I engage critically with C. G. Jung’s late work on the idea of synchronicities, and related work from other authors at the time. My focus is on methodology, argument analysis and conceptual inquiry (rather than empirical or historical research).
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...
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 dealt with the pseudoscientific psychobabble, caught up with the underlying metaphysics of persons, and outlined Chislenko’s reasoning. But we’re still sorting through a host of difficulties, related to physical interaction or otherwise, person re-identification...
I continue looking into the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”. In earlier posts, I have suggested that such a theory would include a necessary element of death, a form of recurrence (something from the past reappears in the present), and the intimation of an inevitability. How does the implied theory that drives Chislenko’s thought...
I continue looking into the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”. After preliminaries (the pseudoscientific psychobabble, underlying metaphysics of persons), we’re knee-deep into Chislenko’s reasoning and the identification of ghosts with persons (and not for the first time). 6. There is an extra complication with the story’s theory of...
I’m discussing the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story, “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”, and in particular the first of the premises whose truth is simply assumed in that theory: that a ghost is a person (or in some sense a continuation, possibly “disembodied”, of a person). Since we’re at it, I might as well make a cross-referencing remark about this idea. I have...
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.