ABSTRACT
The invitation to contribute an essay for this book stimulated George Hogenson to reflect upon how he originally began his reading of Jung and how his reading has developed since the early 1970s. While preparing to write a doctoral dissertation, Hogenson drew on Jung’s late work on synchronicity to better understand Leibnitz’s interest in alchemy. He discovered, however, that Jung’s work must be regarded as a coherent whole. Consequently, he returned to Jung’s early work and wrote his dissertation on Jung’s struggle with Freud. Currently, he sees Jung as an ongoing intellectual challenge and provocation. Jung does not propose a complete and finished theory of the psyche, but rather presents observations and hypotheses that ask later thinkers to take his theoretical constructs – such as archetypes, synchronicity, and the psychoid unconscious – as points of departure for further investigation. Hogenson urges us to bring Jung into a dialogue with both the history of science and ongoing scientific research.
