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The Story Is Told that in the medieval University of Paris, the professors were disputing over the number of teeth in a horse's mouth. They agreed that the number could not be a multiple of three, for that would be an offence to the Trinity; nor could it be a multiple of seven, for God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Neither the records of Aristotle nor the arguments of St Thomas enabled them to solve the problem. Then a shocking thing happened. A student who had been listening to the discussion went out, opened a horse's mouth, and counted the teeth.
In 1968, at the Fourth International Congress for Analytical Psychology, C. A. Meier of Zürich, a spiritual heir of that medieval student, presented ‘A plea for a more scientific approach in Jungian psychology’ (MEIER 34). He pointed out that the psychology of the all-important individuation process was derived from Jung's theory of types; of Jung's hypotheses perhaps the one that can be most readily investigated empirically. Although some work has been done in testing the hypothesis that the attitude and function types are, indeed, demonstrable personality dimensions, Professor Meier seemed to think that it was by no means enough. Even less research has been attempted in other aspects of Jung's theory. It is my thesis in this paper that analytical psychologists can learn from three kinds of contributions of non-Jungian psychologists and other social scientists:
Data they have collected that tend to confirm Jungian hypotheses.
Data that tend to disconfirm Jungian hypotheses and hence should lead to a reconsideration of the hypotheses in question.
Questions they ask, the answers to which would give analytical psychology a more complete personality theory.
A strong tradition in analytical psychology insists that the psyche—the totality and uniqueness of the person—is the subject matter of psychology and outside the purview of some research tools, especially statistics. Yet, as Jung struggled long and