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Madame Gilberte Aigrisse, who is the Honorary President of the Belgian Society of Analytical Psychology, has written a thought-provoking paper about some of Charles Baudoin's theories and of their roots in his personal psychology, a link that the post-Cartesian may no longer ignore or deny. She suggests that Baudoin's dominant archetypally determined preoccupation was with the senses and with the drive towards wholeness, and that this inevitably informed and marked his work.
Charles Baudoin is little known in the Anglo-Saxon world, which is a pity, for he was both poet and psychologist, both philosopher and clinician. He is, I think, of special interest to the Jungian analysts in London because he refused to be held captive within the narrow limits of any one of the psychoanalytic schools. He felt free to evaluate the scientific contributions made by all the schools, and free also to let his imagination put living flesh around the bare bones of fact. He would answer the question, ‘Are you Freudian, Jungian or Lacanian?’ by replying that to put such a question was as nonsensical as it would be to ask, ‘Are you Newtonian or Einsteinian?’, for the only possible answer must be, ‘I am for none of them. I am for psychology’.
Madame Aigrisse believes that Baudoin, being basically a sensation type, was particularly drawn to explore that function and to show that far from limiting a person to the merely sensory, the merely practical and mechanical, the dominance of the sensation function can and does help a man to re-discover that God lies hidden in matter, or, put the other way, that matter is imbued with God—or spirit.
The theoretical contribution that forms the