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INTRODUCTION For those individuals, especially Jungian adherents, who experienced in my first book, C. G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity,1 a championing of the Jungian position, coming to terms with the direction of this book will be no easy task, if it is at all possible to do. I am led to say this not only because of what I have come to understand about paradigmatic entrenchment, but because of the shock I myself experienced when my own inquiry into the theoretical work of Jung took the unanticipated turn that it did. I myself certainly did not put twenty years of exhaustive thought and research into a theoretical model whose collapse I anticipated . I certainly did not foresee I would be forced to abandon a theoretical model on which I had so carefully worked. So I do ask my readers to bear in mind as they move through this book that that which most probably will be their experiences of frustration, shock, and suffering are no less mine. Thomas Kuhn’s monumental work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions tells us that the history of science contradicts conventional assumptions that scientific progress is cumulative. Scientific progress, Kuhn relates , more accurately takes the form of “a succession of tradition-bound periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks.”2 Science, to put it differently , is an enterprise in which cumulative progressions push research and thinking to the farthest reaches of a given scientific model before, and for reasons not always clear, a noncumulative break occurs—what Kuhn calls a paradigmatic shift. Research is then propelled into a new dimension altogether thus causing, among other things, the old research model to be integrated to the new one. Now the assumption of strictly cumulative progress in science is based on an even more fundamental, false premise, that being that science is entirely objective and as such produces absolute facts and absolute theories . If science were objective to the extent that it yielded absolute facts and absolute theories, science most certainly would progress in a strictly 1 cumulative, step-by-step manner. But science does not progress in that fashion, as Kuhn explains, because science has its own belief systems, which, it should be emphasized, are clung to within scientific communities with the fervor shown by adherents of all secular and religious belief systems. Accordingly, far from being objective and untethered, scientific research and the conclusions derived from it are invariably restricted by the assumptions of a given scientific community’s belief system. “Normal science,” Kuhn writes about the limitations of such scientific belief systems , “the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost.” Membership in a scientific community, Kuhn thus concludes with specific reference to the problem of scientific objectivity, entails the pursuit of research in the form of “a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.”3 Paradigmatic shift, it should be taken from the above, will thus come at no small price to one initiating such change. At the least it will entail having to leave behind and go forward alone without those with whom one was once conjoined in shared beliefs and understandings. This was certainly Freud’s experience when he broke with the more conventional medical community of his time, and it was no less Jung’s experience when he parted ways with Freud and his followers. Of course for the rebellious such professional estrangement, albeit seemingly self-inflicted, is never enough punishment; rather there must also be insult and shame. And that must take the form not only of vicious, often entirely unsupported personal accusations from those remaining behind, but also no less energetic attempts from that same quarter to discredit the new paradigmatic model in its entirety. There can be no doubt, for instance, that Edward Glover’s Freud or Jung categorically sought to discredit to the psychoanalytical world Jung’s psychology in its entirety. And there can be no less doubt that Freudians unquestioningly embraced Glover’s blatantly tendentious appraisal “as providing the final word on Jung,”4 as James William Anderson notes. Most Freudians, we should just say, looked no further than Glover to...

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