Jungian studies

Mills' paper tackles an important question for Jungian studies: what are the underlying metaphysical assumptions behind analytical psychology? However, his attempt to pursue this inquiry is undermined by a strong but unsupportable insistence by Mills that Jung intended to present himself primarily as an ontologist. I also argue that various further inaccuracies and misreadings lead Mills into a fundamental misunderstanding of the intentions and aims that characterise Jung's psychology.

Two tendencies co-exist within the field of analytical psychology. The first is to locate Jung’s psychology within the established bounds of official science (by for example insisting on its implicit consistency with orthodox scientific findings). The second is to make claims that Jung’s psychology is extra- (or super-) scientific. It seems to me however that neither approach can do justice to the difficulty of the problem Jung has set us. In order to develop a third approach I place Jung’s problematic engagement with science into a creative encounter with the philosophical ideas of Deleuze & Guattari. The French philosophers distinguish two contrasting ways of doing science: “Royal” or “state” science privileges the fixed, stable and constant. “Nomad” or “minor” science emphasizes the malleable, fluid, and metamorphic nature of being. These are not alternatives but “ontologically, a single field of interaction” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 367). When it comes to Jun...

This essay explores the meaning of Anima and Animus archetypes through the Amazonian myth of Honorato and Caninana. Myths are archetypal narratives and as such have an arbitrary nature. Some of the myths are classified as cosmological for they describe the creation of new worlds as new realities. The myth of Honorato and Caninana falls into this category and the same motifs found in this myth have also been found in other myths throughout the ancient world. This essay also emphasizes the importance of having myths as a therapeutic tool. Palavras-chave: Myths. Amazonian life. Archetypes. Therapy. O MITO AMAZÔNICO DE HONORATO E CANINANA: UM JEITO BRASILEIRO DE EXPLICAR O SYZYGY RESUMO Este ensaio explora o significado dos arquétipos Anima e Animus através do mito amazônico de Honorato e Caninana. Os mitos são narrativas arquetípicas e, como tal, têm uma natureza arbitrária. Alguns dos mitos são classificados como cosmológicos, pois descrevem a criação de novos mundos como novas realidades. O mito de Honorato e Caninana se enquadra nessa categoria e os mesmos motivos encontrados nesse mito também foram encontrados em outros mitos em todo o mundo antigo. Esse ensaio também destaca a importância dos mitos como uma ferramenta terapêutica.

Introduction: The Problem of Writing and Nature for Jung and Evolution. The Problem of the Body In/Out of Nature for Jane Austen and Seamus Heaney. The Problem of Heaven and Hell for Emily Bronte. Re-figuring Evolution for Children's Literature. Hunting Signs with the Trickster Detectives. Shakespeare's Magical Power. The Writer and the Underworld.

This paper takes Jung’s essay ‘Ulysses’ as a case study in order to elucidate his opinion on the relationship between modern artists and mental insanity. The study seeks to contradict a common misconception that Jung ‘diagnoses’ modern artists such as Pablo Picasso and James Joyce with schizophrenia; instead, the paper sheds light on the cultural (not pathological) connections he makes between modern artists and art. The study examines Jung’s writings on modern art and aesthetics, aiming to dismantle some misinterpretations that might make his attitude toward them appear to be a diagnostic one. Above all, I suggest that through his reading of Ulysses, Jung shows how the feelings of confusion that arose in him can actually be reconstructive; this leads to what I would dub a ‘psychic synthesis’ through modern art. Finally, after clarifying Jung’s standpoint on modern art and insanity, this paper seeks to significantly contribute a revaluation of Jung on modernism.

ABSTRACT C.G. Jung proposed that archetypal symbols carry implicit meanings. We therefore hypothesised that symbol cueing facilitates memory and subsequent recall of meaning words associated with symbols. In the present study, participants either freely generated, or selected from a list, one meaning word for each of 30 symbols presented on screen. As expected, results showed little evidence of conscious knowledge of meaning words. Upon presentation of two sets of symbols and meaning words (15 pairs matched; 15 pairs mismatched), words from the matched-pairs set were correctly recalled significantly more often than words from the mismatched-pairs set. Our findings were considered from a cognitive and clinical perspective.

In a previous essay offering an exegesis of Jung's metaphysics, I concluded that his position on the archetypes emphasizes basic constitutional patterns that manifest as imago, thought, affect, fantasy, and behavior inherent in all forms of human psychic life (bios) that are genetically transmitted yet realized on different stratifications of psychical order, including mystical properties emanating from supernatural origins. Mark Saban and Robert Segal provide thoughtful critiques of my work that challenge my basic premises. Saban represents a particular Jungian camp conforming to empirical apologetics, while Segal is more critical of Jung's philosophical ideas. The two main themes that emerge from their criticism are that I fail to show that Jung is a metaphysician, and that the archetypes are not supernatural phenomena. Here I will be concerned with recapitulating Jung's metaphysical postulations about the world and psyche and address more specifically the question of ...

This paper draws from resources in the work of Deleuze to critically examine the notion of organicism and holistic relations that appear in historical forerunners that Jung identifies in his work on synchronicity. I interpret evidence in Jung’s comments on synchronicity that resonate with Deleuze’s interpretation of repetition and time and which challenge any straightforward foundationalist critique of Jung’s thought. A contention of the paper is that Jung and Deleuze envisage enchanted openings onto relations which are not constrained by the presupposition of a bounded whole, whether at the level of the macrocosm or the microcosm. Openings to these relations entail the potential for experimental transformation beyond sedentary habits of thought which are blocked by a disenchanting ‘image of thought’ that stands in need of critique. Other examples of enchanted openings in Jung’s work are signposted in an effort to counter their marginalisation in some post-Jungian critiques and to s...

... Main, R. 2007b. “Ruptured time and the re-enchantment of modernity”. In Who owns Jung? , Edited by: Casement, A. London: Karnac. ... Main, R. 2007b. “Ruptured time and the re-enchantment ofmodernity”. In Who owns Jung? , Edited by: Casement, A. London: Karnac. ...

This paper provides the outline of a ‘step ladder model’ (SLM) comprising 12 steps of scientific discovery making. It incorporates both a ‘leap-off point’ from Kuhn'sStructure of Scientific Revolutions, and ideas from Jungian psychology to reveal patterns in the way in which scientific discoveries are made, across 40 examples from the history of science. The current consensus is that these discoveries are accidental. This paper aims to provide a model for deliberately making dream-based scientific discoveries. The key to this model is intrapsychic patterns in how discoveries of this kind can be made. As these patterns become gradually clearer, greater understanding of the dream-based scientific discovery-making process can develop. Gradually as a collective endeavour, as the SLM develops, the dream-based scientific discovery process can by degrees become less accidental, and progressively more deliberate.

This article offers a commentary on a recently discovered letter from Jung to Karl Stern. Jung's hopes for a fruitful dialogue with Stern are based more in Jung's own long-term desire for dialogue with theology than in Stern's use of Jung in his own version of a Freudian approach to psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, there is common ground in a shared sense that this is an ‘imperilled age’. The possibilities for dialogue are set within a heuristic frame that reads Stern's Christian personalism as a contextualising theology and Jung's dialectical psychology as a reinterpretative project in relation to theology. This facilitates a discussion of the issues of metaphysics and psychology, teleology, and analogy. Whatever mutual benefit they might have derived from these areas of dialogue, their journey together might well have foundered once Jung's own theological commitments had become clear.

Since the 1970s, the ‘slasher’ movie, with its violence towards women and the surviving ‘final girl’, has been a constant presence in the horror genre to the delight of some and the perplexed dismay of others. Traditional academic approaches to the genre have tended to make assumptions about who is watching these films and why. This article uses a Jungian-inflected approach to reconsider the potential meaning of the genre, suggesting that the violence in the films is less an exhortation to violence against women, but rather a representation of women's experience of patriarchy, with the ‘final girl’ as a figure of resistance. The article also considers the meaning of the more contemporary ‘final girl as perpetrator’ slasher films.

My article re-reads John Milton’s Paradise Lost through a feminist post-Jungian perspective; the study will observe the implications of contemporary Jungian critical approaches toward Milton’s portrayal of Eve, who helps Adam find ‘a paradise within …, happier far’ (PL 12. 587). I will first highlight the negative portrayal of an evil, intellectually inferior Eve in Paradise Lost, and ultimately re-reading the poem—and the role of Eve in it—from the perspective of a feminist Jung. The initial reading of Paradise Lost, in which Eve was regarded as inferior and complementary to Adam, reflects Jung’s criticized notion that the anima’s role is to complement a man’s psychology. This, however, can be read differently through a post-Jungian feminist perspective. From this new viewpoint, Eve can be regarded as Adam’s equal, rather than an inferior company, and a catalyst in their ‘coniunctio’, in which they both individuate (rather than Eve, the anima be subservient to Adam’s individuation)...

Jung was not interested in exploring group dynamics within the many dimensions of concrete social reality that the authors claim also contributes to how we are formed as individuals in addition to psychical phenomena. Our interactions with these concrete and psychical phenomena have lingering effects on both the individual and the intersecting social worlds to which we are inured across the planet and through time. The authors argue that sociodrama facilitates the exploration of uncritically held ideological belief structures that are influenced by these interactions that can hinder our ability to bear responsibility for our transactions within any collective. The authors’ theoretical assumptions that support sociodramatic exploration within an academic conference environment are elaborated, including details about a diversity sociodramatic exploration the authors conducted during the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) conference in Cape Town, South Africa in 2017....

Humanizing the devastating emotional forces released by the worldwide plague of collective violence and trauma demands developing integral awareness. This article develops an ecological perspective that views human communities as ecosystems and individuals as embedded in these environments. This perspective offers a space large enough to generate fresh ideas. The process evolved under the press of fieldwork in crisis areas in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. To explore psychosocial and political characteristics of human ecosystems Riedel employs a biaxial map, the Mandala of the Five Worlds. The map brings into purview in dynamic mandala format the Familial and Societal Worlds on the horizontal axis, the worlds of Nature and Mind on the vertical axis, and the Rhizome World at the core. Riedel views the rhizome world as a container and co-created field of human inheritances and codes, natural-physical and socio-cultural. The rhizome plays a central role in the resonance and ...

Despite it being the focal point of his theoretical system, I argue that Jung's notion of the archetypes is one of his least understood concepts because it was nebulous to Jung himself. Jung vacillated between viewing archetypes as analogous to primordial images and ideas inherited from our ancestral past, formal a priori categories of mind, cosmic projections, emotional and valuational agencies, and numinous mystical experience, but the question remains whether a ‘suprapersonal’ or ‘transubjective’ psyche exists. In what follows, I will be preoccupied with tracing the theoretical development of Jung's thesis on the collective unconscious, with a special emphasis on the archetypes, and hence pointing out the metaphysical implications of his thought. It is not possible to critique his entire body of work in the context of this abbreviated article; therefore, the reader should be aware that I am limiting myself to a narrow scope of interest in explicating and analyzing the philosophical viability of his major concepts. The greater question is whether the archetypes adequately answer to the question of origins, of an omnipresent and eternal dimension to the nature and structure of psychic reality.

This paper contextualizes Jung's method of amplification within the larger history of philosophical hermeneutics and most particularly within the relational ethics of the post-modern, post-phenomenological and post-Heideggarian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. While finding the epistemological assumptions (foundationalism) of subject formation guiding Jung's interpretative method incompatible with the extra-ontology perspective of Levinas, this paper underscores the necessity for revitalizing our theory and practice by bringing back the unthought in Jung's corpus so that the truly ethical dimensions of life and analytic work are in alignment with our present epoch. Finally, one enigmatic analytic moment demonstrates how the radical Levinasian primacy of ethical experience in subject formation can emerge in a contemporary clinical encounter. The Levinasian sensibility will be shown to open up new perspectives that contrast with the formulaic ways in which we tend to understa...

Despite the impact of the publication of Jung's own (literally) monumental work of rendering images in The Red Book (2009), the relation of art, artists, art psychotherapy and Jungian studies is puzzling and complex. As Tjeu van den Berk's excellent Jung on Art (2012) demonstrates, Jung by no means posited a comfortable continuum between his psychology and aesthetics. Even artists impressed by his notions of the inherently creative unconscious imagination do not share the priorities of Jungian-oriented art psychotherapists. In exploring this problem of Jungian psychology and the aesthetic domain, I take issue with some of van den Berk's conclusions, proposing instead that in his core concept of the ‘symbol’ Jung constructs a theory of the imagination that overcomes disciplinary, mythic and individual boundaries: rather, it is an idea of radical re-visioning of psyche as expressed in time and space. By dismantling the notion of psyche as bound to an individual person, I suggest the symbol transforms the dialogue of Jung, Jungians and art.