18/01/2026
Jungian psychoanalyst Margaret Klenck argues that empiricism is a valid but incomplete way of knowing, and that human meaning, psyche, and spiritual life require additional epistemologies that cannot be reduced to measurement, prediction, or falsification.
She is not anti-science. She is anti-reductionism.
Ways of knowing she emphasizes beyond empiricism:
1. Experiential knowing (lived reality)
This is foundational for her.
What is experienced is real in a psychologically decisive sense, whether or not it is externally measurable. Grief, awe, dread, transcendence, guilt, love, and moral conviction are known from the inside, not discovered by instruments. Therapy works primarily through this mode of knowing, not through data accumulation.
Her point:
If psychology ignores lived experience, it ceases to be psychology and becomes behavior management.
2. Symbolic and imaginal knowing
Drawing directly from Jung:
Symbols are not decorative metaphors; they are carriers of meaning that emerge spontaneously from the psyche.
Dreams, myths, religious imagery, and fantasy are ways the psyche thinks when it is not constrained by rational language.
These forms convey truths about the individual’s inner life that cannot be paraphrased into empirical propositions without loss.
This is a hermeneutic mode of knowing—interpretive rather than experimental.
3. Mythic truth vs. literal truth
She distinguishes between: literal-historical truth (the domain of empiricism) and mythic or psychological truth (the domain of meaning).
A story, religious narrative, or myth may be:
Empirically unverifiable, historically uncertain, yet still psychologically true in its capacity to orient a life. This is where her thinking often resonates with C. S. Lewis, who made a similar distinction.
4. Moral and value-based knowing
Empiricism can describe what is, but it cannot tell us:
what matters, what is worth suffering for, what one ought to do.
She argues that:
Values are discovere
