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...
Imagine the following scenario: you’re walking back home at night and pass through a dark alley; suddenly you see, a few steps ahead, an obscure figure lurking in a corner; you startle and freeze; you get somewhat frightened; for a second or two you’re certain there is a threatening presence over there, you’ll get mugged or worse …; and then you realize, with considerable relief, that it’s just...
Usener famously theorized that the idea of a new god could, in ancient times, appear spontaneously anywhere in human dealings with their surroundings. All that was needed was that a person suddenly felt the touch of the divine, and religious sensitivity invested the moment with the notion of a newly created deity. In Usener’s picture, these momentarily generated deifications merely formed a proto...
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...
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...
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”...
The term “individuation” has a rather particular meaning in Jung, when he talks about the “individuation process”. Elsewhere, primarily in philosophy, it is used somewhat differently. Let’s explore the differences. 1. To begin with, in philosophical discussions the question is framed more broadly: it’s not just persons who are individuated, but really anything at all. Imagine two fresh and...
In my last post, I reviewed Jung’s definitions of a psychological “individual” and the process which creates it (i.e., the “individuation process”) from the beginning of the individuation essay; and I noted there that it wasn’t entirely clear whether Jung took these definitions to be a premise shared in his own tradition: he doesn’t explicitly say so in the essay, but it appears that he did, at...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.