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.
… Meier's prime concern is with the archetypal, and he confronts the reader with the opening words:'The patient concerned is a woman of 31, a talented musician, well-educated
and very intelligent. No more need be said about her as a person because the specific phenomena to be depicted here are manifestations of the collective unconscious’ (my italics). While this is understandable in view of the florid state of psychosis discussed in the paper, Meier does have a tendency to gloss over personal detail in favour of the archetypal in ways which can be tantalizing.…
He is particularly renowned for his classical scholarship and his discussions of the contribution of language, ancient and modern, to the understanding of the psyche are rivalled only by the work of Onians. ‘Cultural education as symbol’ (chapter 13) exemplifies this with an inspired exegesis of the German word Bildung (education) combining ideas of image, forming and reforming.
Meier is vociferous in his call for a more scientific approach to analytical psychology, which he envisages through the greater application of statistical research and test data. The key issue he believes to be typology ‘with which individuation begins and ends’. The almost mystical way in which he elaborates this in ‘Psychological types and individuation: a plea for a more scientific approach to Jungian psychology’ contains the essence not only of what he holds individuation (and hence analytical psychology) to be, but also of what he believes were Jung's deepest convictions. It is here in particular that one has a sense of being put in touch with aspects of Jung's intuitive genius, of which subsequent generations may have tended to lose sight.
At the same time there is something seemingly paradoxical in the way Meier reflects such a spirit of scientific enquiry and yet often seems to imply tacitly that reverence for the mystery of the psyche obviates the need to strive to understand its personal manifestations in any detail.
(From JA