Carl Gustav Jung’s views on the human psyche have gradually been marginalized—if they are not completely ignored in most university psychology departments today and his efforts to reconnect psyche and cosmos only more so. His work has been written out of college textbooks and rendered close to anathema in academia. Indeed, arguing his case, Jung ventured into academically patently unfashionable realms such as the study of dreams, parapsychology, myths, ‘Eastern wisdom’, and even ufology. While Jung’s teaming up with the well-known physicist Wolfgang Pauli may have inspired confidence in some, the predominance of dreams in their correspondence about synchronicity may have gambled that credit again for many ... Whereas conventionally minded scientists usually are reluctant to accept phenomena that seem beyond experimental control, Jung, in his complementary holistic vision, saw in them proof of the vital proclivities of the soul. Jung’s bold and provocative ideas even foreshadow much of the warp of the later so-called New Age movement (whether he would have liked that or not).
However, science may well be more prone to fashion and hype than many should like to admit. The present dire predicament of the academic study of Jungian thought stands in quite marked contrast to the surge of interest in Jung in the last decades of the previous century. Moreover, Jung’s ‘counter-culturally’-tinged response to the burgeoning new disciplines of ‘scientific’ psychology and medical psychiatry and his efforts to heal a broken world and reenchant what increasingly has become disenchanted have exerted enormous influence, overall. The popular impact of Jung now reaches way beyond that of some of our greatest academic psychologists and psychiatrists—is this poetic justice?