I continue looking into the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”. 2. Hill has some fun with “rational” explanations in the story. The character of Natasha provides the requisite psychobabbling turns of phrase: Perhaps I could dress it up for you. A para-psychological phenomenon, how would that sound in your report? Or perhaps you prefer...
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...
Jung’s suggestion, in the Grundproblem lecture, of a phenomenalist ontology runs counter to the proposal I have made earlier on this blog, where I suggested an ontological layout that would fit Jungian thought. This should not be surprising: if Jung’s own (admittedly rather sketchy) ontological views had been sufficient as a basis for his theories (and his methodology), there would be no need to...
In my last post, I have started critical discussion of Jung’s line of thought in the Grundproblem lecture, and particularly the first step: a statement of a philosophical view called phenomenalism. 3. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask about the status of this argument. There’s a variety of ways we might understand it. We could read it as a sweeping metaphysical stance: the...
When I reconstructed the main line of argument in Jung’s Grundproblem lecture, I noted that it proceeds in two steps. The first is an endorsement of a version of phenomenalism: the view that only particular episodes of experience are real, whereas whatever content they purport to refer to is a later construct (and therefore systematically unknowable as such). If we take “the psychological” as the...
I have left off last week with a sketch (more detailed than earlier) of the ontological layout implicit in Jungian thought; and I have noted that there are several passages in Jung’s work where he outlines those same ontological categories. Let’s examine one of those more closely. 1. In his 1931 lecture on “Das Grundproblem der gegenwärtigen Psychologie” (GW VIII, §§ 649-688) Jung describes an...
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...
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...
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.