Research Methods and Strategies

Mediatory Research engages in the study and explanation of the whole and healthy human psyche. Our context begins with the wisdom of C.G. Jung, explicitly, the human psyche is the most complex thing in the universe. It follows that the individual human psyche in its whole and healthy state is the focal point of our research.

When a science approaches a subject for study, it usually begins by identifing the methods and means appropriate to the scientific observation of the subject. In every modern science since Descartes, scientists are bound to identify an “Archimedean point” from which the research apparatus or observer may be separated from the subject and the fields of observation.

Carl Jung described the problem for psychology as follows:

“Though we do not possess a physics of the soul, and are not even able to observe it from some Archimedean point ‘outside’ ourselves, and can therefore know nothing objective about it since all knowledge of the psyche is itself psychic, in spite of all this the soul is the only experient of life and existence. It is, in fact, the only immediate experience we can have and the sine qua non of the objective reality of the world.”

“If all knowledge of the psyche is subjective, and if there is no Archimedean point from which to study it, we need a strategy to eliminate or at least minimize bias in the discovery and discernment of the workings of the human psyche.”

This is accomplished in other sciences by a miltifactor built on a paradigm, and a community of researchers working under the paradigm to explore and discover its full contents and limits.

The simple structural model of the psyche that was favored by Carl Jung is centered in consciousness and surrounded by two powerful neighbors – a vast unconscious on one side, and the outside world on the other. Although a structural model, whether simple or complex, cannot fulfill the scientific requirements for a paradigm, this model is sufficiently open-ended to accommodate a broad spectrum of research.

Explore the essential aspects of our programs for identifying, understanding, and describing the thresholds to individuation.