MAN & TIME
Presenter: Robert Dommett B AppSc MBA
On a recent visit to Switzerland, as part of a conference on Synchronicity, Psyche and Matter, I attended a lecture at the ERANOS hall in Ascona. This is the venue made famous by the annual ERANOS conferences at which Jung was a leading figure from 1934 to 1953. On the bookshelf in the ERANOS hall were the six English language conference proceedings edited by Joseph Campbell. Mysteriously, I was drawn to Volume 3 which contains Jung’s original essay on Synchronicity, his final ERANOS paper. This synchronistic event inspired me to research the context in which Synchronicity, one of Jung’s most controversial propositions was originally presented.
Aside from Jung’s Synchronicity paper, the 1951 ERANOS conference was a feast of high intellect, with substantial contributions from Henry Corbin, MirceaEliade, Henri-CharlesPuech , Eric Neumann, Adolf Portman and Max Knoll (among others). The theme for the conference papers was “Man and Time” and most of the discussion was at the “cosmological” level representing Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Christian, Islamic, Taoist and Scientific perspectives on Man’s conception of Time. Many of the papers created an illuminating context for Jung’s Synchronicity concept.
My presentation will give a background to the history of ERANOS, followed by a review of the key cosmological concepts presented in 1951,a consideration of their relationship to Jung’s Synchronicity propositions and finally offer some speculations on the role of Synchronicity within Jung’s oeuvre.
Robert Dommett is a market analyst, programmer and developer of social profiling & market segmentation systems for use in the corporate sector. His interest in the work of Jung and Giegerich has been stimulated by a desire to gain a deeper understanding of the basis for consumer motivations and behaviour across different social strata and consumer segments. Robert is currently the Technical Director of RDA Research, a leading market analytics agency and is the architect of the geoTribes global needs segmentation system.