All I remember is he comes after Freud, some of his followers are annoying, there’s a Marxist podcast that likes him called ‘the return of the repressed,’ and I don’t think Lukacs liked him.
All I know about Carl Jung is that he features in every piece of pop-psych “connect with the energy” nonsense published or printed in the past several decades. The instant I hear his name in any conversation or read it in any article, my eyes start to glaze over.
From the little I’ve read of his work, Jung attempted to weld a kind of mental science to his fixation with animal mysticism. I think that produced something of an esoteric fantasy view of the world that feels romantic to some people, similar to our fascination with ancient mythologies. I think the modernish pop-psych stuff is an attempt to export those vibes as some kind of product.
He’s invoked and cited to lend credibility to a lot of pseudoscience in commercial team building training courses. That’s my main exposure to him and it makes me very sceptical of his work’s value.
Fair enough. I had an insane teacher that forced everyone to take some personality test and talked about how important it was for her to work with one of the numbers. Then she never mentioned it again after a couple weeks.
I dont mean to dismiss his body of work, which I’m largely unaware of, just to say that his name gets tagged on to Meyers Briggs and resold as some kind of psychoanalytical science.
Like for what kind of stuff?
Personality tests. Getting gr groups of people to stand in different areas on a large floor map like a pentagram with different colours associated with different personality types.
“That’s such a blue thing to say!”… when you say something…
That sounds painful
Three days of it.
So I do not have the clarity I can summarize him on my own. I recall some iffy stuff with his views on the Nazis, here is one source I could find on it though I’m not sure if this page has the full text: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.12072
The article shows how strongly anti-Nazi Jung’s views were in relation to events during World War II such as Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, the fall of France, the bombings of Britain, the U.S. entry into the War, and Allied troops advancing into Germany. Schoenl and Peck, ‘An Answer to the Question: Was Jung, for a Time, a “Nazi Sympathizer” or Not?’ (2012) demonstrated how his views of Nazi Germany changed from 1933 to March 1936. The present article shows how his views evolved from 1936 to the War’s end in 1945.
If you need whole stuff written on you to explain your views on Nazis, that’s probably not a great sign.
Then there’s also stuff he wrote on psychology. From what I’ve seen, he’s most known by association for his Psychological Types, which is what MBTI was derived from. But he also wrote some other lesser known stuff on psychology.
Yeah, idk about the nazi stuff. Wasn’t Freud a Jew? Anyway, I know some people here have hot takes against MBTI, but I think it’s a little overblown. I realize that if I want to look into the Marxist take on psychoanalysis I should look at Althusser.
Yeah, MBTI is a topic I could probably get into at great length. Spent a lot of time in it on and off over the years. I think a lot of its problem is that people see the surface level MBTI categorization, especially as pushed on them in workplaces and the like, and justifiably think it’s an annoying oversimplification. But I’ve also seen quite a lot of sincere effort into digging deep into psychology and using theories relating to Psychological Types and MBTI as a means of understanding each other better and being more accepting of cognitive differences. Then again, I’ve also seen people who use it for obsessing over how they are better than others, or uniquely unique and special, or becoming so enmeshed in viewing the world through an MBTI lens that they lose sight of more complex dynamics beyond it. So it can go a number of ways.
MBTI is fine as far as personality systems go, but the reason I bounced off of it was that it eventually became clear there’s zero method to objectively distinguish one type from another. Every single person who gets typed and classified by this system is categorized by vibes, and that’s pretty much it.
That’s reasonable to me. “Objective Personality System”, a derivative of it that is intended to be more scientific, is the closest I’m aware of to going beyond that. And as far as I know, they have yet to actually publish their findings in any meaningful capacity that others can study and reproduce, so it’s sort of down to trusting they are doing any kind of research diligence.
MBTI makes the fundamental assumption that each personality axis is bimodal, and pushes people to one side or the other. Actual research shows that people tend towards the center.
The whole test is pseudoscience made by non-psychologists and propped up by “research” from organisations that profit from the test.
That’s fair. I don’t pretend it is “scientific.” Where I’ve seen value in it, in practice, is as a framework (like a lens through which to think about thinking), not an empirical description of reality. I’m just not sure if the potential benefit outweighs the harm it can cause. Now I’m reflecting on it more, the notion of tension in the psyche between the dominant and inferior function might be the most salvageable part of the theory, on the fact that it’s looking at contradiction and tension between opposites that is never fully resolved. Not unlike dialectics, in spirit, even if the rest of it is a bit iffy. I could maybe see value in examining the psyche as tension between contradictions, where instead of viewing the “cognitive functions” as static preferences that stay dominant and inferior throughout life, there are primary contradictions and secondary contradictions that can shift and change as you develop as a person. This is closer to one alternative take on the theory, which views the cognitive functions more as something you flow between rather than as static preferences.
But in practice, it would still probably be more useful to ground such a view of contradictions in the details of a person’s life and upbringing and so on, rather than through a generic lens of preferences like Intuition or Sensing.
A number of common critiques of Jungian typology and the MBTI are often voiced in no uncertain terms by people who have comparatively little knowledge about these fields.
Notably, the authors don’t give their own qualifications.
In terms of empirical evidence, types don’t exist. Human traits are distributed on a bell curve, not as two camel humps.
True.
People who take the MBTI multiple times often come out as different types (Low Test-Retest Reliability).
True.
MBTI descriptions contain vague and flattering statements that anyone would agree to (Forer Effect).
True.
wow.
However, as we will discuss below, the MBTI is not an end in itself. It is an attempt to quantify C.G. Jung’s cognitive theory empirically. And as most people who have grappled with Jung’s theory will readily attest, his concepts are by no means as straightforward as the Big Five’s ideas that someone who delivers his work on time is ‘conscientious’ and someone who talks a lot is an extrovert. Jung’s concepts of the cognitive functions are not only staggeringly complex, they also stand in a dialectical relationship to each other where they alternatively imply, negate, and complement each other.
In other words, the complexity that goes into the definition of Jung’s cognitive functions is well beyond what we are currently able to prove or disprove empirically. Since Jung’s cognitive theories were not laid out in a format suited to empirical analysis, the advocates of Jung’s ideas can always claim that the fault lies not with the concepts but with the process of translating and interpreting the concepts into a format that will suit empirical testing.
Saying that the theoretical basis of MBTI is beyond empirical analysis doesn’t help their case.
You’ll probably get just as much out of this test from the same site: https://www.idrlabs.com/pusheen/test.php
Why Use This Test?
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Free. This test is provided to you free of charge and allows you to obtain your scores related to the characters from the Pusheen universe.
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Statistical controls. Test scores are logged into an anonymized database. Statistical analysis of the test is conducted to ensure maximum accuracy and validity of the test scores.
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Made by professionals. The present test has been made with the input of people who work professionally in psychology and individual differences research.
It’s made by professionals!
Tbh I just linked it because they agree with what you said about the bell curve.
Sorry, I was definitely overly aggressive.
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Has some interesting ideas, and his autobiography isn’t a bad read, but the force of his life was essentially pushing idealist trends in psychology and philosophy.
I don’t think he took a firm stand in the cold war, and he never engaged with Marxism directly, or any political topics really. Also since his philosphy is completely unthreatening, and has not even the tiniest hint of class analysis, he’s held up as a pillar of western thought in the 20th century. Many of the “anti-totalitarian”, “post-left”, and various other european nonsense tendencies cite him as an influence. I believe some of Gabriel Rockhill’s articles / books touch on this.
I personally think he’s not worth reading, as he addresses none of the most pressing questions of our times.
10/10 artist, otherwise kinda shit but was a natural deviation away from freuds insanity and progressive in that regard
His analysis regarding Hitler and fascist germany is peak stupidity, way more absurd then all those guys from the Frankfurter Schule. Psychoanalysis is not scientific. While it was kind of revolutionary at a certain point, today it is nothing more then quackery.
The only one who was more “special” is Wilhelm Reich. Before he started to believe in esoteric stuff, he had very interesting ideas and observations regarding fascism and Hitler. To summarize it a bit: Reactionaries are against sex. They want to make it strict. How you have sex and with whom. Also the kind of relationship you have. Communism is different, there is good sex, peak sexual freedom. This was the centre of his entire thinking.
Similar things go for all those other dudes. They all had their special fetish. If it wasn’t centred somehow around sex, then it went esoteric or into full pessimism and they became reactionary. Nothing marxistic about them.
Jürgen Habermas is still alive btw.
