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Psychology as Ethics: Reading Jung with Kant, Nietzsche and Aristotle is Giovanni Colacicchi’s reader-friendly but philologically rigorous reconstruction of the ideas that converge from the great tradition of Western moral philosophy into Jung’s “psycho-ethical model.”. Colacicchi probes the Jungian text with a philosophical mind in search of conceptual clarity, but he does not refrain from putting forth also original theoretical ideas such as the notion of an “ethical transference” between analysand and analyst or a model of Jungian-Aristotelian psycho-ethical types. The challenges faced by the emerging field of Jungian ethics are discussed on the basis of this foundational work.

This book chapter presents an attempt to translate the Jungian model of psychological development, as expressed in the notion of transcendent function, into a language of virtues. It proposes to adopt an explicitly ethical language to refer to the two sub-processes favoring the transcendent function, given their already implicitly prescriptive use. The chapter introduces the virtues of “vulnerability” and “incorruptibility” as the normative equivalents of the naturalistic mechanisms of integration/coniuctio and differentiation/separatio, respectively. In order to better understand these depth psychological virtues, a gallery of moral cases is used. Finally, the question is raised as to who is the subject of individuation or centroversion that would be able to embody a synthesis between these two mutually contradictory virtues.