Jung and Hillman

All of the social sciences have difficulties with objectivity, quantification, and rigor stemming from the fact that their subject matter is human beings, a condition of course shared by the practitioners of these disciplines. There have been two major contradictory tendencies to this dilemma. The dominant mode of psychological research has adopted whole hog the scientific model of research, which produces endless studies conducted in the laboratory or by questionnaire, which are then subjected to sophisticated statistical analysis. The results of these quantified studies are often only restatements of the obvious, or the discovery of trivialities which leave behind the great mysteries of human psychology.

The other tendency, starting with the seminal work of the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has been to make pronouncements about psychic processes based on extensive case studies of therapeutic situations which can only be termed subjective, however insightful and intriguing they may be. The psychologists to be discussed here -- Carl Jung and James Hillman - fall into this second group.

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychologist who founded a school of the discipline known as Analytic Psychology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_jung). Along with Freud, with whom he at first collaborated and then partially repudiated, Jung was one of the most influential writers on the mysteries of the human mind in the first half of the 20th Century. Like Freud he focuse

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Category: Psychology - J