Overview

Magic and Melancholia argues that the soul was once understood as cosmic in nature and that what we now call therapy was correspondingly theurgic, magical, and theological. The loss of this earlier vision has had devastating consequences. ] Appealing to a profound vision of soul articulated through mood, the book proposes that the recovery of these lost dimensions offers a more adequate picture than contemporary psycho-therapeutic frameworks, which reduce the ontologically rich, cosmic reality of soul to mind and ""self,"" while neglecting the soul's need to be harmonized with body, cosmos, and transcendence. Such a vision restores the vitally important aesthetic and ethical dimensions and situates the human being within a resonant, participatory realm that bears directly upon psychic health. That imaginative world must be regained, so that a more adequate account of the hidden relationship and correspondences between soul and body can be found, and with it a psyche-ology that avoids both over-rationalism and reductive materialism.

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Reviews

""Between the psychological subject who first appeared within the therapeutic regime of Freudian analysis and the living soul who had long enjoyed an eminent station in the religion, philosophy, and plain intuitions of untold centuries, there is a vast qualitative difference. The one requires therapy, the other 'magic, ' and-as McCormack's study wonderfully illuminates-a scrupulous anatomy of melancholy is an ideal proof of which truly has the power to heal.""-DAVID BENTLEY HART ""Laura McCormack's arresting book shows us that the historical boundaries between traditional Christianity, esotericism, and psychiatry have not been as stable as one might imagine. In an epoch where our very identity as human could be under threat, this work is as crucial as it is challenging.""-CATHERINE PICKSTOCK ""Laura McCormack shows how an older and more authentic practical care of the soul was as magical as it was religious, just to the extent that the soul lies at the 'occult' cusp of spirit and body. Few theses could be more important for the recovery of a genuinely spiritual culture today.""-JOHN MILBANK ""In this astonishing work, McCormack challenges the reduction of the soul to the mind, and the self-referentiality of therapeutic practice, by realigning therapy with its mystical, metaphysical, and magical foundations: genuine wellbeing requires more than the mind's reorientation to the body; it requires the soul's relation to the entire cosmic order.""-MARCUS POUND ""While the field of psychology has abandoned the soul in favor of pharmacy or pharmakeia, this book returns to the soul as the starting point for the recovery of sanity in an over-medicalized and denatured world.""-MICHAEL MARTIN ""McCormack's achievement is grounded in both a psycho-historical examination of the past, a clear philosophical critique of secular and mechanistic assumptions, and practical suggestions for ways to cure our melancholia.""-STEPHEN R. L. CLARK

Author Information

LAURA MCCORMACK is a graduate of the University of Oxford and holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham. She is a teacher of philosophy and a forest school practitioner.

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