Carl Jung, Darwin of the Mind

Thomas Lawson, Thomas T. Lawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781855754683
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429911705
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Carl Jung, Darwin of the Mind is a review and an explanation of Jung's thought set in an evolutionary context. Jung explored the human psyche throughout his long life. His writings, of astonishing scope and depth, elaborate on imagery that can be found in rituals, myths and fables worldwide as well as in the dreams, visions and fantasies of his patients and himself. Jung pursued common threads of meaning to the point of becoming deeply versed in the esoterica of Eastern mysticism, Gnosticism, and alchemy. Taken collectively, Jung's works develop a coherent theory about how the psyche is constructed, including an idea of how consciousness emerged as a part of it. The author demonstrates that Jung's concept of a collective unconscious structured by archetypes meshes well with accepted views of evolution and can be squared with the most rigorous science of today. So taken, Jung's work is of unrivaled explanatory power and opens new vistas for understanding who we are and how we function.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

Psychology and philosophy

This book advances some ideas about the evolution of consciousness. If consciousness evolved in humans, there must have been a time when there was less of it. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that it is not continuing to evolve. That means that there is less of it now than perhaps there will be. We think of ourselves as fully conscious, but it seems to me that there are a lot of ways that we remain unconscious. Let me give a couple of examples.

I grew up in the 1950s, in a small city in Virginia. My parents were reasonably well off, and there was little of doubt, and a great deal of complacency, in the world view that I naturally absorbed from their generation and accepted as my own. I wrestled with the problems of religion and chafed at the absurdity of the sexual strictures of the day, but it was a long time before I came to realize that there are other ways of looking at the world than through the eyes of that particular society, smugly frozen as it was in its comfortable place in time and space.

I had a gift for argument, and I could usually more than hold my own in the debates among the boys at the boarding school I attended. Even so, it occurred to me one day that I was having far more trouble defending the status quo in the south than I should have had. There was nothing for it but to reverse course on the segregation issue. It strikes me now that the reality of that status quo must be all but beyond the comprehension of someone not a part of that time and place. It consisted in a genteel and seemingly decent society where a particular group of people was treated by the majority with such revulsion and disdain as to be forbidden by law to eat at the same restaurants, drink from the same water fountains, or use the same public toilets as the others. If the decent people of that society could have let themselves into the minds of those they were treating in such a way, surely they would have acted otherwise. Must it not be that they allowed themselves to be unconscious of how those other people felt? As I view it now, the hallmark of that societal outlook was unconsciousness.

Somehow, even as the Cold War progressed, it remained possible to think that the world was essentially benign. We now see starkly that in the Cuban missile crisis a false step by either of two fallible human beings, John Kennedy or Nikita Khrushchev, might well have destroyed the whole of humanity. Neither side was insane. Both considered that they were behaving rationally. But they nevertheless brought human life to the brink of extinction. At work was what Carl Jung saw as Shadow behaviour. Each side projected the darker aspects of its collective psyche on to the other. Each in turn therefore felt threatened by the other in the most dangerous way. In not recognizing the unconscious activities within themselves, each side engaged in potentially self-destructive behaviour. Consciousness says in this situation, “A part of what is going on comes from within me; I must take that into account.” The projection of internal psychic contents—ideas or feelings, say, of which one is unaware—on to an external person or thing is a marker of unconsciousness. When one is unconscious of one’s own motives, for example, they may be seen as belonging to others. Think of the treatment of African Americans in the South just mentioned. The white society had repressed—that is, become unconscious of—dispositions they found to be intolerable in themselves; dispositions, for instance, to be lazy, slipshod, ignorant, and of no account, or towards brutality and sexual aggression. Such dispositions, though unconscious, tend nevertheless somehow to find light of day, and so they appear to us as traits of someone else. What better someone than an impoverished minority with a different colour of skin?

My objective in this book is to pull together the thought of Carl Jung and place it in a non-technical way within a contemporary context, so as to make it accessible to the general reader. My method will be to cast Jung’s findings in terms of the evolution of the psyche, of which I think they afford a compelling sketch. I believe that a grasp of psychical evolution can have no less powerful an influence on the way we look at the world than did Darwin’s insights into physical evolution. Nietzsche observed, with characteristic, but as yet not fully vindicated, prescience, that psychology might be seen as “the queen of sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist” (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 32). By this he meant that the essence of knowing a thing must ultimately lie in knowing that by which knowledge is acquired and held: in knowing, in other words, the mind itself. All knowledge and understanding come to us through, and are shaped by, the mind, and thus by our own subjective experience. As Nietzsche’s dictum would logically include philosophy within its scope, it follows that, when we set out to get a fix on what sort of world we live in and how we should go about living in it, we might well consider looking first into our own minds. In short, anyone interested in the great questions of philosophy ought, on the suggestion of Nietzsche, look into psychology.

Such an approach would seem plausible enough, except for the fact that psychology, itself, is so difficult to get a handle on. I tried at college to take a course in analytical psychology—only to learn that, before I might get to what I took to be the good stuff, I must have first subjected myself to a list of dry prerequisites: courses, such as statistics, in which I, a liberal arts major, had very little interest. It would be just as hard today to get a ready gloss on analytical psychology. Even professionally practising Freudians and Jungians find themselves divided, respectively, into schools, which by no means agree within themselves as to doctrine (Samuels, 1985, Chapter One). One can get books explaining quantum mechanics, without the maths, or chaos theory, but with psychology it is not so easy.

There is, however, I believe, a way to get a handle on psychology so as to turn its lamp on the grand issues of philosophy. The way has been pointed out to us by Carl Jung. I am convinced that Jung’s theories, based on his findings in depth psychology, demand, under reasoned analysis, a general acceptance. Moreover, if accepted, they would tell us a great deal about the origins and functioning of that defining characteristic of humanity: the conscious mind.

An argument for Jung

It is generally accepted that everything in biology can be explained through Darwinian evolution. Everything, that is, except the most extraordinary thing: human consciousness. Jung’s theory propounds that a collective unconscious, structured by archetypes, evolved through natural selection, just as did the instincts. It postulates, further, that from this inherited unconscious, present in all humans, consciousness arose. The subsequent and, at least within the last six thousand years, rapid, evolution of consciousness can be charted in developments in civilizations through history.

The phenomenon of consciousness is one of the few great barriers remaining to be crossed in the astonishing advance of science in the modern era. There is an increasing body of knowledge of the workings of the brain, of its electro-chemical processes; but thus far there is in this knowledge no suggestion of that which might afford a bridge between the brain, which is material, and the thinking mind, which seems, at least, not to be. Centuries ago, Descartes struck a division with which we are yet confronted; he labelled the two realms of reality res extensa, the physical world, and res cogitans, the world of the mind. Jung’s penetrating inquiry into the latter realm through its effects, the phenomena it produces, tells us much—if not of what it is, then of how it works in us. And, in the end, we shall find that Jung’s system offers to resolve the duality of these two worlds and bring them together again into one.

People going about their everyday lives, who think about it at all, will probably acknowledge that they have at best a vague grasp of the functioning of their own psyches. And it is probably safe to say that most people operate on the principle that the psyche consists primarily of the conscious mind. Practically speaking, most of us turn a blind eye to the unconscious urges, intuitions, blocks, and inspirations that broadly affect our actions. But what is at work when, for example, at crucial moments we stumble over our words or fail to come up with a name well known to us? What of our drives and motivations that may be obvious to those around us, but of which we remain oblivious? The expression that an idea “pops into one’s head” seems to have a basis in reality. But who is behind the scenes deciding what ideas should pop into our heads and when? If Jung can supply a key to these puzzles, should we be not glad to have it?

Jung’s career was spent in the profession of medicine, treating patients and teaching. What he learned as one of the earliest practitioners of analytical psychology is central to all of his writing. It follows, however, that, while a great deal of what Jung wrote is of general application, there is much of a strictly medical nature that is not of interest to the common reader. My focus here is on the nonmedical side of Jung’s thought, the idea being to propound Jung’s findings in terms of their wider, philosophical, implications. I shall describe what I take to be the essence, distilled from Jung’s writings and in some cases the elaborations of his followers, of what is in broad reach a comprehensive theory of the relation of psyche to the whole of creation. Jung always maintained that he was a man of science and not a philosopher; yet my focus should do him no injustice, any more than would a review, from the standpoint of its philosophical implications, do injury to the spirit of Darwin’s work.

In as much as we are dealing, albeit in a non-technical way, with psychology, it is appropriate at this point that I acknowledge the effects of my own psychology—both as known to me and unknown—upon what I am putting before the reader. Not only are there bound to be shortcomings in knowledge and understanding in one not formally trained in the disciplines of either psychology or philosophy, but also there will be the intrusion, inevitable in anyone, of the subjective into the subject matter. Indeed, it will no doubt be argued on some fronts that my interpretation of Jung is a highly idiosyncratic one.

Although it has been some time ago now, I spent the first part of my adult life as a trial lawyer. The perspective I developed in that work is bound to shape my address to the material before us. Indeed I conceive my approach here as analogous to a certain aspect of trial work. Let me explain. It has been widely observed that Jung, as might be expected in one who evolved in his thinking over a long life, embraced not a few inconsistent positions. Moreover, nowhere did he summarize or attempt to boil down to a digestible mass his varied corpus. Finally, it is often difficult to extract from one of Jung’s writings a single, unambiguous meaning. This is where the trial approach comes in. At the conclusion of a trial, the lawyers on each side make a closing argument. What has gone before has been the presentation of evidence. The evidence from the two sides is, of course, usually in conflict, and, indeed, even within the case as presented for a given side, inconsistencies will often have crept in. Closing argument is the lawyer’s chance to gather together within a relatively short time the whole of the case. The lawyer is called upon to lay the case out from the point of view of the client, resolving or explaining away conflicts and presenting a coherent picture that will be both understandable and persuasive to the jury. If there have been expert witnesses presenting technical information, that information must be reduced to its essentials and made digestible to the common understanding. At this point the lawyers also have the opportunity to comment on the material that has been put forward. They can advance ideas of their own that might cast the matter of the case in greater relief and aid in its interpretation. This book is my closing argument after a years-long study of Jung. The picture it gives is my own, but I hope it accurately presents the material I have to work with—Jung’s thought—and in a way that renders it clear and convincing.

Jung's arguments can be assessed without recourse to depth psychology

Jung saw patients over a long and very active career, and he extracted from his intimate association with the unconscious functioning of his large and varied array of patients a treasure trove of experience. In dreams, fantasies, visions, and the delusions of the insane, he observed recurring types of figures and situations, which could be associated with particular meanings. These observations were Jung’s point of departure for his conclusions about the workings of the mind. Neither I nor the general reader has the means of assessing the data that Jung accumulated. Indeed, what Jung extrapolated from his interactions with patients, because of the subjective element it necessarily entails, is not, in the main, amenable to objective verification. This is to say that the findings of depth psychology are in many particulars not susceptible, as is the case with observations within the hard sciences, of duplication by experiment. Each mind is different.

Even so, it is not necessary to have a grounding in analytical psychology for us form a judgement as to the probity of Jung’s proposals. Jung’s concepts of the archetypes and the collective unconscious serve as the basis of a theory about the relation of the unconscious to the conscious mind and for the development of the latter out of the former. This is an empirical, not a metaphysical theory. It may be examined, as should any theory about some part of experience, in terms of its internal coherence, of its economy, of how it squares with related knowledge, and of its explanatory power. There is also reason to think that with the advance of our scientific tools and understanding, much of it may be testable. I think, therefore, that we have the means, without recourse to depth psychology, to assess the soundness of Jung’s ideas.

A persuasive support for Jung’s arguments lies in the phenomenon that there are unmistakable parallels in the themes that thread through the mythologies of otherwise diverse cultures. These correspondences would be a natural consequence of the ideas Jung proposes, and, because meshes in mythic content across cultures are so close as to be almost uncanny, they provide grounding for those ideas. Common themes in mythology suggest a common source, and it is just such a source that Jung supplies through his concept of a collective unconscious. It is possible, of course, that common traditions were spread by diffusion; that is, carried by early humans as they spread about the earth or passed along by contact from group to group. But, then, what was it about these particular myths and stories that made them stick, that assured that they, rather than some others, were passed down through the ages as the store of images common to culture? It would be very difficult, on the basis of present knowledge, to demonstrate beyond doubt that Jung’s collective unconscious or any other factor was the source or cause of the universality of basic mythic themes. But the weaker proposition that there does exist the widest imaginable distribution of certain characteristic motifs seems a safe enough bet, and that, of itself, will serve us in carrying the argument forward.

Jung conceived of what he named “archetypes” as timeless forms that find psychic expression in images. He saw them as giving body to a collective unconscious, an inherited psychic structure present in all humans. Images springing from the archetypes, in Jung’s conception, supply the attractors by which consciousness is drawn from the unconscious, and they therefore shape the activities of that consciousness. The correspondences of myth and ritual in various cultures were, to Jung, expressions, within those cultures, of the archetypes. Erich Neumann, one of Jung’s most distinguished followers, supplied a compelling reason for the acceptance of this idea. He did so on the basis of his own extensive studies of universal themes in mythology. Elaborating on Jung’s findings, Neumann succeeded in tracing a recognizable course of development of human consciousness. According to Neumann, as consciousness evolved, expressions of the archetypes became more differentiated and personalized. Thus, a direction in the development of consciousness could be established through the progressive manifestations of the archetypes in various cultures across time.

Our ancestors came out of Africa and began to spread across the globe some 50,000 years ago. It is plausible to assume that these early humans—all hunter-gatherers and all having their origins in the same region—were not very different from each other. Now they are represented in cultures of extraordinary variety, and some of astonishing achievement. It is clear that there has not elapsed, since the beginning of the dispersal of our ancestors, time enough for present cultural extensions to have come about through genetic change. Evolution, which involves genetic change, is a very slow process. Yet the evolution of consciousness, as reflected in culture, seems to have proceeded apace. As we go forward, I shall offer a proposal of my own as to how the evolution of consciousness, under the Jungian scheme, could have transpired so rapidly. I shall suggest that it is through the evolution of culture itself: that, through the preservation in culture of the outcomes of certain felicitous encounters between extraordinary individuals and the archetypes, we have a mechanism whereby consciousness might evolve. The mechanism is directly analogous to genetic evolution and operates according to the basic formula of natural selection: replication (here, the passing of the group’s culture down the generations), subject to variation (the new idea of the extraordinary individual), selected according to environmental fitness (of cultural orientation).

I should make it clear that there is not here the suggestion that either Jung or Neumann has identified other than by way of analogy the actual means by which consciousness came about. Jung described in the collective unconscious the living bed from which he concluded consciousness arose, and, in the archetypes, he described the elements of the collective unconscious that somehow function to bring consciousness to the fore. Neumann traced signposts along the path of emerging consciousness by which we can mark its progress. Yet the moving force that began in early humankind to lift consciousness out of the depths of the unconscious, and that does so anew in the life of each individual, remains a hallowed mystery.

The resistance to Jung's findings

There are a number of explanations that may be advanced for why the greater part of Jung’s elucidation of the unconscious mind and its workings has not passed into general awareness. We will look at some of them, but one is tempted to say, in Jungian fashion, that the time has not been right. The impetus for this book is the idea that the time now might be.

There are many psychiatrists and psychologists who base their practices on Jung’s findings, and there are, as well, countless books, periodicals, schools, seminars, and convocations across the world whose testament to the power of Jung’s teachings can fairly be said to be of cultic dimensions. But, in spite of them, to the educated layman Jung seems still to be known vaguely as a follower of Freud who came up with the idea of a collective unconscious. This idea is seen as intriguing, but not the sort of thing one is prepared to incorporate into one’s world view. People who seek learning—academicians, clerics, scientists, philosophers—pursue their disciplines in basic oblivion of what Jung can tell them—with solid rational grounding—about their own minds.

Jung compels us to acknowledge the reality of psychic manifestations. A dream, for instance, is a fact. The dream content may be taken by the sceptical observer as gibberish—bits of nonsense somehow infiltrating the waking awareness; yet no one can deny that the bits are there. So it is with other psychic disturbances of the conscious attitude: moods, fantasies, fears that flood in on one for n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO The evolution of consciousness
• CHAPTER THREE Archetypes and the collective unconscious
• CHAPTER FOUR Individuation
• CHAPTER FIVE Synchronicity
• CHAPTER SIX Conclusion
• REFERENCES
• INDEX