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A patient once asked me ‘What are all those science magazines doing in your waiting room?’ Real Jungian analysts, she believed, read only Parabola, Shaman's Drum, or Modern Wicca. It's a safe bet that she's not likely to read this book. Too bad. If she did, she'd learn things about Jung that would pleasantly surprise her.
Jung was a scientist. Analysts are as well, although some don't realize it. Others, strangely enough, seem to want to deny it. But many of us love science, consider ourselves to be squarely in the scientific tradition, and stand in awe of its methods and discoveries. Robin Robertson writes for this latter group. He particularly enjoys mathematics, which, as the language of science, has its own paradoxes, contradictions, and metaphors.
In Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel, and the History of Archetypes, he traces the history of science as expressed through mathematics. From Pythagoras to Euclid, from Leonardo da Vinci to Gödel, scientists have tried to explore that which exists just beyond the known. Not only has this led to amazing discoveries about the natural and physical orders, it has posed the question of the nature of thought as well. In that way, science and Jungian psychology share common goals and tools. Science can be very Jungian, and Jungian theory very scientific.
For example, Robertson says that Jung believed that ‘number itself — as expressed most basically in the small integers — was the most primitive archetype of order’, and that ‘Jung guessed that the natural numbers were the primary archetypes of order in the psychoid world of the unus mundus, and that all Mathematics develops out of the natural numbers’ (pp. 270 & 179). Consequently, ‘the world outside is somehow contained within our minds, while at the same time, we and our minds are obviously contained in the world’ (p. 280). In short, science's focus on the world outside the mind inevitably led to our modern preoccupation with the world inside our minds. Our relationship with the