ABSTRACT
Existential phenomenology has always insisted that the place of experience is the world in which experience happens, the “life-world,” and that this place of experience should not be conceptually transposed, following Descartes, into another place called “mind.” For a Jungian analyst with a phenomenological sensibility this means that the term “psychological” refers to a dimension of experience rather than to a quasi-substantive, interiorized place called “the psyche.” Jungian psychotherapists are especially sensitive to the “symbolic” dimensions of our experience of things: to the way in which things “presence” themselves to us as the materiality of our psychological lives. However, whereas other papers in this volume have addressed this issue in general terms, Ron Schenk has taken up the specific issue of television and television-watching. He discovers there-in the rituals, hypnotic viewing, and addictions to TV, in the bizarre delusions of schizophrenics, and even in television’s history and physics-some of the longings of the human spirit. Just as the psychotherapist looks for the archetypal telos in an individual’s suffering, Schenk imaginatively uncovers the “calling” in this magical phenomenon of late modernity.
