Experiences and Biographical Events of Jung Related to

Traditionally, the spiritual and the occult have'been seen as an obstacle in the development of science. However, for several decades now there has been a movement in the history of science that argues that a different perspective needs to be considered. Although not all historians agree, some argue that such topics as Neo-Platonic thought, magic, astrology, and alchemy fostered in different ways the so-called scientific revolution in the seventeenth century (Vickers, 1984). A later example of this argument is the claim that the romantic philosophy of nature that occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century stimulated ideas about the structure and function of the nervous system that influenced medical and biological thinking (Clarke & Jacyna, 1987). The issue here is not that these ideas were "valid " or that some phenomena "really " took place, but that these topics affected the intellectual climate in ways that encouraged or facilitated scientific developments. Historians of psychology and psychiatry have also started to do more than label what has been called the "marvellous, " the "supernormal, " the "psychic,&quot