Two Jungs: Two Sciences?

Mark Saban

doi:10.1163/19409060-bja10026

Abstract

Abstract 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 Jung’s writings on science, the irredeemable ambiguity of his psychology shows up in what appear to be two contradictory approaches. One highlights the intrinsically scientific nature of his project and insists upon his empiricism. The other takes the form of a profound and relentless critique of the materialistic, reductive and rationalistic assumptions Jung finds behind the scientific approach. My suggestion here is that the dynamic tension between these two opposing visions of science that forms the crucial condition for the on-going individuation of his psychology.

Highlights

According to William Kotsch, “it is critical that Jungians neither choose nor allow themselves to be excluded from the great conversation that is contemporary science” (2000, p. 220)
In order to follow Peltier in seeing the Red Book as an example of Jung’s science, it is necessary to accept that, far from being univocal, scientific method is animated by contrasting, mutually interactive oppositional dimensions
These are the aspects that Deleuze and Guattari have chosen to name nomad and royal science

Summary

Introduction

According to William Kotsch, “it is critical that Jungians neither choose nor allow themselves to be excluded from the great conversation that is contemporary science” (2000, p. 220). It exemplified precisely the kind of impossibly problematic tension that Jung would later understand to be necessary for the process of individuation At this particular stage of Jung’s development, the problem was resolved (albeit only temporarily) after two dreams.. On the one hand (or perhaps we should say, through one lens), the dreams endorse Jung’s eminently intellectual impulse to discover (dig up) the objective truth about nature; on the other, they keep fully alive the numinous affect (Jung’s “beating heart”) held by Jung’s witnessing of a mysterious creature hidden deep in the forest It was the stereoscopic binocularity of this novel perspective that enabled Jung to transcend what he had hitherto experienced as an all-or-nothing, either/or feeling of impossibly painful contradiction. His lifelong task becomes that of elaborating a scientific methodology that might yoke them together into relation but in a way that would neither loosen nor lessen the tensions between them

The Scientific Individuation of Analytical Psychology

The Archimedean Point?

Conclusion