Can Psychology become a Science?

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

5 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

11/25/2008

Category :

Social studies

Sub category :

Psychology

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Summary :

Introduction.
1. Putting Jungianism on a pedestal.
2. Jung - more prolific writer than Sigmund Freud.
3. The problem of the possibility of psychology as a science.
Part 1.
1. Shamdasani discussion of the fact that there were and still are? many psychologies.
2. The singularity of the term 'psychology'.
Part 2.
1. What Jung intended to establish and what he did not intend to establish.
2. Jung and the establishment of general psychology.
3. Where psychotherapy, as it stands, is helpful.
Conclusion.
1. Psychology - dis-united since its emergence as a field of knowledge.

Abstract

The project being undertaken here is one of an investigation into the possibility of a psychological science from a Jungian perspective. The project will consist of a series of 3,000 - 4,000 word essays (of which this is the first). The primary source used will be Sonu Shamdasani's Jung and the Making of Modern psychology: The Dream of a science.1
My project is not about putting Jungianism on a pedestal. Rather it is about investigating the possibility of establishing psychology as a science.
Serious disciplines need to be tested and can prosper or die in the market of ideas. Jungian psychology has survived for a long time because Carl Jung was such a huge thinker. He was an erudite, a prolific writer, able to correspond with leading thinkers from other disciplines in worlds of science, religion and other fields including of course his own, psychology. His vast knowledge gave him the confidence to attempt to establish psychology as a genuine science. The interdisciplinary approach meant that this attempt was not at all cultist. But in the present day, whilst there are some very bright thinkers in the world of Jungian analytical psychology, they appear to be contained within a Jungian enclave that no longer seeks to branch out. There is an assumption that Jung's ideas are known. The archetypes and the collective unconscious are discussed as if psychology had already established itself as a science. Jung's project for a psychological science is dead in the water because of these assumptions.