Free Psychology Books: Pathways into the Jungian World by Roger Brooke

Pathways into the Jungian World by Roger Brooke

Analytical psychology and phenomenology have had an uneasy relationship. Jung liked to describe himself as an “empiricist” concerned with “facts,” but clearly what he meant by this was not how these terms are usually understood in psychology, defined as it is (or was) as an extension of natural science into the human realm. To use Dilthey’s classic terms, Jung understood “facts” not in terms of the Natuurswissenschaften but in terms appropriate to the Geisteswissenschaften,the human sciences. 1 In other words, Jung’s appeals to the scientific status of his ideas rested on the legitimacy of meanings as the fundamental evidence of human experience. From this perspective, there is less tension between Jung’s claim to being a scientist concerned with “facts” and his insistence that he was a phenomenologist. His appeal to phenomenology was central to his criticism of Freudian reductionism, the tendency to interpret the magnitude and range of experience as “nothing but” something else, at a lower order of explanation—religious experience, for example, as regressive, Oedipal, and defensive. In line with the phenomenological tradition, Jung was concerned to address the phenomena of psychological life “on their own terms,” in ways that did not violate the integrity of experience. That is a fair definition of phenomenological psychology: it is the systematic attempt to describe the phenomena of psychological life without violating the integrity of experience. The question then is why the pioneers of phenomenology paid so little attention to Jung and were generally so unsympathetic, even though their essential criticisms of Freud were not only articulated by Jung but in general anticipatedby him. Before pioneers such as Ludwig Binswanger and Erwin Straus, it was Jung who cogently critiqued Freud’s psychophysiological and materialist assumptions, historical determinism, and his apparent inability to acknowledge that his “findings” were not merely “objective” but were constituted by a certain historically conditioned perspective.Herbert Spiegelberg (1972), in his definitive study of the history of phenomenological psychology, devotes only a page and a half to Jung, and says that Jung’s claim to being a phenomenologist owed to the movement’s popularity rather than to anything substantial. Spiegelberg’s neglectof Jung merely reflects the field.

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