Friday, June 26, 2009

Jung's birthday

Today is Carl Jung's birthday.

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology known as Jungian psychology.

Jung's approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in countercultural movements across the globe. Jung is considered as the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is "by nature religious" and to explore it in depth.

He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy.

Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring other areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity.

1 comment:

Todd Laurence said...

On the nature of reality:

Jung worked with the Nobel laureate
physicist, W. Pauli, (1932-1958)
and their letters were published
under title, "atom and archetype."
The final conclusions about acausal
connections, i.e., Jung's synchronicity principle, is the
view that number is pre-existent
to consciousness, and forms the
most primal archetype of order
in the human mind.

"Since the remotest times men have used number to establish meaningful coincidences, that is, coincidences that can be interpreted.

There is something peculiar, one might even say mysterious about numbers. They have never been entirely robbed of their numinous aura. If, so a textbook of mathematics tell us, a group of objects is deprived of every single one of its properties or characteristics, there still remains, at the end, its number, which seems to indicate that number is something irreducible.

The sequence of natural numbers turns out to be unexpectedly more than a mere stringing together of identical units; it contains the whole of mathematics and everything yet to be discovered in this field.

Number, therefore, is in one sense an unpredictable entity.

It is generally believed that numbers were invented, or thought out by man, and are therefore nothing but concepts of quantities containing nothing that was not previously put into them by the human intellect. But it is equally possible that numbers were found or discovered.. In that case they are not only concepts but something more-autonomous entities which somehow contain more than just quantities.

Unlike concepts, they are based not on any conditions - but on the quality of being themselves, on a "so-ness" that cannot be expressed by an intellectual concept.

Under these conditions they might easily be endowed with qualities that have still to be discovered. I must confess that I incline to the view that numbers were as much found as invented, and that in consequence they possess a relative autonomy analogous to that of the archetypes."

"man has need of the word, but in
essence number is sacred." Jung....