We have broached the topic of Whewellian-Wilsonian
consilience in general,
and of mathematical consilience in particular:
And now we shall rather wander from the main path, to
notice the role such notions have played in the history of analytic psychology. They are scarcely central to its
development; we allude to the
matter merely with a view to rounding out -- and consilience is about nothing
if not rounding out...
Once again, time presses -- We actually do have a
day-job, you know -- so instead of a proper essay, we shall simply type out
some quotes from books that need to go back to the library soon, so as not to
lose them. Perhaps later
these may serve as pegs whereon to hang an essay, if reader interest warrants.
~ ~ ~
The time in which Freud worked was already alive to
the possibilities of disciplinary cross-connections:
In 1912, Freud was invited by Scientia, an important international
periodical published in Italy and devoted to the study of the
relationships between the different branches of science.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of
Maturity (1955), p. 214
Freud’s pupil Fenichel suggests that, so far from
psychology being ignominiously reduced to physics, historically there is a
touch of the other-way-round:
The idea of looking at mental
phenomena as a result of interacting forces certainly was not derived merely by transferring the concept
of energy from the other natural sciences to psychology. Originally it happened the other way around: the everyday assumption that one understands metnal
reactions when one understands their motives has been transferred to physics.
-- Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of
Neurosis (1945), p. 11
Cf. the historical precedence of philology over biology, in
the matter of branching taxonomy.
~ ~ ~
Re the ancient theory that dreams came to us through
either the Gates of Ivory, or the Gates of Horn:
Diese vorwissenschaftliche
Traumauffassung der Alten stand sicherlich
im vollsten Einklange mit ihrer
gesamten Weltanschauung, welche als Realität in die Außenwelt zu
projitzieren pflegte, was nur
innerhalb des Seelenlebens Realität hatte.
-- Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900), ch. I
(Einklang: roughly, Consilience.)
Physical physiology … overthrew this philosophy [viz. Naturphilosophie]. … The conquerer introjected the
emotionalism of the victim. “Unity of science” … “physical
forces” were not merely directing ideas or hypotheses of
scientific endeavor: they became
almost objects of worship. They
were more than methods of research -- they became a Weltanschauung.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: the Formative Years (1953), p.
43
The study of animal behavior with its Innate Releasing Mechanisms can be seen as a sort of dual to Jung’s
endeavors:
Ethology and Jungian
psychology can be viewed as two sides of the same coin: it is as if ethologists have been
engaged in an extraverted exploration of the archetype, and Jungians in an
introverted examination of the IRM.
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction
(1994), p. 5
The following is as lame as Dawkins’ analogizing of ‘memes’
to genes; but we cite it by way of
examining the hypothesis of Consilience,
not by way of defending it:
What Jung was proposing was no less than a fundamental concept on which the whole science of
psychology could be built.
Potentially, it is of comparable importance to quantum theory …Just as
the physicist investigates particles and waves, and the biologist
genes, so Jung held it to be the business of the psychologist to investigate the collective
unconscious and the functional
units of which it is composed --
the archetypes.
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction
(1994), p. 47
According to his associate Jones, Freud made
a half-serious prediction that, in time to come, it
should be possible to sure hysteria by administering a chemical drug, without
any psychological. On the other
hand, he used to insist that one should first explore psychology to its limits,
while waiting patiently for the suitable advance in biochemistry, and would
warn his pupils against “flirting with endocrinology”.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: the Formative Years (1953), p.
43
Here Freud was prescient about Prozac and its tribe,
while warning against premature horizontal consilience.
~
To the objection, “der Mensch habe noch andere Interessen
als die sexuellen”, Freud replies:
Das haben wir keinen Augenblick
lang vergesssen oder verleugnet.
Unsere Einseitigkeit ist wie die des Chemikers, der alle Konstitutionen
auf die Kraft der chemischen Attraktion zurückführt. Er leugnet darum die Schwerkraft nicht,
er überläßt ihre Würdigung dem Physiker.
-- Sigmund Freud, “Eine
Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse” (1917)
Theodor Reik, a
colleague of Sigmund Freud for thirty years, reports: “He insisted that psychoanalysis, as a science, should
adhere to its own methos, and he tried to keep it free of the methods of other
sciences.” (The Search Within
(1956), p. 13).
After the Fliess period, one
notices a diminishing tendency on Freud’s part to physiologize -- or, at any rate, to promise eventually to
physiologize -- the new discoveries.
-- Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind
of the Moralist (1959), p. 7
Jung never disagreed with Freud’s
view that personal experience is of crucial significance for the development of
each individual, but he denied that this development occurred in an
unstructured personality. For
Jung, the role of personal experience
was to develop what is already
there.
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994), p. 48
This exactly parallels the central tenet of Chomsky.
Chomsky-Halle binarism;
ctr. Jungian tetradism:
The categories into which these
[characterological] typologies are divided are commonly four in number. It is as if the mind has a natural propensity to orientate
itself through a tetrad of pair oppositions. The magnetic compass
is a case in point.
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994).
For a kindred topic -- here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/09/chomsky-freud-and-problem-of-acolytes_26.html
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