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The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche
Comprises 2 Jung's ' An Acausal Connecting Principle' & Pauli's 'The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler'.
At the beginning of 1931, shortly after his divorce & immediately following his postulation of the neutrino, Pauli had a severe breakdown. He consulted the psychiatric psychotherapist C.G. Jung who, like Pauli, lived near Zürich. Jung immediately began interpreting Pauli's deeply archetypal dreams, & Pauli became one of the depth psychologist’s best students. Soon, he began to criticize the epistemology of Jung’s theory scientifically. This contributed to a certain clarification of the latter’s thoughts, especially about the concept of synchronicity. A great deal of these discussions is documented in the Pauli/Jung letters, today published as Atom & Archetype. Jung's elaborate analysis of more than 400 of Pauli's dreams is documented in Psychology & Alchemy.
At the beginning of 1931, shortly after his divorce & immediately following his postulation of the neutrino, Pauli had a severe breakdown. He consulted the psychiatric psychotherapist C.G. Jung who, like Pauli, lived near Zürich. Jung immediately began interpreting Pauli's deeply archetypal dreams, & Pauli became one of the depth psychologist’s best students. Soon, he began to criticize the epistemology of Jung’s theory scientifically. This contributed to a certain clarification of the latter’s thoughts, especially about the concept of synchronicity. A great deal of these discussions is documented in the Pauli/Jung letters, today published as Atom & Archetype. Jung's elaborate analysis of more than 400 of Pauli's dreams is documented in Psychology & Alchemy.
247 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1955
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About the author
C.G. Jung
1,871 books11.3k followersCarl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death.
The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.
Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.
Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.
The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.
Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.
Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 21, 2011
These two essays would probably benefit by a concurrent reading of Pauli, Wolfgang; Jung, C.G. (2001). ed. C.A. Meier. Atom & Archetype, The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932–58. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press as well as Lindorff, David (1994). Pauli & Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds. Quest Books. The reference in the book's background description to Pauli's dreams refers to Jung, C.G. (1980). Psychology & Alchemy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
March 25, 2023
The scientific method focuses on the regular and reproducible and is without any doubt very successful in this; however, this means that it leaves out a large part of our experience that is considered accidental, a random noise in no need of further attention. Nevertheless, we encounter meaningful coincidences that play as large a role in our lives as the dependably regular. These, then, from a scientific point of view, are just psychological facts that can be explained away as apophenia; but bearing in mind that our perceptions are not raw sense impressions, but already cast in the mould of archetypal and previously formed concepts that consequently shape our scientific laws and can also be seen as psychological facts, the dividing line appears less clearly drawn, suggesting that a study of meaningful coincidences, although by definition outside the reach of regular scientific law, may still be interesting and worthwhile. (This brings to mind the remarkable collection of observed morally meaningful connections we would tend to interpret as purely coincidental in Linné's astounding book Nemesis Divina.)
As a contribution to this study, C.G. Jung in the first part of the present book (Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle) expounds on his concept of synchronicity. In his first chapter he gives an introduction to the idea and adduces supporting evidence from experiments in extrasensory perception that he obviously found considerably more compelling than we (or certainly I) would today. In the second chapter, he describes an astrological experiment in which the birth horoscopes of married couples and, as a control group, unmarried people are compared. The first analysis indicated a higher incidence in the married couples of a conjunction of one partner's moon with the other's sun, moon or ascendent, corroborating the status of such coincidence as indicative of marriage in traditional astrology, but this fairly weak signal completely collapsed on cross validation. Well, what was he thinking? It is clear (and, judging from what he wrote in other parts of the book, it was also clear to him) that statistics is a way of establishing the dependably regular and, as such, the mortal enemy of the singular meaningful coincidence, which it just subsumes and drowns out in the residual noise.
In the third chapter, in my view the most interesting of this part of the book, Jung gives an overview of precursors of the idea of synchronicity such as the ancient Chinese thought of the I Ching and taoism, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Leibnitz etc.
[My personal impression is that Jung here accepts the concept of causality all to eagerly and easily as an established underlying principle of the scientific world view, to the point of setting up a dichotomy between causality and synchronicity, which he conceives as acausal by definition. However, science, dealing in quantitative relationships rather than metaphysical substances, uses the concept of causality in a quite off-hand manner; e.g. in physics causality is taken to mean little more than a preservation of temporal order, and even this is questionable: as already observed by the ancient Greek sceptics (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 3, Chapter IV seq.), the view that there is first a cause, then the causation, then the effect as a temporal sequence is naive and untenable, and cause and effect need to be conceived as simultaneous, which blurs the distinction of which is which. Contemporary research in quantum entanglement also indicates that things are not quite as simple as one might have thought. In this light it would make more sense to see causality not as an exclusive opposite, but rather a special case of synchronicity distinguished by its regularity and reproducibility.]
The book is saved, in my opinion, by its second part (The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler), in which W. Pauli describes Kepler's pivotal role as a scientist favouring a mathematical, quantitative description of the world over the older holistic, qualitative way of alchemy and hermeticism while still retaining a very symbolic approach, e.g. when he describes the soul as the circle that arises as the intersection of a sphere (his model for the divine trinity) with the plane of the material. This part of the book provides ample source material from Kepler's writings and in particular from the controversy between Kepler and Fludd as representatives of the new and the old ways of thought. It is well worth reading independently of what one may think of Jung's ideas.
My **** rating arises as *** for Jung and ***** for Pauli.
As a contribution to this study, C.G. Jung in the first part of the present book (Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle) expounds on his concept of synchronicity. In his first chapter he gives an introduction to the idea and adduces supporting evidence from experiments in extrasensory perception that he obviously found considerably more compelling than we (or certainly I) would today. In the second chapter, he describes an astrological experiment in which the birth horoscopes of married couples and, as a control group, unmarried people are compared. The first analysis indicated a higher incidence in the married couples of a conjunction of one partner's moon with the other's sun, moon or ascendent, corroborating the status of such coincidence as indicative of marriage in traditional astrology, but this fairly weak signal completely collapsed on cross validation. Well, what was he thinking? It is clear (and, judging from what he wrote in other parts of the book, it was also clear to him) that statistics is a way of establishing the dependably regular and, as such, the mortal enemy of the singular meaningful coincidence, which it just subsumes and drowns out in the residual noise.
In the third chapter, in my view the most interesting of this part of the book, Jung gives an overview of precursors of the idea of synchronicity such as the ancient Chinese thought of the I Ching and taoism, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Leibnitz etc.
[My personal impression is that Jung here accepts the concept of causality all to eagerly and easily as an established underlying principle of the scientific world view, to the point of setting up a dichotomy between causality and synchronicity, which he conceives as acausal by definition. However, science, dealing in quantitative relationships rather than metaphysical substances, uses the concept of causality in a quite off-hand manner; e.g. in physics causality is taken to mean little more than a preservation of temporal order, and even this is questionable: as already observed by the ancient Greek sceptics (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 3, Chapter IV seq.), the view that there is first a cause, then the causation, then the effect as a temporal sequence is naive and untenable, and cause and effect need to be conceived as simultaneous, which blurs the distinction of which is which. Contemporary research in quantum entanglement also indicates that things are not quite as simple as one might have thought. In this light it would make more sense to see causality not as an exclusive opposite, but rather a special case of synchronicity distinguished by its regularity and reproducibility.]
The book is saved, in my opinion, by its second part (The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler), in which W. Pauli describes Kepler's pivotal role as a scientist favouring a mathematical, quantitative description of the world over the older holistic, qualitative way of alchemy and hermeticism while still retaining a very symbolic approach, e.g. when he describes the soul as the circle that arises as the intersection of a sphere (his model for the divine trinity) with the plane of the material. This part of the book provides ample source material from Kepler's writings and in particular from the controversy between Kepler and Fludd as representatives of the new and the old ways of thought. It is well worth reading independently of what one may think of Jung's ideas.
My **** rating arises as *** for Jung and ***** for Pauli.
September 22, 2021
Pauli imagines “inner images pre-existing in the human psyche.” Referred to as archetypes by Jung, they are something like signatures of the creation woven throughout the universe, including our very souls. Importantly for science, Jung defines number as an archetype of order, and thus has the quality of being “…pre-existent to consciousness, and hence, on occasion, of conditioning it…” And so we see that number can be apprehended by the soul directly, such as in the observations of Pythagoras linking musical harmony to mathematics. Plato carried on this kind of thinking, particularly in geometry, which would pass down to influence Kepler to conceive of a geometric order which he believed must be inherent to the universe.
Jung’s repeated references to quite dubious (and pretty much debunked) ESP experiments, along with examples including chance, astrology, and near-death accounts were distracting from his argument of meaningful synchronicity. He recognizes the problem with these examples and states that science would necessarily ignore meaning in such things. Archetypes “…are indefinite… they can only be determined approximately.”
Pauli asks a fascinating question, “What is the nature of the bridge between the sense perceptions and the concepts?” He investigates a period in history when synchronistic thinking was still running wild by way of magical-symbolical explanations but quantitative-mathematical descriptions of nature were accelerating. Through Kepler’s application of archetypes to his conception of the universe (“Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world”), he ultimately facilitated a great leap toward modern science. Kepler claimed to have an answer to Pauli’s question about connecting senses and concepts. Ideas “…are not at all received within by discursive reasoning; rather they are derived from a natural instinct and are inborn in those beings as the number (an intellectual thing) of petals in a flower or the number of seed cells in a fruit is innate in the forms of the plants.”
Jung, Pauli, and Kepler seem to have a point that makes sense to me, that there is a “signature of all things” throughout all existence that explains why mathematics seems to be universal – it is innate to everything in it. It (and any other such “archetypes”) could reveal themselves in any aspect as an artefact of the nature of creation. Pauli, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, concludes that scientists should look inward to “bring to light the archetypal images used in the creation of our scientific concepts.”
Jung’s repeated references to quite dubious (and pretty much debunked) ESP experiments, along with examples including chance, astrology, and near-death accounts were distracting from his argument of meaningful synchronicity. He recognizes the problem with these examples and states that science would necessarily ignore meaning in such things. Archetypes “…are indefinite… they can only be determined approximately.”
Pauli asks a fascinating question, “What is the nature of the bridge between the sense perceptions and the concepts?” He investigates a period in history when synchronistic thinking was still running wild by way of magical-symbolical explanations but quantitative-mathematical descriptions of nature were accelerating. Through Kepler’s application of archetypes to his conception of the universe (“Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world”), he ultimately facilitated a great leap toward modern science. Kepler claimed to have an answer to Pauli’s question about connecting senses and concepts. Ideas “…are not at all received within by discursive reasoning; rather they are derived from a natural instinct and are inborn in those beings as the number (an intellectual thing) of petals in a flower or the number of seed cells in a fruit is innate in the forms of the plants.”
Jung, Pauli, and Kepler seem to have a point that makes sense to me, that there is a “signature of all things” throughout all existence that explains why mathematics seems to be universal – it is innate to everything in it. It (and any other such “archetypes”) could reveal themselves in any aspect as an artefact of the nature of creation. Pauli, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, concludes that scientists should look inward to “bring to light the archetypal images used in the creation of our scientific concepts.”
December 29, 2019
کتاب رو ارزش گذاری نمی کنم چون تمومش نکردم. ولی یکی از بدترین ترجمه هایی بود که تا حالا دیدم.
October 1, 2020
Skvělé a rozvíjející eseje. Fakt těžké na čtení i pochopení. Jungův výklad o sinchronicitě je však neocenitelný, přibližuje zde matematiku úvah, které ho vedly k vytvoření této teorie.
May 24, 2021
من با این یونگ ارتباط نمیگیرم. 🤷🏻♀️
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احساس شگفتی ام از ادمی هزاران برابر می شه
باید بار 3 و 4 هم این کتاب رو بخونم
اما قبلش فاوست گوته ،چنین گفت زردشت نیچه ،کمدی اهی دانته و کلی مطالعه در مورد اساطیر
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May 1, 2019خوبه
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