Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Godel and the History of the Archetypes

by Robin Robertson

Paperback, 1995

Status

Available

Call number

155.264

Genres

Publication

Hays (Nicolas) Ltd ,U.S. (1995), 320 pages

Description

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Pythagoras taught that the simple counting numbers are the basic building blocks of reality. A century and a half later, Plato argued that the world we live in is but a poor copy of the world of ideas. Neither realized that their numbers and ideas might also be the most basic components of the human psych: archetypes. This book traces the modern evolution of this idea from the Renaissance to the 20th century, leading up to the archetypal hypothesis of psychologist C. G. Jung, and the mirroring of mathematical ideas of Kurt Gödel.

User reviews

LibraryThing member P_S_Patrick

I feel a bit let down by this book, but it is probably my own fault for expecting too much from it. It does have in its title the word history, and that is what it is, simply put. It is a history of archetypal thought.
I got the book because I have read several other books about Goedel's hypotheses,

which are arguably the most profound discoveries in maths in terms of their impact on how we should consider the nature of maths itself, and the universe. I also have read a bit of Jung recently, and I think his view of psychology explained a lot more about reality scientifically than anything else I have come across in that field. A book that combined the two sounded like it should be very interesting. The book is interesting, but it just doesn't offer anything new, no grand synthesis, only a thorough history of philosophy, mathematics, and science which led up to the work of Goedel and Jung. The author does find some nice ways in which the two are both trying to say similar things, in their respective fields, but I occasionally thought he slightly over played this, and there was the odd sentence that made me doubt whether he quite had the complete grasp of Jung which the rest of the book suggested he did.
This would be an interesting read for someone who had either read Jung, or read Goedel, but if you have read the two of them, and Plato, and a reasonable amount of other philosophy, then you would come to many of the conclusions in this book yourself. There was a good section on Cantor and his theories, which I wasn't completely familiar with before, but a lot of the book was stuff I already knew.
This is definitely a good popular science book, and more or less suitable to a generally educated lay audience, as well as specialists in mathematics who don't know a lot of psychology, or psychologists who know little maths, and I would recommend it to these groups. It might also be of interest to the philosopher, but to properly appreciate and be convinced by the theories which this book deals with, it will be necessary to read a few books of Jung, and a book on Goedel such as Goedel, Escher, Bach, which illustrates the theorum in a fuller and easier to understand way.
This book deals with very interesting things, which people ought to know, but it if you have the time, you ought to read the originals as well. If you want a nice quick summary of the ideas, with a good amount of historical background, then you should be satisfied with this.

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