The birth of the human sciences

The last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the modern disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and social psychology, as well as the short-lived disciplines of crowd psychology and ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie). Through studying prehistoric, primitive, or modern societies, these disciplines attempted to surpass the limitations of individual psychology. Each sought to establish the pre-eminent science of the social. Yet the very attempt at disciplinary differentiation and hegemony was bound up with numerous intermeshings and mutual borrowings. This clustering provides one of the matrices for the emergence of Jung's complex psychology, which attempted to incorporate the subject matter of these disciplines under its purview, while differentiating itself from them. This section commences by sketching the development of these disciplines. It then reconstructs how Jung drew upon them to form a collective transindividual psychology, and how this in turn was to enable the reconciliation of the demands of the individual and society, and, through reconciling the ancient and the modern within the individual, resolve the malaise of contemporary Western societies. It concludes by showing the reception of this project.

We first turn to anthropology. On the left-hand side of Jung's library, by the window, may be found the hefty volumes of the Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1879 to 1919. These dates demarcate a critical period in the founding of modern anthropology and modern psychology.