Part of the problem with how Jung and others present his views is a frequent blurring of methodological and metaphysical questions. This is not entirely accidental: one of its consequences is that it hides methodological flaws. And one of the worst of these has the effect of misrepresenting what Jung does as empirical science. Moreover, this is by no means merely a historical problem — a problem...
Suppose you’re writing a novel. Your plot requires that one of the characters, let’s call him Damocles, dies (of natural causes). You can do this in several distinct ways. One would be simply by making a sober factual statement: “On Saturday evening, Damocles died in his hospital bed.” In this case, we just have a basic statement of what happens, along with the time and place of the event; and...
In my recent exploration of the implied theory of ghosts (in Reginald Hill’s short story), I stumbled, in fact repeatedly, over a certain ambiguity in the notion of “projection”. That is one of those terms from older psychology (think Freud, Jung) that has sunk into common parlance and popular culture, but unfortunately in a potentially misunderstood way. To sort it out, let’s look at an example...
I continue looking into the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”. We’ve discussed the first of the Chislenko premises, and then digressed into a number of complications. It’s time to move on to the second premise. In earlier posts, I have already speculated that a theory of ghosts would include a necessary element of death, a form of...
I have posed what I’ve called, perhaps a bit over-dramatically, the ‘provocative’ thesis that the ideas Jung extracts from the Pauli dream series in Psychology & Alchemy (GW XII) have not the general validity he claims for them; that they’re really just an interpretation of a single subject’s psychological and narrative world. I have made a case for this thesis in one of my previous posts;...
We have seen how saying that a dream figure is “the same” as one we encountered before is different, both from re-identifying embodied persons in real life and from re-identifying characters in a narrative text. A problem is beginning to emerge here. Persons in the real world have an objective existence: they (or more precisely, their bodies) have a determinate spatial location and persist...
I concluded my last post with a bit of a provocative hypothesis. I don’t mean it quite seriously, but I’m exploring it to some degree, in order to learn what might support it and what might suffice to dispel it. Yet even though it’s not seriously entertained, the thesis is a far-reaching one. Here’s why. At the end of his discussion of the Pauli dream series in Psychology & Alchemy (GW XII)...
On what basis can we say that someone we encounter is “the same” as someone we’ve met before? I have discussed this in my last post, and we’ve seen that the answer will be very different if that “someone” is not an actual, embodied person, but a character we hear or read about in a text (such as, in a dream report). This should give us food for thought when it comes to dream figures that seem to...
Stepping into the shady interior of the old bookstore I passed an old man who was just leaving. I soon gravitated towards a shelf with the latest arrivals, picked a publication and immersed myself in its table of contents. Behind my back I sensed someone entering the shop; had the old man returned? What criteria do we use, in everyday life, to find out if, say, a person (one we don’t already...
I was a little too quick with what I called the “second man” problem, in my discussion of the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s story. I noted, first, the obvious: that a second man appeared in the ghost sighting episode where the first man was killed, and that this second man is later recognized as one of the still living players in the plot — and hence whatever was sighted couldn’t...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.