“Science is the tool of the Western mind, and with it one can open more doors than with bare hands.”
“Scientific thought, being only one of the psyche’s functions, can never exhaust all its potentialities.”
“Dogma is like a dream, reflecting the spontaneous and autonomous activity of the objective psyche, the unconscious. Such an expression of the unconscious is a much more efficient means of defense against further immediate experiences than any scientific theory. The theory has to disregard the emotional values of the experience. The dogma, on the other hand, is extremely eloquent in just this respect. One scientific theory is soon superseded by another. Dogma lasts for untold centuries.”
“In reality all inner experience springs from the unconscious, over which we have no control. ….inasmuch as the scientific approach disregards metaphysics, basing itself entirely on verifiable experience, it plunges us straight into the uncertainty which is conditioned by the variability of everything psychic.”
“Since scientific statements are inductive, starting as they do from irrational data, they are bound to be irrational in so far as they are descriptive. Only deductions are logical.”
“… ‘scientism’ almost put an end to speculation and went to the other extreme. It tried to create an “objective” psychology.”
“The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded. If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leaves Nature to answer out of her fullness.”
In an earlier essay I noted how Carl Jung got so many labels put on him–Gnostic, theist, atheist, mystic, materialist–while he referred to himself as “a doctor and a scientist,” a psychiatrist, and “an empiricist, first and last.” Given the orientation of our modern culture, science goes down well in our public imagination and, in our competition with other countries in STEM areas, scientists are recognized as crucial figures. But not all people using the label “scientist” manifest the qualities that made Carl Jung a true scientist. What are these qualities? And how did Jung reflect them in his life and work?
Quality #1. Openness to the wide range of realities. In a 1957 letter to Esther Harding, Jung noted (rather forlornly) his attraction to “unpopular things.” By these “things,” Jung was referring to his investigations of astrology, the paranormal and other manifestations of psychic abilities. Growing up in a family of gifted psychics, Jung was familiar with non-rational modes of living, and his entire life as a doctor was devoted to healing the psychological disturbances of his patients, always operating in the firm recognition the “the psyche is real.” In other words, Jung never fell into the “scientific materialism” of modern science. He knew there was much more beyond the limited purview of the world of matter.
Quality #2. Passionate curiosity. Much like Albert Einstein, with whom Jung was compared by some who met both men, Jung had a range of curiosity that was unbounded. It did not matter to Jung how mainstream society disparaged a subject, e.g. astrology, fairytales, the I Ching and other mantic arts. If some area of life could shed light on the workings of the soul or offer help in treating a patient, Jung would investigate it and use it.
Quality #3. Rejection of dogma. Jung adamantly rejected dogma in science. It was one reason he broke with Freud, because, as he explained years later:
“… to me dogma and science are incommensurable quantities which damage one another by mutual contamination. Dogma as a factor in religion is of inestimable value precisely because of its absolute standpoint. But when science dispenses with criticism and skepticism it degenerates into a sickly hot-house plant. One of the elements necessary to science is extreme uncertainty. Whenever science inclines towards dogma and shows a tendency to be impatient and fanatical, it is concealing a doubt which in all probability is justified and explaining away an uncertainty which is all too well founded.”
Jung knew that some scientists (not just Freud) did “incline towards dogma” and doing so held back progress in scientific discovery and understanding. We saw this years later, for example, in how the “central dogma” of molecular biology impeded the understanding of living organisms. Barbara McClintock witnessed this in her years of isolation, ostracism and frustration when the dogmatists refused to hear her criticisms of their focus on DNA.
Quality #4. Use of empirical methods. Jung proudly wore the label of “empiricist” because his insights and discoveries came from his personal observations and experiences in his work with hundreds of patients over 60+ years as a psychiatrist. By definition, an “empiricist” is an investigator who “uses methods based on experiment and observation;” and every appointment with a patient gave Jung opportunities to glean more data on how the psyche worked, which healing modalities produced helpful results, and the myriad ways the unconscious revealed its riches.
Quality #5. Use of induction. Induction is a way of reasoning that starts from particular facts (observed empirically) and formulates a general rule or principle. This is how Jung worked in creating his hypotheses from years of noting manifestations of the psyche in his patients’ dreams. The opposite way was Freud’s use of deduction, in which he started from theories (e.g. libido as sexual) and inferred facts from the theory–not an accurate method, especially when the theory is erroneous and too limited. All too often deduction resulted in the patient’s true nature being distorted on the Procustean bed of Freud’s dogmatism.
Quality #6. Avoid the pitfalls of scientism. The term “scientism” refers to “the tendency to reduce all reality and experience to mathematical descriptions of physical and chemical phenomenon.” Jung described it as a “reaction” against the scholastics’ error of projection, in which scientists in the 19th century “tried to create an ‘objective’ psychology.” Jung had no use for scientism because, in its quest for objectivity, it removed the human being’s subjectivity from its remit. By being based “in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge” scientism “imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role.” This would not do, because Jung regarded the individual human being as “the true and authentic carrier of reality.”
Quality #7. Support and amplify the discoveries in other branches of science. Given his open mind and a wide-ranging curiosity that transcended boundaries, Jung developed the psychological form of entropy, widening the purview of thermodynamics beyond physics and chemistry. In his recognition of the psyche as a self-regulating system, he anticipated by several decades our modern ideas in cybernetics, and in his investigations into “psychophysical parallelism” (the mind/body problem), he had insights that have been proven correct by modern researchers into brain/consciousness research.
As a discipline, science is accretive, building on discoveries made by earlier researchers, but given the “silo effect” in our culture (and especially in academia), it often takes years, even decades, for scientists working in one branch of science to become aware of advances that were made in another that supported or confirmed their own theories. Jung was an independent figure, well aware (from his personal activities early in his career in Swiss higher education) of how “universities of course are the last to be touched or moved” by new ideas:
“… new ideas are rarely recognized by contemporaries. Most of them fight blindly all creative attempts in their special field. They thrive on things already known and therefore ‘safe.’ Universities are the worst in this respect…..People who know that there are such things need no further confirmation, and people not wanting to know are free, as hitherto, to say that one tells them fairytales. I have encountered so much discouraging resistance that I am amply convinced of the stupidity of the learned guild.”
Jung recognized that few academics find the intellectual courage to stand against any potential condemnation from their peers. Independently wealthy and self-employed as he was, Jung knew his situation gave him a freedom to range far beyond the boundaries of the various disciplines in science. He went wherever the psyche took him, while giving “a wide berth to anything dogmatic or metaphysical.”
In this, as well as in his open-mindedness, his curiosity, his abrogation of dogma and scientism, his empiricism and inductive methods, Jung was a true scientist.
Bibliography
Begley, Sharon (2007), Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. New York: Ballantine Books.
Dalai Lama (1999), Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism, eds. Zara Houshmnand et al. Ithaca NY: Snow Lion Publications.
________ (2003/2006), The Dalai Lama at MIT, ed. Anne Harrington & Arthur Zajonc. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
________ (2011), The Mind’s Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation, eds. Jon Kabat-Sinna & Richard Davidson. Oakland CA: New Harbinger Publications Inc.
Jung, C.G. (1960), The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, Collected Works, 3. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1961), Freud and Psychoanalysis. Collected Works, 4. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1956), Symbols of Transformation. Collected Works, 5. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1960), The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works, 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), Civilization in Transition. Collected Works, 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1969), Psychology and Religion, West and East. Collected Works, 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1967), Alchemical Studies. Collected Works, 13. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1966), The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. Collected Works, 15. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1976), The Symbolic Life. Collected Works, 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1975), Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler & Aniela Jaffé. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1977), Jung Speaking, eds. William McGuire & R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Keller, Evelyn Fox (1983), A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W.H. Freeman & Co.
Storr, Anthony (1955), “A Note on Cybernetics and Analytical Psychology,” The Journal of Analytical Psychology. 1, no. 1, pp.l 93-95.
