Portrait of Our Lady: Mary, Piero, and the Great Mother Archetype

Mary the God-bearer is explored symbolically from the perspective of the archetype of the Great Mother as described by Carl Jung and Erich Neumann. Drawing from primordial and collective origins, the dark and the chthonic as well as the light and spiritual aspects of the archetype are considered as represented in the work of fifteenth century Italian painter Piero della Francesca. Piero's images of Mary incorporate body as well as spirit, power as well as vulnerability, death, as well as life and rebirth. The feminine presence of the Great Mother archetype creates a powerful dynamic on an unconscious level in both men and women that culminates in radical transformation.     

Metaphor and Thinking in Science and Religion

Excerpts from Chapters 1 and 3 of New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (Gerhart and Russell 2001) explore the ramifications of metaphoric process for changes in thinking, especially those changes that lead to a new understanding of our world. Examples are provided from science, from religion, and from science and religion together. In excerpts from Chapter 8, a double analogy—theology is to science as science is to mathematics—is proposed for better understanding the contemporary relationship between science and religion. A conservation of epistemological sufficiency is disclosed as one moves from mathematics to empirical science to theology—a move from one discipline to another that involves a sacrifice of one aspect of thought to gain another.     

Images of the Abyss

Images of the abyss in traditional Christian theology and psychology are generally symbolic of hell, destruction, or death. Here, the notion of abyss is regarded afresh through the experiences of Jacob Boehme, the 17^th century German shoemaker and mystic, and Carl Jung, the 20^th century Swiss psychoanalyst. Boehme's pre-existent abyss, which he called the Ungrund, or un-ground, and saw as underlying all of creation, even God, relates to the unitary reality of Jung's Self. The Self is before the beginning of the individual human psyche and also its ultimate goal in terms of psychological life.     

Kant and experimental philosophy

While Kant introduces his critical philosophy in continuity with the experimental tradition begun by Francis Bacon, it is widely accepted that his Copernican revolution places experimental physics outside the bounds of science. Yet scholars have recently contested this view. They argue that in Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant’s engagement with the growing influence of vitalism in the 1780s leads to an account of nature’s formative power that returns experimental physics within scientific parameters. Several critics are sceptical of this revised reading. They argue that Kant’s third Critique serves precisely to deflate the epistemological status of experimental physics, thereby protecting science from the threat of vitalism. In this paper I examine Kant’s account of science in the context of the experimental tradition of philosophy, particularly in relation to the generation dilemma of the eighteenth century. I argue that Kant does not deflate the epistemological status of experimental physics but rather introduces systematicity to the experimental tradition. By identifying the reflective use of reason to organize laws of experience into a systematic whole, Kant aims to ground experimental inquiry on the secure course of a science, opening a conception of science as a research programme.     

丁若镛象数易学方法初探

丁若镛是朝鲜后期实学思想的集大成者,一生写了500余卷著作,收录在<与犹堂全书>中,其有关易学的著作有<周易四笺>二十四卷和<易学绪言>十二卷.在解<易>的方法上多继承我国汉代以来易学家的诸种方法,尤其注重互体和爻变,本文旨在探讨茶山的象数解<易>之法,以探析他的易学思想.     

An interview with Murray Jackson by Jan Wiener

Murray Jackson was among the early trainees at the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) drawn to Jungian ideas during the 1950s when the training was still relatively informal. He was born in Australia where he became a doctor and came to London to study psychiatry with a particular interest in psychosis. He was influenced by Michael Fordham with whom he had an analysis and his four papers, published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology in the early 1960s, contributed significantly to the growing interest in clinical technique, particularly transference, that developed in the Society at that time. Later, he retrained at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis in the Kleinian tradition and was the first consultant at the Maudsley Hospital to run a 10-bed unit for severely mentally ill patients applying psychoanalytic principles. In April 2010, Jan Wiener interviewed Murray Jackson in France, where he now lives in retirement, about his interest and subsequent disappointment in Jungian ideas as well as his involvement with the Society of Analytical Psychology at a particular point in its history. After a brief introduction, the interview is reproduced in full.     

Enhancing Family Therapy with Analytical Psychology

In a postmodern era of changing values and competing world views this article suggests that analytical psychology can enter the epistemological debate and speak to contemporary family therapy. Key concepts and contributions are examined and highlighted with an emphasis on their relevance for enhancing the field of family therapy. Individuation is discussed in light of Jung's analytical treatment stages, which include confession, explanation, education, and transformation. The relevance for family therapy is illustrated throughout the article as each treatment stage is explicated. Jung's emphasis on the spiritual is also discussed with implications for the importance of recognizing and attending to issues of spirituality in family therapy.     

Analytical psychology and its relation to psychoanalysis. A personal view

Jungian analysis is a process based on analytical psychology; it shows local variations giving emphasis to different aspects of Jung's work within the various societies which make up the IAAP. I describe the orientation of the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP). I have emphasized the different origins of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology and described how, because we encounter the same clinical phenomena, our differences centre on technique and interpretation in the context of our theoretical differences (see Astor 1998, p. 697 & 2001). In the main the link to psychoanalysis has come from the connection forged by Fordham, who recognized that Jung and Klein shared a similar perception of the significance of unconscious phantasy. For Klein unconscious phantasy was the primary unconscious content, and this is different, as Spillius has recently pointed out, from Freud for whom, 'the prime mover, so to speak, is the unconscious wish.     

'Stream of consciousness' and 'ownership of thought' in indigenous people in central Australia

Fifteen Central Australian Aboriginal adults (8 patients, 7 colleagues) were presented with a culturally modified version of Flavell's 'stream of consciousness' experiment (pictures of persons with empty or 'busy' thought-bubbles, and an invitation to assign a picture to the mental state of a second experimenter seen reading or sitting quietly). Only 4 people assigned the empty thought bubble to the quiet experimenter. This result was at least as good as that of a sample of Stanford College students tested by Flavell. The experiment provoked detailed comments from the informants about subjectivity, suggesting great subtlety of phenomenological awareness in Central Australian Aboriginal people, and attributing a kind of subjectivity to non-human entities, including inanimate elements. We learnt that the Western Deserts dialect term watiya was reserved for the subjectivity attributed to trees and rocks. The ownership of all thought was attributed to the tjukurpa (the Aboriginal dreaming). These Aboriginal cultural attributions were compared and contrasted with reflections developed by Jung and the post-Jungian David Holt on the nature of subjectivity, and religious notions of the redemption of matter.     

荣格与《易经》

荣格在《易经》的影响下提出了具有重大理论价值的"同时性原理",这是一种与因果律完全不同的普遍性联系。本文介绍了荣格的这一原理,依据《易传》的相关论述对其作了深入剖析,并进一步用"同气相求"同类相动"的道理,对同时性现象,包括占筮过程作了新的解释。文章认为,荣格在肯定《易经》科学价值的同时,正确地指出了《易经》所代表的中国科学与西方科学在思维方式和认识方法上的根本区别。