Re-Imagining Spirituality in the Work of Carl Jung and Philip K. Dick

Date of publication: TBA

Both Carl Jung and Philip K. Dick were drawn to an intensive study of human reality. Their early pre-occupations caused difficulty fitting in society, but also paved the way for their later occupations as a psychiatrist and science fiction writer, respectively. Both men had an intense focus on inner experience and interrogated reality. Both men also had what has been variously been described as a confrontation with the unconscious, a creative illness, a psychotic break, or spiritual enlightenment. Following their years long crisis, they both emerged with new views of their lives and their work. Both men also kept personal journals of their experiences, which were private, but which they also shared parts of as evidence supporting their later writings. Carl Jung’s The Red Book and Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis have just recently been published and these journals shed new light on their later works. They also reveal the creative and personal nature of transformative spiritual experience and the entanglement of the spiritual, the psychotic, and the creative.