Comment by dwringer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwringer | Hacker News Reader

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When I took some undergraduate level Psychology courses there was nothing to make me think Jung had been discounted as "an interesting part of ... history, but not actually useful" - with several comments from various instructors that his work could be tremendously beneficial but incredibly dense. FWIW the field of Psychology is full of theories and models with highly subjective applications and widespread disagreement on what is "best" for a given individual, hence the existence of so many institutional guidelines and diagnostic criteria (and even the DSM, as it changed from edition IV to V, has generated a tremendous amount of controversy among professionals, scientists, and laypeople alike). There's been a lot of coverage in the media in the past few months/years about a "replication crisis" in sciences such as this, as well, where a substantial portion of published scientific results [presumably the only "scientific backing" a theory can have in a situation like this] have outright failed to be replicated by subsequent researchers.

EDIT: I'd appreciate any further detail you might have on your specific criticism of Jung, as I've apparently attracted some downvotes. I guess I'll just add that another thing I remember hearing about in school was that a lot of Jung's theories were considered impenetrable without having access to his so-called "Red Book" - which was not widely available until ~2009.

According to Wikipedia the "Red Book" was written during an odd time for Jung:

>Biographers and critics have disagreed whether these years in Jung's life should be seen as "a creative illness", a period of introspection, a psychotic break, or simply madness.

Which makes me wonder about the context of what you heard in school. By that I mean people seem to agree that what Jung wrote makes sense to a lot of people, so there's something of worth in there. What it doesn't make it is scientific. There's not a lot of people currently arriving at the same conclusions as Jung.

I'll admit I don't know anything about psychology (just what I've heard second hand), but I do find people like Jung quite interesting.

Thanks for the reply; I've read only a small fraction of Jung's vast body of work and certainly don't always agree with [or understand] his conclusions, but I've also felt he was pretty moderate in drawing them and often fills his professional writing (not his private, personal "Red Book" and related materials) with disclaimers and warnings about not jumping to various conclusions or misinterpretations (some of which seem to manage in spite of that to be used to this day as characterizations of his text).

What I meant about the "Red Book"'s significance (and I agree that it's "odd") is that it tends to show some of the "raw data" of Jung's personal experience from which he was deriving his hypotheses that otherwise seem very abstract (and for that reason were not relatable to me when I was in school). Its extreme subjectivity and unscientific quality is a main reason Jung and his heirs did not wish for it to be published, and successfully kept it from being so for many decades.

Perhaps in terms of scientific rigor there is much to improve upon with Jung's work. I fully agree that he is "quite interesting", and still think there is likely something that could be gained scientifically from critically revisiting some of his ideas in a modern context.

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