ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some factors possibly inhibiting the interdisciplinary engagement of analytical psychology with academic sociology. It addresses the issue by considering C. G. Jung’s response to a situation with which both disciplines have been deeply concerned: the disenchantment of the modern world. Synchronicity, as the technical term that Jung developed to articulate the transcendence of space, time, and causality, thus implicitly describes what for Jung is the kernel of numinous or religious experience. One of the most influential efforts at the re-enchantment of modernity—restoring the “sense of wholeness and reconciliation between self and world”—has been made by Jung. Jung’s concept of synchronicity can therefore be seen as part of his strategy for rediscovering a deeper source of spirituality in order to re-sacralise the modern world and thereby address the crisis of modernity. The sources of the possible significance of the symbol of the scarab for Jung are worth exploring in detail.
