Embracing Fictions: A Commentary on the Book Spell Bound

From earie noises, bizarre coincidences, synchronicities, time slippage, and shelves and doors that seemingly open and close on their own to the unexplained light patterns in the night sky I remain fascinated by the firsthand accounts of what may be inappropriately labeled paranormal or supernatural phenomena. My interest is not as a skeptic or debunker per se because these efforts reflect the opposite extreme, an absurd other-worldly confidence in scientific verification. If it cannot be verified by its methods, it isn’t meaningful. Yet science is an invention, a very useful one, but it’s imbued with human fragility. There are, I think, natural, and I want to emphasize natural here, causes for everything, while at the same time, a portion of these fall outside scientific methods.


To fully understand what I mean here, scientific methods can’t be viewed as an impersonal set of tools that overcome bias. A tool must be observed, and its capabilities (what it can do) are a matter of perception, which depends on experience. Professional scientists are trained in a very specific way—in highly controlled environments, insuring that through their training, any rough edges or individual differences are lessened; this is critically important in making the whole enterprise work as this shared training provides some assurance of future consensus; at some point, scientists look at the experimental findings and converge on an interpretation; outside of science, outside of that shared training, this isn’t guaranteed. For the sake of making everything work, we therefore have injected bias. And the overconfident scientist or skeptic risks becoming a true believer, a priest or prophet of a newfound religion that transforms hope, belief, and faith into certainties and facts. As I see it, the scientist must embrace what appears to be “anti-scientific” as a matter of perspective hopping; to periodically free oneself from the burden of specialized training, discovering the bias that influences daily research by taking a different perspective. This is not to say, go wild, become a true believer in the paranormal. I’m instead suggesting a compromise, an effort to reinvent both sides, so that the natural world is more explicable.


With this background in hand, I enjoy reading books that I think intuitively lack credibility; I do so because my intuitions remain hopelessly incomplete. And science, in my view, doesn’t chase facts or answers, which our intuitions resemble, but perfectly framed questions. To that end, I wanted to write about the book Spell Bound by the psychiatrist Daniel Z. Lieberman. I’ll begin with a brief overview. Later, I’ll attempt to reframe the book’s content so that it’s not as divisive; language is very powerful; some words are so strong in fact that we may hear them and instinctively think only nonsense follows. This instinctive or “cringe” response is what I’m hoping to overcome. I think there’s something interesting in it for everyone.


The book is heavily influenced by the psychologist Carl Gustav (CG) Jung. A student of Sigmund Freud, Jung disagreed with his mentor’s excessive libidinal or sex-dominant psychological theories. Freud was more medically oriented and was interested in reducing the mental to the biological, though he lacked the tools to meaningfully investigate the biology, and couldn’t reduce to biology per se. At best, he had the physical, observable facts—the behaviors, the instincts, the effects—pulling these threads to draw his thinking closer to the biological origins that he couldn’t quite grasp. Jung discarded the Western model and instead leaned on Eastern approaches, dominated by Buddhist, Hindu, gnostic and esoteric philosophical and religious texts. His work has grown in popularity as traditional religious structures deteriorate; a turn, much like the scientist and mystic Emanual Swedenborg before him, that reflects a desire to embrace wonder and mystery without discarding science and reason.


Central to Jung’s writings is his instance on a hidden, if using the ancient language, “occult,” mental world. This world is not conscious. It’s then, one would reason, unconscious. We must learn of its existence largely through dreams. We can benefit from the more expansive representation of reality offered by the unconscious (e.g., the iceberg metaphor) in our dream life. Because our language is insufficient and too reductionistic, we must, however, analyze dream imagery holistically and assemble a strange, new language of the unconscious. He saw many parallels between ancient myth and dream life and much like myths can be grouped according to themes, the unconscious, exposed in dream life, can be understood through archetypes, which are simply mental or psychological themes. That very brief summary captures Jung’s approach. The book Spell Bound extends it with recent experimental findings and speculation on the biological foundations, which are poorly conceived and deceptive. Take for example the statement, “Consciousness is associated with the most recently evolved part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.” (“recently” in this case makes consciousness an evolutionary leap, implying it’s rare and absent in more distant ancestors).

 

If a most “important part” is even sensible in this context, it would have to be subcortical, particularly the thalamus, which distributes sensory inputs. Notably, it relays visual and auditory information to more specialized processing regions such as the auditory and visual cortices, and it, along with subcortical brain structures nearby, plays an important role in generating the oscillatory patterns that synchronize brain regions and are measurable in EEG recordings. It may go without saying but to clarify, these structures are evolutionarily old, implying consciousness may vary but is not wholly absent in other animals.


I find this interesting, and I think it reflects the Western influences in Jung’s work and modern adaptations of it. Namely, it has many Eastern religious undercurrents, religious writings that describe the self as illusory. Psychiatry, contrary to this position on the self, seeks to preserve it—aimed at building a superior, better adapted self. Consequently, the language around psychology/psychiatry can be deceptive and damaging, supporting self-serving views that have historically dominated Western religion—build up the self, put it at the center of the universe; humans are superior.


The author next attempts to biologically ground Jung’s idea of archetypes. They see archetypes as closely aligned with instinct. Since instinctual behaviors are strongly tied to genetics, this suggests archetypes may originate in genetics as well. It’s immediately clear that genetics seems insufficient, so this effort is doomed from the start, though it serves a purpose.


A significant span of time separates Freud’s work in Vienna and this book, yet there haven’t been any revolutionary advancements in psychological or psychiatric thought; most progress is technological (e.g., brain imaging) or merely apparent such as with the resurgence of old and forgotten ideas. Unsurprisingly, we can relate the book’s effort to Freud’s earlier, failed attempt to rigorously define psychology in medical and scientific terms, also retreating into hazy “instinct” (e.g., Oedipal striving, etc.).  


The author rightly concludes instinctual behaviors must be connected to genetics but are not easily reducible to them. There’s nothing like: Gene A à Instinctual Behavior. As a result, they must claim archetypes, while loosely genetic, are emergent phenomena. This, however, serves as an admission that the book is now ready to discard biology and neuroscience, taking on a flavor that’s like the Freud of old.


Like Freud, biology has already served its purpose in the book: first convince the reader the book is scientifically plausible, a step that’s similar to movies that begin with “Based on true events”; next, exactly like the movie, add embellishments that may make the specific claims or happenings unverifiable. Essentially, it implies don’t take the words that seriously; the meaning is there; it’s in the background. It’s just a story. Of course, for the believer who isn’t interested in verification the words “just” and “story” aren’t seen. As with the moviegoer who desires, above all else, to be deeply immersed in another reality, the reader is free to indulge.

And so, we will as well, hopefully, knowing that it’s just a story, but one, admittedly, that contains something worthwhile when embracing fiction. Commonly, fiction means less true, factual, or rigorous. It’s however a flawed interpretation that follows from the language we’ve invented to describe the world. Our perception is to a certain extent shaped by language (refer to the box Words and Reality). There’s natural and artificial and fiction and non-fiction, and we tend to group science with the latter, and when it fails to fit the more rigorous criteria, it’s then not an attack on science itself but a flawed instance of it. This is how we eventually got the arts and sciences, qualifiers like “social” science. I want to avoid what I now see as the original sin, so to speak, when the logical errors first emerged, contributing to these non-existent divisions. Changing how we think about fiction is task number one.

Box: Words and Reality

The “Russian Blues” experiment; in English blue hues are defined using a modifier such as “light” or “dark” as in the car is “light blue”; Russian has two words goluboy/siny that express the distinct, perceptual experiences of light and dark blue; when instructing native Russian speakers to assign the labels goluboy/siny to blue patches, researchers have found response times are fastest for goluboy/siny patches and slowest for patches that are shades of goluboy/siny; native English speakers, who, recall, rely on modifiers rather than two separate words, don’t seem to show response time differences; there are many extensions of the Russian Blues experiment, but the general conclusion is that native Russian speakers activate language categories that don’t exist for the English speakers; while this helps rapidly respond to or predict examples of goluboy/siny, it can get in the way when the examples aren’t quite goluboy/siny or in divided attention tasks that involve simultaneous color discrimination and verbal processing, an example of which is the Stroop, where research participants are instructed to report the word color and ignore the word itself; in seeing Blue versus Blue, the participant would report “blue” and “green”; the second example is more challenging because the word competes with the color, and this delays the response.

 

 

 

Building up the Idea of True Fictions:

 

Historically, humanity has approached neuroscience problems with an incomplete understanding, inventing a specialized vocabulary for our mental lives. Subsequent generations acquire new tools and interpret the observations of the past differently; the specialized vocabulary is shaken up; some terms are dropped, others are gained. We can see this progression in the once popular and respected practices of phrenology, pyrotherapy, and frontal lobotomies; the last two, interestingly, won Nobel Prizes. Today, we recognize that their popularity or success didn’t originate from a deep knowledge of or insight into the human brain.  It would, however, be wrong to say history doesn’t teach in these instances. History is a narrative. It’s a myth. Since it’s a product of the human brain, it’s layered with figurative elements that function not as descriptions of an actual world but a possible or imagined one. Something obviously happened. Yet history is itself invented in the act of looking back. From this vantage point, the brain sees the past as what has happened and therefore what could be—what’s possible, imaginable.

 

Although something historical like phrenology is ridiculed from our perspective, we did learn something, and continue to build on this, whether right or wrong. For phrenology, it was localization of function or modularity. For example, lesion studies where the brain is damaged have assigned very specific functions to brain regions. The frontal lobe (parts of it to be more specific) regulates emotion and significantly contributes to what we recognize as “personality.” We see truth in pyrotherapy as well. Throughout history, it was assumed that immune cells only negatively impacted brain function. Pyrotherapy subtly rejected this assumption, as it seemed immune activation could be therapeutic. Nobody formalized this, however, and the therapy was ridiculed, joining phrenology in the pantheon of bad, unscientific ideas. It wasn’t until the early days of neuroimmunology that people began interpreting the result mythically; namely, recognizing it wasn’t literal or precisely true in its detail and was unethical, but it still expressed something that was meaningful for modern day research.

 

Recognize that it’s all Storytelling

I’m reminded of Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If, later formalized by the little-known, though revolutionary, psychologist George Kelly (1905-1967) in his Personal Construct Theory. Essentially, they both observed that humans tell stories, and are often entangled in stories that they neither control nor recognize, though there is freedom in knowing this. In Kelly’s case, he saw this as the fundamental existential crisis facing society. He suggested however that we just needed to recognize the stories in our lives, the false narratives, and simply tell new ones. To act, that is, as if it were the case. To no longer be victimized by the stories but to control them.

Spell Bound is ostensibly a book about the unconscious, the supernatural, and the magical, and it is heavily influenced by Jung’s writings on these topics, as I’ve already discussed. In the next few sections, I want to reframe much of the book’s content by taking this perspective of true fictions. Hopefully, by now I’ve built up the idea that fiction achieves truth not through literal description but by being plausibly real.  The topic would require a book-length treatment, yet it suffices to say that science is also best understood in the way; the fictional perspective is simply more consistent with the innerworkings of the human brain, and by embracing it, our thinking is better attuned to the natural world. Ultimately, this is the implicit power the book is outlining, even as it fails by not embracing or controlling the story—by trying to be something other than fiction.

 

Implicit Processing

There are some interesting experiments discussed in the book, which may evoke images of someone wiggling their fingers, mockingly, dragging out the word, “spoooky” because of the use of language and concepts with a lot of baggage. I’ll refer to the unconscious as implicit processing, avoiding for the time being any gut reaction to the word “unconscious.” Since most of the studies seem redundant, I’ve selected just two to cover in detail.

Selecting apartments

In this study, the subjects had to select an optimal apartment given 48 parameters. One was decidedly the best. Ultimately, the researchers wanted to understand the factors that contribute to a successful versus unsuccessful selection. Could the participants find the optimal apartment and under what circumstances were they most successful?

In one group, the participants had to select the apartment immediately after reviewing the options; in another, they made their selection after a delay. The most interesting group was the third and final where the participants were distracted before making their selection, tasked with solving an irrelevant anagram puzzle.

The researchers found that the distracted participants were more successful at selecting the optimal apartment. Delaying the selection, overemphasized participants’ rationalizations. This type of deliberation—attending to, comparing pros and cons, and weighing the options—was, on average, unsuccessful. We might speculate that as the number of parameters an individual must parse increases, the decision-making process becomes focused and arbitrary—highlighting a few parameters here and there, and crafting a narrative that justifies the position. The book then focuses on whether we (the readers) can benefit from this supposed “unconscious” or implicit processing ability. But beforehand let’s cover an additional experiment

Predicting circle locations

Here, participants saw a circle in one of four locations and were instructed to press a key associated that location; the researchers recorded the time it took for the participants to press the correct key. On its own this isn’t very interesting. But the researchers had introduced repeated patterns of varying complexity. Some patterns were obvious while others were too complex and non-obvious (beyond their awareness). Because the delay between the button press and the appearance of the circle measures the “surprise,” shorter delays would imply the participant had successfully predicted the location of the circle, suggesting that they had learned (at some level) the repeating pattern of circle positions.

 

The authors of the study found the timing decreased even when the participants were unaware of the pattern. When the researchers told the participants that the sequence wasn’t random, this information limited their success, presumably, this is additional evidence that far from there being a distinct, obscure unconscious, the division we’re detecting here is between consciousness and our limited awareness of these processes. Hence, the generic, implicit processing seems like a good fit. We can refer to experiments probing the opposite as well—the tendency to imagine that a pattern exists when it doesn’t; in the context of a game, the participants explain their success by suggesting they had leveraged these fictional patterns. This doesn’t give us much leeway, however. Thus far a book that intends to empower individuals by taking advantage of these implicit processes has provided several studies that seem to oddly deny our causal efficacy. We are left with a dilemma that’s likened to the distinction between an herbal immune bosting supplement versus an antiviral. The book wants the reader to believe that our insight possesses powers like the antiviral, where scientists have identified how the virus replicates—understanding the lock and key and then developing a drug that separates the two. At best, after these preliminary studies, the reader must contend with the first, less desirable option; in the virus example, the first option is that the scientists can’t treat the virus; they can only recommend ways to improve the immune response through supplements. Returning to the study and book at hand we find ourselves in the strange position of feeling hopelessly unable to strategically guide our mental lives.

 

Paradoxically, the authors of that same study, the book’s author reports, next divided the participants by religious beliefs. They were interested in quantifying the influence of a religious narrative or belief on the button press task, particularly the belief in an interventionist God. Individuals who believed excelled at identifying and taking advantage of patterns that were too complex for awareness, performing better, on average, than those without such beliefs. I use the term paradoxical because the study’s earlier findings suggest—try as we might to make use of the patterns—our thoughts, ploys, or strategies are ineffective. This degrades any a value intrinsic to our thoughts. We could just as well study longtime video game enthusiasts, or practitioners of yoga, and find the same thing; the point being that the study doesn’t affirm our thoughts or institutions or beliefs; it affirms at most the role of practices and actions (non-verbal influences) in shaping attention, hand eye coordination, and any other factor of value in the button press game. For example, we have the narrative of the religious believer in an enchanted world, but we possibly have a video game enthusiast narrative; or the narrative of the health-conscious spiritual person, all of which affirm the narrative through practices (e.g., yoga). And while the study didn’t explore these alternatives, we have no reason to think they’d be any different.

I want to pause and untangle this for a minute because though this isn’t the empowerment we were promised at the start of the book, this is the power of storytelling in-action. It’s the power of fiction.

 

Telling a Probabilistic Narrative

I want to tell a story. In this fictional tale, the brain is a purely computational or a “Bayesian” machine, generating probability models to guide behavior. From this perspective, “unconscious” is a poor label. It’s a poor label because a probability model must consider the constant stream of sensory data including self-awareness, proprioception/enteroception. That is, “self” or “subjectivity” is not situated above anything; it’s just another input; it’s information. While this implies we can’t be aware of the precise stream of inputs and outputs (I/O), for reasons the experiment seems to confirm—consciousness, a word that in this mathematical context simply means the information stream (low level sensory and the more complex aggregate of this content experienced as self) is widely or globally available—the probability models wouldn’t be useful and accurate if access were restricted; and that’s essentially what the folk psychological term “unconscious” demands of us—that there’s an artificial demarcation. Whenever we say our actions, thoughts, ideas about the world “out there” are successful we are implying access to a useful model à (that implies) global processing, or wide access to the continuous I/O stream à consciousness is present. In sleep, the information stream is discontinuous and less accessible, and this results in dreams; here, the models are still making predictions, however, the loss of continuity means that there’s a loss of feedback. This effectively puts the models in “generation” mode. Pure, ceaseless prediction without any constraint other than an individual’s past learning and experience.

 

What are archetypes?

 

Archetypes are abstract; and their open-endedness has supported an esoteric language that’s very distinct from modern neuroscience. In the previous section, I introduced a computational perspective. Now I want to apply this to archetypes, rendering them more generically. Fortunately, this isn’t as challenging a task as it seems. We need only look to the ancient symbols and stories canvasing rock walls in Western Europe and the American Southwest among others, which we are already well acquainted with, because here, as in the past, we’re just storytellers.

 

Natural systems (networks) undergo reorganization to optimize information flow, which is to say, by creating relationships or developing interdependencies. We observe this as patterns, groupings, or clusters. The process I’ve just described could similarly be called evolution and the patterns organisms. Extrapolating from this process, letting it play continuously, it’s uncontroversial to state that self-similarity will emerge; it then follows that scale becomes negligible. In other words, at multiple scales, one would see patterns that are themselves representations of the whole. Everything would be analogically linked in this scenario. Nothing could truly be reduced to anything else as there’s only an apparent hierarchy; one that originates from an incomplete vantage point, where the experience is simply insufficient to see that the analogy is indeed present.

It is widely observed throughout the history of mathematics and computer science that problems and their solutions may be formulated in many ways; only later is it shown that two seemingly independent efforts had been saying the same thing (e.g. the Church’s lambda calculus). Connecting the dots in this manner has revealed that from one perspective a problem and its solution may be intractable and yet the problem may be conceived of and solved efficiently from an alternative perspective. Accordingly, we can think of these historical cases in science as examples of analogies, repeated patterns of the type I discussed above; the task of intellectual work is therefore to excavate these patterns from the different disciplines and scales. After accomplishing this, it’s not a matter of discarding (into the dustbin of history) but flexibly moving from one perspective to the next in the hope that we might refine our language and thinking—doing away with the archaic and least helpful formulations so that we can effectively discuss and better understand nature’s patterns.

 

Archetypes are conceivably a type of pattern, an aggregate of information that’s repeated, implying saliency. When something’s repeated, the meaning is just that—that it’s repeated. An organism takes repetition into consideration to successfully predict its environment. It’s therefore not helpful to think of archetypes as literal, which it seems Spell Bound, as many other similar books, are interested in doing. This anthropomorphizes the languages and makes it virtually impossible to see the archetype as extending from all living systems, which it must. It must have a generic corollary. Avoiding trivial disputes, we need only say that we must act as if this corollary exists because it’s seemingly impossible to create a rigorously logical argument. We must simply, finding ourselves at bedrock, admit that this is a reasonable explanatory position, stopping short of fact and avoiding the inevitable logical holes. We admit that there’s–wink-wink, shove-shove, playful sarcasm here—just healthy pretending at work.

 

Let’s look at some ways of thinking about archetypes below:

The appearance of eye-like forms is is seen on feathers and wings in the images; the form is a common repeated pattern, and it’s ubiquity makes it informative. Initially, it was just a pattern in a much  larger pattern, such as a face or head, and soon came to signify that larger pattern. To see eyes, was then to see a face–to be looked at, which promoted fear or attraction. But fear or attraction isn’t simply a physiological response. It’s a mathematical model, and it’s the model that must first justify the energy resources required to act or generate the response. The images below are thus examples of a purely computational reality that is hidden from our everyday ordinary experience. There are examples of hijacking mathematical models to justify the energy cost of organisms’ actions in the physical or tangible world. Yet strictly speaking what we see is is artifice; it’s pure fiction. Our task is to took beyond the veil and the find the truth. Interestingly, what I’ve described here is very Jungian, though I’m appealing to a different language. This is the power of story and analogy at work. We needn’t abandon anything, but we must be prepared that in hopping from analogy to analogy,  or from perspective to perspective, one scale to another,  some of the old language won’t work in the broader narrative. And we must use it with air quotes, so to speak, implying that it’s not really that “____”–it’s just hard to express it if the interpretation is literal. This I refer to as mastering the art of fiction.

Mastering the Art of Fiction


How should we proceed if not literally? 

As it stands the book Spell Bound perfectly characterizes an immature science that knows what it’s supposed to be studying (obviously, a psychologist studies mental life; a neuroscientist studies the brain) but is at a loss when it comes to formulating problems, experiments, and interpretations. In an immature science, science is strangely an inward practice or is sociological; namely, it’s more about being a psychologist or neuroscientist—what does it mean; what are the words?


As the Quantum Revolution began, which in some ways gave rise to the “real” or truly explanatory physics that characterizes the modern world, physicists were struggling with ideas that are now uncontroversial but not necessarily any less confusing – like the space-time continuum and wave-particle duality. The problem was that the ideas were experientially foreign (or unrelatable) and our long-standing efforts to construct narratives from these experiences resulted in our collective disbelief. Psychology and neuroscience, though it seems like we have intimate, introspective knowledge here, fit into a similar category of disconnect or fracture. For physicists in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, something wasn’t right. The world was not that strange; the categories we impose on the world are not arbitrary; they meaningfully describe and organize its contents. Even Albert Einstein—who began that revolution with his work on Brownian Motion (quantum perturbations) and black body radiation (the discovery that electromagnetic radiation was discretely bundled as quanta)—spent the remainder of his life challenging these narratives, battling over language and its influence on thought and perception. 


If after recognizing our faulty perspectives, which, I think, this historical example in physics provides, namely, by sidestepping our sympathies with a particular psychological theory, near and dear to our hearts, showing us that, yes, even physics is philosophical/psychological, we may see the limitations of our psychological theories, particularly their language.

Continuing as the psychologist George Kelly, modern society’s problems seem centered on our storytelling tendencies. As the book is concerned, we therefore should not draw up or reinforce dichotomies as if they are actually “out there,” which it does in its weighty terminology alone (e.g. unconscious, intuition, natural, supernatural). I speculate that Kelly would have next embraced a computational or probability-based model of the human brain, as this is appropriately a kind of master narrative.

If we do away with the word “unconscious” we break the unconscious-conscious dichotomy. We must then admit that “self” or “ego,” as they are part of a language constructed around this flawed dichotomy, aren’t helpful. They are imbued with a reality defined by the Thomas Theorem* (beliefs may be real by way of their effects on the physical world; to further clarify, that is, if we believe in the supernatural, acting on this belief, we may very well draw it into the physical world, giving it an existence that it wouldn’t otherwise have had). 


The Thomas theorem suggests we create truth at the expense of controlling the future narrative. We must forever link ourselves to the belief or risk losing truth. This seems very restrictive and undesirable. In the book, if we are a reader that accepts Jung’s notions as literal descriptions, we are stuck with his language. And taken literally it’s a language that constantly gets in our way in brain science. It supports fallacies. See Box What’s in a Name?

 

In this scenario, the Thomas Theorem offers a strange, undesirable truth; an individual realizing this variety of truth would run from it, looking for an alternative—like in the movie The Matrix. The individual isn’t empowered but imprisoned by their belief. They become candidates for Kelly’s therapeutic approach, in that they are potentially harboring a conflicting (or less than ideal) model of the modern world. Even if this model works, it may do so tenuously. This isn’t to say the model’s bankrupt as a result. It simply points to, or is a path to, something else rather than it being an endpoint for meaningfulness. The meaning is instead as a method we are prepared to discard. The ability to incessantly “act as if,” to reinvent like Kelly and Vaihinger.


Box: What's in a Name?

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the problem of naming in psychology and neuroscience. We’ll do this by embracing Jung’s ideas precisely as he wrote and others interpreted them, this book being an example. I want to show that when we do this, we invent dichotomies and risk treating them as if they are facts of the world: for example, Jung’s language centered around the occult and mystical and used the term “unconscious” as a way of legitimizing, through scientific inquiry, a hope that the mystical, occult or supernatural transcends mere belief. As much as modern society fetishes an ancient past, and its wisdom traditions, it does so with, I think, an even stronger fetishization of the scientific method. Arguably, the past was more skilled in its use of figurative language. And it was truly figurative for the past. It is through the historical lens and our insistence on a scientific perspective that everything is algorithmic and machine-like. What was poetic or figurative for the past is for us an example of a failed attempt to understand the world factually. Now, Jung is a perfect example of transition point in Western intellectual thought. He was working in a time when institutions were crumbing; the ancient tradition, while admired, also seemed childish and primitive. Someone might argue, far from being seen as childish, wouldn’t Jung’s insistence on studying or revitalizing these ideas of the past be a sign of deep respect for it. I would say, no, because he’s trying to understand something that was never intended to be understood according to his approach. He’s a modern trying to make these ideas scientifically palatable. He is saying, finally, this is scientific, and we can feel good about it. Ultimately, this muddied the intellectual waters of psychology and then soon after neuroscience as well.


What are some examples?

The minute we embrace Jungian ideas literally we have little choice but to encounter non-existent distinctions. We don’t need to disregard them but lessen the influence of the language.

Let’s go through a sequence to understand this:

There is an unconscious hidden from us à there’s consciousness, which is not hidden, and this implies it’s limited in scope à ego, identity, and self, as we have some awareness of these, must also be limited à This limitation seems undesirable and unnecessary; after all, we sit on a vast, hidden, mystical repository of hazy knowledge called the unconscious à there must be a truer, less impoverished concept of self, melding the unconscious and conscious à the unconscious is however not sensible; if it were sensible, it would conscious; it would be rational and logical à consciousness then defines the rational and scientific à the unconscious, on the hand, logically becomes the world of spirituality and mysticism.


Let’s break this down into to just two simple conclusions and then briefly get into the possible consequences if we aren’t careful.

(1) Humans must be very unique, since we can’t imagine any comparable mental life in other species. This is a bad idea since we have no access to nature’s examples.

(2) Science is very different from religion


Implications

I. We rediscover the Ancient Greek scala naturae that suggested the existence of a divine order in which humans occupied the spot just shy of the heavens.

This type of thinking is very damaging as humans inevitably become the gods; soon, there’s nothing above or below; there are no hopes; there are no fears. And what need is there for a moral/ethical system in a world of enlightened gods. Take any perspective, all actions may be divine. Who are we to judge another a god?

 

II Science must describe the natural; religion and spirituality describe everything else. 

The problem is that there is never any formal distinction between a scientific or religious viewpoint; we lack a trusted, impartial, logical system; one that’s situated outside of each and therefore capable of adjudicating these cases. Essentially, we must rely on personal belief or faith. Back to square one. And anything goes. Infinite regress. The only way out is to destroy the false dichotomy so that the scientist advances the scientific cause by embracing a religious narrative as the religious believer advances their cause by embracing the scientific narrative. But this is impossible if we insist religion expresses the irrational but meaningful and science handles the logical and rational.

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