Analytical Psychology: A “Modern” Science1

In 1926 Jung (Coll. Wks., p. 65) was anxious to prove that psychology was one of the youngest sciences and he has reiterated this claim on several subsequent occasions (e.g. 1938, pp. If.), when, describing himself as an empiricist, he has stressed his scientific, exclusively phenomenological point of view in contrast to an approach based on speculative and naïve idealistic preconceptions. Jung holds that medical psychology is to be placed among the natural sciences since it sees everything as a natural phenomenon. It may therefore be expected to explain psychic phenomena as properties of life and to subject them to a strictly scientific inquiry along the lines of biology, a science that “has sharpened the eye of the psychiatrist for factual data and made possible a method of description closely approximating to reality” (Jung, 1926, Coll. Wks., p. 86).

Jung is, of course, aware that science does not stop short at factual data. He is, no doubt, acquainted with the idea of scientific prediction and the verification of hypotheses through experimentation. Yet he confines himself to a mere empirical verification of fact (Jung, 1926, Coll. Wks., p. 87) and even goes so far as to admit that the principle of explanation employed by analytical psychology as “pure” psychology is the ignotum per ignotius (Jung, 1926, Coll. Wks., p. 87). This means that what is unknown is explained by reducing it to what is even more unknown. The science of the mind is —paradoxically—constrained to make this necessity into a principle, since it can elucidate the process involved only in the same terms as those in which the phenomenon observed has been described. It is, moreover, a fact that the psyche is both subject and object of the science that deals with it (Jung, 1938, p. 62).

At this crucial point, it is true, psychology stands outside natural science and is, to this extent, at a disadvantage. It will be shown, however, that to explain something unknown by something more unknown may be eve