Jung in the 21st Century Volume One

Evolution and Archetype

John Ryan Haule

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136844553
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This first volume provides an original overview of Jung's work, demonstrating that it is fully compatible with contemporary views in science. It draws on a wide range of scientific disciplines including, evolution, neurobiology, primatology, archaeology and anthropology.

Divided into three parts, areas of discussion include:

• evolution, archetype and behaviour
• individuation, complexes and theory of therapy
• Jung's psyche and its neural substrate
• the transcendent function
• history of consciousness.

Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution and Archetype will be an invaluable resource for all those in the field of analytical psychology, including students of Jung, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists with an interest in the meeting of Jung and science.

Chapter 1
The past and future of Jung

This book emerges from equal measures of pessimism and optimism over the future of Analytical Psychology, the “Zurich School” of psychoanalysis that C. G. Jung started a century ago and that I have practiced more than three decades. On the one hand, pessimism: psychoanalysis was a major cultural force in the twentieth century but has waned significantly in recent decades. Its standing as a “science”—once loudly proclaimed but always somewhat questionable—has become precarious with recent advances in brain research.¹ Worse, within the world of psychoanalysis, Jung has generally been marginalized as a “mystic” who dispensed with science in favor of dubious superstitions. Despite such good reasons for pessimism, however, I am also optimistic. Recent developments in evolutionary biology show that the basic tenets of Analytical Psychology are amazingly “consilient” with the most recent scientific theories and the evidence that supports them. The word consilience has been given prominence by Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, to mean that when facts and theories from different disciplines all point in the same direction, they implicitly support one another and jointly contribute to their mutual likelihood of being proven correct. They “create a common groundwork of explanation” (E. O. Wilson 1998: 8).²

Consilience convinces us by its cable-like argument. We follow a bundle of evidence strands, all supporting one another so that gaps here and there in some of the strands do no damage to the argument (Lewis-Williams 2002: 102). Much of archaeology, paleontology, evolutionary biology and neurobiology have no choice but to draw their conclusions on the basis of cabling or consilience, and this is precisely the sort of reasoning Jung employed in developing his theory of the archetypes. Jung dreamed of unifying the biological and human sciences at a time when a cabling of those disciplines had little empirical justification. And he did so with amazing prescience. Therefore, the time has come to tell the story of the remarkable consilience between Jung’s archetypal psychology and a biology founded on Darwinian principles and augmented by the science of genetics—what biologists today call the “modern synthesis.”³

But this is only half of the story. Jung was also relentless in challenging the limitations of science, especially its refusal to admit phenomena that are undeniably real, such as life, intentionality and consciousness. From his university years onward, Jung argued that science had to explore its “border zones,” especially the phenomena of parapsychology. Later in life he collaborated with one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Wolfgang Pauli, to formulate synchronicity as a cosmic principle. Although the doctrine of synchronicity is not accepted by contemporary scientists, Jung’s argument for it is consilient with the scientific thinking that solved earlier problems involving “action at a distance,” namely magnetism and gravity.

Specialists and dilettantes

Among the three or four hundred books and articles outside the field of Analytical Psychology that I have read in preparation for this study, only E. O. Wilson’s Consilience and the articles of a diverse group of scholars that call themselves biogenetic structuralists mention Jung’s doctrine of the archetypes as a possible contribution to the synthesis of knowledge.⁴ Wilson adds that archetypal theory has never been sufficiently developed (E. O. Wilson 1998: 85). Among Jungian analysts, only the British psychiatrist Anthony Stevens has publicly recognized the problem: “Concepts introduced by Jung more than a half-century ago anticipate with uncanny accuracy those now gaining currency in the behavioral sciences generally” (Stevens 1983: 27). Stevens notes that no theory of psychology can today “command more than esoteric interest if it fails to take account of biology, physics, and neurophysiology.” Jungians, however, have been reluctant to investigate such things, remaining satisfied to be “mesmerized by archetypal symbols” (Stevens 1983: 32, 29).

In the end Stevens has been too much a specialist in psychiatry, not only to explore the broad consilience between Jung and the modern biological synthesis, but also to use this knowledge to begin rethinking the doctrine of the archetypes.⁵ The job requires a shameless dilettante, hard-working and curious, someone who has a yen for facts and theories and the patience to sift through mountains of them. Jung viewed himself as a dilettante of this type, “constantly borrow[ing] knowledge from others.”⁶

As the author of this study, I put myself forward as such a dilettante. No one can master all of the fields of study involved, but the right sort of dilettante might hope to sketch out the confluence of those fields, leaving it to specialists to follow some of the leads into new territory. My own qualifications for surveying diverse fields of science are limited. In 1963, I earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry and biology and later taught high school chemistry. In 1973, I earned a doctorate in religious studies and taught philosophy and religion at university level. More recently I have taught Jung’s Collected Works nearly every semester for more than twenty years and published several articles on the history, development and import of his thought.

Jung’s dream of a fundamental science⁷

Jung’s scientific ambitions manifested as soon as he finished his medical degree and accepted an appointment to the Zurich mental asylum, Burghölzli, where he apprenticed himself to Alexander von Muralt and began studying cross-sections of the brains of schizophrenics under a microscope. However, when von Muralt confessed that for him brain dissection was “just a sport” (Shamdasani 2003: 45f), Jung turned to the Word Association Experiment, where he first made a name for himself by establishing the empirical foundations of neurotic dissociation. He found that emotionally charged words organize themselves into “complexes” or subpersonalities.

In this effort, Jung was working in the middle ground between the French dissociation school of Pierre Janet and Freud’s brand new school of psychoanalysis (cf. Haule 1984). It led to a six-year-long association between Jung and Freud, in which Jung strove to accept the sexual doctrine of psychoanalysis. The end of that period was heralded for Jung by a dream of a house in which each floor, moving from attic to sub-basement, came from an earlier period of history than the last. He found a pair of skulls in a pit under the basement floor. He discusses this dream a half-century later, shortly before his death in 1961:

The dream is in fact a short summary of my life—the life of my mind. I grew up in a house two hundred years old, our furniture consisted mostly of pieces about a hundred years old, and mentally my greatest adventure had been the study of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great news of the day was the work of Charles Darwin. Shortly before this I had been living in a still medieval world with my parents, where the world and man were still presided over by divine omnipotence and providence… .

I was fascinated by the bones of fossil man, particularly by the much discussed Neanderthalensis and the still more controversial skull of Dubois’ Pithecanthropus. As a matter of fact, these were my real associations to the dream. But I did not dare mention the subject of skulls, skeletons, or corpses to Freud, because I had learned that this theme was not popular with him.⁸

(CW18: ¶485f)⁹

For Jung the dream was a clear description of the layered psyche of his later theories. From the year of the dream, 1909, onwards, Jung looked to phylogeny, the evolution of the species, as a basis for understanding the development of the human individual. In the fall of 1913, he wrote a letter to Smith Ely Jelliffe and William Alanson White, the founders of the brand new American journal, Psychoanalytic Review: “We need not only the work of medical psychologists, but also that of philologists, historians, archaeologists, mythologists, folklore students, ethnologists, philosophers, theologians, pedagogues, and biologists” (Letters, i: 29f). In 1932, the publisher of Rhein Verlag invited Jung to edit a new journal, to be called Weltanschauung, in which Jung and his editors were to “fish out from the ocean of specialist science all the facts and knowledge that are of general interest and make them available to the educated public” (Letters, i: 106f).

Although Weltanschauung never got off the ground, a more limited but related project did, the annual Eranos Conference to which specialists from a variety of disciplines (unfortunately, few from the sciences) met for a week and discussed one another’s papers. Meetings began in 1933 and survived for decades after Jung’s death at the villa of its benefactress, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, near Ascona in Switzerland (Bair 2003: 412ff). Almost simultaneously, Jung established a lectureship at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute, in Zurich, where “psychology should be taught in its biological, ethnological, medical, philosophical, culture-historical, and religious aspects” (Shamdasani 2003: 15).

In the 1930s, while all these “universalizing” activities were going on, Jung stopped calling his school “Analytical Psychology” and began to call it “Complex Psychology”: “Complex psychology means the psychology of ‘complexities’ i.e. of complex psychical systems in contradistinction from relatively elementary factors” (Shamdasani 2003: 14). In this statement, as was often the case, Jung was working in the spirit of William James, whose model of self and reality has been described as “fields within fields within fields” (Barnard 1998: 199).

A look back at twentieth-century social science

By 1900 little had been established that might have formed a scientific foundation for psychology. Neurology had not yet discovered the nature and function of the neuron. Evolution as a theory was not in doubt, but how it worked still awaited the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work with pea plants.¹⁰ The scientific study of animal behavior (ethology) had to wait for Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen in the 1930s. Meanwhile, a century of French experiments in hypnosis had shown that the psyche has both conscious and unconscious portions, and that splits between them are variable and possibly related to traumatic events. Upon this poorly defined foundation, Freud intuited a way forward, inventing a theory of psychotherapy that was compelling, controversial, and vaguely scientific-looking, although rather isolated from the scientific mainstream. Harvard psychologist, J. Allan Hobson, summarizes the situation this way:

It was owing to the initially slow growth of neurobiology that psychoanalysis diverged from the experimental tradition. And it is owing to the currently explosive growth of the brain sciences that a reunification of psychoanalysis and experimental psychology may now be contemplated in a new, integrated field called cognitive neuroscience.

(J. A. Hobson 1988: 24)

Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection itself required almost a century of debate before rough agreement was reached. Darwin had had the kernel of the theory for a good two decades without publishing a word of it, while he compulsively accumulated data to support it. He was finally forced to “rush” his ideas into print when Alfred Russell Wallace hit upon the same theory. The Origin of Species was published in 1859 without a mechanism to explain how natural selection works. Today it is common to define natural selection in opposition to the theory of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829)—for instance the notion giraffes gradually “acquired” a long neck by stretching it a little further in each generation. But Darwin did not clearly reject Lamarckism, even arguing that “information flows from the organism to its reproductive cells and from them to the next generation” (Badcock 2000: 38–40). Only with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel was it realized that the units of inheritance are relatively unchangeable entities (genes). The “modern synthesis” of genetics and natural selection was forged between 1918 and 1932 (Plotkin 1998: 27). The final piece of the puzzle was supplied in 1953—nearly 100 years after Darwin’s initial publication—when James Watson and Francis Crick established the structure of DNA, and the science of “molecular biology” began.

Thus the foundation that Jung was looking for was finally established when Jung was seventy-eight. Complaints that some of his statements about the inheritance of the archetypes have a Lamarckian flavor, therefore, appear to be unfair in view of the fact that no one was clear on the meaning of natural selection until long after the theory of the archetypes had been promulgated.

Through most of the twentieth century, Jung’s primary opponent was the “Standard Social Science Model.”¹¹ The SSSM assumed that biology had a negligible effect upon human behavior. Although animals were moved by inherited instincts, human behavior was determined by culture, alone. Our human mind, the SSSM supposed, frees us from the determinism of matter, but shackles us with cultural determinism. At birth our mind is a “blank slate” (tabula rasa),¹² waiting to be written upon by culture. Behaviorists measured cultural inputs (stimuli) and outputs (behaviors) and ignored the mind itself. They thought of it as a “black box,” the investigation of whose unfathomable innards would simply be a distraction from inputs and outputs that could be measured. They aspired to a science as clean and hard as physics to free themselves from the stickiness and complexity of biology.

While the Standard Social Science Model insists upon a nature/nurture dichotomy, contemporary evolutionary psychology has found that nature and nurture are interdependent. We inherit the neural and anatomical structures that make our experience what it is and give it a species-specific shape. But these inherited structures can be used only in the particular cultural context into which an individual is born.¹³ The structure itself is “empty,” and each human culture “fills” it with its own specific adaptations. In the words of Konrad Lorenz, “Nurture has nature; … nurture has evolved and has historical antecedents as cause” (Plotkin 1998: 60). Similarly, the archetype is “a bi...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 The past and future of Jung
• Part I Evolution, archetype and behavior
• Part II Jung’s psyche and its neural substrate
• Part III History of consciousness
• Notes
• References
• Index