By Carl JungOur Price: $11.95 Our Item Code: jung Postage Code: book1
138 Pages, MJF Books |
| Our Review | Opinion of the webmaster, subject to debate |
Some say they're real, some say they're swamp gas, and the US Air Force says they are balloons and parachute dummies. Famous psychologist Carl Jung has a more interesting idea. They're in your head, but because they're in your head, they become real. Follow that? This book is so often cited in UFO circles that it ought to be part of your library, if only to make you seem learned and, well, Jungian. Although relatively short, this book is no easy read, and we have had some difficulty figuring out what exactly Jung is trying to say. -- tm/gc
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| Information from the Publisher | Always supportive |
Ironically it is our extremely scientific, technological culture that indirectly elicits these visions, visions that are often interpreted as direct challenges to conventional science and the existing order of "accepted knowledge" and its guardians--the media, the academy, and the government.
Jung writes. "The whole collective psychological problem that has been opened up by the Saucer epidemic stands in compensatory antithesis to our scientific picture of the world...[the scientific picture] consists, as you know, very largely of statistical or average truths. These exclude all rare borderline cases, which scientists fight shy of anyway because they cannot understand them. The consequence is a view of the world composed entirely of normal cases. Like the "normal" man, they are essentially fictions, and particularly in psychology fictions can lead to disastrous errors. Since it can he said with a little exaggeration that reality consists mainly of exceptions to the rule, which the intellect then reduces to the norm, instead of a brightly colored picture of the real world we have a bleak, shallow rationalism that offers stones instead of bread to the emotional and spiritual hungers of the world. The logical result is an insatiable hunger for anything extraordinary. If we add to this the great defeat of human reason, daily demonstrated in the newspapers and rendered even more menacing by the incalculable dangers of the hydrogen bomb, the picture that unfolds before us is one of universal spiritual distress, comparable to the...chaos that followed A.D. 1000 or the upheavals at the turn of the fifteenth century. It is therefore not surprising if, as the old chroniclers report, all sorts of signs and wonders appear in the sky, or if miraculous intervention, where human efforts have failed, is expected from heaven."
The threat of imminent nuclear attack may have temporarily subsided today with the cessation of the Cold War, but it could renew itself at any moment. In the meantime, other threats stoke the public's anxiety, and today tales not just of spaceship sightings but of actual encounters, abound. This may indicate a shift in the nature of our anxieties. But Jung's fascinating and provocative approach to understanding such accounts within the context of the known psychological is better presented in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies than in any other single volume.
Table of Contents
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
On Flying Saucers
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