The issues of our age are not so new. Globalisation, cultural conflicts, alienation and spiritual bankruptcy in affluent communities - these were all concerns of past thinkers. One of them, the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, seems particularly relevant today. After a period of relative obscurity, references to his work again proliferate in popular culture. Jung, the son of a Swiss pastor, was a disciple of Freud until they fell out in 1913. One point of contention was that Freud, widely considered one of the greatest minds of his century, rejected religion as unscientific and focused on the individual outside his or her social setting. Jung, on the other hand, developed an intense interest in the spiritual dimension of mental health and formulated the concept of the collective unconscious. This is a concept in common currency now, as thoroughly absorbed into our way of thinking as the notion that early childhood experiences are important. Jung proposed that the collective unconscious was a set of universal psychological patterns. He subtracted the ways in which cultures differ with respect to what they dream, the art they produce and their religious practices and beliefs. What was left was what we might call today the global mind - the psychological repertoire of themes and features that together make up what it means to be human at the deepest level. Jung also appears relevant today because of his fascination with all things Asian, shared by many westerners almost a century later. By merit of the exoticism of the Chinese philosophy he studied, he could view his own spirituality and that of like-minded westerners in more enlightening contrast. In this, he was an early cross-cultural psychologist. He found less contrast than he expected between eastern and western philosophy. In the Book of Mutations, a Chinese work, he discovered the same questions and attempted answers as he had been tackling in Switzerland. He eventually came to study Zen Buddhism, another link to the contemporary mood. Buddhism has gained dramatically in popularity in recent years in the face of what many see as alienation due to excessive materialism. Another probable reason for Jung's appeal is his relative penetrability. The take-home value of the collective unconscious in today's shrinking world is obvious. A less provincial view in the workplace, for instance, allows for greater potential. In any case, the benefit of having an idea of what all people have in common is probably clearer to more people than, say, the Oedipus complex of Freud. Both were equally unproven in scientific terms. But that did not stop psychology up until then. This lack of scientific proof is one of the many reasons Freud has lost all but iconic significance, except among the bookish. Psychology students today can easily get through their entire undergraduate and post-graduate education without his name even being mentioned. The smart money is now on carrying out experiments. Psychologists still work in hundreds of fields, in dozens of capacities. But the fastest way to fame, and certainly to anything like serious funding, is through research. So where does this leave Jung? After all, he was essentially an armchair psychologist, reading, reflecting and formulating his theories alone in his study. This contemplative approach to the mind and the spirit does not represent the cutting edge of psychology. So, why the resurgence in interest? Perhaps because, for the layperson, Jung's language is easier than that of an experimental psychologist, and his conclusions make intuitive sense. Who among us has not read an article beginning: 'New research has shown that ...' only to find the results are either blatantly obvious or unrelated to real life? For better or worse, we expect impenetrability in, say, quantum mechanics, but not in psychology. Jung's current popularity suggests that moods in psychology come and go according to the times more than for scientific reasons. In this respect, psychology is more like a cult than a science. A favourite joke among those in more established fields of science is that psychology, as a new discipline, has yet to overcome its physics envy (alluding to the Freudian concept of penis envy). For decades, self-absorption was all the rage - an elitist sign of psychological and intellectual enlightenment, personified by angst-torn neurotics. Now, there is statistical analysis. Jung offers relief from both. His ideas and reflections seem less doctrinaire than the former and more suited to the human condition than the latter. Jean Nicol is a Hong Kong-based psychologist and writer everydaypsychologist@yahoo.com
