ABSTRACT
In his conclusion to Psychological Types (1921), Jung argued for a pluralism of approaches to the psyche. On its own, he argued, neither of the two ways of looking at the psyche – the ‘reductive’ and the ‘constructive’, as he called them (CW 6 §855) – can present an adequate explanation of it. For reality is not theory-bound, it escapes our attempts to capture and imprison it in conceptual cages, ‘everything that is alive in the psyche shimmers in rainbow hues’ (jedes lebendige Etwas in der Seele schillert in mehreren Farben). So, too, for Goethe’s Faust, the rainbow rises above the tumbling waterfall, an example of permanence-in-change (Wechseldauer), and this glorious reflection gives us life (Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben).1 What Jung calls ‘this vitality of psychic contents’ (diese Lebendigkeit des psychischen Inhaltes) means that anyone hoping for a single, true explanation of a given psychic process must soon give up this hope, or even fall into ‘despair’ (CW 6 §854). The truth, as Oscar Wilde put it, is rarely pure, and never simple; and Jung even entertains the possibility that, in addition to the ‘reductive’ and the ‘constructive’ approaches, there may be yet other, equally valid approaches to psychic processes, ‘just as many in fact as there are types’ (CW 6 §855).
