ABSTRACT
Jung admits that in some ways his psychology is not ‘modern’, for to derive a psychology from spiritual principles is to move counter to the reductive bias that is found in everything modern. His psychology represents, in part, a return to ‘the teachings of our forefathers’ (§ 661). Jung distrusts materialism, since for him it purports to be based on scientifi c principles, yet is ‘a religion or, better, a creed which has absolutely no connection with reason’ (§ 651). He despises the fact that materialism has become fused with scientifi c enquiry, thus generating scientism. Decades before the philosophy of science and the work of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, Jung was arguing that scientifi c materialism is an ideology and not
a science. Materialism is destroying the thinking of our era, and hardly anyone dares to contradict it because:
To think otherwise than our contemporaries think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual. He is stupidly swimming against the social current.
