Friday, February 1, 2019

Cutting Room Floor Series, part 1, Carl Gustav Jung and Psychology

I have decided to start a new series I am calling "The Cutting Room Floor." The reason is because I am finishing up this book chapter on John Kennedy Toole, and there are things I wanted to put in my paper, but which just don't fit. They are slightly off-topic and the chapter is too long anyway, so I am cutting them. But I think that they are worth saying, so I will say them in this series.

Forward: Strange traffic patterns

BTW, I see that I now have two followers. Thanks to both of you.

From December 2018: The blog statistics have a strange trend: most of the traffic is now from an unknown country, and the operating system for the traffic is now ninety percent Linux. What's with that? Is it just an army of bots? Or do most people use Linux now routed through a VPN in Antarctica? Very strange.

From January 2019: The usage this month was concentrated on two days. Those two days had about 200 hits each. The rest of the month had about 30 hits. The two countries the traffic came from were the United Arab Emirates with 198 hits, and Spain at 193 hits. The site from which the most traffic was referred to my blog was a porn site. Most of the traffic is from a Linux platform. Again, very strange. But on to the real topic of this entry.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number One: The psychological validity of the theories of Carl Gustav Jung

In my book chapter, I have a brief discussion of Jung's essay on the trickster archetype. While reading the essay, I ran across a statement by Jung that to me signals that his system is completely bogus as science. I was going to put it in the footnote to my discussion, but it is just not worth the increase in word count. Here it is:

... Jung's work seems to be worthless as science (to say nothing of its racism), as Jung claims that conflict “is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity” ("On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," 269). Yikes. To say that a proposition is proven valid only if its reverse is valid is crazy talk.
Jungian psychology is bogus. Full stop.