Jung's Uncertain Separation of Psychology from Philosophy: A Response to Segal

With characteristic rigour, erudition, and clarity Robert Segal develops in his paper a most ingenious argument that, if accepted, has unsettling implications for understanding Jung. He argues (especially pp. 378-81) that, for those who accept them, social scientific explanations of belief in God make it improbable that God exists. The social sciences provide naturalistic explanations. If one accepts that one's belief in God has a natural cause, such as in Freud's theory a projected wish, then one must also accept that any supernatural cause of the belief (such as God's existence) is redundant and, moreover, that one's holding of the belief is based on faulty reasoning (such as the error of projection). God's existence is made improbable because it is unlikely that a redundant cause (God) postulated on the basis of faulty reasoning (projection) actually exists. Since Segal includes psychology among the social sciences (p. 363) and claims that Jung aspires to make his psychology as scientific as a natural science (p. 364), he can treat Jung's psychological explanation of belief in God (that it stems from projection of an archetypal God-image) as a naturalistic social scientific explanation and so can apply to it the argument summarized above. Segal's professed aim in his paper is mainly to show that ‘Jung was wrong to deny that the psychology of religion can bear on the issue of the existence of God’ (p. 362). However, the bearing that Segal shows psychology—or any other social science—can have is negative only: reducing the likelihood that God exists. He does not draw attention to the contradiction that this exposes between the atheistic implications of Jung's professional work and Jung's private belief that God exists (affirmed by Segal on p. 374).

In this brief response I shall suggest that some of the claims on which Segal bases his argument need to be qualified. I acknowledge that the evidence in Jung's work to which Segal appeals does, on its own, tend towards t