What exactly is a “numinous” experience?

This collection takes Jung’s idea of the numinous — encounters charged with awe, terror, fascination or a sense of contact with something larger than the conscious self — and tests what remains useful about it in contemporary analytic thought.

The contributors move across dreams, archetypes, psychopathology, spirituality, individuation and clinical practice, with particular attention to psychological disturbance and experiences that feel revelatory. Several essays resist the easy version of Jungianism in which spiritual experience simply heals: the numinous can also arrive as terror, compulsion, grandiosity or psychic destabilisation, and its value depends on how it is understood and integrated rather than on intensity alone.

A useful collection for readers interested in Jung without the incense fog. It treats religious and mystical experience as psychologically serious phenomena while remaining alert to projection, pathology and the dangers of turning transcendence into an alibi.

Routledge, Hove and New York, 2006. First edition. Paperback. Printed and bound in Great Britain. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor edge and corner wear. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.