Syllabus
1. Disenchantment and re-enchantment.This lecture will introduce dream, myth, and magic as three interrelated forms of expression that present alternatives and challenges to rational modes of apprehending and engaging with reality. Essential reading: W. Hanegraaff, 'How magic survived the disenchantment of the world' (2003).R. Main, 'Psychology and the occult: dialectics of disenchantment and re-enchantment in the modern self' in Partridge (2015), 732-743.
2. Making sense of dreams. This lecture will provide an overview of approaches, both physiological and psychological, to understanding dreams. Within this overview, it will highlight the theories of Freud and Jung and provide a preliminary account of them.Essential reading: Hoss and Gongloff (2019), Chapter 15, 'Influential contributions to dream psychology', 415-448.
3. The dark tide.This lecture will look at Freud's theory of dreams and how Freud attempted to find a place within it for the anomalous phenomena of thought transference or telepathy.Essential reading: S. Freud, 'Dreams and occultism', in Freud (1933), 45-77.
4. Confrontation with the unconscious. This lecture will look at Jung's theory of dreams and the role dreams played in his personal confrontation with the unconscious, which included a range of anomalous experiences.Essential reading: Jung, 'Confrontation with the unconscious', Chapter 6 in Jung (1963), 194-225.
5. The world of myth. This lecture will provide an overview of the phenomenon of myth and of various theories that have been proposed for understanding and interpreting myths. In particular, we shall consider what is the role of myth in a world dominated by science.Essential reading: D. Leeming, 'Introduction', in Leeming (2005), xi-xii.R. Segal, 'Does myth have a future?' in Segal (1999), 19-35.
6. Dreams writ large. This lecture will look at how Freud and subsequent Freudians have explained and interpreted myths. Essential reading: D. Merkur, 'From Mythology to metapsychology' and 'Myth as unconscious manifestation', chapters 1 and 2 in Merkur (2005), 1-30.
7. The mythopoeic mind. This lecture will examine Jung's theory of myth, focusing on how it can be seen as an attempt to re-enchant the world.Essential reading: S. Walker, 'Mythology and the archetypes of the collective unconscious', Chapter 1 in Walker (1995), 3-27.R. Main, 'Myth, synchronicity, and re-enchantment' (2013), 129-146.
8. Magic: a wretched subject. This lecture will provide orientation in the academic study of magic and Western esotericism more broadly, which have had a close symbiotic relationship with the development of depth psychology. Essential reading:W. Hanegraaff, 'Magic', in Magee (2016), 393-404.
9. Psychoanalysis and magic. This lectures explores the association of psychoanalysis with magic and the paranormal, and the possibility that psychoanalysis, as once stated by Freud, may itself be a form of magic.Essential reading:M. Brottman, 'Psychoanalysis and magic: then and now', American Imago 66(4) (2009): 471-489.
10. Synchronicity: the return of magic as science.This lecture considers the role of magic in Jung's thought, from his encounter with an inner figure of a magician in his Red Book experience to his late writing about synchronicity as a modern, scientific version of the theory of correspondences on which traditional magic was based.Essential reading:C. G. Jung, 'The magician', in Jung (2012), 395-406.C. G. Jung, 'On synchronicity' (1951), 520-531.