ABSTRACT

Existential phenomenology and analytical psychology have both made major contributions towards understanding the nature and the complexities of what it means to be a human being in the world. They can be seen as countermovements to the pervasive natural scientific viewpoint in mainstream psychology where human subjects are objectified and distanced from their own bodies, from others and from the things around them. Both movements aim to recover and understand the explicit as well as the implicit meanings of our lived experience situated in historical contexts. Yet they mostly remain apart since leading phenomenologists critiqued Jung’s implicit ontology and epistemology as Cartesian in the tradition of nineteenth-century materialism and realism. Today, new postJungian developments in analytical psychology have led to theoretical shifts and a growing concern with ontological and epistemological issues.