London Regional Best Abstracts 6.11-1

Abstracts Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Psyche in Transformation Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Psyche in Transformation : Regional Conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies The International Association for Jungian Studies 1 School of Oriental and African Studies July 15th & 16th 2011 Abstracts Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Psyche in Transformation The International Association for Jungian Studies presents its Inaugural Regional Conference Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Psyche in Transformation Dr. Roderick Main July 15th‐16th 2011 Title: Enchantment, disenchantment, re‐enchantment: C. G. Jung in a secular age The School of Oriental and African Studies, Abstract: University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG Disenchantment (Entzauberung, ‘de‐magification’) has been an important recurring theme in sociology, as part of the broader secularisation discourse, since Max Weber famously announced the ‘disenchantment of Keynote Speakers and Workshop Leaders the world’ in his 1918 lecture on ‘Science as a Vocation’. The term implies a prior state of enchantment from which the modern world has become Dr. Wolfgang Giegerich removed, and it has prompted a variety of claims of, attempts at, or calls Title: The Disenchantment Complex: C.G. Jung and the modern world. to re‐enchantment. In a more psychological register and in different terminology, these states of enchantment, disenchantment, and re‐ Biographical note: enchantment also figure prominently in the work of C. G. Jung, a thinker who claimed to have ‘no sociological intentions whatever’ and who in turn Wolfgang Giegerich, PhD, is a Jungian analyst who after many years in has been almost comprehensively ignored by sociologists. In this paper, I private practice in Stuttgart and later in Wörthsee, near Munich, now lives consider whether the discourse of disenchantment can in any way in Berlin. He has lectured and taught in many countries. His publications in illuminate the work of Jung, be illuminated by it, or provide a site for the several languages, include numerous books, among them The Soul’s closer engagement of Jungian thought with sociology. In order to view Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology (Peter Lang, 1998; Jung’s work in relation to a more current account of disenchantment, I 4th ed. 2007), and the four volumes of his Collected English Papers: The draw primarily not on Weber but on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) Neurosis of Psychology, Technology and the Soul, Soul‐Violence, and The as well as some critical responses to it. Taylor’s repudiation of ‘subtraction Soul Always ThinKs (all published by Spring Journal Books). story’ accounts in which the removal of enchantment discloses the true (secular) reality that was always there; his depiction of the ‘immanent frame’ in which we live, with its different ‘spins’ either closed or open to the transcendent; and his evocation of the ‘cross pressures’ between these spins to which modern persons are subject – these, I argue, all help to make better sense of Jung’s complex, equivocal engagement with the sacred. At the same time, the case of Jung’s psychology suggests the need The International Association for Jungian Studies 2 School of Oriental and African Studies July 15th & 16th 2011 Abstracts Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Psyche in Transformation for some modifications to Taylor’s account of disenchantment, especially Jung wrote strongly against promiscuity in 1930 (CW10: para 958, through confounding Taylor’s discussion of the ‘therapeutic turn’ of originally entitled 'Your negroid and Indian Behaviour'). He called it an modernity. Finally, I argue that in Taylor’s account of disenchantment one 'American sex problem', and adding that 'as a consequence the individual of the principal factors responsible for Jung’s disregard by sociologists – his rapport between the sexes will suffer'. 'Easy access' never leads to 'the genuine openness to the possibility of the transcendent – finds a values of character'. Promiscuity (in present‐day Americans) 'tends framework in which it becomes intelligible, creditable, and even useful for towards sexual primitivity, analogous to the instability of the moral habits social analysis. I conclude not that Jung is straightforwardly committed to of primitive peoples, where under the influence of collective emotion, all a sacred source of enchantment but that he holds a difficult, continually sex taboos instantly disappear'. adjusted tension between the sacred and the secular that allows the multidimensionality of individual and group experience to be more fully Biographical note: disclosed, explored, and engaged. Andrew Samuels is Professor of Analytical Psychology at Essex and holds Biographical note: visiting chairs at new York, London and Roehampton Universities. He works internationally as a political consultant. Training Analyst, Society of Roderick Main, PhD, is Director of the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at Analytical Psychology. Founder member IAJS. Co‐founder Psychotherapists the University of Essex. He is the author of The Rupture of Time: and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. Chair, UK Council for Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (Brunner‐ Psychotherapy. Former Hon Sec IAAP. His books have been translated into Routledge, 2004) and Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual 19 languages. Experience (SUNY, 2007) and the editor of Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (Routledge and Princeton, 1997). Professor Paul Bishop Professor Andrew Samuels Title: Disenchantment and the Crisis of the Humanities: Or, Has The Magic Really Gone From the “Ivory Tower”? Title: Promiscuities: Psychological, Political and Spiritual Perspectives ‐ with a Note on Hypocrisy Abstract: Abstract: According to Stanley Fish, in the USA the crisis of the humanities has “officially arrived”; for Gregory Petsko, senior university managers have A great deal of psychological thinking and social organisation is based on struck a “Faustian bargain” with their state funders; while, over here, the fact and the imago of 'the couple'. Hence the notion of promiscuity is Anthony Grafton has spoken of “the disgrace of the universities” in Britain; interesting for its contrariness. Andrew will discuss the recent history of James Vernon has announced “the end of the public university in England”; promiscuity, from the 'sexual revolution' of the 1960s to today's and Simon Head warns of “the grim threat to British universities.” So to 'polyamory'. There are some interesting spiritual and clinical aspects to speak of disenchantment in universities in the UK (and around the world) consider. Personal experience, though not foundational, is also important. would seem an understatement at best. Yet the notion of disenchantment The International Association for Jungian Studies 3 School of Oriental and African Studies July 15th & 16th 2011 Abstracts Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Psyche in Transformation can also offer us a useful tool to diagnose the current climate in higher notably in the French tradition), a possible source of hope, and an education and to analyze this “crisis” in depth —and in terms of “depth opportunity to “re‐enchant” the future of education? Is there, to use psychology.” Jung’s suggestive phrase, a “saving thought” that can reinvest with magic the quadrangle and concrete tower‐block alike? If so, what might it be? For the concept of disenchantment, usually associated with Max Weber, has a complicated filiation that goes back to the German eighteenth Biographical note: century. Subsequently, in the nineteenth century Nietzsche intensified this classical sense of despair at the loss of the ancient world, whose Paul Bishop is Professor of German at the University of Glasgow. His philological, philosophical, and even scientific achievements he lavishly publications include Analytical Psychology and German Classical Aesthetics praised. And disenchantment remained a conceptual reference‐point for (2007‐2008), Jung’s “Answer to Job”: A Commentary (2002), and other Jung when he wanted to describe the condition of the modern world, as he studies on aspects of analytical psychology. Forthcoming studies include saw it; most recently, the term has been taken up in the thought of Marcel Reading Goethe At Midlife: Ancient Wisdom, German Classicism, and Jung Gauchet. (published by Spring) and a collection of papers entitled The Archaic: The Past in the Present (published by Routledge). With reference to the current debate surrounding the humanities in the West, this paper draws on subsequent theoretical explorations of disenchantment to analyze what numerous observers describe as the “crisis” of our universities. Engaging both Jungian thought and the Frankfurt School to understand the psychological dynamics of “disenchantment” as experienced on campus, it investigates Adorno’s notion of the “totally administered society,” and — more broadly — surveys some of the arguments proposed to explain this decline, drawing on the work of such academic commentators as (among others) Bill Readings (The University in Ruins), Kenneth Westhues (The Envy of Excellence), Konrad Paul Liessmann (Theorie der Unbildung), and Martha Nussbaum (Not For Profit). While the seriousness of the current cuts in funding is beyond question, is it possible to move beyond, on one hand, the lamentation and hand‐ wringing nostalgia for a long‐lost past, and, on the other, what some have termed a “new

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