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;...
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...
Unfortunately, the formulation “incessant circling” which I used to characterize Jung’s writing can be interpreted in multiple different ways. So let’s clarify. What I don’t mean are those many passages of “amplification” which we find in some of his works. Instead, I want to keep strictly to passages where Jung outlines his principal ideas.
Whenever Jung introduces his principal ideas and their interconnections, at some point or other a fault line appears. It’s often half-hidden (or glossed over in the presentation), but it’s always there and it always subtly complicates the subsequent stages of Jung’s lines of thought.
I have just spent half a year re-reading much of Jung’s work, in order to gain a more integrated perspective on his principal ideas. There is a reason why this is a sensible thing to do. Of course, I take it that Jung’s work has enough substance and relevance to be still of value today. (Anyone who doesn’t agree with that would simply ignore Jung entirely, or relegate him to a footnote in history...
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...
When I summarized the view that emerges from the individuation essay, I listed a number of respects in which the notion of “personality” on which it is based is different from our everyday notion of a person. One of these was that a psychological individual (according to Jung, in the individuation essay) partly consists of unconscious, collective structures which are diffused throughout the...
There is an interesting corollary to the argument of the individuation essay, as I have reconstructed it in my recent postings. That argument was, roughly, that a psychological individual had to be (by presupposition) a “whole”, expressed and held together by some structural principle; that this whole could not coincide with the conscious subject, and this structural principle could not be the...
A psychological individual is a whole, and what makes it a whole (and keeps it together) is that it has personality character. That personality is like a sleeping (and dreaming) person, rather than a waking person. A waking person would be structured by consciousness, whereas a psychological individual, as a whole, is not characterized by that. This Jungian view is both weirder and more radical...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.