Analytical Psychology and Metascience

MY INTENTION in this paper is to encourage a favourable attitude among psychotherapists to the matter which lies behind my title. I do not conceal my wish to throw out a challenge, and to incite perhaps a few scholars to further investigation. I am aware that the psychotherapeutic profession at large is not inclined to welcome metascientific inquiries. But my personal view is that metascience is in no way an enemy of psychotherapy. I believe it to be, in fact, the opposite: a most valuable ally. Discussions with unprejudiced students of medicine and psychology have convinced me that even those who have no grounding in philosophy may learn to grasp the issues involved. And I would like to see the philosophical aspects of the field of psychology cultivated at some stage in the training of therapists.

The source and point of departure for the development of metascience is the realization that not only is the matter to be investigated a problem, the investigation itself is also problematic. The puzzling nature of empirical research has revealed itself in a particularly dramatic way in the development of physics in our century. In nuclear and particle research the immediately apperceptible character of the object of study has been lost—it is no longer self-evident what that element of reality is which man is studying. In one respect it manifests itself as energy; in another as material. In other words the mode in which reality presents itself is determined by the particular system the investigator applies. Slightly exaggerating, we might say that he can get the reality he is studying to look like whatever he wants. In the light of such an observation the function of research approach, hypotheses, method and mode of description and explanation is seen to be particularly significant.

Problems arising out of empirical research are not accessible to study by the same methods appropriate to the particular field of science in question. Once one sets out