Summary
Title: What is Wrong with Jung?
Author: Don McGowan
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 0879758597
Pro:
• Critiques most of Jung’s major ideas
• Explains what is wrong on Jung’s own terms
• Easy to read and understand
Con:
• Could use more information on Jung’s work and history
Description:
• Covers Jung’s major ideas
• Critiques the errors and problems in Jung’s theories
• Explains why Jung is still important
Book Review
It is a mystery to McGowan how a person could live through the scientific revolution, but still believe in the reality of things like alchemy and archetypes. In fact, this seems to be one of the critical weak points in all of Jung’s work: that he uses metaphors as if they were literal realities. Later followers seems to have recognized this and so have tried to return his literal claims to metaphor, thus avoiding many possible criticisms. But that does not save Jung’s work itself, because Jung never made the claim that he was describing metaphors which were valid for only a few people.
Why was Jung wrong about so much? McGowan is able to expose Jung’s work as suffering from a consistent lack of rigor, a highly selective use of evidence, and a tendency toward broad generalization while ignoring important cultural distinctions. This is especially prevalent in this basic work on archetypes, which he based on a narrow and rather biased study of Indo-European cultures. It can be readily argued that Jung’s conclusions simply point to cultural commonalities, not a universal unconscious behind the mind of every human being.
There is also the question about his argument that, despite the universality of this collective unconscious, there were nevertheless racial and national differences in how it is expressed in people. Because certain characteristics become “innate” in certain races, this allowed Jung to talk about the “blond beast” of the Germans, or argue that Westerners should not convert to Eastern religions like Buddhism, because they were unsuited for the Western mind.
Jung seemed to realize that he work lacked real rigor, because unlike Freud he never claimed that what he was doing was actual science. Because of this, McGowan notes that he cannot critique Jung’s work on strictly logical or scientific grounds. It would, he says, be improper to apply standards which Jung never made use of.
Nevertheless, McGowan is able to find internal problems with Jung’s work, showing that even by Jung’s own standards, they fail. This requires using the logical standard of internal consistency, but I think that most will agree that if Jung’s theories are not internally consistent, they won’t have much value.
Some may argue that Jung amasses considerable evidence in support of his claims, but it simply isn’t enough to find facts which might support the theory. Instead, it is necessary to find facts which only the theory can explain. This also entails providing evidence that there are things that other theories cannot explain, which would put Jung’s theory ahead of the rest. This Jung fails to do.
But why is Jung so popular, if he is also so wrong? McGowan candidly explains that it is likely due to the fact that an untrue myth is often more comforting than a true fact:
- ...people, when given the choice, would rather ascribe their origin to a myth than to random activity.
This book is important because Jung is still taken seriously in the academic and psychological world. For those who simply use his ideas as metaphors which will apply in some cases, but not others, this isn’t a problem. But for the many who take Jung as literally as he unfortunately took himself, this is a serious issue, and McGowan explains why they and Jung are wrong.
