Beyond Jung 2024 – Synchronicity and Jung’s Holistic Epistemology

Synchronicity and Jung’s Holistic Epistemology

with Professor Roderick Main

Sunday, December 8, 2024
9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

Beyond Jung 2024, Session 4 of 6

This event is LIVE. All participants will receive the RECORDING.

Jung developed his concept of synchronicity to address the scientific, spiritual, and social crises he saw as stemming from the one-sided rationalism of modern Western culture and its concomitant ‘disenchantment’. With his concept of synchronicity, Jung provided a holistic approach to knowledge that aimed to undo disenchantment by reinstating mystery, meaning, and connection to the sacred at the heart of our scientific and scholarly as well as therapeutic and creative practices. In this presentation, I shall first clarify the holistic character of Jung’s proposed epistemological contribution with his concept of synchronicity. I shall then illustrate how this holistic approach to knowledge informed Jung’s scientific and scholarly work, including on synchronicity itself. Finally, I shall indicate some of the ways in which my own work as a researcher and educator has been influenced by holistic epistemological principles based on the concept of synchronicity.

Roderick Main holds a BA and MA in Classics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Religious Studies from Lancaster University.  He now works at the University of Essex, where he is Professor in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the Centre for Myth Studies.  His books include Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (1997; edited); The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (2004); Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (2007); Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013; co-edited); Holism: Possibilities and Problems (2020; co-edited); Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole (2021; co-edited); and most recently, Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment: Mystery, Meaning, and Metaphysics in the Work of C. G. Jung (2022).