Otidsenliga upplevelser : Om erfarenhetens betydelse i Carl Gustav Jungs liv och verk

Sammanfattning: The importance of experience in relation to intellectual work has been of growing interest within historical research, as it focuses on the subjective, biographical, and thus historical conditions preceding any claim to abstract or objective knowledge. This paper explores the connection between experience and intellectual thought in relation to the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), primarily through an examination of his autobiography. The analysis shows that experience was essential to Jung in several ways, and that he struggled with it as an intellectual, epistemological, and personal problem. His encounters with Kant, Nietzsche and Freud were especially formative in this regard, as they brought him theoretical and practical insights into the limits of communicable knowledge. Mystical experiences, beginning from hischildhood, gave rise to a dichotomy between the inner and the outer world, and with it a deep sense of solitude, which remained important throughout his life and work. The sense of being outside of his time informed his psychological conceptions of “the shadow”, individuation and the collective unconscious. However, Jung’s struggle to lend credibility to his experiences resulted not so much in recognized scientific knowledge as in what Nietzsche once called a “personal confession”.