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...
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...
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...
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...
I have started exploring the notion of an objective and independent reality (beginning with the connected idea of individuation, as it is used in philosophy); but it will perhaps be helpful to pause and consider why this is relevant to a discussion of Jungian metaphysics. The point of departure is twofold: one is the question of the interiority of psychology and its relation to the “external”...
Much of the thinking on this blog starts from within a tradition in 20th century thought which we might call broadly “Jungian” or “archetypal”. This tradition is generally characterized as a psychology, originating from Freudian psychoanalysis, but distancing itself from the reductionism and scientism of the latter by bringing in more mystical, hermeneutical, and existential elements. Calling it...
A metaphysical theory is an account of which kinds of thing exist in the world and how they interact. Theories like that are generally considered to be a branch of philosophy; and especially when concerned just with kinds of existing things, they are also called ontologies. The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang...
In my last post, I left it at the observation that archaic images (urtümliche Bilder) as Jung defines them already have a certain assumption of “timelessness” built into them — since they are specified as those which have “mythological qualities” and can be be found across times and cultures. From a methodological point of view, there are plenty of difficulties with that definition. First, it’s...
In the definitions he presents in Psychological Types, Jung distinguishes between ideas and images, or more specifically: archaic (urtümliche) images. The latter is prior in the order of explanation; the former is understood as “the meaning of an archaic image which was deducted, abstracted from the concretism of that image [der Sinn eines urtümlichen Bildes welcher von dem Konkretismus des...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.