Regulating the psyche: the essential contribution of Kant

Abstract

Jung's difficult relationship with Philosophy is well known and has, to some extent, carried over into later work in the field, which tends to view ideas of a philosophical provenance with some suspicion. Nowhere is this more apparent than with ‘archetype’ and the perceived problems with the Kantian noumenal with which it is felt to be inevitably connected. My concern is that such suspicion is rarely psychological, that is, it does not take into consideration enough the psychological aspects and roles of such putatively questionable philosophical ideas. This is another aspect of not really appreciating the psychological aspects of some philosophy due to the illusion of disparity created by what often amounts to a difference of vocabulary rather than of fundamental concerns. I will examine some of the central Kantian concepts that I believe are fundamentally psychological and essential if we are to retain concerns that distinguish Analytical Psychology from related disciplines. We may feel a scientific or philosophical embarrassment when faced with ideas such as ‘noumena’ but my feeling is that, psychologically, there is little to be embarrassed about: such ideas are extremely important in giving some substance to defining concepts of the field of Analytical Psychology.

Keywords:

• Kant
• noumena
• categories
• idea
• regulative
• constitutive
• archetype

Notes

1. Bär (1976), Bishop (2000), Brooke (1991), de Voogd (1977, 1984), Huskinson (2004), Nagy (1991), Pauson (1969), Pugmire (1981), Shelburne (1988).

2. Bishop (2000) being the most comprehensive account of this.

3. See particularly, Jung, 1976, p. 496.

4. Although I will have a few things to say about the phenomenological approach towards the end.

5. It should be stressed that the Greek rooted ‘noumenon’ has no etymological connection to the Latin rooted ‘numinous’, which Jung obtained from Otto (1923). Associating these two terms can cause a great deal of confusion since the former is usually used to indicate something of which experience is impossible and the latter is used to indicate the feeling tone of a type of experience. The Greek root of ‘noumenon’ gives us the concept of something that can only be thought of or ‘meant’ as opposed to the sort of experience we have of the ‘phenomenal’ world. The Latin root ‘numen’ is a ‘presence’ of some sort, ‘numinous’ being a certain type of ‘presence-ness’.

6. See the third chapter of the Analytic of Principles beginning A236/B295 in Kant (1998).

7. de Voogd (1984) is a longer but similar treatment of the same concerns.

8. It is interesting to note that this formulation is from the fifth edition of one of the Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, first written in 1917 and so it certainly survived four revisions.

9. Exceptions are Pugmire (1981), who speaks very briefly about this distinction, and Bär (1976), who, while somewhat more detailed, simply states that there is an isomorphism between Jung and Kant in respect of certain rather subtle concepts without really explaining this.

10. This is of course, inaccurate since without the categories, the concept of ‘event’ would be meaningless.

11. ‘Anschauung’, which does not mean what Jungians usually mean when they refer to ‘intuition’; it refers more to a unified sense of ‘looking at’ something.

12. See, for example, Pellionisz (1987), Pellionisz and Llinàs (1980, 1982).

13. From Jung (1971)

14. Jung (1971)—the entry in the definitions section for ‘Image’.

15. Knox (2003) is also explicitly concerned with how Analytical Psychology appears in terms of its scientific credentials and Knox is keen to re-name ‘archetype’ to ‘image schema’ in an attempt to avoid the unscientific ambience that Shelburne fears. This may improve how the field appears, granted but within the field I would hope we would care more about how well we understand our own concepts.

16. Based partly on Bishop (1996), which constitutes chapter 3 of Bishop (2000).

17. This matter is well summarised by Findlay (1981, p. 273).

18. Pauson (1969) makes some brief but interesting comments about how Kant's antimonies of reason might be thought of in terms of Jung's ideas about the necessary tension of opposites. She connects the notions because both Kant and Jung were adamant that such tension, such antimonies could not possibly be resolved without losing the entire subject matter by the very attempt at resolution.