics but how he also reveals his personal metaphysical beliefs, especially his monism, based on the idea of the unus mundus. I will show how Jung acknowledges a spiritual dimension to the psyche, in contrast to most other forms of psychology, especially in terms of his ideas about the Self and the objective psyche as a source of religious experience. I will discuss the debate about Jung’s status as a scientist. Finally, I will describe how Jung and Wolfgang Pauli tried but failed to find common ground between depth psychology and quantum mechanics based on their common interest in synchronicity.

Lionel Corbett trained in medicine and psychiatry in England and as a Jungian Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. Dr. Corbett is a professor of depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, in Santa Barbara, California. His primary interests are: the religious function of the psyche, especially the way in which personal religious experience is relevant to individual psychology; the development of psychotherapy as a spiritual practice; and the interface of Jungian psychology and contemporary psychoanalytic thought.