I would like to start this discussion with two relevant posts, the first from Terence Blake on "unconscious Jungians," those thinkers who disavow the influence of Jung but are nevertheless working in the same areas of thought:

http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/unconscious-jungians-the-theological-turn-is-an-unconscious-variant-of-the-jungian-turn/

The 2nd is from Kent Palmer in response to the question, "Where does the thought of Carl Jung fit in the continental philosophical tradition?"

http://www.quora.com/Carl-Jung/Where-does-the-thought-of-Carl-Jung-fit-in-the-Continental-Philosophical-tradition

From my own research, I have been attempting to integrate the thought of Bergson and Deleuze with Jung. I am also keen on the Lacan-Jung connection as both spoke of subjective destitution and had similar aims of analysis, despite their seeming incommensurability. 

I am also invested in bridging the gap with Zizek as he is one of my favorite thinkers and I do think he accidentally stumbles across some deep insights which jive with a Jungian worldview.

I am quite interested in the work of Whitehead, Peirce and Simondon, all of whom have seen a resurgence in popularity in recent times. In particular I would like to work on the Whitehead-Jung connection that Tarnas and others in the field of archetypal cosmology have explored. There are a number of Whiteheadians (Shaviro, Stengers off the top of my head) who completely reject Jung, and I would like to make it as difficult as possible for them to maintain that stance.

I have a friend who is working on the Merleau-Ponty-Jung connection, and I do think there is something to be said for Jung and phenomenology sharing a taste for empiricism and the lived lives of bodies. I am also interested in expanding materialism to no longer be a "bad word" that refers only to physicalism, but to talk about things like astrological/archetypal conditions of a time (the quality of a given time, its haecceity) as material conditions as well. (Using "material" loosely here in the way Zizek does when he says, for him, concepts are material).

In any case, my idea here is just to raise the question -- where does Jung fit in with (Western) philosophy, to you? Even if it's some far out connection which others haven't explored. Do you have any favorite philosophers that you've been able to reconcile (in full or in part) with Jungian thought?

You need to be a member of Depth Psychology Alliance to add comments!

Join Depth Psychology Alliance

Email me when people reply –

Replies

  • Some people mentioned in this comment won't necessarily be with diplomas from philosophy. For instance, David Bohm with implicate and explicate order in (quantum) physics fits very well with Jung's approach to the unconscious, archetypes, and synchronicity. Actually, this might be cheating since Bohm has mentioned Jung in a sentence somewhere. Still, he was aware of similarities to Jung after he had already developed his ideas. Martin Buber (this one might also partially be cheating, but he has never mentioned Jung's name) with I and It (reductionism, completely describable reality) vs. I and Thou (the whole reality irreducible to definitions and complete and final explanations) also resembles Jung. I'll finish this paragraph about thinkers not so unrelated to Jung with Hermann Hesse because he had used the concept of synchronicity (coincidences) in Demian decades before Jung coined this term.

    Older (tradition in the title of this discussion) thinkers dealing with similar issues were Nietzsche and Goethe and other people (for instance alchemists) mentioned in Jung's books. This brings me to the next paragraph about what actually is the purpose of this discussion topic - people encountering the same area as Jung, but from a different starting point. 

    Kurt Gödel (mentioned in the book title "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter who fits nicely in this comment even though he would disagree) has proven that there are truths that cannot be derived from a predefined set of axioms. This is exactly the style Jung was writing his books and interpreting dreams of his patients. Last but not least, back in the day I wondered what Jung meant when he mentioned two different approaches dynamics of the psyche - causal and final. Later I found out that Robert Rosen, while looking for a mathematical definition of life ("A material system is an organism if and only if it is closed to efficient causation." - Life Itself) and following the footsteps of Nicolas Rashevsky came to conclusion that life and self-awareness are anticipatory systems (with both causal and final causation) in which, on order to find a proper methodology for analysis, we have to focus on relations rather than parts. He was trying to spread his ideas into the realm of individual and collective psyche. Also, anticipation used by Rosen (if used for consciousness) and individuation used by Jung look to me like the same thing.

    There are more people dealing one way or another with nondeterminism whose ideas are occasionally similar to Jung's.

    • I forgot to mention in the previous comment Arthur Schopenhauer (he has influenced Jung) and Gaston Bachelard (influenced by Jung - his approach to philosophy was one long active imagination).

      • Thank you for all these wonderful links! I will follow up and add relevant texts to the Jungian Studies topic on aaaaarg.org.

        Are you on the Carl Jung Depth Psychology group on Facebook? Some good convos going on there as well.

        Thanks again for this. I will let you know if I turn up anything.

        Best,
        -Jonah

This reply was deleted.