Welcome to the Carl Jung exegesis wiki.
So far, we have no main pages! This wiki was started on June 23, 2004. As of right now, it's virgin territory, waiting for people to fill it with their ideas about Jung. You have free reign to add ideas about Carl Jung here all you like, organize the pages however you like--make of this thing the best resource on Jung that you possibly can, in whatever way you deem fit.
This wiki is for understanding the psychological and philosophical ideas of Carl Jung.
By exegesis, we do not simply mean "What did Jung mean?" but rather "What is he talking about?" We don't aim to nail down precisely what is or was in Jung's head. Rather, we aim to see for ourselves some of the same things that Jung was trying to describe--assuming they even exist. Naturally, each person will see such things in his or her own way.
The purpose of this wiki is not to settle on any definite interpretation of Jung's writing, but to learn whatever we happen to learn by trying to articulate Jung's ideas in our own words and through our own observations, and by watching other people's attempts to do the same. It's inspired by Lance Fletcher's concept of Slow Reading.
In accord with wiki tradition, when people propose opposing ideas, the wiki renders no verdict. Rather than attempting to have the wiki's text be an official statement of the settled truth of a matter, we encourage you to post all the competing ideas as clearly and persuasively as possible.
Even if an interpretation turns out to be clearly wrong, we still want it on this wiki. This wiki is a record of people's thoughts as they try to make sense of Jung's writing: the surprising insights, the dead ends, the great ideas, the dumb ideas, everything. Nothing on this wiki is an official statement of what Carl Jung meant by anything he ever said. This wiki is not an authority on Jung, it's a place where people hash out their understandings of his work.
While we eagerly welcome nearly any contribution of any Jung-related ideas, we're not interested in judgements of Jung's ideas, whether positive or negative. You're invited to explore and articulate the ideas, and leave judgement to the reader.
This wiki is hosted by Ben Kovitz.
A wiki is a web site that lets you edit its pages. It's sort of like an on-line bulletin board. To experiment, see Sand Box.
The first wiki ever was Ward Cunningham's Wiki. It was where many of the ideas of Extreme Programming were hashed out, as well as many software development patterns. Ward's Wiki still thrives as a meeting place for the software world to discuss culture, techniques, and ideas of all sorts.
Wikis, like Extreme Programming, involve a special style of collaboration: unilateral cooperation. Each collaborator edits without asking permission from the other authors. There is little or no planning or discussion: you just edit the text itself. This results in an anonymously, collectively written work that is never "complete" but just keeps on growing and improving.
You are invited to modify any text on the wiki you like, to make it clearer, more interesting, more stimulating. It doesn't matter who the "original" author of the text is. You are invited to improve it however you like. That might be as simple as fixing a typo or as involved as splitting text into several pages or rewriting it from scratch. The one proviso is to please never "improve" some text by having it no longer express an idea that you believe is mistaken. The wiki expresses all ideas that anyone found interesting or persuasive--rightly or wrongly. The improvements are to express the ideas so they are more stimulating to readers, and to add more ideas, never to take away.
The name "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means "quick". Editing a wiki page is quick and easy, and requires no knowledge of HTML.
The logo is a modified version of a figure from a Tarot card of the Rider-Waite deck. It's actually borrowed from the Lenore Thomson exegesis wiki until we get something more appropriate. If you have a better image to use as a logo for this wiki, please email Ben Kovitz.
Q. Some people are malevolent and will delete just to delete. Do you have a CVS state save (or something like it) if restoration is necessary?
A. Yes. Every page includes a history of all edits made to it. You can see all previous edits of a page by clicking the "History" button at the bottom of the page.
Looks like I'm the first to write anything here, and as I am not an academic this is extremely daunting. I first came across Jung in the early 80s when I bought The Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching (book of changes) which had a foreword by C Jung. I am interested in his theory of global consciousness, which I believe is so real it is almost tangible (see also http://noosphere.princeton.edu/).
Hi, Theresa. Congratulations on posting! This idea of Global Consciousness sounds interesting. How'd you like to write up a description of it on its own page? To start the page, click the red text in this paragraph. Other folks might find it interesting and add to it. It's OK to make mistakes, too, if you're worried about that. That'll give others the joy of correcting them. --Ben Kovitz
I came to Jung many years ago, and have been especially inspired by his book on UFO's and his theory of synchronicity... --JohnReynoldsTheStudent