AuthorLeif Frenzel

Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology. His recent interest is Jungian psychology, especially synchronicities and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.

Jungian phenomenalism: the point of reality as Erklärungsgrund

In my last post, I have started critical discussion of Jung’s line of thought in the Grundproblem lecture, and particularly the first step: a statement of a philosophical view called phenomenalism. 3. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask about the status of this argument. There’s a variety of ways we might understand it. We could read it as a sweeping metaphysical stance: the...

Jungian phenomenalism: the immediate and the real

When I reconstructed the main line of argument in Jung’s Grundproblem lecture, I noted that it proceeds in two steps. The first is an endorsement of a version of phenomenalism: the view that only particular episodes of experience are real, whereas whatever content they purport to refer to is a later construct (and therefore systematically unknowable as such). If we take “the psychological” as the...

The Homeric Greeks didn’t do perspective reversal (yet)

I have written quite a few times on this blog about “perspective reversal”: the move that Jung and Hillman frequently make of reminding us that “I had a dream” is phenomenologically untrue. Actually, when we are dreaming, we are immersed in the dream, walk around it and it would really be more adequate to say that the dream “had me”. Only later, when awake and remembering it, the reversal of the...

Matter, spirit, and phenomenalism

I have left off last week with a sketch (more detailed than earlier) of the ontological layout implicit in Jungian thought; and I have noted that there are several passages in Jung’s work where he outlines those same ontological categories. Let’s examine one of those more closely. 1. In his 1931 lecture on “Das Grundproblem der gegenwärtigen Psychologie” (GW VIII, §§ 649-688) Jung describes an...

Refining the ontological layout at the basis of Jung-Hillman metaphysics

I ended an earlier post deriving a (very rough) sketch of an ontological layout that would be consistent with Jungian thought. It would be consistent in the sense that it takes seriously both its methodological fundamental — starting with subjective experience — and its central idea — that our subjective experience is not fully transparent to our conscious personalities. Taking them seriously...

Methodological fundamentals and the distinction between extraversion and introversion

When I left my big-picture sketch of Jungian thought, I noted that the methodological fundamental (with subjectivity rather than objectivity as point of departure) was itself a theoretical choice; a choice that contrasts with the dominant preference for intersubjectively verifiable observation taken, paradigmatically, in a scientific approach. There is a certain temptation to assign this...

Fundamental methodological choice, central theoretical idea, and ontological categorization

In contrast to objective science, which relies on intersubjectively verifiable observation, the Jungian tradition is based on a different methodological fundamental. It starts with subjective experience, which we know from our own personal introspection and from the reports and narration which others give us. Whereas scientific observation is stated in the third person, subjective experience as a...

Everyday perceptions, materialism, and Jung-Hillman metaphysics

What makes Jungian thought, although it is generally called “psychology”, really a philosophy of the unconscious are its speculative mode and its central idea: that our own psychological life is not transparent to us. The latter means that our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, memories, phantasies, and intentional behaviors — all of our psychological life — can at times be triggered or shaped by...

Future directions for a Jungian way of thinking

To expand once more on the question of classifying, as psychological or otherwise, the considerations on this blog: there is an important difference in method. While our contemporary psychology adheres to the scientific method, the Jungian tradition is focused on understanding “the unconscious”; we might say that contemporary psychology is empirical, focuses on intersubjectively observable and...

Independent reality: active and passive, inner and outer

When Jung insists on the reality of the psyche, the emphasis is not on experience-independent existence, on continuity and re-identification. Instead, what seems to be important to him is that there are factors in the psyche which act autonomously (independent of the conscious perception and will of any individual person), and which are effective in producing psychological change — they manage to...

Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology. His recent interest is Jungian psychology, especially synchronicities and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.

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