SOURCE: Taylor, Eugene. “The Appearance of Swedenborg in the History of American Psychology.” In Swedenborg and His Influence, edited by Erland J. Brock et al., pp. 155-76. Bryn Athyn, Penn.: Academy of the New Church, 1988.

In this essay, Taylor discusses Swedenborg's ideas about psychology and his influence on American psychiatry, philosophical psychology, Jungian psychology, personality-social psychology, and humanistic psychology, arguing that Swedenborg's thought contains the germ of the idea that psychiatry and psychology can be central to the transformation of the social and medical sciences.

He looked at his own Soul with a telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and shewed to be beautiful constellations, and he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds.

Coleridge, Notebooks

One would not expect to find in psychology and psychiatry, as those disciplines are presently construed today, any references to Swedenborg, for the dispassionate claim of science, even in the...