Nominalism enters the depth-psychology corpus primarily as a foil — a philosophical tendency against which the reality of psychic images, archetypes, and universals must be defended. Jung’s treatment in ‘Psychological Types’ is the most sustained, situating the medieval controversy between nominalism and realism as a perennial expression of psychological typology: the nominalist, who denies the independent reality of universals and insists that generic concepts are mere names, is identified with the extravert, whose orientation toward the concrete object makes abstraction secondary. Realism, conversely, aligns with introversion. For Jung, the quarrel is not merely logical but ‘a psychological one, which in the last resort amounts to a typical difference of psychological attitude.’ The tension finds its most complex figure in Abelard, whose conceptualist middle ground Jung reads as a failed synthesis of incommensurable temperaments. Hillman intensifies the stakes: nominalism becomes a cultural pathology, emptying psychopathological terms of archetypal substance and filling them with the bodies of actual patients — a parasitic literalism. Hillman’s nominalism is the accomplice of Mersenne’s rationalism, together conspiring to depersonify existence and evacuate the image-world of soul. William of Occam surfaces in Campbell as the nominalist who demonstrated the illegitimacy of projecting experiential categories onto the transcendent. Across these voices, nominalism marks the boundary at which depth psychology insists psychic reality begins.
the radical difference between nominalism and realism is not purely logical and intellectual, but a psychological one, which in the last resort amounts to a typical difference of psychological attitude to the object as well as to the idea.
Jung’s central claim: the nominalism–realism debate is not a logical but a typological opposition, with the nominalist’s object-orientation corresponding to extraversion and the realist’s idea-orientation to introversion.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
realism corresponds to introversion, and nominalism to extraversion. The controversy about universals undoubtedly forms part of that ‘clash of temperaments’ in philosophy to which James alludes.
Jung aligns nominalism with extraversion and tender-mindedness with realism/introversion, reading the history of philosophy’s universals debate as an expression of psychological typology.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
This is nominalism which too has been instrumental in de-personifying our existence. Nominalism empties out big words
Hillman identifies nominalism as a co-conspirator with rationalist science in the historical destruction of the image-world, draining language of its psychic substance and personifying power.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
nominalism will fill its empty terms by personalizing them with actual people. And indeed this is the case. For the terms, so arbitrary and so empty, are attached to persons who, by so becoming ‘alcoholics,’ ‘suicidals,’ ‘schizophrenics,’ ‘homosexuals,’ seem thereby to substantiate the words
Hillman argues that psychiatric nominalism — bereft of archetypal grounding — parasitically borrows reality from the bodies it labels, turning patients into empirical props for hollow diagnostic categories.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
From nominalism Abelard took over the truth that universals are words, in the sense that they are intellectual conventions expressed by language, and also the truth that a thing in reality is never a universal but always an individual fact.
Jung explicates Abelard’s conceptualism as a synthesis of nominalist and realist insights, showing how the nominalist truth — that universals are linguistic conventions — is retained but transcended.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
The problem of the two forms of judgment remained unsolved because—tertium non datur. Porphyry handed down the problem to the
Jung frames the scholastic problem of universals as the historical arena in which introversion and extraversion first fully confronted each other, requiring a third, psychological resolution.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
This desire forces itself on all those who pay homage to extreme nominalism, in so far as they make any attempt to escape from their negatively critical attitude. Hence it is not uncommon to find in people of this sort an idea of fundamental uniformity.
Jung observes that radical nominalism, which dissolves all generality into particulars, generates a compensatory drive toward an all-embracing unity — an unconscious realism born from the negation of every universal.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
he taught that generic concepts are without reality and objective validity. Anyone, therefore, who speaks of ‘man’ speaks of nobody, because he is designating (neither this nor that).
Jung traces the ancient precursors of nominalism through Stilpon and the Megarians, whose denial of the reality of generic concepts anticipates the medieval nominalist position.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
that exactly is what the Invincible Doctor, William of Occam, demonstrated in his own brilliant way in the early fourteenth century. By simply stating in so
Campbell invokes Occam’s nominalism as the philosophical proof that projecting experiential categories (including causality and creation) onto transcendence is a form of disguised anthropomorphism.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
Socrates replies in effect that words have an independent existence; thus anticipating the solution of the mediaeval controversy of Nominalism and Realism.
The commentator on Plato’s ‘Cratylus’ identifies Socrates’ claim that words have independent existence as an anticipation of the realist side of the medieval nominalism–realism controversy.
, Cratylus, -388supporting
Were I a philosopher, I should continue in this Platonic strain and say: Somewhere, in ‘a place beyond the skies,’ there is a prototype or primordial image of the mother that is pre-existent and supraordinate to all phenomena. But I am an empiricist, not a philosopher
Jung positions himself between Platonic realism and nominalism by affirming the functional reality of archetypes without committing to their metaphysical pre-existence — an empirical rather than ontological anti-nominalism.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
nominalism, 288f
An index entry in Jung’s Collected Works Volume 3 confirms that nominalism is treated at some length within that volume’s analytical discussions.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907aside
nominalism and realism, 76
An index entry in ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’ locates the nominalism–realism pairing as a topic within the volume, signalling its relevance to Jung’s archetypal theory.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959aside
a modified Pohlenzian position which attributes a radical nominalism to both Zeno and Chrysippus
Inwood notes a scholarly debate over whether Stoic psychology implies a radical nominalism regarding the soul’s faculties — a peripheral but cognate usage within the corpus.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985aside