Jung

I'm really not sure which section of the site this belongs in.

On his Quorum page, Craig Weiler posted a link to John Freeman's 1959 interview with Carl Gustav Jung, from the BBC's "Face to Face" series:



I thought the interview was very interesting. It begins with Jung coming across as an amiable old man; when asked whether he thought his grandchildren were afraid of him, he replied:
"I don't think so. If you would know my grandchildren you wouldn't think so. They steal my things. Even my hat that belongs to me they stole the other day."

But then Freeman's gently penetrating questions take Jung through his childhood, his career and his relationship with Freud, and end with his thoughts about post-mortem survival and the "impersonal stratum in our psyche" - in particular, comments about the sun by a schizophrenic patient which Jung later found to echo part of the (then unpublished) text from antiquity known as the Mithras Liturgy.

I'm now tempted to watch the three-hour interview with Jung from 1957 that's available here:

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - the "Carl Jung Depth Psychology" blog has an interesting post containing Jung's answers to a survey on the future of parapsychology circulated in 1960:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog...R3aXKR7nIX

In another post are Jung's answers to some questions posed by J. B. Rhine in 1945:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog...R3aqKR7nIW
The final cryptic paragraph about a bread-knife and a table is explained by this post on two seemingly paranormal events which Jung experienced as a young man:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog...R3ZkaR7nIU

I thought it was interesting how seriously Jung took mediumistic materialisations, At least, that's what I assume he was talking about.

Very interesting thank you. He comes across as perceptive and cautious.

Very interesting thank you. He comes across as perceptive and cautious.

Also, I thought, as what's now called "thinking outside the box." Which of course is only to be expected from a great pioneer.

Jeffrey Mishlove interviewed Gary Lachman about "Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung" last week:



I didn't know who Gary Lachman was until I looked him up. It turns out I first encountered his work on psi when I was still at school!

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - the Carl Jung Depth Psychology blog has a long extract on Jung and Parapsychology, from Aniela Jaffé's book, "From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung," originally published in 1971. It covers both Jung's personal experiences and his theories, particularly relating to synchronicity, the I Ching and astrology:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog...ritualism/

I quite liked this extract from Jung's foreword to an English translation of the I Ching (1948):
"The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries ..."

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - the "Carl Jung Depth Psychology" blog has an interesting post containing Jung's answers to a survey on the future of parapsychology circulated in 1960:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog...R3aXKR7nIX

In another post are Jung's answers to some questions posed by J. B. Rhine in 1945:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog...R3aqKR7nIW
The final cryptic paragraph about a bread-knife and a table is explained by this post on two seemingly paranormal events which Jung experienced as a young man:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog...R3ZkaR7nIU

Jung as a scientific observer, put forward a huge idea.  Causality can be based on a generative source that is fully relational, rather than physical.  He put it in a formal context where it could come under better review as new tools come available.

 Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.[1] During his career, Jung furnished several different definitions of it.[2] Jung defined synchronicity as an "acausal connecting (togetherness) principle," "meaningful coincidence", and "acausal parallelism." He introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture.[3]

In 1952 Jung published a paper "Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge" (Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle)[4] in a volume which also contained a related study by the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli,[5] who was sometimes critical of Jung's ideas.[6] Jung's belief was that, just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning.

-wiki


This idea asserting real-world meanings are an active part of our objective informational environments, is the core concept in seeing mind as a natural process.  A natural generative activity as causal as physical processes.

I enjoyed this review of Peter Kingsleys new book on the esoteric side of Carl Jung on New Thinking Allowed.



https://www.newthinkingallowed.org/inpre...atafalque/

[Laird]

Though I have not digested any of the above resources, and know very little about Jung in general, I thought it was worth adding these two resources which deal in an aspect of Jung which is less pleasant.

First, the 1988 paper by Farhad Dalal in the British Journal of Psychotherapy titled Jung: A Racist, or, alternatively in a copy I have, The Racism of Jung. Several months back I read approximately the first two fifths of this paper, and it is very cogent. I might yet finish it. I am unable to locate from where I first downloaded it but an equivalent free copy (though whether it is a violation of copyright I am not sure) seems at present to be available from here: https://jungstudies.net/wp-content/uploa...Racist.pdf

Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

In the ‘growth movement’ one hears constant accolades on Jung. He is revered for several things. He is said to be the father of Transpersonal Psychology; the man who unified the human race through his concept of the collective unconscious, and then connected the human race to the greater cosmos; it is said that he is the great equaliser and the great unifier; that his philosophy is that of balance and humility. And it is true that he has done these things, but only in part and at a cost, the cost being not only a retention but also a reinforcement of the status quo and the iniquities contained therein.
His attempts at ‘unification’ and ‘balance’ consist of several identities.
He explicitly equates:
1) The modern black with the prehistoric human
2) The modern black conscious with the white unconscious
3) The modern black adult with the white child
It is this that constitutes the racist core of Jungian Psychology on which all else is based. The equations are where he begins; these are the ideas and beliefs that he accepts without question. As ‘evidence’, in order to substantiate these claims, I will use his words extensively. On the whole it will not be necessary to interpret passages to find the ‘hidden meaning’ in his words. Given that the words speak for themselves, it is curious to note the selective reading of Jung that has taken place.

Then there is the response, just over thirty years later, from a group of Jungians, Open Letter from a Group of Jungians on the Question of Jung’s Writings On and Theories About “Africans”. Here is how that letter begins:

Dear Editor,

Thirty years ago, the British Journal of Psychotherapy published a paper by Dr. Farhad Dalal entitled ‘Jung: A racist’ (Dalal 1988). Regrettably, no adequate acknowledgement or apology for what Jung wrote, and Dalal critiqued, has been forthcoming from the field of analytical psychology and Jungian analysis. (To contextualize what follows, the Abstract to Dalal’s paper has been placed in an Appendix to this letter.)

We write now as a group of individuals—Jungian analysts, clinicians, and academics utilizing concepts from analytical psychology—to end the silence. We felt further encouraged to write to the BJP in particular because of the Journal’s strapline making clear its interest in ‘Jungian practice today’.

Via detailed scholarship, Dalal sets out what Jung wrote about persons of African and South Asian Indian heritage, as well as other populations of colour, and Indigenous peoples. Before and since the paper, Jung’s views have caused considerable disquiet and often anger within the communities concerned. There has also been disquiet and anger about Jung’s views in clinical, academic and cultural circles generally. Analytical psychologists and other Jungians have known about the implications of Jung’s ideas for decades; there are signatories to this Letter who have campaigned for recognition of the problems. But there has been a failure to address them responsibly, seriously and in public.

We share the concern that Jung’s colonial and racist ideas—sometimes explicit and sometimes implied—have led to inner harm (for example, internalized inferiority and self-abnegation) and outer harm (such as interpersonal and social consequences) for the groups, communities and individuals mentioned in the previous paragraph. Moreover, in the opinion of the signatories to this letter, these ideas have also led to aspects of de facto institutional and structural racism being present in Jungian organizations.