Although the works of C.G. Jung have received worldwide attention, there has been surprisingly little engagement by philosophers. In this volume, internationally recognized philosophers, Jungian analysts, and scholars attempt to fill this void in the literature. Although Jung did not have a formalized, systematic philosophy, the philosophical implications of his thought are explored in relation to his key theoretical postulates on archetypes, the collective unconscious, the mind-body problem, phenomenology, epistemology, psychology of religion, alchemy, myth, ethics, aesthetics, and the question of transcendence. Through analyzing Jung philosophically, new vistas emerge for enhanced explication, theoretical refinement, revision, and redirecting shifts in emphasis that lend more proper cohesion to Jung’s philosophy. For the first time we may observe philosophers attempting to unpack the philosophical consequences of Jung’s thought applied to many traditional topics covered in the humanities and the social sciences. Given that Jung has not been historically taken up by philosophers, critiqued, nor applied to contemporary theories of mind, culture, and human nature, this is the first book of its kind. It is argued that a new generation of research in analytical psychology can benefit from philosophical scrutiny and theoretical fortification. Jung and Philosophy will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, cultural theorists, religious scholars, and the disciplines of depth psychology and post-Jungian studies.

For the philosopher and psychologist this book offers the first thoroughly cross-disciplinary interpretation of Jung's psychology. Using the conceptual framework of traditional Western philosophy, Nagy studies the internal structure of Jung's theory. His epistemology, his ontology (archetypes), and his teleological views (individuation and theory of self) are analyzed in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophical and scientific problems. Jung's psychology is a response to the challenge of Freud and to the rise of the empirical sciences.

Winner of the IAJS Book Award 2023 for Best Theoretical Book Traditionally, alchemy has been understood as a precursor to the science of chemistry but from the vantage point of the human spirit, it is also a discipline that illuminates the human soul. This book explores the goal of alchemy from Jungian, psychological, and philosophical perspectives. Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy: Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea is a reflection on Jung’s alchemical work and the importance of philosophy as a way of understanding alchemy and its contributions to Jung’s psychology. By engaging these disciplines, Marlan opens new vistas on alchemy and the circular and ouroboric play of images and ideas, shedding light on the alchemical opus and the transformative processes of Jungian psychology. Divides in the history of alchemy and in the alchemical imagination are addressed as Marlan deepens the process by turning to a number of interpretations that illuminate both the enigma of the Philosophers’ Stone and the ferment in the Jungian tradition. This book will be of interest to Jungian analysts and those who wish to explore the intersection of philosophy and psychology as it relates to alchemy.

Through his clinical work and extensive engagement with major figures of the philosophical tradition, Jung developed an original and pluralistic psycho-ethical model based on the cooperation of consciousness with the unconscious mind. By drawing on direct quotations from Jung’s collected works, The Red Book, and his interviews and seminars – as well as from seminal texts by Kant, Nietzsche, Aristotle and Augustine – Giovanni Colacicchi provides a philosophically grounded analysis of the ethical relevance of Jung’s analytical psychology and of the concept of individuation which is at its core. The author argues that Jung transforms Kant’s consciousness of duty into the duty to be conscious while also endorsing Nietzsche’s project of an individual ethics beyond collective morality. Colacicchi shows that Jung is concerned, like Aristotle, with the human need to acquire a balance between reason and emotions; and that Jung puts forward, with his understanding of the shadow, a moral psychology of the Christian notion of evil. Jung’s psycho-ethical paradigm is thus capable of integrating ethical theories which are often read as mutually exclusive. Psychology as Ethics will be of interest to researchers in the history of ideas and the philosophy of the unconscious, as well as to therapists and counsellors who wish to place their psychodynamic work in its philosophical context. It will also be a key reference for undergraduate and postgraduate courses and seminars in Jungian and Post-Jungian studies, philosophy, psychoanalytic studies, psychology, religious studies and the social sciences.

More than an insightful psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung was the twentieth century's greatest articulator of the primacy of mind in nature, a view whose origins vanish behind the mists of time. Underlying Jung's extraordinary body of work, and providing a foundation for it, there is a broad and sophisticated system of metaphysical thought. This system, however, is only implied in Jung's writings, so as to shield his scientific persona from accusations of philosophical speculation. The present book scrutinizes Jung’s work to distil and reveal that extraordinary, hidden metaphysical treasure: for Jung, mind and world are one and the same entity; reality is fundamentally experiential, not material; the psyche builds and maintains its body, not the other way around; and the ultimate meaning of our sacrificial lives is to serve God by providing a reflecting mirror to God’s own instinctive mentation. Embodied in this compact volume is a journey of discovery through Jungian thoughtscapes never before revealed with the depth, force and scholarly rigor you are about to encounter.

The author explores and defends the bold thesis that the idea of the collective unconscious can be reconciled with a scientific world outlook as he sketches a big picture from Jung's psychological viewpoint. In his examination of Jung's archetypes, Shelburne considers the chief critical views of the scientific import of Jung's thesis as he discusses the issue of rationality posed by the theory. There is also a discussion of how the ideas of James Hillman contrast with those of Jung on the issue of the scientific nature of archetypes. Shelburne presents scientific evidence for the existence of archetypes and shows how the theory fits in with modern evolutionary biology.

Charet uncovers some of the reasons why Jung's psychology finds itself living between science and religion. He demonstrates that Jung's early life was influenced by the experiences, beliefs, and ideas that characterized Spiritualism and that arose out of the entangled relationship that existed between science and religion in the late nineteenth century. Spiritualism, following it inception in 1848, became a movement that claimed to be a scientific religion and whose controlling belief was that the human personality survived death and could be reached through a medium in trance. The author shows that Jung's early experiences and preoccupation with Spiritualism influenced his later ideas of the autonomy, personification, and quasi-metaphysical nature of the archetype, the central concept and one of the foundations upon which he built his psychology.

Time and Timelessness examines the development of Jung's understanding of time throughout his opus, and the ways in which this concept has affected key elements of his work. In this book Yiassemides suggests that temporality plays an important role in many of Jung's central ideas, and is closely interlinked with his overall approach to the psyche and the cosmos at large. Jung proposed a profound truth: that time is relative at large. To appreciate the whole of our experience we must reach beyond causality and temporal linearity, to develop an approach that allows for multidimensional and synchronistic experiences. Jung’s understanding surpassed Freud's dichotomous approach which restricted timelessness to the unconscious; his time theory allows us to reach beyond the everyday time-bound world into a greater realm, rich with meaning and connection. Included in the book: -Jung’s time theory -the death of time -time and spatial metaphors -the role of time in precognition, telepathy and synchronicity -Unus mundus and time -a comparison of Freud’s and Jung’s time theories: temporal directionality, dimensionality, and the role of timelessness. This book is the first to explore time and timelessness in a systematic manner from a Jungian perspective, and the first to investigate how the concept of time affected the overall development of Jung's theory. It will be key reading for psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians, as well as those working in the field of phenomenological philosophy.

In this outstanding book, originally published in 1997, and subsequently translated into many languages, Michael Palmer presents a detailed and comparative study of the two most famous theories of religion in the history of psychology: those of Freud and Jung. The first part of the book analyses Freud's claim that religion is an obsessional neurosis—a psychological illness fueled by sexual repression—and the second part considers Jung's rejection of Freud's theory and his own assertion that it is the absence of religion, not its presence, which leads to neurosis. Originally given as a series of lectures at Bristol University, this Classic edition of Freud and Jung on Religion is important reading for general and specialist readers alike, as it assumes no prior knowledge of the theories of Freud or Jung and is an invaluable teaching text.