C.G. Jung and the Scientific Attitude

180 Pages·2007·8.171 MB·English

by  Edmund D. Cohen

C. G. JUNG AND THE SCIENTIFIC
ATTITUDE

C. G. Jung and the
Scientific Attitude
by
EDMUND D. COHEN, Ph.D.
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Copyright© 1975 PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY, INC.
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Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Acknowedgments Xl
1. THE COMPLEX l
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. THE STRUCTURE OF THE PSYCHE AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL
TYPES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3. THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE UNIVERSAL FORMS 29
4. JUNG AND THE SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE .......... . 70
5. JUNG'S SOCIAL RELEVANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
.
6. JUNG AND ACADEMIC PSYCHOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
7. THE DANGERS OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY 138
Appendix I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Appendix II 158
Bibliography 161
Index 163
v

Preface
The psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961; pronounced
"yoong") is pervaded by paradoxes: A great many people are
aware it exists, but exceedingly few have more than a superficial
knowledge of it, laced with several very persistent misconceptions.
It is scientific in the truest sense of the term, yet its critics charge
its author with obscurantism and mysticism. It includes an aston­
ishingly comprehensive model of the structure of the psyche,
that lends itself all too easily to being misunderstood as a finished
systematic theory, yet harbors an irremediable vagueness and leads
to wondering speculation at the frontiers of human knowledge.
And although every facet of it is imbued with skepticism and
modest regard for the limitations of our knowledge, it attracts
disciples who quickly come to profess mastery of the secret of
life itself, and make a sort of personal demigod of Jung.
The present work aims to introduce Jung's viewpoint to a
readership which, like the author, has been brought up on mater­
ialism, positivism, and the view that matters of the spirit are
incommensurable with those of science, the latter asserting their
truth by giving us power over nature, and the former, their falsity
and unreality, representing only so much whistling in the dark
on the parts of our poor benighted forebears. The physical
science that masters nature, however, also points increasingly to
a reality behind its phenomena which is alien to conscious under­
standing and boggling to the intellect. This same science is a
product of the psyche, which also produces art, myth, religious
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expression, and the best and worst in our social surroundings.
Psychology, to be true to its subject matter-the psyche-(and
the ultimate aim of any science is fidelity to its subject matter
without arbitrary methodological restrictions) must include all
these things, and thereby be a focal point of disciplines and a bridge
between them. In addition, it must struggle against the distortion
of perspective which comes from being itself a part of the whole
it attempts to study. A one-sidedly physical science-oriented
psychology reduces the psyche to one of the psyche's own several
modi operandi, which is, of course, ridiculous. Contemporary
academic psychologists, often limiting themselves to reduction­
istic, mechanical explanations, and covering over the nuances of
human experience with statistics, seem to me to have all but ceased
making progress toward their true objectives. The excuse that
theirs is a young science that will increasingly resemble its more
mature sisters as time goes by, is wearing thin.
My aim in this book, then, is the rehabilitation of some sig­
nificant and valid content of a kind which academic psychology
has all but overlooked. To be sure, I also discuss some matters
Jung was interested in, that have become fashionable and sen­
sational, such as astrology, occult phenomena, I Ching, and
matters psychedelic. Since Jung's productivity covers a span of
more than fifty-five years, his reputation rests largely on earlier
statements, upon which he later improved. I have tried to cor­
rect the resulting misconceptions, and some others, namely that
he was merely an offshoot of Freud, an obscurantist, a mystic, an
anti-Semite, a racist, a Nazi-sympathizer, or even a philosopher.
Most of all, I wish to correct the misconceptions that he claimed
there were inherited memories, reminiscences or the like, and that
he was inconsistent or self-contradictory. His work reflects that its
subject matter is full of paradoxes and conjunctions of opposites,
but what appear to be contradictions turn out, under close scru­
tiny, not to be so.
Jung's psychology, being an attempt to generalize from experi­
ence, is primarily empirical. Since discrepancies between the logical
and psychological significances of a thing are the rule rather than
the exception, one cannot deduce a psychology. Jung would fre­
quently defend his formulations saying, "it is simply so," not mean-
Vlll
ing to be arbitrary, but referring to his background of experience as
their foundation. Accordingly, the extent to which his work sheds
light on the inner experience of others is the measure of its valid­
ity. On the problem of the validity of his psychology, Jung said:
I know that what Freud said agrees with many people, and
I assume that these people have exactly the kind of psychology
that he describes. Adler, who has entirely different views, also
has a large following, and I am convinced that many people
have an Adlerian psychology. I too have a following-not so
large as Freud's-and it consists presumably of people who
have my psychology. I consider my contribution to psychology
to be my subjective confession. It is my personal psychology,
my prejudice that I see psychological facts as I do . .. .B ut I
expect Freud and Adler to do the same and confess that their
ideas are their subjective point of view. So far as we admit our
personal prejudice, we are really contributing towards an ob­
jective psychology.1
After I had settled on the basic outline of this book, it became
evident that I had arranged its parts unknowingly in more or less
chronological order; this has emphasized to me the inseparability
of the process of discovery from the content. I believe it is prin­
cipally the neglect of the context of Jung's experiences, and of
the intellectual and spiritual climate in which he lived, that have
made so much of the secondary source material on Jung's psy­
chology fall flat.
I have made liberal use of footnotes to introduce background
material, and consider these integral to the book. More references
appear than are, strictly speaking, necessary: I hope some readers
will find them useful nevertheless.
Many people have helped with this work, and there are a few
to whom I am particularly in debt. Mrs. Aniela Jaffe, Dr. Gerhard
Adler, and Mr. William McGuire made it possible for me to read
1 Jung, C. G. Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice. New York:
Pantheon, 1968. p. 140. Not part of the Co1Iected Works, this book consists
of five lectures Jung gave originally in English to the Tavistock Society in
London, in the fall of 1935. It is a superb summary of Jung's thought up to
that time, but stresses the superfluous dichotomy of ectopsyche vs. endopsyche,
which he subsequently abandoned.
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