Roderick Main

Short Biography

Roderick Main is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director in the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK, where he mainly teaches on the historical, philosophical, religious and cultural contexts of Jungian analytical psychology as well as on the application of analytical psychology to the study of myth and religion. His research has two main aspects. One aspect examines the emergence of analytical psychology out of tensions between secularising and sacralising currents in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Western culture. The other aspect explores how the resultant distinctive character of analytical psychology might be turned to account in the socio-cultural analysis of religiousness as it has transformed under conditions of modernity, looking especially at science and religion interactions, religious fundamentalism, and ‘New Age’ spirituality. He is the editor of Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (Routledge/Princeton, 1997) and the author of The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung's Critique of Modern Western Culture (Brunner-Routledge, 2004) and Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (SUNY, 2007). He holds an MA in Classics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Religious Studies from Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.