Psychological Perspectives
April 3, 2026
K. Jironet
This essay offers a creative and psychologically grounded dialogue between Carl Gustav Jung and Hazrat Inayat Khan, the early 20th-century Indian Sufi mystic and musician who brought Chishti Sufi mysticism to the West. While Jung is well known for engaging Christianity, Gnosticism, and Eastern religions, Islam—particularly its mystical dimension—has remained underexplored in Jungian psychology....
Psychological Perspectives
April 3, 2026
J. Hatem
This article introduces Chapters 1 and 2 of La Transmutation: Jung et l’Islam, in which Jad Hatem offers a close hermeneutic reading of Qur’anic Sura 18 (The Cave) through the lens of analytical psychology. Engaging, and at times challenging C.G. Jung’s own interpretations, Hatem situates the narrative of the Sleepers, Moses, and Khidr within the process of individuation, emphasizing...
Psychological Perspectives
April 3, 2025
Stephen K. Witty
This paper explores the experience of receiving a fatal medical diagnosis. It is meant to shed light on a phenomenon that, for obvious reasons, rarely gets reported on. The narrative takes one through the business of navigating a flawed medical system in search of an accurate diagnosis—and finally accepting that one’s condition is dire and untreatable. It is about bumping up against this wall...
Psychological Perspectives
July 3, 2023
Michael Gellert
The following consists of the final chapter of my book, The Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God’s Inner Journey, published by Prometheus Books in 2018. The book tells the story of God’s evolution as depicted in the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Needless to say, this parallels the evolution of human consciousness, as each reflects the other. This...
Psychological Perspectives
January 2, 2023
John Hart Young
Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity is defined by Jung as the “occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.” Fundamental to this proposal, developed with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, is the profound assertion that the acausal nature of synchronicity is “equal in rank to causality as a principle of...
Psychological Perspectives
January 2, 2020
Oreet Rees, Leanne Whitney
5 citations
The sleep paralysis nightmare has been reported from antiquity to modernity across manifold cultures. Many people who experience nocturnal assaults by dark entities, demons, hags, or incubi during sleep paralysis ascribe them to evil spirits with varying degrees of malevolence. The majority report the episodes as terrifying, mysterious, and uncanny. Known in the neurocognitive literature as...
Psychological Perspectives
October 1, 2011
Christophe Le Mouël
1 citation
This meditation on the symbol of the number four is based on a series of personal dreams that came in August of 1999, after I completed my Ph.D. in quantum physics. Weaving around a second dream in this series, I explore the alchemical axiom of Maria Prophetissa and argue that it formulates a worldview rooted in the principle of life. After the Enlightenment, the alchemical goal transformed...
Psychological Perspectives
July 1, 2011
Lance S. Owens
9 citations
C. G. Jung stated in 1957 that the visionary experiences recorded in The Red Book: Liber Novus were the foundation of his life work: “My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream … the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.” Liber Novus is now historically placed in a hermeneutic relationship with...
Psychological Perspectives
May 30, 2007
Robin Robertson
1 citation
Two models of physical transformation, one ancient—alchemy—and one current—chaos theory—present amazingly similar descriptions of the key factors in all transformation, including the emergence of consciousness. This paper concentrates on four stages in this process: (1) a series of steps in which the results of each step are “fed back” into the next step; (2) a descent into chaos; (3) the...
Psychological Perspectives
December 1, 1998
Ernest Lawrence Rossi
3 citations
Marie-Louise von Franz's classical volume on Number and Time was a pioneering effort to explore the deep archetypal structure of the way we organize our understanding of ourselves and the world. She used dreams, myths, and ancient cultural images to illustrate how numbers provide us with important insights into the co-creative dynamics of the psyche. In this column I seek to extend von Franz's...
Psychological Perspectives
March 1, 1988
Rupert Sheldrake
3 citations
This is the third in our series of essays by Rupert Sheldrake on the implications of his hypothesis of Formative Causation for the psychology of C. G. Jung. The intense controversy thishypothesis generated with the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life (1981), has stimulated a number of international competitions for evaluating his ideas via experimental investigations. The...