Is Scientific Objectivity a Fiction?
Some have wondered why a psychologist might share personal beliefs and affective states when describing encounters in the mundus imaginalis, that subtle world between the material domain and the ideas of the rational mind.
Jung knew as early as 1900 that it was a fiction to suggest that we could describe our world, or at least part of our world without any reference to ourselves, in other words, without subjectivity. He was discovering this idea at the same time that the physicist Max Plank was also coming to understand the same thing, that to describe the world without reference to ourselves was an illusion. This has since been proven by quantum physicists.
June Singer, in summarizing Jung's life, tells us as much when she writes "...[Jung] became interested in the subjective aspect of experience, that is, the realization that what happens in the subjective world is highly colored by the factors present in the individual to whom it is happening. Understanding these subjective factors gives the event a whole new dimension of reality ..." Singer continues the same thread in saying, "...what is perceived must be seen in the context of the total field of the perceiver before it can have any existential meaning and before it can be given any valid interprettion. (Boundaries of the Soul, p. xxxiii).
This same realization guided me when I shared 7 autobiographical snapshots in IMAGINAL FIGURES IN EVERYDAY LIFE: STORIES FROM THE WORLD BETWEEN MATTER AND MIND. After each story, I reported the personal beliefs and affects that embued my life as the stories unfolded. In this authentic and complete telling, I take full responsibility for the context in which each experience of the imaginal unfolded, and therefore found a truer dimension of psychic reality. IMAGINAL FIGURES has just become available in a hardcover version at Chiron Publications.
