The work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is still revered by many who refuse to subscribe to a mechanistic view of the universe and human life. But who was he?

The Himalayan ice-roof of the world has produced many of the great sages of the East. Numbered among them are the Indian rishis of the Upanishads, the lama-savants of Tibet, and even Gautama Buddha, in nearby Nepal. By a curious symmetry, the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps were the setting for the life of arguably the West’s most enlightened man of the 20th Century — a claim, it has to be said, much disputed recently by some in the psychotherapy establishment..

C. G. Jung is often described as a psychiatrist and physician. In fact his work matured into an all-embracing vision of human life and its relations with all there is (the Absolute). His phenomenal intuition constantly came up against the numinous in everyday affairs and, being the man he was, he courageously based his post-Freudian work on the god in Man and the man in God. Born of Swiss Protestant stock, he became a bridge between western and eastern psychologies that will surely prove seminal for the future.

In his long and fruitful life, Jung trod a careful path between the crusty scientific establishment of his day and the more adventurous thinkers on the fringes of eastern mysticism and religion. He went to enormous lengths to avoid being classed as a Theosophist, a group he regarded as having swung irremediably towards psychological extremism. His published works are always models of empirical analysis, drawing living structures from a mass of precise medical observations. And yet he is never statistically arid like many scientists today. There is a life in his work that can only be described as religious, in the best sense of the word. His main “problem” was that the inevitable conclusions arising from these tireless investigations applied just as much to so-called normal people as to his pathologically disturbed patients.

The basis of Jung’s work was the process he called individuation, a naturally occurring progression in everyone, leading to psychological integration. Individuation, as expounded by Jung, is clearly related to Buddhist enlightenment, in that though his ostensible concern was with empirical psychology, Jung went beyond Freud’s shallow personal subconscious (a repository of repressed mental contents), to what he called the “collective unconscious”, which took in the whole of the psyche, a term he used in the same sense as Buddhists use “Buddha-mind”.

Jung believed that nothing in the cosmos is incapable of psychological inclusion given the necessary insight and balanced vision. Thus he sometimes seemed to scorn the notion of the metaphysical with its transcendental exclusivity, a notable characteristic of many in the psychotherapy movement of his day.

The balance then between what is psychological and what is metaphysical is dangerously subject to all the vagaries of definition, making comparisons between viewpoints all the more perilous.

“One cannot grasp anything metaphysically, but it can be done psychologically. Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology … if finally there should still be an ineffable metaphysical element, it would have the best opportunity of revealing itself.”

How would it reveal itself? Is the viewpoint arising from the non-working of the senses (which includes “thinking” in Buddhism) in the state called “nirvana” to be called psychological?

Jung always uses “psyche” to embrace all experience, normal and trancendental.

The mind is the way we define ourselves, what it means to be us. A survey of more than 2,000 people by psychologists at Harvard University reveals how we perceive the minds of others and what criteria we use.

The survey found that we use two dimensions by which we perceive the minds of others: agency and experience. Agency means the ability for self-control, morality and planning. Experience represents the capacity to feel sensations such as hunger, fear and pain.

Respondents to the survey were presented with 13 characters: 7 living human forms (7-week-old fetus, 5-month-old infant, 5-year-old girl, adult woman, adult man, man in a persistent vegetative state, and the respondent himself or herself), 3 non-human animals (frog, family dog, and wild chimpanzee), a dead woman, God, and a sociable robot.

The respondents were asked to rate each on the possession of characteristics of agency and experience. The results may give insight to how moral and philosphical questions are individually answered as well the formation of a society’s views on issues such as capital punishment, abortion and torture.

The fetus was regarded as having experience but no agency. The man in a persistent vegetative state scored low on agency but in the middle range on experience, showing that people may disagree on whether he would be capable of experiencing sensations.

“The perception of experience to these characters is important, because along with experience comes a suite of inalienable rights, the most important of which is the right to life,” co-author of the study, Kurt Gray says. “If you see a man in a persistent vegetative state as having feelings, it feels wrong to pull the plug on him, whereas if he is just a lump of firing neurons, we have less compunction at freeing up his hospital bed.”

Respondents viewed themselves as highest in agency and experience and viewed the normal man and woman to possess the same degree of these attributes.

How we view the minds of others shapes how we relate and how we believe society should relate to and treat them. If we believe a person has agency - that is, can tell right from wrong and possesses self-control - then society may punish them for wrong-doing. It is when we believe that they may not possess full agency, say due to mental illness, that our response to their actions is altered.

The findings of the study are published in the journal Science.