Reply to responses

From reading the responses of Professors Brooke, Papadopoulos and Ulanov, the impression I gain is that this is an international conversation that is long overdue and must be continued in some way. I am delighted to think that my essay on devotions and resistances in the academy has occasioned such intriguing and hard-won insights that will undoubtedly be of great value to many people world-wide, especially to those who are students and teachers within universities. What we are dealing with is not only the future of Jung studies outside the professional clinical institutes, but also the general intellectual reputation of Jung and how he fits into a pluralist intellectual world in which his work is not awarded any special favours or status. We have to assess Jung's worth for mainstream intellectual culture, while admitting that the specific nature of Jung's psychology creates an environment which generates the problem of ‘insiders’, ‘initiates’, and ‘believers’.

My paper concerned itself with the opposite but related problems of fanatical resistance and fanatical loyalty to Jung. All three respondents could relate to the problem of fanatical resistance, and Ulanov provided the further clarification that academic resistance to Jung is itself symptomatic of a deeper resistance to psychic reality. All three presented fascinating accounts of how to undermine that resistance, whether by presenting Jung as a post-modern epistemologist (Papadopoulos), by presenting Jung as a coherent phenomenologist (Brooke), or by presenting Jung's theory as ‘only one view’ in a tapestry of psychodynamic theoretical standpoints (Ulanov). The way to overcome resistance is not to engage in a head-on collision, but to become ‘like’ the truth that is so valued inside the walls of the academy. This is how viruses manage to thrive at the microbiological level, and so it has to be a useful strategy for the survival of Jung studies in a remarkably hostile intellectual environment! All respondents e