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Comment by nathias | Hacker News Reader

Jung is astrology for men.

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I agree, although somewhat curiously it isn't based on external influences. But while possibly interesting from a historical point of view, what the article describes is what e.g. Penrose still pursues: here's some psychological effect we don't understand, and here's a physical one that can be described with similar metaphors, hence they must be related!

Unfair to Penrose. His view is more like: Hence testing the range and depth of possible relationships to the limits of their coherence with evidence is a worthwhile enterprise.

Why isn't astrology "astrology for men?"

I think what parent means is that /astrology/, per se, is mostly consumed by women, whereas Jung's work, which can be viewed as similarly unscientific, is quite widely read by males, when compared with astrology texts.

I never understood how Jung is more unscientific than Freud.

At least: I don’t see this choir of “but it’s antiscientific!!!” cries when Freud is discussed, but still there’s no evidence whatsoever for the tripartition of self which is at the very base of Freud’a theories.

The super-ego is no more scientific than synchronicities!

I think Freud's theories have all been pretty much considered 'surpassed' in academic psychology. I don't think they're considered valid anymore, outside of popular culture.

Then let me rephrase it this way: I don’t see how Jung is more antiscientific than any other psychological theory.

Well, even though there's a strong argument that around 50% of psychology studies fail to be reproduced when they try to, they are still studies which try to follow something as close as possible to the scientific method (some of the time, at least). Jung and Freud never did that. They just listened to a lot of patients and came up with explanations. Psychology today is still very far from the hard sciences, but it's more scientific than Freud ever was. And Jung.

Because he is a spiritualist and Freud (wrong as he may be) was still trying to find naturalistic explanations.

The tripartition of psyche is not naturalistic at all.

For the same reason sawdust is called “man glitter”

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