Concretism

1. Etymology

Concretism names a way of thinking or feeling that is archaic and undifferentiated, based entirely on perception through sensation. Related: abstraction (compare); participation-mystique; archaic.

2. Plain summary

Concretism clings to material facts and physiological stimuli. It is valuable for recognizing outer reality and deficient in how that reality is interpreted—inner factors get projected into objective data, producing almost superstitious veneration of mere facts.

Concrete thinking rises at most to analogy; primitive feeling is equally bound to material phenomena. The fetish’s magical influence is sensed as effect, not owned as subjective state; the sacred tree is the god’s abode or the god. In civilized life, concretism shows as inability to conceive anything beyond immediately obvious sense-facts—or inability to discriminate subjective feeling from the sensed object.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common concretism motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
archaic undifferentiated thinking/feeling; based on sensation; vs abstraction; kinship with participation-mystique; bound to material facts; projection of inner into objective data; veneration of mere facts; fetish as magical effect; sacred tree = god; inability to separate feeling from object; archaic stamp.

3. Academic elucidation

In analytical psychology concretism is sensation-bound archaic functioning—Definitions territory. Descent Press keeps Sharp in §4; Samuels has no dedicated head this pass. §5 holds sample CW stamps at CW 6 ¶697 / ¶699.

4. Lexicon

Sharp (1991)

Concretism. A way of thinking or feeling that is archaic and undifferentiated, based entirely on perception through sensation. (Compare abstraction.) … Concretism results in a projection of … inner factors into the objective data and produces an almost superstitious veneration of mere facts. … Concretism, therefore, is an archaism…

(Sharp, 1991) — cites CW 6 ¶¶697, 699 in Sharp’s lemma.

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986) — no dedicated concretism head (list) this vessel pass:

(No dedicated Samuels head for concretism.) Related under archaic / participation mystique / sensation.

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

Primitive thinking and feeling are entirely concretistic; they are always related to sensation. … Concretism, therefore, is an archaism (q.v.). The magical influence of the fetish is not experienced as a subjective state of feeling, but sensed as a magical effect. … The primitive does not experience the idea of divinity as a subjective content; for him the sacred tree is the abode of the god, or even the god himself.
(Jung, 1921/1971, CW 6, p. 585, ¶697)

The disadvantage of concretism is the subjection of the functions to sensation. … Concretism sets too high a value on the importance of facts and suppresses the freedom of the individual for the sake of objective data. … concretism results in a projection of these inner factors into the objective data…
(Jung, 1921/1971, CW 6, p. 586, ¶699)

See also: abstraction; participation-mystique; archaic; sensation; projection; thinking; feeling.

References

Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types [Definitions]. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (Vol. 6, pp. 585–586, ¶¶697, 699). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.