In Psychological Perspectives, 2016, Vol. 59, #4, pp. 490-508
Conclusion:
Jung (like Freud) saw himself as a scientist and was
constantly incorporating new ideas from other fields such as linguistics,
anthropology, physics, Gnosticism, and alchemy.
In fact, Jung has been referred to as a bricoler - a French word that refers to someone who pieces things
together from a variety of sources. I
believe Jung, if he were alive today, would have embraced the recent findings
from infant observation, neurosciences, attachment research, and trauma
research just as he did with Fordham’s early forays into child analysis. I would challenge us to consider whether we
want to suspend progress in Analytical Psychology, preserving it in the “just
so” state we’ve become comfortable with.
I believe our task as Jungians is to re-evaluate, re-cast,
re-interpret Jung’s ideas in light of knowledge from other fields – just as
Jung did in developing his conceptual framework originally. But we have to be
in dialogue with other fields and have an understanding of their findings in
order for this to occur. I believe we have a responsibility to the scientific
method which shaped and informed Jung’s inquiries; a responsibility to peer
more deeply into the relationship between brain and mind and between soma and
psyche; into the psychological and neurological underpinnings of conscious and
unconscious processes; to seriously evaluate Jung's typological model in light
of current neurological and cognitive sciences; and inform our candidates about
the current theoretical debate occurring between those holding apriori
positions on the nature of archetypal experience and those who now postulate
archetypal experience as emergent
phenomena.
Ultimately, scientific empiricism
can’t study or evaluate all of the elements of Analytical Psychology. Many
elements of our field can’t be sufficiently operationally defined in a manner
that would allow study through the scientific vertex. But there are many
elements of Analytical Psychology which can be examined through a scientific
lens - a process by which we can deepen our confidence in our methods and
theories, gain a deeper understanding of why certain methods work, and
occasionally a casting off or remaking of certain theories or practices which
can’t be supported from a scientific perspective. We can’t afford to cast off
empiricism out of a preference for subjectivism if Analytical Psychology is to
survive another 100 years as something other than a well preserved museum
piece.
Many fields of scientific inquiry
have moved towards the positions advocated by Jung while at the same time
adding many new insights it wasn’t possible for Jung to imagine despite his
incredible breadth of vision. We do have Jungians among us who are engaged with
the scientific community. There are a small cadre of others trying to bring
Analytical Psychology into dialogue with contemporary science, including Mario
Jacoby, George Hogenson, Joseph Cambray, Jean Knox, Margaret Wilkinson, John
Merchant, Robert Romanyshyn, David Rosen, Christian Roesler, and John Haule.
In order for this shift to happen,
some who come from backgrounds in the arts and humanities may need to learn
something about the scientific method including research design, sample size,
types of validity and reliability, as well as some familiarity with statistical
inference. But this is not unlike my own journey - coming from a
scientist-practitioner model of clinical psychology training and needing to
become more intimately familiar with the metaphoric world of myths, fairytales,
art, poetry, literature, and religion.
I hope this paper leaves you with the impression that Analytical
Psychology and science can be and need to be allies rather than adversaries. We
need the findings from contemporary science to help us reflect on what we
experience as analytic practitioners. Science needs us to advocate for the
subjective element in the laboratory. Be we cannot fulfill Jung’s dream of a
Analytical Psychology as a mediatory science unless we are in an ongoing
dialogue with the scientific community. In closing, I leave the reader with this thought
from Carl Jung (1976, para. 1236) “Ultimate truth, if
there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices.”
