Tag Archives: imagination

Oct 30th BPS/UCL Talk: Meditation, Imagination, Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice in the 1930s

Events, General, , , , , , , , ,

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 its autumn seminar series. On Monday October 30th, Martin Liebscher will be speaking on Meditation, Imagination, Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice in the 1930s. Full details below.

Monday 30th October

C. G. Jung and the Berneuchen Movement: Meditation and Active Imagination in Jungian Psychotherapy and Protestant Spiritual Practice in the 1930s

Dr. Martin Liebscher (UCL)

Active imagination is one of the methodical corner stones of Jungian therapy. Evolved from his self-experimental phase after 1913, Jung tried to establish a psychological and cultural framework for this method. In his university lectures of the late 30s Jung showed the parallels between active imagination and forms of spiritual meditation in Buddhism, Tantrism, and Christianity. During this period, he was in contact with leading clergy men of the Berneuchen circle, a movement that sought to reintroduce meditative spiritual practice in the German protestant church. Using hitherto unknown archival material I will follow the dialogue between Jung and main representatives of the Berneuchen movement and reveal the traces it left in his understanding of spiritual meditation and active imagination as well as in the practice of pastoral care of this protestant group.

Tickets/registration

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

Time: 18:00-19:30

Clinical Nostalgia in 19th Century France

General, Journals, , , , ,

The October 2012 issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences is now online.  Included in this issue is an article on the nineteenth century clinical category of nostalgia that may be of interest to AHP’s readers. In “The Time and Place of Nostalgia: Re-Situating a French Disease,” historian Lisa O’Sullivan (right) traces the history of nostalgia as a disease in post-revolutionary France. The abstract reads,

The history of nostalgia as a clinical category has many highly specific national stories. This paper traces an aspect of this history, examining aspects of nostalgia’s changing meanings in nineteenth-century France. Nostalgia was a disease triggered by displacement, which became medically and politically important after the French Revolution, when military surgeons encountered epidemics of nostalgia in the armed forces. Understood as a form of pathological homesickness, the category straddled environmental medicine and emerging ideas about insanity. The diagnosis became particularly important to Ideologue writers as a case study in regulating and redirecting the emotions, demonstrating the efficacy of their new “moral” treatments and an ability to generate patriotic attachment to the new nation state. Over the course of the century, nostalgia disintegrated as a medical condition reflecting a decline in environmental explanations for disease within medicine, and increasingly plastic meanings attached to nostalgic desire.

The full article can be found online here.