Outside-In: Jung's myth of interiority ambiguated. Or - Knowing me, Knowing Jung - ahah!

Given his lifelong battle against one-sidedness Jung's persistent prioritising of the 'inner life' over the 'outer' can seem problematic. The question is raised as to whether an approach that seems to verge uncomfortably close to solipsism can sometimes render Jung blind to the intuition that psychic life is constituted by an on-going interplay between inner and outer, self and other (an intuition that he himself sometimes articulated so brilliantly). The 'ambiguation' of Jung's work offers an opportunity to confront this problem by utilising a critical dynamic that is consistent with Jung's psychological insights.

Jung, Winnicott and the divided psyche.

In his review of Memories Dreams Reflections, Winnicott diagnosed Jung as suffering from a psychic split, and characterized the content and the structure of analytical psychology as primarily moulded and conditioned by Jung's own defensive quest for a 'self that he could call his own'. This pathologizing analysis continues to be endorsed by contemporary Jungian writers. In this paper I attempt to show that Winnicott's critique is fundamentally misguided because it derives from a psychoanalytic model of the psyche, a model that regards all dissociation as necessarily pathological.

Two in one or one in two? Pushing off from Jung with Wolfgang Giegerich.

This paper responds to a recent paper by Wolfgang Giegerich entitled 'Two Jungs: apropos a paper by Mark Saban'. Giegerich disputes my assertion that the 'rigorous notion' at the heart of his psychology 'finds no source in Jung's psychology, implicit or explicit'. In order to do this he posits the existence of two Jungs, an exoteric Jung and an esoteric Jung.

Another serious misunderstanding: Jung, Giegerich and a premature requiem.

Barreto's paper, 'Requiem for analytical psychology' utilized Jung's dreams and visions to argue for the obsolescence of Jungian psychology. Its thesis rested upon the theoretical assumptions of Giegerich's psychology as a Discipline of Interiority, which he and Giegerich claim are themselves based in Jung's psychology. Here I argue that that claim is misplaced because it depends upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Jung's psychological project.

Entertaining the stranger.

This paper attempts to address the problematic of the other in analytical psychology. Despite the important contributions of Papadopoulos (1991, 2002) and Huskinson (2000, 2002) this question has not received the attention it warrants. Read in the light of Levinas' writings on otherness, Jung's tendency to characterize the self as unitary, autonomous and undivided may be seen as a defence against or even an erasure of otherness.