By the end of the 19th century, the rise and impact of reductive science led Friedrich Nietzsche to pronounce the “death of the God.” About 20 years later, during the First World War, sociologist Max Weber announced the “disenchantment of the world” as a consequence of this development. In this, he noted how death had lost its meaning for modern technological societies.

In parallel, Jung entered his confrontation with the unconscious, in which the loss of meaning was linked to the land of the dead and the unconscious. The subsequent re-spiritualization of nature, the world, and the individual that Jung sought during this period produced the concept of individuation that then required inclusion of the synchronicity principle to achieve its fullest potential. 

In this lecture we will follow and expand this trajectory of reanimation of unconscious processes into the 21st century as they manifest in dreams and synchronicities that link us to the land of the dead.

Personal and clinical examples will be offered to help us enter the new cosmological vision of profound interconnectedness of nature and psyche as it emerges from this journey.

Joseph Cambray, Ph.D. is a Jungian analyst living in the Santa Barbara area of California. He is Past-President/CEO of Pacifica Graduate Institute; Past-President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), and has served as the U.S. Editor for The Journal of Analytical Psychology. He was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies. Dr. Cambray is an internationally known teacher, consultant, and lecturer who has numerous publications, including a recent chapter in Confronting Death (2024) edited by Luis Moris and published by Chiron Press.