All I remember is he comes after Freud, some of his followers are annoying, there’s a Marxist podcast that likes him called ‘the return of the repressed,’ and I don’t think Lukacs liked him.
All I know about Carl Jung is that he features in every piece of pop-psych “connect with the energy” nonsense published or printed in the past several decades. The instant I hear his name in any conversation or read it in any article, my eyes start to glaze over.
From the little I’ve read of his work, Jung attempted to weld a kind of mental science to his fixation with animal mysticism. I think that produced something of an esoteric fantasy view of the world that feels romantic to some people, similar to our fascination with ancient mythologies. I think the modernish pop-psych stuff is an attempt to export those vibes as some kind of product.
He’s invoked and cited to lend credibility to a lot of pseudoscience in commercial team building training courses. That’s my main exposure to him and it makes me very sceptical of his work’s value.
Fair enough. I had an insane teacher that forced everyone to take some personality test and talked about how important it was for her to work with one of the numbers. Then she never mentioned it again after a couple weeks.
Personality tests. Getting gr groups of people to stand in different areas on a large floor map like a pentagram with different colours associated with different personality types.
“That’s such a blue thing to say!”… when you say something…
So I do not have the clarity I can summarize him on my own. I recall some iffy stuff with his views on the Nazis, here is one source I could find on it though I’m not sure if this page has the full text: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.12072
The article shows how strongly anti-Nazi Jung’s views were in relation to events during World War II such as Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, the fall of France, the bombings of Britain, the U.S. entry into the War, and Allied troops advancing into Germany. Schoenl and Peck, ‘An Answer to the Question: Was Jung, for a Time, a “Nazi Sympathizer” or Not?’ (2012) demonstrated how his views of Nazi Germany changed from 1933 to March 1936. The present article shows how his views evolved from 1936 to the War’s end in 1945.
If you need whole stuff written on you to explain your views on Nazis, that’s probably not a great sign.
Then there’s also stuff he wrote on psychology. From what I’ve seen, he’s most known by association for his Psychological Types, which is what MBTI was derived from. But he also wrote some other lesser known stuff on psychology.
Yeah, idk about the nazi stuff. Wasn’t Freud a Jew? Anyway, I know some people here have hot takes against MBTI, but I think it’s a little overblown. I realize that if I want to look into the Marxist take on psychoanalysis I should look at Althusser.
Yeah, MBTI is a topic I could probably get into at great length. Spent a lot of time in it on and off over the years. I think a lot of its problem is that people see the surface level MBTI categorization, especially as pushed on them in workplaces and the like, and justifiably think it’s an annoying oversimplification. But I’ve also seen quite a lot of sincere effort into digging deep into psychology and using theories relating to Psychological Types and MBTI as a means of understanding each other better and being more accepting of cognitive differences. Then again, I’ve also seen people who use it for obsessing over how they are better than others, or uniquely unique and special, or becoming so enmeshed in viewing the world through an MBTI lens that they lose sight of more complex dynamics beyond it. So it can go a number of ways.
MBTI is fine as far as personality systems go, but the reason I bounced off of it was that it eventually became clear there’s zero method to objectively distinguish one type from another. Every single person who gets typed and classified by this system is categorized by vibes, and that’s pretty much it.
MBTI makes the fundamental assumption that each personality axis is bimodal, and pushes people to one side or the other. Actual research shows that people tend towards the center.
The whole test is pseudoscience made by non-psychologists and propped up by “research” from organisations that profit from the test.
Has some interesting ideas, and his autobiography isn’t a bad read, but the force of his life was essentially pushing idealist trends in psychology and philosophy.
I don’t think he took a firm stand in the cold war, and he never engaged with Marxism directly, or any political topics really. Also since his philosphy is completely unthreatening, and has not even the tiniest hint of class analysis, he’s held up as a pillar of western thought in the 20th century. Many of the “anti-totalitarian”, “post-left”, and various other european nonsense tendencies cite him as an influence. I believe some of Gabriel Rockhill’s articles / books touch on this.
I personally think he’s not worth reading, as he addresses none of the most pressing questions of our times.
10/10 artist, otherwise kinda shit but was a natural deviation away from freuds insanity and progressive in that regard
