Albrecht Psychology of Mystical Consciousness

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8245-9956-0
Verlag: PublishDrive
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 428 Seiten

This is the first English translation of the ground-breaking study by the German medical doctor, psychotherapist, and mystic Carl Albrecht (1902-1965), first published in 1951 as Psychologie des Mystischen Bewußtseins. The book, reprinted in Germany in 1976, 1990 and 2018, has remained untranslated to date and is now made available to international scholarship in an annotated English edition. The book offers the results of Albrecht's meticulous long-term empirical research into mystical consciousness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Albrecht, Carl

Leseproben

GENERAL INTRODUCTION F. K. Woehrer “Die Seele des Menschen ist erwählt, Durchgangsraum zu sein für den Eintritt des Geheimnisses in die Welt” [“The soul of man has been chosen to be the passageway for the entrance of the Mystery into the world.”] Carl ALBRECHT (Letter of 19 June 1964) The very first question the critical reader of the English translation of Carl Albrecht’s Psychologie des Mystischen Bewußtseins (1951) is likely to ask him/herself is whether a study first published sixty-seven years ago can still be relevant for research in this field, considering the fact that the empirical investigations into the nature of human consciousness, on which the book relies, were carried out even before 1951. This critical objection would seem to be persuasive, and is hardly invalidated by the fact that the book was reprinted in 1976 and in 1990. So the scholarly reader of the early 21st century might be inclined to dismiss the study beforehand as outdated. Any serious expert in the study of mysticism and spirituality will surely respond with grave reservations at a study based on empirical data collected several decades ago, and be convinced that the insights into the nature of mystical consciousness provided by it have meanwhile been superseded by the myriad of scientific and scholarly studies published since the 1950s.8 So the stock response that is likely to be provoked by the English edition of Albrecht’s study in academe of the English-speaking world might be phrased in such dismissive terms as: ‘an empirical psychological study of this kind can surely be rendered obsolete by recent behaviourist and other scientific enquiries undertaken particularly in the areas of neuroscience and neurotheology.’9 The answer to the first question is emphatically “yes” – Albrecht’s study is as relevant today as it was in the 1950s, and the response to the preconceptions and objections raised above is emphatically “no”: The insights of Albrecht’s empirical research into the nature of mystical experience are neither “obsolete”, nor have they been superseded by more recent empirical enquiries. The following pages, and part three of the book in particular, will persuasively corroborate these seemingly daring claims. The critical reader prepared to study Psychology of Mystical Consciousness without bias will soon realize that the findings provided are indeed ground-breaking, illuminating and relevant for the understanding of the spiritual nature of man across time and cultures. The only disclaimer to be made, though, is that some of the early chapters of the book, dealing with basic aspects of empirical psychology – notably topics from the area of the psychology of sense-perception, feelings, drives, and the ‘layer-theory’ of the personality – are obviously historically dated and convey the standards of psychology of the first half of the 20th century. However, these elementary issues of empirical psychology are not part of Albrecht’s psychological phenomenology of mystical experience as such, but only a methodological point of departure, and therefore only marginally relevant for his conception of mysticism. Thus part one of the book can be said to be to some extent outdated, and of interest primarily for historians of psychology, but this does in no way impair the validity of Albrecht’s findings relating to the nature of mystical consciousness, nor does it affect the significance of his ground-breaking analysis of the mental processes involved in generating altered mental states. While the German edition of Psychologie des Mystischen Bewußtseins won wide acclaim shortly after its publication in 1951 in German-speaking Europe, the book has gone largely unnoticed outside central Europe, mainly because of the language barrier. Scholars and scientists with a keen interest in spirituality and mysticism, who had been alerted to Albrecht’s study, have repeatedly expressed the urgent demand for an English translation. Unfortunately, many obstacles had to be overcome before the call for an English edition could be answered, though it had taken nearly seventy years before the project of translating and publishing the book in the United States could be realized. There have been two major reasons why scholars and scientists have insisted that Psychologie des Mystischen Bewußtseins should be made available in English: (1) Albrecht’s study offers the most comprehensive, most differentiated and most systematic psychological phenomenology of mystical consciousness on the basis of empirical data currently available. (2) Assessed by the criteria of authenticity, reliability and immediacy, Albrecht’s findings can be said to be unique as there is no other study in this field as yet available that can claim to rely on first-hand spoken testimonials of subjects transmitted spontaneously while absorbed in a mystical experience and/or experiences evoked when they were immersed in other altered states of consciousness, or engaged in the mind-transforming process of ‘introversion’ (“Versenkung”). That is to say that Albrecht’s empirical approach is unique in that, unlike any other empirical enquiry into the varieties of mystical experience currently available, it does not depend on records retrieved retrospectively from the subject’s memory or on data derived from ‘outside’, i.e. behaviourist enquiries. (The only exceptions are a few passages that Albrecht included from the writings of eminent mystics from the Christian and Buddhist traditions to substantiate certain phenomena and to corroborate the authenticity of certain varieties of mystical experience.) What makes Albrecht’s empirical investigation unique is the methodology developed by him. This is the method termed “Versenkung” by him, and translated here as ‘introversion’. It is a meditational method, based on Autogenic Training, which allowed a practitioner to speak not only while engaged in the process of relaxation induced by ‘introversion’, but also when absorbed in any altered state of consciousness, including a mystical state of consciousness. By applying this method Albrecht (or by a confidante when Albrecht was himself the subject) was able to collect numerous authentic records by subjects he had introduced into this technique during his practice as a psychotherapist. The utterances articulated by the subjects during the ongoing process of ‘introversion’ and/or mystical encounters were recorded by Albrecht and thus he was provided with empirical data of ultimate authenticity and immediacy. He could therefore dispense with any mediated data, i.e. narratives of recorded experience, retrieved in retrospect from memory, and thus inevitably transformed by interpretation. The mystical (as well as non-mystical) phenomena emerging in a subject when immersed in the serene and tranquil state of “Versunkenheit” (‘quiet state of alertness’), the final stage of the process of ‘introversion’, were instantly verbalized aloud. In this way, the ongoing experience became, as it were, immediately incarnate in the spoken word of the practitioner. This is why it can justly be claimed that Albrecht’s empirical data are more authentic, more immediate and closer to the ‘empirical core’ of a mystical experience than any of the data used in scientific enquiries to date. The recorded testimonies of the subjects were compiled by Albrecht over many years prior to 1951 (and he continued his research after 1951 until his untimely death in 1965). The rather voluminous corpus of empirical data furnished Albrecht with invaluable ‘raw material’ for his systematic phenomenological analysis. His ultimate aspiration was to establish sound scientific criteria by which authentic mystical phenomena could be distinguished from pseudo-mystical ones. Whereas the latter can be traced to the recesses of the subconscious or unconscious, and thus be shown to originate from within the ‘sphere’ of the subject’s ‘self’, the former are experienced as ‘arriving’ from beyond the confines of the individual consciousness. Only the latter qualify, Albrecht insists, as authentic ‘mystical phenomena’. The painstaking task of establishing tangible criteria for distinguishing mystical phenomena from non-mystical, pathological and paranormal phenomena, which may surface in any state of consciousness (e.g. the waking state, night-sleep, somnambulist states, hypnosis, or intermittent higher states of consciousness generated by the practice of ‘introversion’, or other techniques of meditation), is undertaken by Albrecht in part two of Psychology of Mystical Consciousness. Not surprisingly, this part, which provides the pivotal epistemological foundations and detailed practical analyses of empirical records, is twice as long as the final part, which is concerned with the central concern of the book: the portrayal of the phenomenological structure of mystical consciousness and of varieties of mystical experience. Thus part three expounds the results of Albrecht’s meticulous empirical investigations, complete with the succinct psychological definitions of mysticism and ‘mystical consciousness’ derived from them. Before turning to these definitions, however, it seems necessary to explain briefly the technique of “Versenkung” developed by Albrecht. This technique was first applied by him in his...