/JUNG/ General

Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic

>>9324523
It's a theory so if you have good data you can jam it into the theoretical categories and interpret the phenomena and if what you uncover seems sufficient to make senses of the mess of data then pat yourself on the back but you very well might just be deluding yourself

>I so far find the theory of archetypes to be empirical in the sense that they do exist,
Maybe it's just the way you're looking at things, if you actually want to question their '''empirical''' reality try dropping archetypes and looking at things differently and maybe you'll see things totally differently and more clearly

>>9324583
Neat, my library has a copy. I'll be back in 5 hours to tell you if it was what I was looking for or not.

>>9324668
dropping the archetypes still gives me the sense that there are sociological figures ingrained in the psyche but that they are nothing inherent or divine. I think it speaks to the near-homogeneity of human cultures that they are so similar, and maybe there is something to be learned about society with the way we create certain figures, but it's definitely not an inherent psychological phenomenon.

>>9324717
The way I see it, there are universals to human nature rooted in our biology, as we are a social species capable of abstract thought. Archetypes seem reasonable to me in the sense that every culture would necessarily have to manifest some way of reconciling these universals inherent to human existence

Ex: the role and structure of families/the relationship between the mother or father to the child and vice versa; growing from childhood to adulthood & initiation as an adult member of society; Sexual behavior, how men & women relate to one another; contextualizing the society vs. nature/the unknown, dealing with death, etc.

Every human society at even the lowest level of complexity has needed to manifest cultural norms or narratives to deal with these issues since they are fundamental to human nature. As such, while of course every culture manifests these issues differently,

I think the value of the Archetypes is that at the meta level we can find that many of these parallel to a great degree. While of course this isn't the sort of thing you could empirically prove, the idea that certain concepts and ideas of how to orient yourself to the world and society have survived fairly consistently over the course of history is a pretty compelling argument for the efficacy of tradition in an evolutionary sense.

>>9325370
Fucked up the third line, meant to say

>As such, while of course every culture manifests these issues differently, they serve an equivalent function and often converge on how best to act within a specific context.

>>9324583
That was dense as fuck boi

>>9324523
To append this, in case anybody is wondering, Walter Kaufmann's Discovering the Mind Vol. 3 has a great critical chapter on Jung. The whole book is actually great.