Relativism in psychoanalysis and analytical psychology

The article presents a view on the relativistic component of the psychoanalytic concepts of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. In this context, attention is drawn to Freud’s attitude toward relativism, initially negative but at the same time being in conflict with the basic tenets of psychoanalysis. Expressing the opinion that the postulation of the presence of a hidden part of the mental system significantly expanded the scope of psychiatry and psychology and relativized the understanding of «mental disorders», the author of the article at the same time argues that, while remaining faithful to the key positivist attitude, Freud consistently rejected all methods of cognition other than science, considering them speculative and therefore not trustworthy. Freud’s attitude to the relativization of scientific truth is compared in the article with the position of Jung, who, consistently overcoming the ideological framework of classical psychoanalysis, according to the author, became the one who continued to develop the ideas of its founder in their natural direction. In particular, the author characterizes Jung’s key concept of the collective unconscious as deeply relativistic in spirit, since the principle of its operation: the materialization of autonomous content in phenomena of various kinds, implies such a world order in which both the role of man and his capabilities are very relative. The author also expresses the idea that the principles of manifestation of the collective unconscious according to Jung are based on a relativistic understanding of the space-time factor, while the acausal nature of the manifestations of autonomous content implies deabsolutization of ideas about time and space; on this basis, a conclusion is drawn about the interpenetration of the conceptual attitudes of analytical psychology and relativistic physics (the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics).