hence it would be most beneficial, he thought, to apply science towards this realm. Douglas writes that the Romantics had a “fascination with studies of possession, multiple personalities, seers, mediums, and trancers, as well as with shamans, exorcists, magnetizers, and hypnotic healers [… and that…] they all employed altered states of consciousness that linked one psyche to another and made use of the various ways healer and healed enter this vast, omnipresent, yet still mysterious collective world.”8
Douglas traces Romanticism “from the pre-Socratic philosophers Pythagoras, Heraclitus,
and Parmenides, through Plato, to the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century and its revival at the end of that century.”9 In Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes that he was “attracted to the thought of Pythagoras, Heraclitus,
Empedocles, and Plato, despite their long-windedness of Socratic argumentation.”10
It is well-known that by the end of the 19th century Romantic themes were expressed in much of the most famous literary works. Douglas points to the following as having been
inspired by Romanticism: “Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Poe, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Nietzsche, Wilde, R. L. Stevenson, George du Maurier, and Proust.”11 Douglas continues:
“As a Swiss student, Jung spoke and read German, French, and English and so had access to these writers as well as to his own nation’s popular literature.”12
It is fair to point out that Jung, whilst on the one hand declaring his work, ‘scientific’, on the other hand, declared his work as cultural: “whatever happens in a given moment has inevitably the quality
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