Carl Albrecht – författare

Mystical Recognition relies on the insights of Albrecht's earlier study Psychology of Mystical Consciousness, which are applied here to the critical analysis of a representative corpus of mystical texts - about 100 testimonies of numerous Christian and non-Christian mystics across cultural and historical traditions. Mystical Recognition aims at exploring the 'ontic fundament' by which the psychological phenomena and responses are elicited in a mystical event. While conceding that an individual mystical experience is largely imbued with the beliefs and suppositions that a mystic holds prior to a mystical experience, Albrecht insists that a genuine mystical experience will always impart some impact and cognitive insight that cannot reasonably be accounted for from the subject's prior knowledge or the subjective domain of his/her consciousness. Any genuine mystical event is caused by an 'impact' imposed from beyond the confines of the individual self and thus the manifestation of a living 'mystical relation' between the experiencer and the All-encompassing. The discovery that the 'mystical relation' is an existential facticity and, as such, an 'ultimate phenomenon' (i.e. a phenomenon that 'is' - like 'life', 'spirit', or 'love' - but which cannot be rationally explained or traced to a known source) is a unique pioneering achievement and provides a new epistemological foundation for the understanding of the spiritual nature of man. In the final chapter, Albrecht juxtaposes his findings of his analyses of the corpus of mystical records and of several original accounts of mystical experience (including his own) critically to the conception of human 'Dasein' as outlined by Heidegger's and Binswanger's 'hermeneutics of Dasein', resulting in the claim that man is endowed with the capacity of 'openness' which enables him/her to perceive and respond to phenomena of 'transcendental Reality' 'arriving' in his/her consciousness.

Carl Albrecht: Psychology of Mystical Consciousness 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. Albrecht's results are unique in that they derive from a pioneering methodological approach based on 'Autogenic Training', which enabled a practitioner to verbalize spontaneously what he/she is experiencing while immersed in an altered state of consciousness. These spontaneous utterances of mystical (and non-mystical) experience were concurrently recorded by Albrecht (supplemented by his own utterances recorded by a confidante) and provided him with invaluable empirical data for his detailed phenomenological analyses. The outcome was a most comprehensive, systematic psychological phenomenology of mystical consciousness informed by long-term empirical research, which is unique as regards authenticity, immediacy and scope. Unlike other empirical studies in this field, which are either based on records of mystical experience retrieved retrospectively, or derived from behaviorist research, or both, Albrecht's empirical data originate from immediate (not rationally mediated) verbal testimonies spoken by subjects while transported into a mystical state, in addition to records of great mystics from Eastern and Western mystical traditions. Psychology of Mystical Consciousness is now accessible to English-speaking scholars and scientists world-wide and will surely provide a new impetus to interdisciplinary enquiries into mysticism and the spiritual nature of man.