Turning Toward Mental Health - The Hinge Between Lived Experience and Developing the Keys for Growth
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) July 4, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21192751 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that a philosophy of psychology should be grounded in testimony and Jung's analytical psychology, and proposes that children do not arrive with depression, addiction, suicidal despair, anxiety, or attention problems but inherit them from adults through genetic sensitivity and the relational world adults provide, a position the author says is anticipated in Jung's "unlived life" and Fraiberg's "ghosts in the nursery." |
Abstract
The opening essay of the Turning Toward series sets out the method and the stakes of a philosophy of psychology grounded in testimony and in the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung. Moving from the etymology of agnosticism to Jung's 1959 "I know" and the letters in which he qualified it, the essay places the meditative encounter with the boundary between ego and Self within a long cross-cultural record, from the Upanishads and Plotinus to William James and Freud's "oceanic feeling." It weighs what clinical research says about the limits of sequential antidepressant treatment (STAR*D and its contested reanalysis) and the relapse-preventing effect of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, without advising against medication. It then states the thesis the series and the author's planned dissertation will develop: that children are not born carrying depression, addiction, suicidal despair, anxiety, or attention problems, but inherit them from adults, through genes that set a child's sensitivity and through the relational world adults provide, a position anticipated in Jung's writing on the parents' "unlived life" and in Fraiberg's "ghosts in the nursery."