Hi /r/AH,
I'm been getting super interested in Carl Jung's ideas lately. Fortunately, my personal interests of psychoanalysis have intersected with a class on the history of psychiatry + psychoanalysis in school. Our final assignment is writing a history paper on something relevant to our course and interest. I'm interested in writing about Jung. Most interesting to me is his study in religion and alchemy to power his intellectual ideas. My TA advised me to look up the methods of intellectual history, as she felt this was most suited for my inquiry. I've done a cursory search, but still not exactly what intellectual history is.
For studying Jung and his epistemological influences, is intellectual history an apt reporting method? I'm a complete freshman in history — what might I find useful in resources to help write a good paper?
Intellectual history is the history of ideas, in short. It means you are engaging what the ideas were and where they came from. For a template, see Peter Gay's work on Freud.
The upside of intellectual history is that it allows you to engage the ideas rather directly — you get to explore them, play with them, show how they change over time. The downside is that it often oversimplifies the context and can get pretty narrow, lost in the books. Much of the history of psychology is intellectual history. (The history of psychiatry, by contrast, often has more in common with the history of medicine — a different sort of look that focuses on on practices and institutions as well as ideas.)
As for writing a paper — the real trick is figuring out the question you want the paper to answer. If you can figure that out, the rest sort of writes itself (well, not really, but the path towards interrogating the question becomes more clear). When a student tells me that something is "most interesting" to them, I say, great, but explain why it is interesting to you, and you might find a question in there. (E.g., "what did Jung, as an educated person in the 20th century, see in the study of alchemy, which by that point was associated with quackery and proto-science?")