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To: airborne

Gregor Mendel is called the father of genetics because of his lineage studies of pea plants. But modern analysis of his actual datasets pretty much establish that he fudged them a bit to control the flyers. Nonetheless, this doesn’t take away from his insights into the structure of the generational ordering he was observing - he just wanted to make a stronger case for his theory.

I think Jung is a lot like that. Not that he fudged his data (Jung’s data was hardly quantifiable), but rather, he was trying to correlate reproduceable patterns of meaning where other people were simply caught up in the mental experiences. But this was actually a strength for Jung, because whenever the experiences were non-normal, through drugs or even abnormal hallucinations, he still simply observed their patterns and recorded them according to their symbolism. As a result, he was able to extract invaluable signal from all the noise, and go on to explore the meanings of those patterns.

And even if he was wrong about the meanings of the patterns (many of which are better explained by cognitive psychology and brain function analysis), he formalized the meta-analysis of mental patterns itself, and really, in that, invented psychology as a science. In comparison, Freud just took Jung’s ideas and applied his own meanings to Jung’s pattern formalization process.


14 posted on 09/20/2009 12:33:32 PM PDT by Talisker (When you find a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be damn sure it didn't get there on it's own.)
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To: Talisker

if any of you have any spare time just glance through Jung’s book about dreams and you will get some insights about yourself. Your subconscious is really trying to tell you something on occasion. it pays to listen to it. Jung shows that the dreaming process in man, far from being archaic and redundant, was more relevant than ever. When you dream, pay attention to your archetypical dreams.


23 posted on 09/20/2009 2:27:20 PM PDT by Citizen Tom Paine
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