Dadaian, Anna; (2022) C.G. Jung's Psychological Types: A History and Philosophy of Psychology. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

C.G Jung’s Psychological Types: A History and Philosophy of Psychology provides an in-depth historical and philosophical examination of the work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) titled Psychological Types, originally published in 1921. Subsequently, when referring to this work, Jung emphasised the fact that the psychological typology he provided in the book was not a ‘characterology’—an attempt to provide a systematic description of personalities. Rather, for Jung, his project in Psychological Types was intended to be used as a ‘critical apparatus’, a ‘conceptual scheme’ in order to ‘classify empirical material’—in other words, as an epistemological tool. As such, on the one hand, his work provides a philosophy of psychology. Being profoundly interested in the nature of psychology as a science and, hence, its ‘scientific method’, Jung expands on the works of his contemporary philosophers—William James and Henri Bergson—incorporating his reading of the philosophers from previous eras, who also happened to be the heroes of his childhood and student years—namely, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, as well as various classical and medieval philosophers. As a result, Jung produces an epistemological framework for psychology that incorporates the subjective nature of psychological knowledge, as well as the recognition of the limitations of the intellect, whilst also formulating his own concepts, such as ‘individuation’, ‘fantasy’, and the very notion of a ‘psychological type’. Based on this framework, Jung offers his psychological typology as an epistemological method, or a reformulation of the scientific method: what it means to achieve ‘objectivity’ in psychology, to begin with, and, consequently, in science in general. This project, then, explores in detail Jung’s conceptualisation of his psychological typology as an epistemological tool by examining his reading of the above-mentioned philosophers. It also shows the historical layer of Jung’s work: for Jung, the history of philosophy—and for that matter, of science—was in effect a history of psychology.

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