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SLOW_JUNG
July 15, 2011
Three decades ago, I had an odd conversation with
a guy running a fast food joint in Pocatello, Idaho.
I didn't have time to answer his point,
and the way these things go, I find myself
still thinking about it.
This fellow, appropros of nothing, was ranting about
how ignorant people are, how they've never even heard
of Carl Jung, and he added that if they haven't heard
of him, then we can't move beyond him.
I commented that I'd like to talk to him about it,
but I really had to run.
His response: "That's what I get for running
a fast food place."
What I thought at the time was two fold:
(a) It may be true that few have heard of Jung, but
it's certainly not true that the common understanding
of things is completely devoid of Jung's influence.
"Introvert" and "extrovert" are widely
understood terms, and you can't read many
movie reviews without stumbling across
talk of "the collective unconscious" and
"archetypes".
(a) it isn't really true that you need to know
Jung's name in order to move beyond Jung's ideas.
If you look at an intro physics class, it has
little to do with things like "Goethe thought
this, but Newton thought that". Classical physics
is a tightly worked out logical edifice where
the names of the original developers survive only
(and only sometimes) as names, e.g. "Newton's Laws".
There's no real discussion of what Newton thought
and how he arrived at those laws.
An intro Psych class has to take a historical
approach, because they never succeeded in developing
anything like that logical edifice.
And that is comparable to some advanced physics
subjects like Quantum Mechanics, where the
historical approach returns again, along with
the interpretations that different thinkers have
applied to some very puzzling facts.
We return to history,
when all else fails.
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