Newest addition to our Articles Library:

December 28, 2011

An hour-long interview video of Jung: Face to Face with Jung.

Wolfgang Giegerich describes the dilemma Jung's psychology faces today:

The century of psychology is over. The great expectations have been shattered that the emergence of psychology, in particular therapeutic or depth psychology, had given rise to at the beginning of the 20th century. Even Freudian psychoanalysis today is faced with a hostile spirit in mainstream thinking. For psychology in the tradition of C.G. Jung the situation is, on the one hand, a little easier, but on the other much more difficult. It is easier because for the most part it operates leeward of other psychologies, hardly being taken note of; it is more difficult because its innermost substance is fundamentally threatened.

This threat comes from different directions.

It is, firstly, already inherent in the very way Jungian psychology itself is construed, inasmuch as Jung’s high claim that his psychology was in the status of a strictly empirical science has proven untenable, and as his hope that psychology might provide an answer to the psychological-spiritual predicament of the age failed, as we are now forced to understand (W. Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004).

The threat to the substance of Jungian psychology comes, secondly, also from the adherents and friends of this psychology, on the one hand from the professional Jungians under whose hands it has been turned into something completely different from what Jung himself intended with his ‘complex psychology,’ as above all Sonu Shamdasani has demonstrated (Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology. The Dream of a Science, Cambridge University Press, 2003). No one is likely to want to say that what Jung had struggled with is still alive among them and has fruitfully been further developed by them. Still today one would probably concur with Hillman when he stated years ago that the Jungians “really are mostly second rate people with third rate minds” (Hillman, Inter Views, New York [Harper & Row] 1983, p. 36). Jungian psychology has the misfortune not to have been able to attract great minds, in contrast, e.g., to Freud’s psychology, which produced a psychologist like Lacan and was able to inspire many philosophers and poets. On the other hand, the threat comes also from the adherents of Jungian psychology in the wider public, among whom Jung’s work degenerated into “pop psychology,” in other words into a commodity, which has above all the function of satisfying private ideological-spiritual and emotional needs and thus of compensating for a feeling of lack. (Wolfgang Geigerich, A Little Light,to be Carried Through Night and Storm), originally found on: The C. G. Jung Page.

Can a way out of the dilemma Geigerich describes be found? What issues must be addressed? Consider what is written here: Thoughts on Post Jungians by Matt Koeske.