You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There is a tendency in the Jungian community, apparently much more than in the Freudian, towards a reverential and uncritical acceptance of the master's words. Generally the thinking function may be devalued, conceptual tensions in the Collected Works overlooked, and no attempt made to relate analytical psychology to the larger world of intelligent discourse. Marilyn Nagy has attempted to do something about this. She has been practising analysis in San Francisco for a quarter of a century and has a doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. The title of her book, however, led us to expect more than we found, for she does not so much grapple with Jung's ‘philosophical issues’ as circumnavigate them. She divides her book into three parts: theory of knowledge, structure of the psyche, and teleology.
She begins her epistemological enquiry with the Zofingia Lectures of Jung's student days, where ‘the primary orientation’ of his career towards ‘real numinous experience’ was already evident. She identifies Kant as Jung's ‘first hero of the mind’ and the Categorical Imperative as an inner moral principle ‘which takes priority over everything else’ (p. 26). She reads Jung as arguing ‘that the only certainty we have is our knowledge of the inner world. We are in fact imprisoned in the symbolic realm of psyche' (p. 29).
Already we must protest, for our understanding of Kant reveals us to be liberated by the psychic conditions of the possibility of experience, among which are space and time. The spatio-temporal perceptual field enables phenomena to appear and any world to be given, felt, known. Far from a ‘prison’, psyche is a necessary and universal part of any world, material or symbolic. Matter is objectification of enduring mind. For Kant this is evident, and not just a ‘guarantee [of] moral world order’ (p. 45).
Part II of the book is devoted to the archetypal structure of psyche. Nagy argues that Freud's metapsychology was influenced by his mentor, Bruecke, a