Seeing Empty And Full, and some Jung

The Uses of Not Thirty spokes meet In the hub. Where the wheel isn’t Is where it’s useful. Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pot’s not is …

Empty And Full

— I love those little poems. They are so filled with meaning. One could even more say:

we structure our thoughts with words, but where are the words are not, there is what is useful.

Or perhaps something in a way even more profound:

psychology provides a structure of explanation about what is going on in mental health,

but where is psychology is not, there is what is useful.

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Much of my thoughts about psychology, as a career science are generally not very supportive of it. Sadly, I feel that the effective purpose of psychology is to exult status, and not to actually help people. Psychology leaves a sour taste in ones mouth, whenever I think about psychological theories and testing and outcomes and conclusions. When we really look and see what is actually occurring, The psychological proposals that are supposed to help people be mentally healthy tend to appear to be talking about a select few people who want to organize themselves around being mentally healthy. Everyone else, which is the other 88% is left in a gray area where psychology is supposed to mean something to them, that they’re supposed to feel better, but really all that’s happening is they are taking meds and then hoping that The therapy in interventions based on statistical outcomes is making them better than they were two weeks ago or whatever. It’s like a kind of hypnotism or suggestion; psychology the name just has such a force that people having mental health issues, if they are being treated psychologically, then they are sort of “hopefully convinced” well enough that psychology is indeed going to help them, that perhaps they most likely just hope them selves by pretending that they’re doing better. If we ask them more questions, then they will believe we know something useful to help them, kind of approach. The opposite of the notion that was is “not” is actually what is most useful.

*

Psychology in the large general sense is helpful to many people., so I’ll stop that General complaint right there. For like most things, the name ‘psychology’ is used for such a vast assortment of practices and philosophies and determinations for meaning that it almost doesn’t mean anything at all, but that I tend to pick those pieces that are psychological which appear to be at least infused with I want for goodness, and I’ll leave it at that.

Out of compassion, I recognize that most people are stuck in the middle, and so to engage with a philosophical discussion about the merits of what psychology is supposed to deal with, doesn’t really help those people. It just makes them more worried.

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Id Never really read Carl Jung, which is to say, I’ve never really known about his history very much except in a general sense, and I tend to have only heard about and base my opinions upon just general kind of “spiritual” notions that he tends to be involved with, The “fad” Jungian stuff, and my impression of him has always been slightly worried. I worry that people see what he is saying is so profound.

I’ll try to clarify.

Now that I’ve delved a little bit further into actually the person who he was, and the actual development of his psychological theories, I am confirmed in my concern.

Psychology is not really a science in the sense that we currently understand science, which is to say the “hard” sciences; it is, as a colleague of mine said, a “very soft” science. And in fact, his (a counselor and a registered nurse in the mental health field for over 25 years) opinion was that it is hugely biased and it’s approaches to finding things out, and the people who are psychologists are often extremely pompous and defensive about their practice and Philosophy.

Now, this is just in America. I get the feeling from a European friend-colleague that psychology is very deep over there and taken very seriously as a very profound and substantial body of knowledge. It is in America also, but I tend to think Americans tend to be rebels, and, I am as well just naturally resistant. But I try to keep an open mind.

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Anyways. Jung.

He definitely develops an intensionally closed system of spirituality. It can’t really be denied once you understand from where the more “spiritual” ideas of Jung in psychology stem. He did not really break from Freud in a radical way, he broke from Freud in that they were generally developing two different systems about how the psyche operates and what it is. By this, I mean to say that they weren’t really considering what is really going on; what was radical about his break it’s ultimately just that they differed on their theoretical opinions. There was nothing really radical about the break except if you consider what was happening in the first part of the 20th century so far as the way that human beings and scientists were able to understand the human being and the universe. They were considering empirical evidence and coming up with theories to explain the empirical given.

I think that is the short tiny short version of what is been confirmed to me through investigating Jung. From this investigation I get the feeling that what people get from Jung usually is really not what he was trying to give. or, indeed what he was trying to give is contrary to what actually occurs. This is to say, in so much as he offers us a closed system, people use that closed system through which to offer a kind of “open psyche” involved with the universe.

This is just a blog post so I’m not going to go into all the various aspects of proof, because it wouldn’t work anyways. Suffice it to say that his assumption was upon an essential difference between the human being and the universe, that this assumption goes by the name “empirical”, and that Jungian psychology is a description of how the psyche functions in so much as the psyche is located and is developed through the physical brain and perhaps general biological human system. If he is understood to have moved out of this closed domain, it is merely because the system that he created posits such transcendence.

His is a perfect spirituality of modernity.

Now, I’m not suggesting that he doesn’t have good things to say or that he did not come up on things that were actually occurring, neither am I saying that some of his extrapolations of explanation are not applicable to what is actually occurring.

However, I am saying that the systems of modernity are inherently partial to subjectivity. This is not because subjectivity accounts for everything that is possible, rather, it is because in the partiality of subjectivity lay the problems and motions that Jung describes. Empiricism is the systemic subjective proposal of objectivity. It stems from and is based in the primacy of the subject given of the universe.

My point is, I suppose, that individuation, the process that the subject is involved with, is in itself, in the end, something that is not modern. It appears Jung did not recognize this, and hence the confirmation of my concern.

The process of individuation is the object of the psychology of the subject.c