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Discussion Forum |
| JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN THEORY AND PRACTICE |
Vol. 10 No. 1 2008
"Empirical Grounding of Jungian Psychology: Dreams and the Spencer Social Chemosignals Experiment" by Sam Keenan |
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Submitter |
Date Posted |
According to Keenan, “A central hypothesis of Jung’s is that the dream image faithfully reflects the inner state of the dreamer at the time.” First, Jung did not say or mean that a dream was only about the inner state of the dreamer, because his dream interpretations cover also the state of the environment to which the dreamer reacts. Second, reflecting the inner state of the dreamer is not an idea of Jung alone. Freud’s wish fulfillment hypothesis too is about both the inner state of the dreamer and his or her relationship with the environment. But unlike Jung, Freud believed that dreams, and more generally the unconscious, were not faithful to the truth. Heinz Kohut invented the notion of self-state dream, which means exactly what Keenan means in the above quotation. In reality, most people believe, in view of the contents of innumerable dreams, that dreams are about the dreamers’ life experiences. Kohut’s idea of self-state dream serves only to give a learned looked to the popular belief about dreams.
By saying “a central hypothesis” instead of “the central hypothesis,” Keenan points to the fact that Jung hypothesized about dreams more than that particular central hypothesis. But his paper is about finding an empirical basis for only that particular part of Jung’s view on dreams, which is shared by almost everyone. He says, “Naturally, an empirical confirmation only occurs once a suggested experiment is carried out;” and he proposes a type of experiment that is designed to test only that particular central hypothesis in relation to a particular situation. In reality, there is a stronger need to prove Jung’s theory, or hypothesis, that a dream serves to compensate a lopsidedness in the conscious attitude than to prove the inner state hypothesis. In relation to the experiment that he proposes, he says that if the conscious thoughts of the subject which are exposed during the experiment match the thoughts expressed by his or her unconscious through subsequent dreams, this will be a proof of Jung’s “inner state” hypothesis. The interpretation of the results of such experiments is not so simple, as we learn from Jung’s compensation theory: If the experimental situation causes a lopsidedness in the conscious attitude of the subject or exposes an already existing lopsidedness, his or her subsequent dreams will most probably deal with events similar to those involved in the experiment. Otherwise there will be no need for compensation and no dreams dealing with events similar to those that occurred during the experiment. But this will not mean that dreams do not reflect inner states: Dreams do not reflect the inner state when there is no lopsidedness to compensate. Also, if these two sets of thought match despite the fact that there is no lopsidedness to compensate, the experimenter will interpret this result as a proof of Jung’s inner state hypothesis but it will disprove his theory of compensation. In any case, the experimenters cannot correctly interpret the subjects’ dreams and the results of the experiments because the content and meaning of dreams are currently not understood despite Jung’s work, as I explained in my article published in this Journal.
There is even a more serious mistake in Keenan’s thinking, which is apparent in his following lines and is shared by most of modern psychologists: “The standard mainstream academic critique of Jungian psychology is that it has no empirical basis. This perception tends to unduly isolate Jungian thought from mainstream academic culture, to the detriment of both. Although many Jungian writers have noticed this lack of empirical confirmation, as far as I can tell, no experiments have actually been carried out.” Modern psychologists believe that a thought can be empirically confirmed only by deducing it from the results of experiments designed for this purpose. This is what Keenan is trying to do, ignoring like all modern psychologists, that there is a second method of empirical confirmation which is used most fruitfully in physics and made this discipline the most advanced one. Examples will clarify the issue.
Newton’s second law of motion and his law of gravitational attraction were deduced from data supplied by experiments performed in the laboratory by Atwood and Cavendish, respectively, about 100 years after the publication of the first edition of Newton’s book on mechanics, the Principia. The first law of motion is a particular case of the second law, i.e., the null case, and therefore became tested when the second law was tested. The third law of motion is readily seen to be valid concerning many terrestrial phenomena but is still impossible to deduce from measurements related to celestial phenomena because such measurements cannot be made. To repeat, the third law of motion as applied to celestial phenomena is a hypothesis that is non-testable though deduction from data, and his first and second laws of motion and his law of gravitation were tested through deduction from the results of experiments only 100 years after their first publication. But, all of Newton’s laws of mechanics were proved by Newton and others long before Atwood and Cavendish “empirically confirmed” them through laboratory experiments. Such proving by Newton and others is done not by deducing the hypotheses from data supplied by experiments performed in the laboratory as done in modern psychology but by deducing consequences from the hypotheses and comparing them with observed facts or with consequences deduced from observed facts. If they match, the hypothetical laws are accepted as valid and usable. In opposition to this, Keenan recommends comparing consciously produced thoughts with unconsciously produced ones, both being reported by the subject. Also, he thinks, like all modern psychologists, that specially designed experiments have to be performed to realize the tests. The truth is that the bottleneck in psychology today is not the lack of empirical knowledge deduced from observation and experimentation but the lack of integration of existing empirical knowledge. Such integration becomes possible only when investigation is carried out in a wide perspective, which is something not done by modern psychologists, because they isolate phenomena from each other in research to study each one separately instead of integrating them to discover the most general laws as done in physics. Narrow-scope research is done in physics too, but the grand theories that shaped many disciplines of science, the technologies, and even the civilization are products of integration, induction, generalization.
The creation of the electromagnetic theory by Maxwell is another good example of how progress is realized in physics using the theoretical method of scientific investigation. Before Maxwell, several laws of electromagnetism were discovered through narrow-scope research. Maxwell considered all those laws as a whole and noticed that there were some similarities between the electric and magnetic terms in the equations that expressed those laws. He also noticed that one magnetic term in one of the equations had no electric homologue. He hypothesized the existence of what he called displacement currents and introduced in one of the equations a hypothetical term related to the hypothesized displacement currents. With the addition of this term, the equations of electromagnetism assumed almost perfect symmetry between electric and magnetic terms in the absence of real electric currents and charges. These equations constitute the electromagnetic theory and are successfully used to solve problems related to electromagnetism although displacement currents have never been detected experimentally, and the term related to them is still a non-testable hypothesis. Thus, a theory is a group of statements expressing facts, at least one of which being a hypothetical fact that cannot be tested through deduction from empirical data at the time the theory is constructed. Such a non-testable hypothesis may or may not become empirically tested later through deduction from the data as a result of technological development. But a theory as a whole or a part of it can be tested empirically through its consequences as explained above. And the relevant consequences of a theory are the explanations, predictions, and the controls of observed phenomena, which the theory makes possible. In other words, a theory is proved to be correct, or usable, by its usefulness in explaining, predicting, and controlling the phenomena. Modern psychologists claim that a hypothesis that cannot be tested through deduction from the data cannot be used in science. They thus close Psychology to the theoretical method of scientific investigation, which is most needed in the study of mental phenomena, especially in the study of mental disorders and dreams.
Jung appears to have been capable of seeing phenomena in a wide perspective unlike modern researchers. In fact, he criticized Freud’s and Adler’s narrow-scope works, the former concentrating on sex and the latter on mastery. In this context, he related the story of the blindfolded persons who touched various parts of an elephant and said that it was a tree trunk, a hose, a sail, etc. Modern psychologists use narrow scope research as the only valid method of scientific investigation and try to construct wholes out of its parts. In opposition to this, theoretical physicists make guesses, or frame hypotheses, about wholes by generalizing some observed features of some phenomena to other phenomena, and test those hypotheses through their consequences, i.e., through their usefulness in explaining, predicting, and controlling the phenomena. If a hypothesis cannot be proved through its consequences, another one is framed and tested. Einstein said that 100 solutions (hypotheses) are tried one is found to be correct. Fewer trials are needed in psychology because the theoretical method is not used by modern psychologists. Jung’s theory of dreams can be proved using this method, that is, by showing that it serves to explain, predict, and control dreams and mental disorders. Also, many empirical findings about the cerebral localization of mental functions support Jung’s theory, as I briefly explained in my article published in this Journal.
The reason why Jung’s theory of dreams is not found scientific is not only that it lacks empirical confirmation of the type that is found acceptable by modern psychologists, i.e., deducibility from data obtained from experiments. Another reason is that Jung’s theory is not fully developed, as I explained in my article published in this Journal. It appears that Jung could not free himself sufficiently from Freud’s influence to produce such a theory. For example, he believed that each dream presented the compensation of a lopsidedness in the conscious attitude, just as Freud thought that each dream presented the fulfillment of a wish. Jung did not consider the mental processes that made compensation possible and may be found in a dream, again like Freud was not concerned with the mental processes that finally made wish fulfillment possible and may be found in a dream. A fully developed Jungian theory of dreams based on the compensation hypothesis could have a better chance of being accepted by many psychologists because of its usefulness in explaining, predicting, and controlling the phenomena related to dreams and mental disorders, including successful therapy. But even this does not look very probable currently because of modern psychologists’ obsessive-compulsive adherence to the method of narrow-scope research. Modern psychologists have an obsessive aversion to the use of generalization, induction, and theory construction, which appears to be caused by the fact that Freud’s theories were found to be non-scientific after reaching a summit of popularity. Psychologists felt deceived, fooled and, instead of investigating why Freud failed, they adopted an obsessive-compulsive attitude toward narrow-scope research that uses only deduction. This is a scandalous situation that prevents progress in Psychology especially in relation to mental disorders where progress is most needed.
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Altan Loker |
04-Nov-08 |
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