I’ve started investigating the subtleties of a certain well-known phenomenon, using variations of the hypothetical case of the death of Damocles: the phenomenon of somehow “interesting” coincidences. For the time being, I shall keep that wording: various terms are widely in use for our phenomenon, but I’d like to avoid these, since they carry strong and distorting connotations. I’ll call our...
There’s a lot more interesting things to say about my recent topic, the situation I presented as variations over the death of Damocles. 5. When reading (or hearing about) such a story, one cannot help to feel that something “needs explaining” here. But what exactly is it one wants an explanation for? Is it one of the events that should be explained? (And which one: the death of Damocles, or the...
I have written occasionally about mysticism, and mentioned that Jung is best understood as doing something like mystically inspired philosophy. This is not meant as criticism: both mysticism and philosophy are age-old, and very necessary human activities. There is a danger, however, when they get misleadingly framed as something else — as Jung often does, when he tries to make what he’s doing...
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)...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.