Discussion

The Object of Beyme's paper is to validate a psychological theory by correlating archetypal dreams with the occurrence or absence of the capacity of women to experience orgasm, a ‘physiological phenomenon’, during normal intercourse. The paper may therefore be classified as an attempt to bridge the gap between disciplines, a search for the ‘Archimedean point’ which Jung says psychology has not got since it can only observe itself. Quotations from Eysenck in Beyme's earlier publication as well as in the present one allow us to add that his hope is to meet criticisms against depth-psychology by the use of objective criteria of validation and statistical handling of the data and so make the findings of analysis ‘scientific’.

These ambitious aims deserve our critical attention. For we shall have to make up our minds whether Beyme's approach breaks new ground in analytical psychology or whether his findings constitute a syncretism, i.e. are the result of the kind of thinking—usually seen in young children—in which accidental associations take the place of logical, causal connections. If serious flaws in the rules for collecting data and the kind of linkage between them remain apparently unheeded and the person is so sincere and painstaking a worker as Beyme obviously is, one cannot help being puzzled by the naïveté of his assumptions. This at any rate is the position in which I found myself after reading Beyme's present publication and his extensive earlier one, made available to me by courtesy of the author.

The brevity of this latest paper could mislead the reader into feeling that Beyme had not given enough thought to his hypothesis and had dealt with his description of clinical data and methods of investigation in a summary fashion. Two observations need to be made on this score. First, the fact that case material and the method of its collection receive such short shrift may be regarded as evidence that the author feels his proof is relatively independent of such minu