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Despite his patient attempt to reconstruct Jung's metaphysics, Jon Mills fails to show that Jung was a metaphysician or even a philosopher of science and perhaps even a scientist. Mills seems to equate metaphysics with the postulation of immaterial entities – notably, archetypes. But on the one hand metaphysics can be materialist as well as dualist. On the other hand it is a speculative enterprise. A metaphysician would not simply announce the existence of immateriality but would seek to prove that immateriality fits the nature of reality as already known. Jung's metaphysics, which for him means sheer pronouncements, constitutes neither psychologism nor idealism, as Mills seems to agree. But Jung is not a Kantian, either. Jung should be treated as a great psychologist, but not as a thinker.
ABSTRACT
In Jung’s Ethics, Dan Merkur, a psychoanalyst in Toronto and the author of many books on the Inuit, psychoanalytic theory, mysticism, and drug-induced religious experience, here writes for the first time on Jungian psychology. Merkur is not abandoning Freud for Jung. A Freudian he remains. But he seeks to contrast Jung positively to Freud. Merkur draws scores of contrasts. Some of them are already known, some not. But even when the contrasts are known, Merkur illuminates them. He is especially concerned with the difference between Freud and Jung on the relationship of psychology to religion. Where Freud seeks to replace religion by psychology, Jung seeks to make psychology itself religious. Whether Jung in fact succeeds in tying psychology so tightly to religion, as Merkur contends, is considered.