Be that as it may, the impossibility of conceptually defining the psychic—as desirable in the natural sciences—does not mean that we can’t become acquainted with it and therefore know it in this latter sense. Babies become acquainted with their entire experiential environment before conceptual thinking even begins to develop in them. Indeed, it is impossible to not become acquainted with the psychic, for it is all we ever have; it is the water wherein we are always swimming. For Jung, we cannot ‘know’ the psychic merely in the sense that we say fish cannot know water.
