Tag Archives: Carl Jung

UCL/BPS Talks: Henri Bergson’s Cinematographs & Carl Jung’s Dream Analysis

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Henri Bergson

The British Psychological Society‘s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, has announced the next two talks in its spring seminar series. On Monday March 13th Tom Quick will be speaking on “Disciplining Bergson: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1896-1922” and on March 20th Jacomien Prins will speak on “C.G. Jung’s Interpretation of Girolamo Cardano’s Dreams.” Full details follow below.

Monday 13th March

Dr Tom Quick (University of Manchester)

‘Disciplining Bergson: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1896-1922’

Henri Bergson’s use of the cinematograph as a metaphor for scientific epistemology had a major impact on twentieth-century conceptions of science: even today, many philosophers of science regard the relation between recording mechanisms and embodied observers as critical to our understanding of objective knowledge. Yet little is known about the extent to which Bergson’s characterization of cinematographs as epitomizing a pervasive ‘fragmentation’ of nature into lifeless ‘snapshots’ reflected actual scientific practice during the early twentieth century. This talk will address cinematographic experimentation by such contemporaries of Bergson as Charles Scott Sherrington, Hugo Münsterberg, and Max Wertheimer. In doing so, it will suggest that as well as expressing a broader trend towards the mechanical analysis of nature, cinematograph-centred experimentation contributed to a disciplinary divergence between psychological and physiological science during the first decades of the twentieth century. It will further highlight how this changing disciplinary structure came to haunt Bergson’s philosophy during the 1920s. Ironically, the prominence that Bergson gave to his to cinematographic metaphor prevented him from adapting his philosophy to a mode of scientific organization that grew up around the devices themselves.

Tickets/registration

Monday 20th March

Dr Jacomien Prins (University of Warwick)

‘C.G. Jung’s Interpretation of Girolamo Cardano’s Dreams’

Between 1936 and 1941, Carl Gustav Jung presented a seminar on children’s dreams and the historical literature on dream interpretation in Zurich. As part of the seminar Jung analysed twelve dreams of Girolamo Cardano. These sessions do not only give a peek into Jungian dream interpretation in practice, but also demonstrate how Jung used Cardano’s dream reports to corroborate his ideas about archetypes, the collective unconscious, synchronicity and the harmonization of opposites. In his book on dreams, titled Synesiorum somniorum omnis generis insomnia explicantes, libri IV (1562), Cardano defends the merits of dream interpretation and offers a philosophical explanation for his views. Central to his dream theory is the idea that the cosmos is a unified, harmonic and animated entity. The universal harmonic interrelations between all cosmic phenomena provide the basis for Cardano’s theory of dream interpretation. In this paper I will investigate how and why Jung used Cardano’s dream reports to revive the Renaissance notion of a unitary harmonic world as the eternal ground of all empirical being. Moreover, I will analyse why Jung was prepared to make a ‘salto mortale’ to appropriate Cardano’s dreams, while at the same time he considered him as ‘a free thinker who was more superstitious than primitives.’

Tickets/registration

Location:
SELCS Common Room (G24)
Foster Court
Malet Place
University College London

Time: 18:00-19:30

NYT Review: ‘Labyrinths,’ Emma and Carl Jung’s Complex Marriage

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The New York Times has reviewed a recent book exploring the marriage of Emma and Carl Jung: Labyrinths by Catrine Clay. In her review Jennifer Senior notes,

“Labyrinths” was well received when published in England this summer. Yet throughout the first half of the book, no matter how much I squinted, I could not discern why. The subject is rich, definitely, and Jungian analysis has a groovy, woo-woo sort of appeal. But Ms. Clay’s sourcing is thin. She devotes pages of filler to the glorious architecture of Middle Europe — sounding uncomfortably close to the sales pitch for a Viking River Cruise — and to the menu at the Jungs’ wedding, and to the wares of the Bahnhofstrasse, and to the costume of the day.

It all seems a clumsy attempt at trompe l’oeil, to give the illusion of depth. My l’oeil wasn’t tromped.
….
Perhaps most striking is how remarkably adaptable Emma was — and how familiar her predicament still feels. Any semi-sentient observer of American politics has a pretty good idea of what it’s like for a smart woman to bind her fortune to a charismatic man with a wandering eye, a fellow who creates a gravitational warp so pronounced that all objects go rolling in his direction.

And Emma, too, followed in her husband’s footsteps, which at the time made her a true pioneer. Eventually, at Carl’s urging, Emma underwent her own analysis. She became an analyst once their five children were grown. She lectured; she traveled with Carl to conferences; she wrote a book about the symbolism of the Holy Grail.

The full review can be read online here.

Sept 28 BPS/UCL History of the Psychological Disciplines Talk!

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The British Psychological Society‘s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, has announced the first talk in their Autumn seminar series. On Monday September 28th Gaia Domenici will speak on “‘Crush the head of the serpent and it will bite you in the heel’: Jung’s understanding of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in light of his own Liber Novus.” Full details can be found here. The abstract reads,

In 1934–1939, Jung analysed Nietzche’s Zarathustra in a seminar given at the Psychological Club in Zurich. His interpretation has been controversial and strongly criticised by Nietzsche scholars, but to date, it has not been studied in the light of his own recently published ‘Red Book’. This enables one to track the evolution of Jung’s engagement with Nietzsche and how he came to read Zarathustra as analogous to his own work. Obscure points of Jung’s later reading of Zarathustra can be explained in relation to his private experience as portrayed in Liber Novus. This is strikingly the case with his understanding of Zarathustra’s animals.

 

July 18th Workshop, Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping The Psychoanalytic Movement

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UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines is hosting a one-day workshop on how to write the history of the psychoanalytic movement. The workshop, which marks the publication of Ernst Falzeder’s book, ‘Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping the Psychoanalytic Movement’, will be held from 2-6pm on July 18th, 2015 at UCL. Full details follow below.

Written over a span of nearly a quarter century, the “red thread” running through the book is its focus on the network of psychoanalytic “filiations” (who analysed whom), and how crucial concepts of depth psychology were developed before the background of those intense relationships: for example, Freud’s technical recommendations, the therapeutic use of countertransference and the view of the psychoanalytic situation as a social, interactive process, the introduction of the anal phase, the birth of the object-relations-model as opposed to the drive-model in psychoanalysis, or the psychotherapeutic treatment of psychoses. Several chapters deal with key figures in that history, such as Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Eugen Bleuler, Otto Rank, and C. G. Jung, their respective relationships to each other and to Freud, and the consequences that their collaboration, as well as conflicts, with him had for the further development of psychoanalysis up to the present day. Other chapters give an overview on the publications of Freud’s texts and on unpublished documents (the “unknown Freud”), the editorial policy of the publications of Freud’s letters.

Discussants:

Dr. Ernst Falzeder (UCL)
Dr. Shaul Bar-Heim (Birkbeck College)
Arthur Eaton (UCL)
Prof. Brett Kahr (Roehampton University)
Dr. Matt ffytche (University of Essex)
Dr. Sarah Marks (University of Cambridge)
Dee McQuillan (UCL)
Dr. Richard Skues (London Metropolitan University)
Chair: Prof. Sonu Shamdasani (UCL).

Cost: £20, UCL staff and students: free.

Register online here.

Revisiting Yesterday’s Psychology Today

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The Association for Psychological Science‘s (APS) popular periodical, the Observer is publishing an ongoing series of reflections upon interviews with prominent psychologists originally published in Psychology Today decades ago. As described on the Observer‘s website,

Digging into the history of psychological science, the Observer has retrieved classic interviews with prominent psychological scientists for an ongoing series Psychology (Yesterday and) Today. Each interview is introduced by a contemporary psychological scientist, and the full text of the interview is available on the Observer website. We invite you to reflect on the words of these legendary scientists, and decide whether their voices still resonate with the science of today.

As indicated in the above description, each look back at an interview with a given psychologist is accompanied by a downloadable version of the original Psychology Today interview.

The most recent Observer piece looks back at a 1967 interview with Carl Jung. Other recent articles have reflected back on interviews with B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, and Harry Harlow. A full list of previous Psychology Today interviews can be found here.