ABSTRACT
Jung’s psychology is founded on the idea of the reality of the psyche. However, it is not always easy to grasp what Jung means by ‘psyche’. Although Jung sometimes writes as if psyche were more or less equivalent to ‘mind’, generally he seems to want to convey something other than this, something deeper and broader. For example Jung writes extensively about the spiritual dimension of psyche, which he describes metaphorically as the ultra-violet end of the psychic spectrum (Jung 1947: par. 414). However, there has been less attention paid, either by Jung or his followers, to what he pictures as the infrared pole – where psyche merges with matter. Most of the work that has been done in this area has taken the form of speculation about analogies between Jung’s psychology and the scientific disciplines of modern physics, ethology or, most recently, neuroscience. Interesting though such avenues of inquiry may be, they, on the whole, fail to maintain a psychological perspective on their subject matter.
