ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, “Romantic Metasubjectivity: Experience,” articulates the human experience of the absolute subject, the purposive force which organises knowledge without being reducible to that knowledge. Schelling's metaphysics develops this materiality as the unconscious, and in a way which inaugurates the dissociationist tradition in psychology in which Jung is a crucial contemporary voice. Schelling's “On the Nature of Philosophy as Science” (1821) begins with the principle of asystasy, the fluid economy of nonknowledge from which systems of knowledge come. It then formulates a philosophical psychology in which ecstasy marks the counter-transferential encounter between consciousness and the absolute subject in which the ego is placed “outside itself.” The chapter then analyses this philosophical psychology's origins in the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism, which develops intellectual intuition as a dubious attempt to unify mind and Nature in consciousness. Nature's resistant materiality here is part of what leads Schelling to deconstruct and rethink intellectual intuition as ecstasy in 1821. The chapter ends with a discussion of Jungian synchronicity, which articulates the same mind-Nature encounter using the rubric of “absolute knowledge.” With synchronicity, analytical psychology offers Schelling's philosophical psychology a therapeutics and a mode of being in the world, just as Schelling articulates Jung's repressed metaphysics.
