Wikipedia: Carl Jung/Talk

Just replaced a blank page with a stub. Much more needed here! --LDC

: I'm sure I saw the Jungion in a Star Trek chapter :)

Larry Sanger objected to me calling Freud's views 'essentially materialist. I chose those words to describe Jung's dissatisfaction with the (in his eyes) reductionist tendency in Freud. Doesn't Jung's later development show that it is exactly this Freudian materialism that he's trying to get away from? The I Ching, archetypes that live forever in an immaterial 'collective unconscious', alchemy, magic... --Hiram

Well, this is my opinion, and I'm no expert--in fact, I wish some philosopher of psychology would come on the scene and set this all aright. Anyway, if Jung called Freud a materialist, that's one thing; if you are describing Jung's view, that's another. I don't know the facts about that, but what I do know is that it seems very strange to say that someone who bandied about such concepts as the "ego," "id," and "superego" as a materialist. Maybe he was, I don't know, but are you quite sure--I mean, do you have textual evidence from Freud's works? As far as I can tell, he was a "reductionist" only in a very weak sense, i.e., he proposed (allegedly) scientific explanations of mental phenomena. For all I know (again, I wish someone who did know would come and shame me into silence), Freud could be an epiphenomenalist. That is a kind of dualist. --LMS

I know what epiphenomenalism is, my dear colleague... but let's, for the sake of the argument, use the Wikipedia's definition ("Epiphenomenalism is a kind of dualism according to which physical events have mental effects, but mental events have no physical effects"): Freud certainly wasn't an epiphenomenalist. Mental events, according to Freud, were as real as any other type of event, and the very concept of a 'symptom' as used by Freud shows that these mental events do have (even remarkable) "physical effects". Freud would never have allowed mental phenomena to be called by-products of physical realities. This does not mean, however, that he was a dualist, because no-where in Freud's work (somebody correct me if I'm wrong) is there any reference to a special ontological category for mental phenomena. The man was a neurologist, who regarded the mind as the workings of the brain. These workings of the brain, however, do acquire meaningful coherence and allow us to speak of a 'mental life' -- but Freud's insistence on regarding mental processes as meaningful does not constitute an admittance, tacit or otherwise, of any form of existence other than material existence -- not any more than allowing that a book has a story in it can be taken as a dualist view of the book (the paper-and-ink on the one hand, the story on the other). Freud criticized religion and superstition, claiming that the phenomena used to justify dualist ideologies could be sufficiently explained without any reference to some non-material kind of existence. --Hiram

To bring this to a close, let me just say that I never had any doubt that you had a perfectly valid point to make. I'd just like to have the point made more clearly. So the article might include answers to these questions:

What did Jung actually say in reaction to Freud?
When characterizing Jung's reaction as a reaction to Freud's materialism, are you using your description, or Jung's?

From my study of history of philosophy, I'm interested in issues of textual interpretation, and I'm just concerned about a tendency that philosophers (as it happens--but it's obviously not limited to philosophers) have of imposing their own concepts on historical texts, when their own concepts carry a lot of baggage that cannot really be applied to the historical texts. I'm not saying you disagree with any of this, and I'm not requiring you to agree with any of it--go ahead and restore your text, if you want. I just want to make my views here clear. --LMS

Hey, I'm new here -- etiquette, processes, etc. aren't immediately obvious to me. So, I started a big re-write of the section on Jung. I blew away a lot of the older stuff that was there b/c I couldn't figure out how to integrate it into where I thought the section should go. No toes were aimed at. I've been trying with a good bit of effort to understand Jung's work for about the last 11 years. This is a nice chance to hone with others my understanding and offer what I've got so far in hopes it's useful to anyone else.... Curt.