On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena

De: Carl Jung

Narrado por: Joe Gomez

Carl Jung held an interest in occult phenomena from the start of his professional career. After working as an assistant physician at the Burghölzli Hospital in Zürich, in 1902 he published his doctorate titled The Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. In it, he describes various clinical cases of split consciousness, twilight states, and somnambulism, and presents the case of an adolescent medium whose séances he had attended in the 1890s. Attempting to clinically account for the visions experienced by the young woman, he cites the theory of cryptomnesia, in which unrecognized memory images rise into consciousness.

Public Domain (P)2019 Museum Audiobooks

Food for a good dose of rational schepticism

A short audiobook, highly technical but still fairly comprehensible to me, a lay person in psychology. Thanks be to Google, and Bing, for that. The book is a set of interesting descriptions of several clinical cases of people with apparent supernatural experiences from ghost sightings to spiritism practice and the like, which Jung could trace back to mental states induced by a series of mental abnormalities or diseases. Terms like histeria, somnambulism, epilepsy, twilight mental states, cryptomnesia, automatisms, subconscious personalities and others are used in the case descriptions. Apparently all cases were cured or were manageable, some even with simple overwork and stress relief or simply in time. The explanations in the book are good support for a rational skepticism about supernatural phenomena.