There is no question that the author Bernardo Kastrup is a great supporter of Carl Jung. In order to write this book, he re-read the complete works of Jung, going through them in great detail. His aim was to extract the essence of Jung’s seminal contributions to our understanding of the human psyche and to bring them into the 21st century. One motive for this ‘update’ is that, despite the fact that Jung was born nearly 150 years ago and died around 60 years ago, he was well ahead of his time. Jung is a figure who has to be on the agenda of contemporary psychology students. Along with Freud, Jung pioneered the systematic exploration of the human psyche, beyond what had previously been attempted. In addition they introduced the realm of the ‘unconscious’ to modern psychology and emphasised the understanding of dreams. However, unlike Freud, who saw the unconscious as merely a passive ‘storage space’ for repressed and/or forgotten content, Jung saw the unconscious as active and creative. Jung explored this more dynamic concept of the unconscious, analysing its importance for our psychological wellbeing and mapping out its exact role. Jung’s conclusions included the possibility that our psychic life may continue beyond our physical death. He believed in a much closer and more direct relationship between matter and psyche than anyone had ever assume before (and even today). He also saw the whole universe as being full of symbolic meaning, as if we are living in some sort of interactive dreamworld. So in this book Kastrup takes on the role of an interpreter of Jung, looking particularly at Jung’s explanations of; the psyche, archetypes, synchronicity, metaphysics and religion. Regarding the psyche, Kastrup emphasises Jung’s view that the psyche “...refers to the human mind in the most general and comprehensive sense.“ (p 12) This means that Jung included in the concept both conscious and unconscious processes. Kastrup goes through step by step how Jung arrived at this understanding and draws parallels with other philosophers and the modern understanding of the mind and psyche. For Kastrup, understanding Jung’s explanation of the psyche is crucial to understanding and interpreting his metaphysics. Kastrup writes: “In summary, according to Jung consciousness is a subset of what we today call ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ From this Kastrup moves on to look at how Jung defines what he calls: ‘psychoid’—‘almost psychic’ or ‘psychic- like’—contents, as opposed to fully psychic contents. According to Jung the structure and contents of the collective unconscious and our personal unconscious are not linked with conscious experiences, as described by Freud. For Jung the personal unconscious, corresponds more or less to Freud’s description of dissociated, repressed, forgotten or other contents which stem from ego-consciousness. The structure of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, is, according to Jung, based on what he calls ‘archetypes’. They are the primordial templates of our psychic activities and are not entirely under the control of our beliefs, thoughts or emotions. Jung claims that the archetypes are linked to our instincts and act as drives and regulators of the content in our conscious mind. In describing archetypes, Jung also turns to dreams. He regards these as important for understanding both our personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Another of Jung’s major contributions is his notion of synchronicity. This is also important to understanding his metaphysics. According to Jung: “synchronicity transcends the boundaries of psychology and makes statements about the physical world at large.” (p 46) Jung claimed that more than the mechanical chains of cause and effect (recognised by science) are involved in synchronicity: in addition, “archetypically determined relationships of meaning” (particularly in dreams) also play a role. Kastrup explains how Jung differentiated between mechanical cause and effect and synchronicity and describes how this influenced his understanding of metaphysics. In this context, Kastrup refers to Jung’s relationship with the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli who seems to have influenced Jung’s thoughts on this subject. Kastrup argues that Jung held back on expressing his metaphysics, in order not to appear too heterodox to the established science of his time, which may have scared Pauli away. Interestingly, since then science has advanced in a way (in particular in quantum physics) which supports Jung’s position. With this hindsight we can see how remarkable an intuitive thinker Jung was. Part of Jung’s metaphysics involved the view that there is a unifying ground for both psyche and physics which can only be experiential. Jung talked about “Meaningful coincidences”and argued that a person’s individual consciousness, (ego-consciousness) is a manifestation of a wider unconsciousness. In other words, the physical world is as experiential as the psyche itself, and that the expression of archetypes is global. In his writings on metaphysics, Jung repeatedly claimed that his work was empirical rather than philosophical or theological and described himself as a “metaphysically agnostic scientist of the psyche, not a philosopher.” (p 71) As a consequence, Jung focused on empirical evidence, which can’t be ignored on philosophical grounds, in an attempt to insulate his work from the philosophical fashions of his time. This meant in effect that Jung was holding back his real views in order to come across as a “metaphysically agnostic scientist” Kastrup’s thorough analysis of Jung’s understanding of psyche, archetypes, synchronicity and metaphysics, leads him to consider Jung’s views on religion. Kastrup points to what he describes as Jung’s genius when he writes in Psychology and Religion: “The psyche reaches so far beyond the boundary line of consciousness that the latter could be easily compared to an island in the ocean. While the island is small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep, so that if it is a question of space, it does not matter whether the gods are inside or outside. (P &R p. 102). So, rather than neutering religion, Kastrup concludes that Jung sees that religion is as “significant as anything can possibly be.”(p. 105) Kastrup concludes that Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious was developed in order to make sense of the symbolic themes in his patients’ dreams and psychotic visions. In addition, it explains the synchronicities between dreams and his patients’ experiences in the world that surrounds them. But Jung did not stop there. He also saw parallels with the physical universe: he claimed that the collective unconscious explains the nature of the physical world; the universe is in fact an outer appearance of the experiential inner life. This book is the perfect summary for those interested in understanding Jung’s contribution but find his original work a bit overwhelming: not only does Kastrup extract the essentials necessary to understand Jung’s vision of the inner and outer worlds of experience, but he also compares Jung’s ideas with those of other philosophies as well as with contemporary science. ~ David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer

Katrup's book won't be easy for non-philosophers but it's well worth the effort. Fortean Times - 413 - Dec 2021 - page 59 ~ FORTEAN TIMES, Review

......And now the philosopher-scientist Bernardo Kastrup, in his new book, Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe becomes one of those envisaged as putting Jung’s thoughts ‘in order’, and Kastrup does this in a masterly manner. For anyone with an interest in Jung’s work, Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics is essential and inspiring reading. Crucially and topically, for the contemporary culture, Kastrup reinterprets Jung’s message through the lens of metaphysical, or monistic, idealism which understands consciousness as primary and fundamental, regarding Jung’s body of work being the most psychologically sophisticated in the idealist tradition. Thus Kastrup regards Jung as a ‘metaphysical monist’, contending there is no spirit separate from matter, no matter separate from psyche, and no scope left for dualism. For Jung, the external physical world and the collective unconscious are one and the same thing presenting itself to us in two different ways. A complex system of metaphysical thought underlies Jung’s amazing body of work, but it’s an implied system because Jung, that secret metaphysician, sought to guard his scientific persona against accusations of philosophical speculation. For Kastrup, Jung was the twentieth century’s greatest articulator of the primacy of mind in nature, indicating that mind and world are one and the same thing, that reality is fundamentally experiential, not material, that the psyche builds and maintains its body, not vice versa, and that the ultimate meaning of human life is to serve ‘God’ by providing ‘a reflecting mirror to God’s own instinctive mentation’...... https://geoffjward.medium.com/what-carl-jung-was-really-saying-8d08419d69ec ~ Geoff Ward, Medium.com

Erudite, insightful, "Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe" is an inherently fascinating, thoughtful and thought-provoking study and one which is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, college, and university library Jungian Psychology and Analytic Philosophy collections....... ~ Midwest Book Review.com

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. I have absolutely loved this book, I feel I have learnt so much. It’s not a particular area I heave explored in huge detail. Informative, was spot on. ~ Frankie Samah (Educator), NetGalley

What I appreciate most about Bernardo Kastrup’s approach is his recognition that the tools of philosophy can help us approach the depth, the gift of analytic psychology and appreciate its contributions… Kastrup’s decoding of Jung’s profound insights adds another layer to our understanding. Rather than see, post-Kant, metaphysics as wistful speculation, one sees that the meta-physis engagement has moved within, where it always was. ~ James Hollis, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and best-selling author

Bernardo Kastrup's rigorous analysis and penetrating insights are paving the way for an important, and truly massive, shift in our understanding of the relationship between consciousness and what we think of as the physical world. His approach is both subtle and wise. His persistent scholarship in this area makes evident points of metaphysical clarification that even Jung, himself, was hesitant to explicate. ~ Jeffrey Mishlove, Ph.D., psychologist and host of 'Thinking Allowed'