Search Results (18)

This study explores the sustainability of Islamic decorative arts by examining the symbolic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of botanical decorations in Makkah’s architectural heritage. Grounded in Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and Lamya Al-Faruqi’s philosophy of Tawhid, the research uncovers the profound psychological and spiritual meanings embedded in these motifs. Employing a qualitative methodology, the study integrates symbolic analysis, cultural interpretation, and historical documentation, supported by digital design tools, to assess the relevance of these decorations in contemporary urban contexts. Findings reveal that botanical motifs, such as palm trees and pinecones, reflect universal archetypes of resilience and growth while symbolising divine unity through abstraction and harmony. The research highlights their integral role in architectural structures and their potential in cultural tourism and educational initiatives. However, challenges such as urbanisation necessitate urgent documentation and innovative preservation strategies. This study offers valuable insights into sustaining Makkah’s architectural identity by bridging psychological and philosophical perspectives. Its recommendations align with Saudi Vision 2030 and global sustainability goals, advocating for the revival and integration of these motifs into modern urban design to ensure the continued appreciation and recognition of Makkan architectural heritage. Full article

The impact and influence that a religious tradition can have amongst culturally out-group populations can be quite unexpected and can even “boomerang” back home in equally unpredictable ways. This article explores one example of a Chinese religion’s unexpected cultural influence within the Western psychiatric community using religious Daoism and its appropriation by analytical psychologist Carl Jung. Although elements of religious Daoism, such as Daoist Internal Alchemy or the Yijing, integrated into a system of psychiatric practices, its influence was not straightforward. It will be argued that Jungian ideas such as active imagination, individuation, and synchronicity were directly influenced or inspired by Jung’s exposure to religious Daoism through Richard Wilhelm, Daoist texts, and his own adoption of Daoist Internal Alchemy techniques, an influence which would reverberate through both Western and Chinese popular culture. Full article

Robert Lowell’s Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960 and is credited with initiating the confessional poetry movement, which included followers and students of Lowell such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In Life Studies, Lowell channeled his 1950s experiences with bipolar disorder and mental health hospitalizations into poems such as “Man and Wife”, “Waking in the Blue”, and “Home After Three Months Away”. Lowell’s hard-won Life Studies triumph, though most recently analyzed through socioeconomic and “divine madness” lenses, can also be understood through Carl Jung’s individuation concept which posits that self-realization can be attained through the reconciliation of one’s own conscious and unconscious mental processes. This article argues that Lowell’s Life Studies poems, when examined through Jungian individuation, enabled Lowell to achieve self-realization, and paved the way for mentally ill individuals to learn how to achieve psychological wholeness through art. Full article

Endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) is often the only source of tumor tissue from patients with advanced, inoperable lung cancer. EBUS-TBNA aspirates are used for the diagnosis, staging, and genomic testing to inform therapy options. Here we extracted DNA and RNA from 220 EBUS-TBNA aspirates to evaluate their suitability for whole genome (WGS), whole exome (WES), and comprehensive panel sequencing. For a subset of 40 cases, the same nucleic acid extraction was sequenced using WGS, WES, and the TruSight Oncology 500 assay. Genomic features were compared between sequencing platforms and compared with those reported by clinical testing. A total of 204 aspirates (92.7%) had sufficient DNA (100 ng) for comprehensive panel sequencing, and 109 aspirates (49.5%) had sufficient material for WGS. Comprehensive sequencing platforms detected all seven clinically reported tier 1 actionable mutations, an additional three (7%) tier 1 mutations, six (15%) tier 2–3 mutations, and biomarkers of potential immunotherapy benefit (tumor mutation burden and microsatellite instability). As expected, WGS was more suited for the detection and discovery of emerging novel biomarkers of treatment response. WGS could be performed in half of all EBUS-TBNA aspirates, which points to the enormous potential of EBUS-TBNA as source material for large, well-curated discovery-based studies for novel and more effective predictors of treatment response. Comprehensive panel sequencing is possible in the vast majority of fresh EBUS-TBNA aspirates and enhances the detection of actionable mutations over current clinical testing. Full article

This article explores the contribution of modern Muslim revivalism to Muslims’ political decolonization, and the paradoxical role the West plays in that process. On the one hand, revivalism rejects the founding principles of liberal political theory, and on the other hand, it readily adopts the salient structures and mechanisms of the modern polity with a view to Islamize them, all the while insisting on the Muslims’ need to de-Westernize. Toward revealing the hitherto neglected dimensions of revivalism, my analysis adopts an unconventional route by subjecting revivalism to a semiotic analysis in conversation with the archetypal theories of Mircea Eliade and Carl G. Jung. The analysis unveils the universal psychological structures of revival, and their specific Muslim symbolization. I conclude (a) that depth psychology makes modern Muslim revival inevitable, which will only grow stronger and gain wider appeal while the Muslims continue to suffer decline; (b) that among the different forms of Muslim revival, revivalism ventures the farthest in decolonizing Muslim political imagination; (c) that the revivalist imagination makes their espoused caliphate imperative for the purpose of ritual participation in Islam’s sacred origins; and (d) that a critical reconstruction and evolution of revivalism holds out the promise of a greater contribution to Muslim decolonization. For my analysis, I largely turn to the Pakistani political theologian Israr Ahmad (d. 2010), whose ideas have been disseminated widely across the Muslim world, yet who has not received the requisite academic scrutiny. Moreover, intra-revivalist critique of revivalism has been a neglected aspect in the study of revival, and its careful scrutiny should become a topic of investigation in its own right. In that regard, Ahmad offers a most important critique of earlier revival efforts and their entanglement with certain aspects of coloniality. Full article

Toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, rationalism’s demise gradually entailed the transcendent God’s demise. In this article, I will draw on the resurfacing of God in the ensuing tradition of the unconscious. Whereas philosophers such as Schopenhauer or Eduard von Hartmann, undermining the alleged rational consciousness, assumed the existence of an impersonal, unconscious, yet collective will, others took one step back and maintained a higher yet individual “consciousness” beyond the threshold of sense perception. I am referring to the philosopher–spiritualist Carl du Prel (1833–1899), whose notion of a personal unconscious inaugurated both Freud’s and Jung’s “psychologies” of the unconscious. In many respects, Du Prel’s “personal unconscious” (“transcendental consciousness”) interestingly corresponds to the traditional conception of God; it is morally binding and has a cosmological impact. I will explore to what extent Carl du Prel, in his philosophy of the unconscious, allows for a re-emergence of God in the form of a personal unconscious. I will also try to specify the conditions of possibility for equating these unruly notions (“God” and “unconscious”). My question will be as follows: can we consider the personal unconscious (or transcendental consciousness), as developed in Carl du Prel’s work, as a re-emergence of a more traditional conception of a transcendent God in terms of reason and intelligibility? Full article

We developed an X-ray detector using 36 arrays, each consisting of a 64-pixellated yttrium oxyorthosilicate (YSO) scintillation crystal and a 64-channel multi-anode photomultiplier tube. The X-ray detector was designed to detect X-rays with energies lower than 10 keV, primarily with the aim of localizing gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). YSO crystals have no intrinsic background, which is advantageous for increasing low-energy sensitivity. The fabricated detector was integrated into UBAT, the payload of the Ultra-Fast Flash Observatory (UFFO)/Lomonosov for GRB observation. The UFFO was successfully operated in space in a low-Earth orbit. In this paper, we present the responses of the X-ray detector of the UBAT engineering model identical to the flight model, using ²⁴¹Am and ⁵⁵Fe radioactive sources and an Amptek X-ray tube. We found that the X-ray detector can measure energies lower than 5 keV. As such, we expect YSO crystals to be good candidates for the X-ray detector materials for future GRB missions. Full article

The paradigm shift ushered in by the new science of the early twentieth century discloses the universe as a dynamic, energetic, and complex web of relationality. In view of this renewed sense of undivided wholeness, this article seeks to advance the growing synthesis of theology and depth psychology by way of a revised meaning of catholicity. Specifically, the article utilizes Carl Jung’s theory of individuation to suggest that catholicity is the conscious movement of the psyche toward wholeness, an outcome that Jung associated with Christ. The article introduces the term “Holonic Christ” to describe Christ as both the regulating principle of wholeness in nature and the co-recipient of the activity of deepening wholeness through the psychological development of the self-reflective individual. In this way, the article contends that catholicity is the process of individuation in its fullest form: a dynamic energy of the psyche that urges us in the direction of a more integrated personality, an ever-expanding community, and an eschatological remediation of divine self-contradiction made possible by human self-actualization. The article concludes with a discussion of the far-reaching religious implications of this study and explains why this new understanding of Christ is valuable to theological discourse. Full article

Studying potential dietary exposure to antimicrobial drug residues via meat and dairy products is essential to ensure human health and consumer safety. When studying how antimicrobial residues in food impact the development of antimicrobial drug resistance and disrupt normal bacteria community structure in the intestine, there are diverse methodological challenges to overcome. In this study, traditional cultures and molecular analysis techniques were used to determine the effects of tetracycline at chronic subinhibitory exposure levels on human intestinal microbiota using an in vitro continuous flow bioreactor. Six bioreactor culture vessels containing human fecal suspensions were maintained at 37 °C for 7 days. After a steady state was achieved, the suspensions were dosed with 0, 0.015, 0.15, 1.5, 15, or 150 µg/mL tetracycline, respectively. Exposure to 150 µg/mL tetracycline resulted in a decrease of total anaerobic bacteria from 1.9 × 10⁷ ± 0.3 × 10⁷ down to 2 × 10⁶ ± 0.8 × 10⁶ CFU/mL. Dose-dependent effects of tetracycline were noted for perturbations of tetB and tetD gene expression and changes in acetate and propionate concentrations. Although no-observed-adverse-effect concentrations differed, depending on the traditional cultures and the molecular analysis techniques used, this in vitro continuous flow bioreactor study contributes to the knowledge base regarding the impact of chronic exposure of tetracycline on human intestinal microbiota. Full article

This article discusses the motif of the “architecture of transgression”, which is present most implicitly, in Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built. The analysis concerns both the construction of cinematic narrative itself and the subtle allusions, inserted in the script, to two architectural metaphors: the Nietzschean (and Jungian) labyrinth and the Heideggerian die Hütte. Von Trier’s film may be read as an oeuvre immersed in literary tradition—from Dante’s Divine Comedy to the modern Bildungsroman—as well as inspired by modern philosophy, particularly George Bataille’s philosophy of transgression, (as expound in his Erotism and his short 1929 essay on Architecture). Full article

A model describing the wide variety of human behaviours called personality, is becoming increasingly popular among researchers due to the widespread availability of personal big data generated from the use of prevalent digital devices, e.g., smartphones and wearables. Such an approach can be used to model an individual and even digitally clone a person, e.g., a Cyber-I (cyber individual). This work is aimed at establishing a unique and comprehensive description for an individual to mesh with various personalized services and applications. An extensive research literature on or related to psychological modelling exists, i.e., into automatic personality computing. However, the integrity and accuracy of the results from current automatic personality computing is insufficient for the elaborate modeling in Cyber-I due to an insufficient number of data sources. To reach a comprehensive psychological description of a person, it is critical to bring in heterogeneous data sources that could provide plenty of personal data, i.e., the physiological data, and the Internet data. In addition, instead of calculating personality traits from personal data directly, an approach to a personality model derived from the theories of Carl Gustav Jung is used to measure a human subject’s persona. Therefore, this research is focused on designing an archetype-based modeling of persona covering an individual’s facets in different situations to approach a comprehensive personality model. Using personal big data to measure a specific persona in a certain scenario, our research is designed to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the generated personality model. Full article

This article focuses on the period of the historic rupture between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, approximately the period from 1909 to 1913. It examines the relevance of rage and anxiety in the process of escalating conflict culminating in a definitive separation. Their estrangement led to a theoretical parting of the ways, signified by the divergence between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. This study begins from the understanding that, for both Freud and Jung, private life experiences, personal relationships and conflicts, and their emotional responses were deeply intertwined with the processes of theorising and writing. The rift and final split were accompanied by large amounts of rage and anxiety on both sides, which continued to have emotional reverberations on the two famous psychologists for the rest of their lives. This paper will look at how the emotional pressures generated by the feud influenced the theoretical work on the emotional life they produced during this period: Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) and “The History of the Psycho-analytic Movement” (1914), and Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1912). Full article

The Greek notion of archetype was adopted and popularized in the context of the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. Marshall McLuhan used the concept archetype as a formal perspective rather than the content of an alleged “collective unconscious”. In his book From Cliché to Archetype, the idea of archetype is presented as the ground where individual action is the figure. This article, departing from the notion of archetype, explores some convergences between the thought of Carl Jung and Marshall McLuhan and some of its developments for Media Ecology studies. Full article

Mirrors have been studied by cognitive psychology in order to understand self-recognition, self-identity, and self-consciousness. Moreover, the relevance of mirrors in spirituality, magic and arts may also suggest that mirrors can be symbols of unconscious contents. Carl G. Jung investigated mirrors in relation to the unconscious, particularly in Psychology and Alchemy. However, the relationship between the conscious behavior in front of a mirror and the unconscious meaning of mirrors has not been clarified. Recently, empirical research found that gazing at one’s own face in the mirror for a few minutes, at a low illumination level, produces the perception of bodily dysmorphic illusions of strange-faces. Healthy observers usually describe huge distortions of their own faces, monstrous beings, prototypical faces, faces of relatives and deceased, and faces of animals. In the psychiatric population, some schizophrenics show a dramatic increase of strange-face illusions. They can also describe the perception of multiple-others that fill the mirror surface surrounding their strange-face. Schizophrenics are usually convinced that strange-face illusions are truly real and identify themselves with strange-face illusions, diversely from healthy individuals who never identify with them. On the contrary, most patients with major depression do not perceive strange-face illusions, or they perceive very faint changes of their immobile faces in the mirror, like death statues. Strange-face illusions may be the psychodynamic projection of the subject’s unconscious archetypal contents into the mirror image. Therefore, strange-face illusions might provide both an ecological setting and an experimental technique for “imaging of the unconscious”. Future researches have been proposed. Full article

Scientific advances made in the 21st century contend that the forces of nature and nurture work together through an ongoing series of complex correspondences between brain and mental activity in our daily activities with others. Jung’s cosmological model of the psyche minimizes the fundamental corporeal condition of human nature and as such is critiqued and amended, influenced by the transcendental materialist theories of subjectivity inspired by Žižek, Johnston and Laplanche. Full article