C. G. Jung’s approach to psychology and to the psychological study of religious experience cannot be understood without an appreciation of his fundamentally phenomenological method.
Husserl’s epistemological and scientific call to arms, “To the things themselves,” announced the birth of phenomenology, which became one of the great intellectual movements of the twentieth century. In a number of places, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, C. G. Jung (1875–1961), argues that his method of psychological analysis is phenomenological. However, his references to phenomenology are always passing remarks, and his phenomenology is never systematically developed.
Jung’s sense of phenomenology is evident most clearly when he contrasts his method and assumptions with those of his mentor, Sigmund Freud. Like other phenomenologists, Jung was consistently critical of Freud’s materialist reductionism, namely, the attempt to explain the complex phenomena of psychological life in terms of the...
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Brooke, R. (2014). Jung, Carl Gustav, and Phenomenology. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_365
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