As a quick little metaphysical Fingerübung, we might have a look at some characteristics of figurations and configurations, and their components. Configurations are particulars: they are bound to an individual subject (a person, albeit potentially a fictional one) and in part made up of that subject’s psychological processes. They’re not individual mental states, however, in the sense a mental...
At this point I shall introduce more terminology, some of which I’ll borrow from mediaeval notions. A set of events like that of the death of Damocles and his clock stopping, where some can be understood as a metaphorical expression of others in the set, I’ll call a figuration (from the Latin figuratio). In the middle ages, there was a sense (in theology and philosophy) that things and events in...
Part of the problem with how Jung and others present his views is a frequent blurring of methodological and metaphysical questions. This is not entirely accidental: one of its consequences is that it hides methodological flaws. And one of the worst of these has the effect of misrepresenting what Jung does as empirical science. Moreover, this is by no means merely a historical problem — a problem...
In my recent exploration of the implied theory of ghosts (in Reginald Hill’s short story), I stumbled, in fact repeatedly, over a certain ambiguity in the notion of “projection”. That is one of those terms from older psychology (think Freud, Jung) that has sunk into common parlance and popular culture, but unfortunately in a potentially misunderstood way. To sort it out, let’s look at an example...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.