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    It is almost as if Jung has constellated a gathering of and safe haven for well lets be ecumenical and say people interested in a generic depth psychology. Men in search of a soul or the inner life/meaning or the kingdom of heaven within or the internal aspect of nature/ the Unconscious. This train has been sitting at the station awaiting departure for over 50 years. It may well be that those gathering round the Jungian banner are waiting for someone to initiate the marriage to neoplatonism as you so insightfully suggested Mats. The only other path would be for the Jungians to bring back something that would be recognized as being of universal value even in the eyes of its most virulent detractors. Maybe that would be the signal for Jungian psychology to lift itself out of intellectual stasis... maybe leave the station is the most appropriate metaphor. The point being we are not going to leave the station until the engines are started. I intuit that your thoughts on the marriage to neoplatonism is a great insight and the obvious solution to the jungians current static ddilemma mats..

    I've been meaning to bring up the fact that a Jungian type of shadow personality has been documented and extensively studied in regard to the psyhopathic personality by robert hare and his team. But when you google hare and jung nothing turns up. When you google shadow and hare not much turns up either. So a Jungian concept has escaped the train station and entered the mainstream already.... for clarification I've seen the term egopath floating around as a sidebar phenomenon associated with the efforts to define the psychopath. Egopath might be more akin to Jungs concept of the shadow... Though the psychopathic phenomenon appears to emanate from the psychic matrix as the egopath...    

  • I listened to this interesting podcast and I think his critique of Hillman and Giegerich is relevant. Maybe Jungian psychology should divorce from psychoanalysis and negotiate a marriage to Neoplatonism. It could be the answer to the question that Tacey poses, namely to which academic branch Jungian psychology really belongs. After all, the whole blueprint of Jungian psychology can be found in the Neoplatonism of Proclus, Damascius and Iamblichus.

    /Mats

    • So in a university setting the academic branch would be philosophy?
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        Sorry for not dealing with your thought directly...What I was originally thinking of were the philosophers Tacey was naming during his audio. I had never heard of them... Well I heard and have briefly perused mircea eliade.  His thought is sterility plus for me; Geigerich as well.These guys have killed off god only to deify themselves/egos and logic. They use a highly purified logic containing no significant content because these guys have disconnected themselves from the soul. These third rate .... ego is god thinkers writings exhibit an almost total logically spun sterility of the soul. They are essentially thinking types formed and then ejected from the christian matrix.They carry the baggage of their fatally flawed concepts  .. Modern men who aren't even searching for their own souls. In fact they are repressing them with all their might in favor of their inflated thinking type of mentality. Aside from a big pay check these poseurs are not going to amount to much when it comes time to determine their place in the history of philosophy. thats my opinion harsh as it may be but I'm sticking to it.

        Jung wasted a lot of time and effort trying to win acceptance from these clowns. It didn't work. it will never work. They are possessed by a psychological complex that will never allow the god like ego to be subordinated to archetypes or God of Jesus Christ or whatever. Mats Winther suggested an alternative neoplatonist path that would remain true to the jungian precepts. We will forever remain at the station until we jungians overcome our inertia and get on with getting the Jungian train out of the station. There will be no help from the mainstream academic community because Jung's way of thinking  lies in their far distant future, if they have one. Meaning Jung found his own soul thereby solving the problem of the death of God already. 

        • I suppose there is a "story" behind each individual who visits this website. In that sense I have some respect for all those authors mentioned here, even some that aren't mentioned (all the way to Shamanism and Occultism) and that I don't know they exist. I was in a phase when I was playing with my imagination (I was and am totally drug-free) to the point of getting totally messed up. It was interesting, but it was just one inaccurate (those voices and shapes weren't real) perspective. I am shaped by my experiences whatever they are.

          Since this topic is about the collective scale (individual stories might be equally interesting), I think that this and the next generation of humans will face a lot of confusion and experimenting with ideologies and perceptions. So, they will either figure out the most accurate approach to society and the collective conscious and unconscious or pass this confusion to the next generations. On the other hand, maybe the ultimate truth doesn't exist and self-destruction is a part of the package of being self-aware. Dinosaurs weren't a dead-end of evolution. They had fun for a very, very long time.

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        Whatever.. I am just brainstorming holly. Max Winthers essay was very thought provoking and inspirational as were his essays on Hillman et al.... 

    • A layperson would hardly tell a difference between psychotherapy in Jungian and some other approaches. I've had a conversation with a friend that looked like some kind of psychotherapy. It was pretty much played "by the book" and with surprisingly positive results, but Neoplatonism would mean an inner or outer dialogue about Persona, individuation, Anima and Animus (a difference between "how stuff works" and "this stuff works"). Sometimes it works better if a message is packed in a metaphor created on the spot specifically for that person and "nobody else". It's like driving a car - you can have an inner conversation "Now I'm doing this because..." and "Now I'm doing that because...", but it isn't always necessary.

      There is a book "Plato not Prozac!" about philosophy used as some kind of psychotherapy. Bachelard and Buber (philosophers) could for instance be combined with Neoplatonism, Jung, or something totally different. Also, a person involved in politics should do much better if he/she did something ethical without mentioning too much Heidegger or Kant (legit influences).

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        A most excellent book title alek. I agree with you in regard to metaphor. 

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      i wish we could recco posts around here. 

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    This morning as I was lying in bed I was thinking Dostoevsky was the psychologist of our christian civilization while Jung was the psychologist of our individual soul. Drats you and mats ended my panglossian reverie real quick...

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