Archetype

A Natural History of the Self

Anthony Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134964604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Commonly dismissed as mystical by scientists, archetypes were described by Jung as biological entities, which have evolved through natural selection, and which, if they exist at all, must be amenable to empirical study. Anthony Stevens has discovered the key to opening up this long-ignored scientific approach to the archetype.

Part I

Archetypes in Theory

· 1 ·

Jung and the Ethologists

With hindsight one can see that Jung suffered ostracism by the academic establishment not because he was a mystic but because his ideas ran counter to the intellectual currents of his time. The academic psychologists insisted that the behavioural repertoire of human beings was infinitely plastic, almost completely subject to the vicissitudes of the environment, and relatively uninfluenced by innate or predetermined structures, whereas Jung persisted all his life in advancing the opposite view. For Jung, a science of psychology could not be founded on the study of a seemingly infinite variety of individual differences: it was necessary, first of all, to establish the ways in which human beings are all psychologically similar. The question which seems to have been perennially at the back of his mind was, what are the archetypal features of human nature? What are the behavioural and psychological characteristics that are specific to us as a species? To him, there were no fundamental incompatibilities between man’s spiritual attainments and his lowly biological origins, and pondering such matters induced in him no such feelings of existential nausea as seemed to afflict the academics. On the contrary, he was greatly excited by them, and the vision that these two aspects of human life – the biological and the spiritual – could be united in one scientific theory provided the impetus that drove him to become a psychiatrist in the first place.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes his reaction when, as a medical student, he began reading Krafft-Ebing’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie:

My heart suddenly began to pound. I had to stand up and draw a deep breath. My excitement was intense, for it had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.

With time, Jung’s vision was to develop such breadth as to embrace those arch-antagonists science and religion, conceiving man’s spiritual life not as a denial of his evolutionary origins but as an expression of them.

So, although ethology and analytical psychology might strike one as odd bedfellows, the incompatibility is in fact more apparent than real. Both are valid approaches to the meaning of behaviour. Where they differ, it is more a matter of observational emphasis than a fundamental contradiction, for while ethology concerns itself with behaviour which is objective, ‘outer’ and public, analytical psychology deals with behaviour which is subjective, ‘inner’ and private. The two disciplines, therefore, may be regarded as antinomies, in the sense that they are complementary attempts to comprehend the same universally occurring phenomena. An illustrative parallel would be provided by two teams of cartographers who set themselves to map some terra incognita, one team recording coastlines, estuaries, rivers, lakes and political boundaries, the other concentrating on the geological structures underlying the visible features of the landscape. The completed maps may present very different aspects to the eye of the beholder, but, in fact, both would represent equally valid interpretations of the same terrain.

The data on which Jung based his theoretical formulations came from an impressive galaxy of sources; but his main insights were derived from a heroic descent into the deeper reaches of his own personality, from a lifetime devoted to the study of mythology, comparative religion and alchemical texts, and from a careful analysis of dreams, phantasies and pictures produced by patients who came from all over the world to consult him. Much of this material has been published in the 18 volumes of Jung’s Collected Works, and has been summarized and reinterpreted by numerous authorities other than Jung (e.g. Edinger, Henderson, Hochheimer, Jacobi, Jaffe, von Franz, Storr, and Whitmont, to name but a few). I have no wish to reduplicate this already extensive literature. The inspiration for my own approach to Jung’s thought arises, as I have described, from my own research and clinical work, and from the discoveries of ethologists and sociobiologists which demonstrate impressive similarities between the behaviour apparent in animal and human societies, and between that of widely differing populations of human beings. The findings of these contemporary scientists dramatically corroborate Jung’s previously despised assertion that the human psyche, like the human body, has a definable structure which shares a phyloge-netic continuity with the rest of the animal kingdom.

Although it is undeniable that the cultural and environmental circumstances into which a human child is born will influence his behaviour as an adult to a greater extent than is true of members of other mammalian species, it has in the past been too easily forgotten that the forms which human cultures adopt are themselves profoundly influenced by the human genome (i.e. the characteristic genetic structure of homo sapiens). Thus, all cultures, whatever their geographical location or historical era, display a large number of social traits which are in themselves diagnostic of a specifically human culture. These have been independently catalogued by George P. Murdock (1945) and Robin Fox (1975). According to them, no human culture is known which lacked laws about the ownership, inheritance and disposal of property, procedures for settling disputes, rules governing courtship, marriage, adultery, and the adornment of women, taboos relating to food and incest, ceremonies of initiation for young men, associations of men which exclude women, gambling, athletic sports, co-operative labour, trade, the manufacture of tools and weapons, rules of etiquette prescribing forms of greeting, modes of address, use of personal names, visiting, feasting, hospitality, gift-giving, and the performance of funeral rites, status differentiation on the basis of a hierarchical social structure, superstition, belief in the supernatural, religious rituals, soul concepts, myths and legends, dancing, homicide, suicide, homosexuality, mental illness, faith healing, dream interpretation, medicine, surgery, obstetrics, and meteorology. The list could go on.

Knowledge is, after all, a matter of imposing order on chaos. Darwin’s contribution is a case in point. He entered a world of infinite biological complexity, where scientists were so overwhelmed by the staggering variety of living forms that they could do little more than describe, draw, classify and annotate. (Since 1758, when formal classification was started by Carolus Linnaeus, 1707–78, almost a million different animal species have been listed.) But in his lifetime Darwin changed all that – through one tremendous insight, namely, that the guiding principle governing the structure and function of all living organisms is, quite simply, the survival of the species.

Similarly, Jung, contemplating the apparently infinite multiformity of symbolisms created by mankind, so richly complicated, so ingeniously diverse, came to realize that they were in fact variations on a number of universally recurrent themes. So, just as Darwin found homologues in anatomy, and the ethologists have demonstrated homologues in patterns of behaviour, so Jung traced homologues in symbols. It was this insight which caused him to formulate the theory of archetypes, which attributed the universal occurrence of homologous symbols and mythologems to the existence of universal structures within the human mind.

True to the same tradition, ethology has proceeded by applying the Darwinian insight to the study of behaviour, describing the behavioural characteristics which distinguish one species from another, analysing the way in which these characteristic behaviour patterns enable each species to meet the exigencies of its environment, and demonstrating the steps by which one pattern of behaviour emerged from another as species underwent genetic evolution. The dramatic achievements of this approach, which have become known to such a huge public through television documentaries and bestsellers of the Morris-Ardrey type, has at last begun to have an impact on psychology – as well as on endocrinology and neurophysiology, where it has proved helpful in studying the effects of hormones and changes in the central nervous system. Moreover, ethology has had a profound and controversial influence on sociology, with the development, in recent years, of a whole new science of sociobiology, which views social organization from the standpoint of genetics and ecology (the study of organisms specifically in relation to their environment), elucidating the means by which human and animal populations adapt, through genetic evolution, to the demands of their own peculiar ‘ecological niche’.

Naturally, the introduction of genetics into the social sciences has met with hostility from those Romantics who still wish to believe that all human behaviour is the product of social conditioning; but, whether they like it or not, it is clear that genetics has more than its foot in the sociological door. As E. O. Wilson, the most influential of the socibiologists, has written (1978): ‘The question of interest is no longer whether human social behaviour is genetically determined; it is to what extent.’ Thus sociobiology is hostile to social theories, like those which have dominated university teaching until now, derived from the ideas of savants such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, or Ruth Benedict, which would have us believe that an almost infinite variety of behaviour patterns is possible for our species, depending on the social conditions which prevail at any given time or place. Ethology and sociobiology teach, on the contrary, that human behaviour is highly circumscribed by the genetic consequences of evolutionary adaptation, and that any attempt to adopt forms of social organization and ways of life other than those which are characteristic of our species must lead to personal and social disorientation, and, ultimately, to the extinction of whole populations.

Unfortunately, anthropologists have, with a few notable exceptions, proved as slow as psychologists to meet the ethological challenge. Just as in the past psychology and psychiatry sought to explain personality in terms of influences arising from the individual’s personal circumstances, so anthropology increasingly occupied itself with the minutiae of how one culture differed phenomenologically from another, each being a coherent entity and a law unto itself, and how local climate, geology, child-rearing practices, and so on, combined to bring these differences about. Hardly anyone concerned himself with those things which all men and women and all cultures had in common, or asked to what extent these universal features might be susceptible to a purely biological explanation. But the ethological revolution has begun to change this, with consequences whose theoretical importance it would be hard to exaggerate: for if we can discover the archetypal structure of human nature we shall be able to define its optimum needs, and thus provide a rational basis for the practice not only of psychiatry and medicine, but of sociology and politics as well. In this momentous enterprise the comparative method will be crucial.

To take a mundane example, in the medical field epidemiological studies have established that since the human bowel evolved to process a diet rich in fibre human communities living in accordance with this ‘archetypal intent’ (i.e. they eat plenty of bran, fruit and vegetables) are relatively free of bowel diseases, while those communities like our own which contravene it suffer a comparatively high incidence of colonic cancer, ulcerative colitis, regional ileitis, diverticulitis, piles, and so on. Similarly, our species is not equipped to deal with a high daily intake of animal protein and fat: we evidently evolved in an environment which provided vegetables and fruit in greater abundance than animal foods. The result is that the protein-glutted northern hemisphere affords diseases of which the protein-impoverished south knows nothing. Findings such as these carry the highest significance for both therapeutic and preventive medicine.

In the same way, research into the archetypal nature of mankind must have direct impact on the theory and practice of politics. Though it has been fashionable to speak of ‘political science’ since early Fabian days, the term is a misnomer because hitherto no science of politics could exist in the absence of an epistemological foundation on which such a science might be based. It is not farfetched, however, to propose that biology and the comparative method could provide that foundation: the better we understand the essential parameters of human nature, the better we shall be able to legislate for that nature, to create societies in which human beings will feel most truly at home. Objective political science might then make us conservatives and radicals all – conservatives in the sense of wishing to preserve those political institutions which are essential, and radicals in wishing to adopt new institutions more suited to our archetypal needs than those already in existence. As it is, the political views dominating the world at the present time are based on assumptions about the fundamental nature of mankind which are hopelessly out of date.

The point is well argued by Robin Fox (1975), who is one of the few anthropologists to adopt the ethological standpoint:

If there is no human nature, any social system is as good as any other, since there is no base line of human needs by which to judge them. If, indeed, everything is learned, then surely men can be taught to live in any kind of society. Man is at the mercy of all the tyrants – be they fascists or liberals – who think they know what is best for him. And how can he plead that they are being inhuman if he doesn’t know what being human is in the first place? If, however, man can establish what the basic human satisfactions and needs are – if he knows what the human social nature is and what kinds of social systems are compatible with it – he can make a stand against the brainwashers, genetic tinkerers, totalitarians, and utopian liberals who would knock us into shape.

Jung would, I believe, have been in complete sympathy with this argument. ‘All those factors,’ he wrote, ‘... that were essential to our near and remote ancestors will also be essential to us, for they are embedded in the inherited organic system’ (CW 8, para. 717).

Although Jung would have been quick to point out the ‘reductionist’ tendencies inherent in the ethological approach, there are many aspects of it which would have delighted him – especially the wealth of data it provides for the ‘amplification’ (a favourite word of Jung’s) of archetypal themes. He would have found himself at home with many of the intellectual assumptions of ethology; and it is impressive to note the similarities that link Jung with the man who has done most to advance ethology to its present status, Konrad Lorenz. It is true to describe both Jung and Lorenz as ‘charismatic’ personalities with a zest for life, capable of inspiring intense loyalty in their adherents, both reared in the Central European mould of Germanic scholarship and holding a special respect for Kant and Goethe, both possessing an intractable penchant for swimming against the academic tides of their time in pursuit of private visions, both widely misunderstood, and both inspiring the wrath and contumely of the behaviourists. It has been persuasively suggested (Gorer, 1966) that the cultural biases which have blinded all but some (mainly European) workers to the role of innate psychic structures are due to the pre-eminence of the United States and Soviet Russia in the behavioural sciences: the egalitarian ethos prevailing in these two very different societies has resulted in a powerful commitment to the proposition that all men and women are quite literally born equal, and this has induced both American and Russian psychologists to devote their attention to the mechanics of learning so as to facilitate the activities of pedagogues and politicians in realizing the dream of a truly egalitarian society. Reared in a more aristocratic tradition, neither Jung nor Lorenz was constrained by any such preconceptions.

However, there exists between Lorenz and Jung a significant personal difference that needs to be emphasized, and that is the extraversion of Lorenz and the introversion of Jung: it is not surprising that their work should bear the stamp of this fundamental distinction, and the complementary nature of the two approaches makes any attempt to compare and, where possible, to synthesize them both attractive and overdue. As I hope this book will help to make clear, there is, in fact, remarkably little conflict between the Jungian and ethological positions. What is particularly striking is the way in which concepts introduced by Jung more than half a century ago anticipate with uncanny accuracy those now gaining currency in the behavioural sciences generally. Jung would have appreciated this irony, since it was the practitioners of these very sciences who, in his lifetime, persistently misunderstood his work, stigmatized him as a crank, and dismissed his concepts of the archetype and the collective unconscious with frank derision. Yet, the data which these workers are amassing are not only compatible with Jung’s theories, but also serve to strengthen and amplify them to an extent that few Jungians (and certainly few behavioural scientists) appear to realize.

Nowadays, it is common to hear ethologists praised for their part in bringing psychology into the mainstream of biology; but those who deliver these accolades never give Jung his due for attempting a similar achievement, against almost universal opposition, so many years earlier. Not that he would have minded. He was too committed to the direction in which his own researches carried him ever to pay much attention to the narrow intellectual fashions that dominated academic psychology in his day. His psychological approach was, as Marie-Louise von Franz has observed, ‘too f...