Carl Jung & Wolfgang Pauli

Austrian physicist and Nobel prize winner Wolfgang Pauli was said to be one of Jung's collaborators. He was, in fact, Jung's student, patient and case study. Jung recorded 1300 of Pauli's dreams and published 400 in his book 'Psychology and Alchemy'. Pauli felt that dreams should be collected and studied scientifically: 'Thus for Pauli, complex psychology needed to utilize the mathematical and statistical methods to validate its findings. Only in such a way would interdisciplinary cooperation with the natural sciences be possible'. -Quote from Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, Sonu Shamdasani, Cambridge University Press (2003)

Jung and the Occult

Carl Jung's work has been hijacked by those who would have him be a mystic, spiritualist or occultist. His published work suffers from mistranslation, misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Even his "autobiography" is not really Jung's own work. He wrote the first chapter, but that was revised. Because Jung's output was so vast and the scope of his investigations so broad, people can draw selectively from his writings and interpret exactly as they like, to support their particular viewpoint.

Jung: Scientist or Mystic?

It is nonsense to call Carl Jung a mystic just because he was interested in the occult. It is unfortunate that his work is often hi-jacked by those needing to give legitimacy to a particular supernatural view of the universe. There is no doubt that Carl Jung considered himself to be a scientist. His psychology was to have been a natural science, not merely a school of psychotherapy. Jung wrote: "The treatment of psychology should in general be characterised by the principle of universality. No special theory or special subject should be propounded, but psychology should be taught in its biological, ethnological, medical, philosophical, cultural-historical and religious aspects". - Quote from The Psychology of Jung, CA Meier (1984)

Jung's Unfinished Masterpiece

Much of Carl Jung's prodigious output of books, papers and letters remains untranslated and/or unpublished. According to Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology by Sonu Shamdasani there are "...sufficient unpublished manuscripts to fill half a dozen volumes." Furthermore, in the Jung papers in Zurich there are "...approximately 20,000 letters, and there are many letters scattered in public and private archives around the world ...less that 10 percent of this has been published". No wonder Jung is so misunderstood and misrepresented.

Religion & Consciousness

The word "consciousness" means different things to different people: "To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world."* As such, all that religion has to say about consciousness has already been said. But Crick and Dennett's consciousness, human or otherwise, is a phenomenon of the real or physical world, an emergent property of the brain which has only recently (in the last decade or so) been the subject of serious scientific investigation.

*Quote from Wikipedia.