Jung: Scholar

The whole edifice, put on trial

A course on the thought of Carl Jung.

Psychology

What you will learn

  • State the falsifiability charge against the archetype and my heuristic-value defense, and evaluate where each is strong.
  • Distinguish the empirically-grounded core of the theory from its unfalsifiable reaches (synchronicity), and judge the archetype's scientific status honestly.
  • State how Jung reconceived libido and why (the energic conception), and state Freud's charge that the desexualization was a retreat.
  • Evaluate the break as both advance and evasion — what the general-energy view opened up, and what the loss of the sexual specificity may have let the theory avoid.
  • Assemble an honest two-column ledger of Jungian ideas — surviving vs set-aside — and justify each placement by the kind of evidence that bears on it.
  • Articulate the durable core of Jung that remains even where specific doctrines have been discarded.

Course outline

  1. Science or Beautiful Supposition? — The methodological trial: is the collective unconscious an empirical hypothesis or an unfalsifiable metaphysics? my defense rests on heuristic and explanatory value rather than strict proof; the…
  2. The Break With Freud, Re-Judged — The founding controversy re-judged: Jung reconceived Freud's libido as general psychic energy rather than sexual drive. Freud charged that this drained the disturbing sexual truth from psychoanalysis…
  3. The Ledger — The honest verdict of a century: what survived (introversion/extraversion as a robust trait dimension; the feeling-toned complex; the developmental view of the second half of life; the influence on…

Works read in this course

  • Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928) — the Baynes translation — including my reflections on the validity of psychological hypotheses (heuristic and explanatory value) and my empiricist self-positioning.
  • The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1915) — my lectures reconceiving libido as general psychic energy — the theoretical core of the break with Freud.
  • Psychology of the Unconscious (Hinkle, 1916) — the book that broke with Freud — libido and myth; the work Freud read as a flight from the sexual theory.
  • Psychological Types (Baynes, 1923) — the typology whose introversion/extraversion dimension is the most empirically durable part of my legacy.

Terms introduced

falsifiability, synchronicity, psychic energy

Part of the Simposeum course library.