Frank N. McMillan

Co-sponsored by the McMillan Institute for Jungian Studies, the Fay Lecture Series (originally founded by the late Carolyn Fay, the legendary Houston philanthropist) welcomes internationally-renowned scholars from the world of analytical psychology to Houston's Jung Center for a weekend of pioneering and thought-provoking research into the mystery of the objective psyche.  Each lecture series is later published in hardcover by Texas A&M University Press and makes a significant and enduring contribution to the history of psychology.  This year the center warmly welcomed Heyong Shen, the foremost scholar of Jungian analysis in China. 

The symposium explored some of the various roles that quantum theory and the nature of matter have played in shaping our understanding of who we are what our place in the cosmos is.  In particular, presenters looked at the mind-matter interface and the nature of time from the perspectives of psychology, philosophy of mind, and quantum theory and the  obvious but still contentious resonances these display with the phenomenologies of mystical, imaginal, synchronistic, and other “rogue” or anomalous phenomena.

Local realism’s limitations for a complete view of reality have been empirically proven time and again in the laboratories of the world’s physicists for over a quarter of a century. Despite this fact, philosophical materialism remains modernity’s reigning existential myth and continues to infect the contemporary world’s popular culture like a narcotic fantasy, serving as the default intellectual setting for many of our private assumptions, global media corporations, information technologies, political ideologies, and public entertainments. What does liberating ourselves from its restrictions imply for the future? What might a restoration of things like meaning and purpose to reality portend? And what are the evolutionary/revolutionary implications of such an emerging consciousness?