The objective nature of the psyche justifies the notion of a soul. For Jung, the old view of the soul as an objective, independent reality is justified since our very existence as physical creatures and all the processes that make our life possible in the first place depend to a startling degree upon the smooth, proper functioning of inner, spontaneous physical, chemical, biological, and psychological processes that are largely unconscious from the viewpoint of our conscious mind.
3. Critic of the materialism and scientism of modern experimental psychology.
Scientific materialism and scientism. Jung is important to transpersonal psychology because of his outspoken criticisms of the philosophical foundations of modern scientific psychology that had become established by the end of the 19th century. His was one of many dissenting voices to the metaphysics of scientific materialism (the belief that “only the physical is real; what is nonphysical does not exist, and even if it does, it cannot be verified unless it is entirely reducible to physical matter”) and the epistemology of scientism (the belief that “there is no reality except that revealed by laboratory science; science is the final arbiter of what is real; no truth exists except that which sensory-empirical science verifies”) that came to characterize much of orthodox, mainstream psychology of his time.
Today the psyche does not build itself a body, but on the contrary matter, by chemical action, produces the psyche…. Mind must be thought of as an epiphenomenona of matter… To allow the soul or psyche a substantiality of its own is repugnant to the spirit of the age, for that would be heresy. (Jung, 1960, pp. 340-341)
C.G. Jung (1960) believed that the modern psychology’s present inclination “to account for everything on physical grounds…[was] because up to now, too much was accounted for in terms of spirit. …Most likely we are now making exactly the same mistake on the other side” (p. 342).
|
Loss of mind and spirit. Under the influence of scientific materialism and scientism, the entire interior dimension of mind and spirit and those great spontaneous, unconscious, inner processes that make life possible were either reduced to a generalized mass of neural impulses and neurotransmitters or else dismissed entirely and denied any substantial reality at all because the physical senses or their extensions - the microscope, electroencephalograph, galvanometer - could not detect or measure them.
This view [of modern psychology] reduces psychic happenings to a kind of activity of the glands; thoughts are regarded as secretions of the brain, and thus we achieve a psychology without a psyche. From this standpoint…the psyche does not exist in its own right; it is nothing in itself, but the mere expression of processes in the physical substrate…. Consciousness…is taken as the sine qua non of psychic life, that is to say, as the psyche itself. And so it comes about that all modern ‘psychologies without a psyche’ are psychologies of consciousness, for which an unconscious psychic life simply does not exist. (Jung, 1960, p. 343)
A modern psychology without a psyche. And so it remains today that cognitive science, the branch of psychology that studies attention, memory, imagery, thinking, language, and creativity focuses strictly upon conscious cognitional processes and their biological, environmental, and behavioral correlates, without including in their equations or theories the existence of a subconscious mind or an unconscious psychic life from which conscious cognitional processes spring and is its source. The psyche does not exist in its own right, or of it does as a mere shadow of itself, a hypothetical construct meditating the physical processes that actually give rise to conscious, alert awareness. What is conscious is what consciousness is.
|
