The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications

by Renos K. Papadopoulos

I think that Descartes’ first epistemological steps – the separation of ‘mind’ from ‘matter’ and the cogito – established bad premises, perhaps ultimately lethal premises, for Epistemology, and I believe that Jung’s statement of connection between Pleroma and Creatura is a much healthier first step. Jung’s epistemology starts from comparison of difference – not from matter. So I will deine Epistemology as the science that studies the process of knowing – the interaction of the capacity to respond to differences, on the one hand, with the material world in which those differences somehow originate, on the other. We are concerned then with an interface between Pleroma and Creatura. (Bateson and Bateson 1987: 18)