The Behavioral Sciences Did Not Reject Jung—They Were Architecturally Incapable of Receiving Him

Raya Jones’s 2013 paper operates as a compact genealogy of exclusion. Its central achievement is not to argue that Jung deserves a seat at the behavioral science table, but to demonstrate why the table itself was built to make such seating impossible. Jones traces the discipline of psychology’s self-narration—from Wundt’s laboratory through behaviorism to the cognitive revolution—and, drawing on Costall’s forensic historiography, reveals this arc as “largely fictional,” a storyline with “the structure of Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis” that serves not truth but institutional identity. The psychoanalytic movement was “written out of that history and destiny.” Jung was not refuted; he was rendered architecturally invisible. This is a stronger claim than it first appears. It means that the epistemological criteria by which behavioral science evaluates knowledge—hypothetico-deductive method, falsifiability, replicable experimentation—are not neutral instruments but products of a particular disciplinary genealogy that actively excludes holistic, hermeneutic, and phenomenological approaches. Dilthey’s argument that psychology belongs to the humanities because it concerns “inner experience” presented as “a living active reality” lost the institutional battle but, Jones notes, “is implicitly sustained by analytical psychology to date.” The implication is that Jung’s marginalization indexes not his scientific inadequacy but a foundational disagreement about what counts as a psychological datum.

Jung’s “Empiricism” Operates as Poetic Method, Not Experimental Protocol

Jones’s most incisive section addresses the science-versus-art tension that haunted Jung throughout his career. She cites Hillman’s observation that Jung uses the word “empirical” to describe “a subjective process within him”—an observation drawn from Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, where Jung is positioned within a lineage running from Heraclitus through Plotinus, Ficino, Vico, and Coleridge. Jones amplifies this: Jung’s hypotheses “are speculative explanations—not testable predictions à la Popper—and he builds them by piling examples upon examples.” This is induction in Popper’s pejorative sense, proceeding from observation to theory to confirmatory cataloging. But Jones refuses to leave the diagnosis at “bad science.” She reframes the method as coherent on its own terms: Jung’s theory “might be correct in the way that a poem or a literary novel is correct; that is, as a whole coherent unto itself, all its elements in perfect relation to each other.” This resonates directly with Hillman’s insistence in Re-Visioning Psychology on “a poetic basis of mind,” a psychology that begins “in the processes of imagination” rather than in brain physiology or behavioral output. Jones thus locates the real fault line: not between good and bad science, but between two incommensurable truth-regimes—one seeking invariable relations of succession (Comte’s positivist ideal), the other creating meaning through “the multiplicity of overlain images and subjective connotations.”

The Practitioner’s Psyche as Instrument Defines a Discipline Behavioral Science Cannot Absorb

Jones’s concluding formulation deserves careful attention. By labeling analytical psychology “a psychology with the psyche,” Jung “implicitly positions its practitioner—not as someone who detachedly studies something called a psyche—but as someone trained to apply his or her own psyche as a tool towards trying to fathom how human beings attune themselves to own existence.” This is not therapeutic sentimentality. It is a radical epistemological claim: the instrument of investigation is identical with its object. Jung himself recognized this paradox—“only the psyche can observe the psyche”—and it places analytical psychology in a category that Comte would have dismissed as pre-scientific and that contemporary neuroscience cannot accommodate. Michael Conforti’s Field, Form, and Fate attempts to bridge this gap through dynamical systems theory and self-organization, arguing that archetypal patterning can be understood through the lens of the new sciences. But Jones’s paper implicitly shows why such bridges remain incomplete: the behavioral sciences, even when they embrace complexity and emergence, “reinforce reductionism” rather than turning toward holistic epistemology. The excitement about embodied embedded cognition concerns “the objective living body, not the subjectivity of the lived-in body.” Steve Myers’s companion paper in the same journal issue explores how analytical psychology might apply to “normal populations” through the persona and the ego-self axis, but this too confirms Jones’s point: the moment Jungian concepts enter behavioral-science discourse, they must be operationalized in ways that strip the psyche of its autonomous, experiential character.

What William James Knew and the Discipline Forgot

Jones’s most poignant thread is the recurrence of William James as a figure who straddled both worlds. James pleaded for psychology as a natural science while simultaneously insisting on the reality of “the pinch of his individual destiny,” a feeling that “fills up the measure of our concrete actuality.” Jung inherited this tension without resolving it. Jung’s passage from The Undiscovered Self (CW 10) — that meaning is “something mental or spiritual” yet “enables us to influence the course of the disease far more effectively than we could with chemical preparations” — makes the same Jamesian wager: that fictions, illusions, and subjective truths have causal power in the psychophysical realm. Jones does not sentimentalize this; she simply observes that the behavioral sciences have no conceptual apparatus for it.

This paper matters for anyone encountering depth psychology today because it articulates, with unusual precision and without apologetics, exactly where and why the disciplinary wall stands. It does not plead for Jung’s readmission. It maps the wall’s construction, identifies its ideological mortar, and shows that the wall protects not scientific rigor but a particular mythology of what science is. For readers navigating between Hillman’s archetypal psychology, Conforti’s field theory, and mainstream cognitive science, Jones provides the epistemological coordinates that make orientation possible.