Interesting thread. I found a cheap copy of his Mysterium Conjunctionis not do long ago, and agree he is tough to digest, his work is full of footnotes from obscure sources that would be difficult to track down and validate. What I did pick up from reading his Psychological Types, is how much he was influenced by Kant. Kant in turn seemed to be looking for answers to the question on how we make sense of the world, beyond just being drowned by sensory perception. I am given to believe that's how he came up with the idea of a priori assumptions, for example we see a cat, and from then on draw a broad picture of what a cat is all about, rather than always starting as a beginner again each time we see a cat. All this is as much a psychological question as it is a philosophical question, and possibly the germ of his archetypes comes from this.
But Memories, Dreams and Perceptions takes us further. He admits that the splits within himself and his childhood experiences of spirituality are what drove him to look for answers. Other commentators have pointed out that Jung quite possibly suffered from childhood schizophrenia, which by the way is a misnomer. It would be called something else now. But beyond that it seems his mother was psychic, and do was he. But somehow after Kant and James, there was never anyroom for notions such as these beyond the strictly materialist model propagated by the likes of Hobbs, Humes or Russell.
That could be why he was so very insistent thst his model of analytical psychology was strictly empirical, he wanted his work to be seen as scientifically valid, even as he was also sneaking God though the back door really (he did have a Sun square Neptune! But a Moon square Saturn too).
But not a fundamentalist tycpe of God. He sais it himself in his autobiography - he wanted to bring back Gnosticism and neo-platonism into public awareness. There was a way to get past the scientific/empirical split and that of the spiritual authoritarisnism of Mother Church with it's unfortunate habit of burning heretics, and his analytical psychology was that.
He worked primarily with psychotic patients as a physician, where Jesus and the Devil, and the need to reintegrate a, split psyche are paramount for psychological survival. He recounts that he nearly went off the deep end himself after splitting with Freud, at the dangerous age of 41.
As for astrology, it seems that he was like a john who knew the whores working the street, but did not want to admit that he used them himself. Again, he admits to drawing up horoscopes for difficult patients, but not because, of course, he saw any objective truth in astrology.
So he became a 'respectable' alternative for those spiritual seekers who wanted this precious :scientific' basis f or their interest in all things broadly spiritual or occult.
And it wasn't just Liz Greene who jumped on Jung hook, line and stinker: there were one or two fromainline Europe too, as well as Dame Rudhyar, the latter of whom saw Jung as the saviour away from those psychologists who immersed fully in post-vartesian models of the psyche: ghost in the machine, consciousness being an ethnocentric accident in a clockwork universe.
But what has to be remembered, I think, with both Rudhyar and Green, was that Jungbactisllly came as the empirically respectable afterthought. Both, nif you read them closely, bowe far more to the theosophivsl models generated by the channelled writings of Blavatsky and Bailey.
Regarding Green e, check out her first book Saturn for yourself! It's steeped in Alice Bailey. She only became more Jungian than Jung in her second book Relating, where she follows all his ideas about thinking, feeling, and animus-possessed women, to the letter.
I remember attending an astrologicsl/Jungian conference at the turn of the 80's, full of questions and concerns about the implications of all of this at a callow 22, but there the Jungian matriarch shut me up by telling me my immature anumus was incapable of comprehending the profundity of their great gurus Greene and Jung, because after all I was still too jung. Seemed to me everywhere I went, it didn't to to question all the marvellous gurus and unimpeachable channelled authorities on high! Just wish I had seen the writing on the wall even then, and not tried to pursue it, alas.
By the time Greene writes her handbook on Uranus, or rather the way Saturn transits dovetail with those of Uranus in pater life, Greene sounds a lot more mellow on the the subject of Jung, and does mention his penchant for pursuing animas in bed, outside his marriage.
There are astrologers like Mike Harding who would now say, why can't astrology just be astrology? Psychology brings a wealth of insight to the subject to be sure, and presumably it does need to be more than just brutal foretune-telling. I suspect it is almost impossible not to tread on Gnostic territory when perceiving the planets as psychoid nodal points within the psyche (archetypes or archons), as Tarnas puts it - he too, being massively indebted to the thinking of Jung.
The thing is, Jung did get elevated as a guru. Why not take whatever insights that can be gleaned from whoever, then in turn these can be accepted, rejected, discussed further down the line? Personally I suspect there is still massive fallout from the way the Church became a spiritual dictatorship, following in large part superstition that inquiring minds were notvliwed to question (remember Galileo)? That's why we now have crusaders like Dawkins defending the scientific faith on the one hand, and all these gurus on the other. I believe now the most accepted position in astrology is that is is, at the end of the day, nothing more than divination, but who said subjective is less valid than objective. That in turn seems just a little like a fudge to me in places, but I'm not about to sign up at the University Sophia Centre to do battle with the current astrological authorities in High places.
My 5 cents. Euros.
