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The Transcendent Function: Jung's Model of Psychological Growth Through Dialogue With the Unconscious Kindle Edition
| Jeffrey C. Miller (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherState University of New York Press
- Publication dateMarch 17, 2010
- File size809 KB
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About the Author
Jeffrey C. Miller is a licensed psychologist in Palo Alto, California.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.From the Back Cover
Product details
- ASIN : B003DM3QSA
- Publisher : State University of New York Press (March 17, 2010)
- Publication date : March 17, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 809 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 249 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,595,811 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #170 in Transpersonal Psychology (Kindle Store)
- #283 in Transpersonal Psychology (Books)
- #422 in Jungian Psychology (Kindle Store)
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As Lucy Huskinson devastatingly reveals in her book "Nietzsche and Jung," Jung's debt to Nietzsche was not acknowledged by Jung. Great as he was in his own area, there is not a major idea to be found in Jung's corpus that originated with him. It was all there in the work of predecessors, not only Nietzsche, but Schopenhauer, Hegel, and in particular Schelling and Blake. The last two thinkers are never referred to by Jung, yet it is their ideas that he cut and pasted into his own work.
The day will never come when you'll have this fact acknowledge openly by any Jungian. June Singer came closest to the facts, and we do have her book "Blake, Jung and the Collective Unconscious." However this book hardly does justice to Jung's debt to Blake, and is one of the least good treatments of what Blake was about.
The concept of a Transcendent Function and of the famous four types are derived directly and demonstrably from Blake, but without due respectul acknowledgement. Also, when all is and done, it is Blake who had the more complex and sophisticated philosophy of the origin, nature and role of the unconscious. Schelling too was way ahead of Jung in this regard. He actually coined the term "unconscious," but you wont hear Jung, or any Jungian of repute, acknowledging this genius of geniuses. Nope, it's always a trumpeting of their Big Daddy Animus figure whose work gave them each a cushie life, you know...living forever in the reflected light and glory of another while remaining pitch black yourself.
This scandalous plagiarism and idol-worship is carried on in this book also, by Miller, who never mentions either Schelling or Blake, and glosses over Hegel's monumental work on the Dialectic in the usual, predictably infantile manner, woefully misrepresenting Hegel's account of the process of self-realization in order to give the reader the false impression that Jung originated the idea of the teleological interchange between the conscious and unconscious hemispheres in order to come to wholeness. However, as well-read students of philosophy know, there isn't an idea in Jung that wasn't thoroughly explored, extrapolated and published by men of immense prestige and insight before his time, men he largely if not entirely ignores.
That Jung was familiar with Jacob Bohme and other German mystics, and aware of the German Idealists (Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel) should never be doubted. It is no secret. In fact this becomes crystal clear when one reads the monumentally important work by Eduard Von Hartmann, "Philosophy of the Unconscious" (not referenced by Miller) an author once cited by Jung himself, and definitely read by him. And yet for all that, his references to the actual "inventors" of the concepts he deals with and takes full credit for, are rarely if ever mentioned.
As Blake's readers will clearly see from this book, Jung adopted the concept of Imagination from Blake, rephrased it as "fantasy" and made off with the idea, giving it his own twist which has been accepted ever since by Jungians and others. No mention is to be found of the great originator who actually suffered for his work, lived in poverty, and was a far louder and braver critic of society than Jung, the institution man who, for all his accurate comments, could ever have hoped to be, or that his followers could ever hope to be, if they want to keep their prestigious positions in the Jungian "club."
In short, I highly recommend Lucy Huskinson's work which exposes Jung for the disingenuous plagiarist he was, and also Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious," which correctly and ethically places Schelling center stage in the advent of theories later appropriated wholesale by Jung and others.
Moreover, i direct readers of this book to read Blake, Schelling and Hegel, to thereby discover what Jungians are desperately hoping will remain permanently obscure - their Big Daddy's unpaid debt to the men who formulated and better expressed the ideas he so liberally "borrowed" without acknowledgement, making him one of innumerable other "scholars" throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries who have likewise egregiously plagiarized these same men, making that theft into a veritable art, heinously scratching off their august names and scrawling their own worthless signatures there instead.
Perhaps instinctive to our Western culture, many of us humans need to feel we are progressing in life … whatever that “progressing in life” might mean.
Jeffrey Miller, in The Transcendent Function, explores C G Jung’s concepts of psychological growth. Where many think dualistically (in either / or terms) where juxtaposed opposites lead toward compromise, the transcendent function suggests a “neither / nor” structure where the tensions between opposites create a new third that is totally new and not a compromise.
Miller further posits that psychological growth results when our Transcendent Function works with tensions between the conscious and the unconscious.
An very interesting (and very well researched) read. Highly Recommended! Five Stars.
Miller does a fine job of clarifying terms, identifying inconsistencies, and suggestion resolutions. The work is at times pedantic in comparing the exact language of Jung's original and revised essays about the transcendent function. That is the nature of academic writing, however. Overall, I found Miller's language clear and instructive.