ABSTRACT
It has been said that the history of Western thought is a series of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. Psychoanalysis and analytical psychology are no exception to this dictum. Their differences as traditions of analysis and schools of thought originate in the contrast between Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s empiricism. Jung, with his theory of the archetype, is akin to Plato, while Freud, with his emphasis upon causality and deductive reasoning, is heir to Aristotle. Little wonder, then, that these two men became the progenitors of rival traditions of depth psychology. Whatever their famous parting of the ways was about in their minds during their time, it had, in another sense, happened already. Long before they ever met, their colleagueship was doomed. Though the persons they were had wanted it otherwise,
neither could withstand the logic of the God-terms playing through them. And so it was that their names, no less than those of their ancient Athenian precursors, came to be figurative of that rent in the Western soul which they each, at the same time, felt called to heal.
