Carl Jung said
Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.
[via Idiolect]
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Matt – Your quote from Jung really moves me. Also, this comment is so pinpointed amng all he’s written that I have read, that it strikes me just as it is as an extraordinary and open insight. Someday, I’d enjoy sharing some critical thoughts, both positive and some more sheerly analytical, because his archetype and thus dream theory has a limited vocabulary of just 64 archetypal images-stories – compared to say the Tibetan Buddhist whose psychotherapy depends on the assignment of one over a thousand images. The devotee seeking help explains his problem to a wise old monk, who assigns meditation on that particular image. As maybe you know, the different sects of Tibetan Buddhism are designated by different coloured hats for their monks and leaders. I forget which colour of hat originated this specific vocabulary, but it must have been built up over a very long stretch of time to achieve the level of specificity it entails. Just a thought to stimulate your image-sensitive brain-juices on Jung’s interesting vocabulary and that of the Buddhists, in comparison.
Again, thanks for the Jung quote. I have the condition of theorizing through my emotions, which is risky, and often enuff puts people off, including afterward myself. It’s been difficult to discipline this way of argument in an intellectual exchange. Dare I tack on: Pray for me!
Yours, Albert
Matt should reality be something that only a handful of the worlds most advanced physicists understand?One would expect at least a majority of people to understand it.Should reality be expressible only in symbols that require university-level mathematics to manipulate?Should it be something that changes year to year as new scientific theories are formulated.Should it be something which different schools of physics can quarrel for years with no firm resolution on either side?If this is so then how is it to imprison a person in a mental hospital for life with no trial and no jury and no parole for ‘failing to understand reality’By this criterion shouldn’t all but a handful of the worlds most advanced physicists be locked up for life.WHO IS CRAZY HERE AND WHO IS SANE?
:-)
Matt did you know that Henri Poinare asked
‘Why is the reality most acceptable to science one that no small child can be expected to understand’