Jung and Science Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution and Archetype by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) The 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:
Jung in the 21st Century Volume Two: Synchronicity and Science by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) The second volume explores Jung's understanding of synchronicity and argues that it offers an important contribution to contemporary science. Whilst the scientific world has often ignored Jung's theories as being too much like mysticism, Haule argues that what the human psyche knows beyond sensory perception is extremely valuable.
Divided into two parts, areas of discussion include:
Volume One: C. G. Jung has become the most beloved of the original giants of psychoanalysis in the minds of the general public, but his fate in academic circles has been much less impressive. Scientists have generally ignored his contributions, accepting the official Freudian judgment that his theories are mystical and anti-Semitic. For many decades Freud seemed to be the "scientific" psychoanalyst, and views about Jung were based less on fact than on his reputation as the Crown Prince of Psychoanalysis who strayed too far into the realm of superstition to be taken seriously.
Two developments since 1970, however, have uncovered a different and truer Jung. The first of these was Henri Ellenberger's publication in 1970 of The Discovery of the Unconscious, where Freud, Jung, Adler, and Janet were placed in historical context, and it came out that Jung had always belonged more to the French-English-Swiss-American tradition in psychology that paid attention to natural and "artificial" (i.e. hypnotic) dissociations in the human psyche. They were the so-called "French School" of psychology that Jung had always claimed to belong to, investigators who were fascinated by the discovery, first, that all of us have simultaneous conflicting subpersonalities; second, that each subpersonality lives in a different world, remembers a different past and strives for a different future; and third, that some of these subpersonalities seem capable of knowing things that appear to be impossible (telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.).
Ellenberger was a tremendous inspiration for me, and I began to study the works of Pierre Janet, Theodore Flournoy, Morton Prince and the other dissociationists (all cited by Jung) who were experimenting with hypnosis a century and more ago. New aspects of Jung's lifework opened up to me, and my concept of the psyche expanded marvelously.
Still, however, I was not sure how "scientific" any of this work was, and I remained skeptical about whether Jung's insights would ever be appreciated by the mainstream of Western thought. At that point, in the late 1990s, I became aware of the new field of Evolutionary Psychology, founded by the married couple, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Here were researchers who accepted Jung's view that the human psyche is the product of evolution and that something very much like the archetypes (now called "mental modules") had become the center of discussion.
Here, I thought, were people carrying on the work of Jung—even though they never mentioned his name. As I studied their work, however, I found their ideas more rigid than Jung's and a bit too dogmatic. I began reading the sources that they were citing, and a whole new world opened up for me. What I discovered and how it affects my understanding of C. G. Jung's lifework is the subject matter of Jung in the 21st Century.
Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution and Archetype by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) Volume 1, Evolution and Archetype, presents a coherent and unified perspective on Jung's lifework as an outgrowth of the dissociation school of a century ago, with special attention to how the essence of his theories has been rediscovered by contemporary evolutionary science. The nature of the archetypes, the complexes, the role of dreams, relationship between ego and self, the transcendent function—all of these deeply "Jungian" concepts are actually supported by what brain science, the science of animal behavior, paleontology and similar fields have discovered. Working out the details in all of this really does give us a Jung for the twenty-first century, one whose views are dependable, not only because Jungian analysts say they are effective in the consulting room, but also because laboratory work links them solidly with the biology of the human organism.
Jung in the 21st Century Volume Two: Synchronicity and Science by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) Volume 2, Synchronicity and Science, takes up Jung's critique of science for failing to investigate certain matters that it finds to be impossible or embarrassing: the practical value of altered states of consciousness, the reality of parapsychological experiences and the like. In 1896 Jung urged the members of his college debating society to take up the challenge of these things that lie in the "border zones of exact science" and discover what the truth really is. A half-century or so later, in dialogue with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, he offered a new vision of the cosmos—of reality in general—one in which life, intentionality (striving for the future) and parapsychology are not embarrassing exceptions to reality as we know it but just as deeply real as everything that we naively take to be self-evident. There is substantiation, too, from physics and biology that Jung's speculations in this realm enjoy a good deal of support.
The Jung described in these two volumes may be a more radical critic of Western culture but a more cautious and astute theorist than many have guessed.
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.' 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. 0. 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).
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."'
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.' 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.' 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."'
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 science Jung's scientific ambitions manifested as soon as he finished his medical degree and accepted an appointment to the Zurich mental asylum, Burgholzli, 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.' (CW18: para48509
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.' 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."" 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), 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.' 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 biological entity . . . acting . . . in a manner very similar to the innate releasing mechanism much later postulated by ethologist Niko Tinbergen" (Stevens 1983: 39). The maturation of the Darwinian paradigm has restored the continuity of humanity's place within the Animal Kingdom.
In 1973, while the. SSSM still dominated the scene, evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky set the tone for future studies: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" (Richerson and Boyd 2005: 237). Today, evolution is, the braid in the "cabling" of arguments in biology and the
social sciences. During the reign of the SSSM, Jung's theory of the archetypes seemed to diverge from the general course of Western science. Now that evolutionary theory has matured, however, the existence of archetypal patterns is no longer outside the purview of science. All living beings depend on them, and every human archetype has evolved from pre-human precursors. We are not set apart from nature; we are part of it.
The task ahead
Evolutionary psychology was founded in the 1980s by people who saw that psychology was "in trouble." Because, "No general theory of how the mind works was on the horizon," they realized they would have to "make psychology consistent with the other sciences by founding it on evolution" (Aunger 2002: 35). Now it is not only possible but also essential that we finally take up the work Jung dreamed of doing and find the connections between archaeology, primatology, neurology and the rest. A truly Darwinian science of the mind and of culture is beginning to assemble and must have a decisive impact on how we conceptualize the archetypes.
Not Jung, but Robin Fox, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, said: "What we are equipped with is innate propensities that require environmental input for their realization" (Fox 1989: 45). Fox insists that no account of the human condition can be taken seriously if it ignores the five million years of natural selection that have made us what we are (Fox 1989: 207). He lists more than twenty human patterns that would be sure to manifest if some new Adam and Eve were allowed to propagate in a universe parallel to ours. These would be archetypal realities, passed on through DNA, and expressed in distinctive neuronal tracts in their brains. Such behavioral patterns would surely include customs and laws regarding property, incest, marriage, kinship, and social status; myths and legends; beliefs about the supernatural; gambling, adultery, homicide, schizophrenia, and the therapies to deal with them (Fox 1989: 22).
Jung said pretty much the same things in the 1920s. He did not do the research, and he did not know many who agreed with him. He just had a damn good hunch. In the end, however, science works with its hunches, tests hypotheses, discarding some and refining others. Hunches always lead the way, while testing and refinement keep them viable. A theory of archetypes risks becoming nothing more than a "folk theory of psychology' if its consilience with the other fields in the grand Darwinian synthesis is not tended to.
A "folk psychology" lives outside the mainstream of cultural and intellectual discussion and devotes itself to private, "interior" experience. Often it prides itself on speaking an almost secret language. Historian of psychology and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Eugene Taylor, has made a strong argument that folk psychology is exactly what Analytical Psychology is: that, in the United States, it belongs to a long "shadow" tradition going back as far as the Great Awakening in the early eighteenth century, and including Quakers, Swedenborgians, Christian Science, and Esalen. By "folk psychology," Taylor means "a mythic and visionary language of immediate experience . . . usually some form of depth psychology" whose "function is the evolution and transformation of personality" encompassing themes "of deepest, highest, and ultimate concern" (E. Taylor 1999: 15).
Analytical Psychology runs the risk of becoming not only a "folk psychology" but a "mystery religion" as well. There is nothing derogatory in what I mean by a mystery religion. During the Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire, underground religions kept alive a vast reservoir of wisdom about morality, consciousness changing and the spiritual life. Many Jungian analysts believe they are doing the same thing today, and are very likely not deluding themselves. But adherents of a mystery religion cut themselves off from the mainstream cultural dialogue and agree to speak a different language. They may even delight in the numinosity of that language, and they may be right to do so; for such words and metaphors may harbor a great wisdom.
It seems that Jung foresaw this dilemma in the 1930s when he was trying 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." He tried repeatedly to contribute to the cultural conversation, to found a Complex Psychology that belonged under the evolutionary tent, talking the language and using the metaphors that the wider world uses. As the twenty-first century began, the time for Complex Psychology had finally arrived.
Archetypal hypotheses may someday become testable; if so, the tests will likely be performed in the laboratories or digs of other academic specialties that work under the umbrella of evolutionary science. "Complex Psychology" will go right on "borrowing knowledge from others." It is the aim of this book to sketch a borrowing program, to bring together a large number of discoveries from several Darwinian specialties and see what they tell us about Jung's ideas.
The borrowing program
Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution and Archetype by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) Part I of this book attends primarily to archetype as a species-specific behavior pattern. We review Jung's definitions (Chapter 2) and examine language behavior as a model archetype (Chapter 3). The evolutionary roots of language are traced into our primate heritage (Chapter 4), and we discuss two forms of symbolic Communication that make our species unique, language and art, in Chapter 5.
Part II examines the relationship between psyche and brain. Chapter 6 provisionally accepts the mainstream opinion that psyche and brain are two aspects of the same reality—where psyche is the subjective dimension, the lived brain, and the brain itself is the objective "substrate." In Chapters 7, 8 and 9 we see that neurobiology supports Jung's theory of the distinction between ego and self and the compensatory role of dreams, and in Chapters 10 and 11 that it actually explains his theory of the feeling-toned complexes. Chapter 12 deals with the neurobiology of psychotherapy, while Chapters 13 and 14 describe the relationship between archetypes, altered states of consciousness and psychological transformation.
Part III takes up Jung's idea that the human psyche itself has been "evolving" over the course of our species' history. Chapter 15 reviews Jung's claims about the history of consciousness, and Chapters 16-20 describe our emergence from our primate roots and the ways we have used our consciousness from the Paleolithic era to the present. We end with the problem Jung identified as the crisis of modernity: the split in our Western psyche between an underdeveloped capacity for altered states of consciousness and a highly developed capacity for technological thinking. Chapter 21 summarizes the results of this study.
part I: Evolution, archetype and behavior
When psychologist Noel W. Smith, whose findings are very useful to our argument, discovered striking similarities between the rock art of the California Native Americans and that of our Ice Age ancestors in the caves of Europe, he felt required to make the following disavowal: " 'Archetypes' are the mystical concepts invented by psychoanalyst Karl [sic] Jung. There is no objective evidence for them nor is any possible" (N. W. Smith 1992: 13). It is not unusual for such repudiations to include a misspelling of Jung's name or more serious errors of fact. They reveal that the scholar in question is dealing with Jung's rumored reputation and not with any ascertainable facts. Smith evidently believes that Jung propounded archetypes as inherited images, a view that Jung struggled all his life to correct.
We begin our review of Jung's relationship with contemporary science by clarifying the essence of archetype. It is a behavior pattern. No one doubts that animals inherit behavior patterns; and with the advance of evolutionary science in the last few decades, very few any longer doubt that humans do. Although Jung described archetypes in various ways, the strong trend of his views has turned out to be amply supported by the structure of brain-and-psyche as modern science understands them.
After a survey of Jung's claims about archetypes, we shall describe language as a model archetype and pursue its evolutionary roots into primate communication and sociality. We end this section with an investigation into what sets our species apart from other primates.
Part II: Jung's psyche and its neural substrate
Part I focused on the behavioral dimension of archetype so that we could appreciate what such patterns are, how they are inherited, how they manifest in characteristic ways at characteristic times, how they prepare us to attend to and to work at some things rather than others, how they have evolved through our primate heritage, how they are filled in and completed by culture and how the numinous power of their emotional charge can alter our consciousness and transform us personally, socially and culturally.
Now in Part II we look at the relationship between psyche and its primary physical organ, the brain. In Chapter 6, we consider the relationship between psyche and brain in a general manner, particularly the dominant contemporary paradigm of psyche/brain identity. A Jungian perspective will have some reservations with this paradigm, but we will accept it provisionally so as to more easily demonstrate that Jung's theories are in fact consilient with evolutionary science. Our reservations will be reserved for Volume 2.
Part III: History of consciousness
Part I has demonstrated that Jung's concept of the archetype as a species-specific pattern of behavior is harmonious in good detail with the various evolutionary sciences. Part II has demonstrated that when Jung's model of the psyche is interpreted along the lines of the psyche/brain identity theory which dominates today's discussions, it is strongly supported by contemporary neuroscience.
Another essential dimension of Analytical Psychology is Jung's diagnosis of our current sociocultural situation as an unhealthy psychological environment for the modern Western individual. For Jung, the twentieth century represented the culmination of a long historical development in the West, whereby a strong and well-defined ego has gradually been achieved at the expense of losing organic rootedness in our species nature. We act as though we have no foundation in our collective unconscious, believing that our identity as conscious agents is sufficient. This is why we come across as hectic, lost and hollow-eyed searchers to outside observers like Mountain Lake, the Pueblo spokesman. Jung concludes that we need a myth that gives depth to our lives, and that this will never be found so long as we continue to "resent the irrational." We have to open our culture to poly-phasic living, cultivate altered states of consciousness and allow our perspective to be transformed.
Part III will begin addressing these issues. We will consider the history of consciousness from monkeys and chimpanzees through the modern humans of the West. We begin with Jung's views on that history and then follow with what the evolutionary sciences have been able to discover about it. The evidence is quite strong that we have slowly extricated ourselves from a sleepy embeddedness in myth to the point of believing ourselves to be identical with our empirical egos and their monumental accomplishments through science and technology. But we have been left longing for what seems no longer to exist, the sort of meaningful discoveries available in a maximally polyphasic environment such as is common among simple hunter-gatherers. There is much we have to recover.
Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution and Archetype by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) excerpt: The preceding twenty chapters have sought to demonstrate that Jung's dream of psychology as an architectonic science—linking the various biological specialties and setting the whole on a reliable empirical foundation—can now, in the twenty-first century, finally be realized. An evolutionary perspective now really can under-gird a dependable psychology, and we can finally appreciate what Jung meant to accomplish with the idea of "archetype." The research and the writing of this volume has been guided by the aim of Complex Psychology, namely to identify di and appreciate the patterns nested within patterns that characterize the data of the human sciences and pursues this aim much the way Jung envisaged in his unsuc- cessful journal project, Weltanschauung—by extracting the leading ideas from the I sciences, archaeology to zoology, and making them available to non-specialists. This book has pulled a great deal of material from a variety of specialties in imitation of Jung's own propensity to borrow material shamelessly, like the "accursed dilettante" he confessed himself to be.
The original purpose of all this has been to rescue Jung from his undeserved reputation as an irresponsible and muddle-headed mystic, and demonstrate that he was trying to build psychology on a firm scientific foundation, despite the sketchy nature of biological knowledge a century ago. He did so by making some very astute choices. Archetypes are the intentional dimension of instincts and structure everything we do. They are not images, as is popularly believed; and they are not found exclusively in mythology. They are the products of evolution and evidence of our place in the natural world. They do not reside in some separate spiritual substance resembling Descartes' soul—for that idea is really theological, a claim that we humans stand above and outside of nature by virtue of our immortal destiny in a Christian heaven. We all have psyches, every living organism on earth; and archetypes are patterns in the intentional process (i.e. psyche) by which every organism not only survives but seeks to thrive. Since evolutionarily we are primates, human archetypes are probably 98 percent identical with those of our cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos.
Although warmly embraced by some, these ideas have proven to be scary for other Jungians who have attended lectures I have given on this material or who have engaged me at academic meetings. If Jung's psychology has a biological basis, some have said, "Where is the magic?" Clearly they assume biology to be as devoid of "soul" as Descartes' machine-like picture of the body. Paradoxically, however, even as they apparently believe they need the hypothesis of a Cartesian soul to preserve the special numinous and magical nature of the archetypes, some also wax evangelical over the romantic idea of "embodiment." Implying that Jung was "too much in his head" (or possibly his "soul") like the mystic of popular legend, they attempt to save Analytical Psychology with techniques designed to assist people to "get into the body." They fail to realize that it is their own philosophical baggage that stands in the way of their discovering the real Jung.
An accurate reading of Jung's intentions does not begin with his brief association with Freud and conclude that he went off the rails on a mystical rampage. On the contrary, it finds his origins where he always said they were, in the "French School" of somnambulism and its investigation of altered states of consciousness. By clarifying the trend of thinking that underlies his more careful definitions of "archetype," an accurate reading of Jung discovers how rooted it is in biology and evolution. Psyche (or soul) is not some esoteric dimension of human nature, it is a universal and essential dimension of every organism. All animals have psyches, even the protozoa. Psyche is the intentional aspect of every living process. Therefore, it is inseparable from the body—inherent in every living creature and dependent upon the complexity of a creature' s anatomy and particularly its brain (if it has one) for its higher abilities.
It has been nearly three decades since Anthony Stevens (1983) diagnosed the problem with "Jungians as a group," that we have been "mesmerized . . . by archetypal symbols" and defensive about the biological implications of Analytical Psychology to the point of ignoring the "behavioral manifestations" and the "phylogenetic roots" of the archetype (Stevens 1983: 29). I would go further. We have been mesmerized by theories about symbols, as though they have no relationship to the body. Such a perspective fails to recognize the top-to-bottom structure of the archetype and the fact that the constellation of any archetype is above all a typical emotional body state. Those fascinated with symbols and their theories see only the very top of the archetypal configuration, missing the cortical and limbic changes in the brain, the alteration of autonomic nervous system balance, the dispatch of hormones and neuromodulators, bodily posture, facial expression and the like. They call for "embodiment" only because the filter of their mesmerized condition has hidden the larger physical portion of the archetype from their awareness. We have to open our eyes to the fact that symbols are the brain's interpretation of the bodily state itself and include that in our analysis of our patients. In the twenty-first century we can no longer afford to live in the stratosphere of the image alone.
We Jungians have lived, too, in the penumbra of Jung's authority. If that authority has been treated with skepticism in our monophasic society, we have chosen to view that fact with pride. Jung was a misunderstood genius who articulated insights the conventional world is not yet ready for. The effective magic of Jungian jargon-- anima, transcendent function, enantiodromia, inferior function, numinosity, ego-self axis—these words and phrases have become the secret language of initiati practicing a mystery religion, saving those blessed souls who have thought they were lost because they could not accommodate themselves to the comfortable mainstream. In working like this, we had no authority but Jung's to rely upon. We pulled sentences and images out of the Collected Works to justify our claims on the bare evidence that "Jung said so" and that it must therefore be true.
Now, however, that several scientific specialties have uncovered the biological basis for the phenomena Jung named nearly a century ago, we Jungians can begin to find the theoretical foundations of our own therapeutic interpretations, or perhaps discover that they are not as sound as we had long believed. The crucial scientific work is being "extracted" from its primary sources for us—not in a convenient single journal as Weltanschauung was designed to be—but in an endless series of well informed and well written books, many of them by the very scientists themselves who did the primary work. These are the secondary sources I have relied upon and summarized in this volume.
Widespread support from the biological sciences—as unexpected as it may seem to be—also forces us to shift some of our perspectives. Altered states of consciousness are a case in point. All Jungians surely employ them when we attend to complexes and dreams and when we practice active imagination. Jungians as a group are minimally polyphasic, but we have not recognized the wider implications of these activities—the fact that Jung, in encouraging us not to resent the irrational, has implicitly called for a much more vigorous polyphasic approach to life. In the last dozen or so years of my practice of Jungian analysis, I have found it extremely useful to attend to the spectrum of conscious states induced in me by the analysand (through limbic resonance) or implicitly reported by the analysand himself as he .describes crucial experiences from his childhood or just the past week. For to identify and experience—that is to feel—the altered states that our monophasic society denies or denigrates is to be in touch with corresponding body states. Every discrete body state generates or is induced by its own discrete state of consciousness. To feel that state is to be in touch with the archetype, top-to-bottom. Every "symbol" either induces or is the conscious evidence of a discrete state of body-and-mind. The reason for this is that the symbol appears in consciousness as a sort of report from the brain about the state of my body. This is why in the previous twenty chapters I have avoided speaking merely o
Divided into three parts, areas of discussion include:
- evolution, archetype and behavior
- 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 Two: Synchronicity and Science by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) The second volume explores Jung's understanding of synchronicity and argues that it offers an important contribution to contemporary science. Whilst the scientific world has often ignored Jung's theories as being too much like mysticism, Haule argues that what the human psyche knows beyond sensory perception is extremely valuable.
Divided into two parts, areas of discussion include:
- shamanism and mastery
- border zones of exact science
- meditation, parapsychology and psychokinesis.
Volume One: C. G. Jung has become the most beloved of the original giants of psychoanalysis in the minds of the general public, but his fate in academic circles has been much less impressive. Scientists have generally ignored his contributions, accepting the official Freudian judgment that his theories are mystical and anti-Semitic. For many decades Freud seemed to be the "scientific" psychoanalyst, and views about Jung were based less on fact than on his reputation as the Crown Prince of Psychoanalysis who strayed too far into the realm of superstition to be taken seriously.
Two developments since 1970, however, have uncovered a different and truer Jung. The first of these was Henri Ellenberger's publication in 1970 of The Discovery of the Unconscious, where Freud, Jung, Adler, and Janet were placed in historical context, and it came out that Jung had always belonged more to the French-English-Swiss-American tradition in psychology that paid attention to natural and "artificial" (i.e. hypnotic) dissociations in the human psyche. They were the so-called "French School" of psychology that Jung had always claimed to belong to, investigators who were fascinated by the discovery, first, that all of us have simultaneous conflicting subpersonalities; second, that each subpersonality lives in a different world, remembers a different past and strives for a different future; and third, that some of these subpersonalities seem capable of knowing things that appear to be impossible (telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.).
Ellenberger was a tremendous inspiration for me, and I began to study the works of Pierre Janet, Theodore Flournoy, Morton Prince and the other dissociationists (all cited by Jung) who were experimenting with hypnosis a century and more ago. New aspects of Jung's lifework opened up to me, and my concept of the psyche expanded marvelously.
Still, however, I was not sure how "scientific" any of this work was, and I remained skeptical about whether Jung's insights would ever be appreciated by the mainstream of Western thought. At that point, in the late 1990s, I became aware of the new field of Evolutionary Psychology, founded by the married couple, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Here were researchers who accepted Jung's view that the human psyche is the product of evolution and that something very much like the archetypes (now called "mental modules") had become the center of discussion.
Here, I thought, were people carrying on the work of Jung—even though they never mentioned his name. As I studied their work, however, I found their ideas more rigid than Jung's and a bit too dogmatic. I began reading the sources that they were citing, and a whole new world opened up for me. What I discovered and how it affects my understanding of C. G. Jung's lifework is the subject matter of Jung in the 21st Century.
Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution and Archetype by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) Volume 1, Evolution and Archetype, presents a coherent and unified perspective on Jung's lifework as an outgrowth of the dissociation school of a century ago, with special attention to how the essence of his theories has been rediscovered by contemporary evolutionary science. The nature of the archetypes, the complexes, the role of dreams, relationship between ego and self, the transcendent function—all of these deeply "Jungian" concepts are actually supported by what brain science, the science of animal behavior, paleontology and similar fields have discovered. Working out the details in all of this really does give us a Jung for the twenty-first century, one whose views are dependable, not only because Jungian analysts say they are effective in the consulting room, but also because laboratory work links them solidly with the biology of the human organism.
Jung in the 21st Century Volume Two: Synchronicity and Science by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) Volume 2, Synchronicity and Science, takes up Jung's critique of science for failing to investigate certain matters that it finds to be impossible or embarrassing: the practical value of altered states of consciousness, the reality of parapsychological experiences and the like. In 1896 Jung urged the members of his college debating society to take up the challenge of these things that lie in the "border zones of exact science" and discover what the truth really is. A half-century or so later, in dialogue with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, he offered a new vision of the cosmos—of reality in general—one in which life, intentionality (striving for the future) and parapsychology are not embarrassing exceptions to reality as we know it but just as deeply real as everything that we naively take to be self-evident. There is substantiation, too, from physics and biology that Jung's speculations in this realm enjoy a good deal of support.
The Jung described in these two volumes may be a more radical critic of Western culture but a more cautious and astute theorist than many have guessed.
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.' 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. 0. 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).
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."'
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.' 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.' 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."'
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 science Jung's scientific ambitions manifested as soon as he finished his medical degree and accepted an appointment to the Zurich mental asylum, Burgholzli, 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.' (CW18: para48509
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.' 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."" 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), 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.' 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 biological entity . . . acting . . . in a manner very similar to the innate releasing mechanism much later postulated by ethologist Niko Tinbergen" (Stevens 1983: 39). The maturation of the Darwinian paradigm has restored the continuity of humanity's place within the Animal Kingdom.
In 1973, while the. SSSM still dominated the scene, evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky set the tone for future studies: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" (Richerson and Boyd 2005: 237). Today, evolution is, the braid in the "cabling" of arguments in biology and the
social sciences. During the reign of the SSSM, Jung's theory of the archetypes seemed to diverge from the general course of Western science. Now that evolutionary theory has matured, however, the existence of archetypal patterns is no longer outside the purview of science. All living beings depend on them, and every human archetype has evolved from pre-human precursors. We are not set apart from nature; we are part of it.
The task ahead
Evolutionary psychology was founded in the 1980s by people who saw that psychology was "in trouble." Because, "No general theory of how the mind works was on the horizon," they realized they would have to "make psychology consistent with the other sciences by founding it on evolution" (Aunger 2002: 35). Now it is not only possible but also essential that we finally take up the work Jung dreamed of doing and find the connections between archaeology, primatology, neurology and the rest. A truly Darwinian science of the mind and of culture is beginning to assemble and must have a decisive impact on how we conceptualize the archetypes.
Not Jung, but Robin Fox, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, said: "What we are equipped with is innate propensities that require environmental input for their realization" (Fox 1989: 45). Fox insists that no account of the human condition can be taken seriously if it ignores the five million years of natural selection that have made us what we are (Fox 1989: 207). He lists more than twenty human patterns that would be sure to manifest if some new Adam and Eve were allowed to propagate in a universe parallel to ours. These would be archetypal realities, passed on through DNA, and expressed in distinctive neuronal tracts in their brains. Such behavioral patterns would surely include customs and laws regarding property, incest, marriage, kinship, and social status; myths and legends; beliefs about the supernatural; gambling, adultery, homicide, schizophrenia, and the therapies to deal with them (Fox 1989: 22).
Jung said pretty much the same things in the 1920s. He did not do the research, and he did not know many who agreed with him. He just had a damn good hunch. In the end, however, science works with its hunches, tests hypotheses, discarding some and refining others. Hunches always lead the way, while testing and refinement keep them viable. A theory of archetypes risks becoming nothing more than a "folk theory of psychology' if its consilience with the other fields in the grand Darwinian synthesis is not tended to.
A "folk psychology" lives outside the mainstream of cultural and intellectual discussion and devotes itself to private, "interior" experience. Often it prides itself on speaking an almost secret language. Historian of psychology and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Eugene Taylor, has made a strong argument that folk psychology is exactly what Analytical Psychology is: that, in the United States, it belongs to a long "shadow" tradition going back as far as the Great Awakening in the early eighteenth century, and including Quakers, Swedenborgians, Christian Science, and Esalen. By "folk psychology," Taylor means "a mythic and visionary language of immediate experience . . . usually some form of depth psychology" whose "function is the evolution and transformation of personality" encompassing themes "of deepest, highest, and ultimate concern" (E. Taylor 1999: 15).
Analytical Psychology runs the risk of becoming not only a "folk psychology" but a "mystery religion" as well. There is nothing derogatory in what I mean by a mystery religion. During the Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire, underground religions kept alive a vast reservoir of wisdom about morality, consciousness changing and the spiritual life. Many Jungian analysts believe they are doing the same thing today, and are very likely not deluding themselves. But adherents of a mystery religion cut themselves off from the mainstream cultural dialogue and agree to speak a different language. They may even delight in the numinosity of that language, and they may be right to do so; for such words and metaphors may harbor a great wisdom.
It seems that Jung foresaw this dilemma in the 1930s when he was trying 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." He tried repeatedly to contribute to the cultural conversation, to found a Complex Psychology that belonged under the evolutionary tent, talking the language and using the metaphors that the wider world uses. As the twenty-first century began, the time for Complex Psychology had finally arrived.
Archetypal hypotheses may someday become testable; if so, the tests will likely be performed in the laboratories or digs of other academic specialties that work under the umbrella of evolutionary science. "Complex Psychology" will go right on "borrowing knowledge from others." It is the aim of this book to sketch a borrowing program, to bring together a large number of discoveries from several Darwinian specialties and see what they tell us about Jung's ideas.
The borrowing program
Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution and Archetype by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) Part I of this book attends primarily to archetype as a species-specific behavior pattern. We review Jung's definitions (Chapter 2) and examine language behavior as a model archetype (Chapter 3). The evolutionary roots of language are traced into our primate heritage (Chapter 4), and we discuss two forms of symbolic Communication that make our species unique, language and art, in Chapter 5.
Part II examines the relationship between psyche and brain. Chapter 6 provisionally accepts the mainstream opinion that psyche and brain are two aspects of the same reality—where psyche is the subjective dimension, the lived brain, and the brain itself is the objective "substrate." In Chapters 7, 8 and 9 we see that neurobiology supports Jung's theory of the distinction between ego and self and the compensatory role of dreams, and in Chapters 10 and 11 that it actually explains his theory of the feeling-toned complexes. Chapter 12 deals with the neurobiology of psychotherapy, while Chapters 13 and 14 describe the relationship between archetypes, altered states of consciousness and psychological transformation.
Part III takes up Jung's idea that the human psyche itself has been "evolving" over the course of our species' history. Chapter 15 reviews Jung's claims about the history of consciousness, and Chapters 16-20 describe our emergence from our primate roots and the ways we have used our consciousness from the Paleolithic era to the present. We end with the problem Jung identified as the crisis of modernity: the split in our Western psyche between an underdeveloped capacity for altered states of consciousness and a highly developed capacity for technological thinking. Chapter 21 summarizes the results of this study.
part I: Evolution, archetype and behavior
When psychologist Noel W. Smith, whose findings are very useful to our argument, discovered striking similarities between the rock art of the California Native Americans and that of our Ice Age ancestors in the caves of Europe, he felt required to make the following disavowal: " 'Archetypes' are the mystical concepts invented by psychoanalyst Karl [sic] Jung. There is no objective evidence for them nor is any possible" (N. W. Smith 1992: 13). It is not unusual for such repudiations to include a misspelling of Jung's name or more serious errors of fact. They reveal that the scholar in question is dealing with Jung's rumored reputation and not with any ascertainable facts. Smith evidently believes that Jung propounded archetypes as inherited images, a view that Jung struggled all his life to correct.
We begin our review of Jung's relationship with contemporary science by clarifying the essence of archetype. It is a behavior pattern. No one doubts that animals inherit behavior patterns; and with the advance of evolutionary science in the last few decades, very few any longer doubt that humans do. Although Jung described archetypes in various ways, the strong trend of his views has turned out to be amply supported by the structure of brain-and-psyche as modern science understands them.
After a survey of Jung's claims about archetypes, we shall describe language as a model archetype and pursue its evolutionary roots into primate communication and sociality. We end this section with an investigation into what sets our species apart from other primates.
Part II: Jung's psyche and its neural substrate
Part I focused on the behavioral dimension of archetype so that we could appreciate what such patterns are, how they are inherited, how they manifest in characteristic ways at characteristic times, how they prepare us to attend to and to work at some things rather than others, how they have evolved through our primate heritage, how they are filled in and completed by culture and how the numinous power of their emotional charge can alter our consciousness and transform us personally, socially and culturally.
Now in Part II we look at the relationship between psyche and its primary physical organ, the brain. In Chapter 6, we consider the relationship between psyche and brain in a general manner, particularly the dominant contemporary paradigm of psyche/brain identity. A Jungian perspective will have some reservations with this paradigm, but we will accept it provisionally so as to more easily demonstrate that Jung's theories are in fact consilient with evolutionary science. Our reservations will be reserved for Volume 2.
Part III: History of consciousness
Part I has demonstrated that Jung's concept of the archetype as a species-specific pattern of behavior is harmonious in good detail with the various evolutionary sciences. Part II has demonstrated that when Jung's model of the psyche is interpreted along the lines of the psyche/brain identity theory which dominates today's discussions, it is strongly supported by contemporary neuroscience.
Another essential dimension of Analytical Psychology is Jung's diagnosis of our current sociocultural situation as an unhealthy psychological environment for the modern Western individual. For Jung, the twentieth century represented the culmination of a long historical development in the West, whereby a strong and well-defined ego has gradually been achieved at the expense of losing organic rootedness in our species nature. We act as though we have no foundation in our collective unconscious, believing that our identity as conscious agents is sufficient. This is why we come across as hectic, lost and hollow-eyed searchers to outside observers like Mountain Lake, the Pueblo spokesman. Jung concludes that we need a myth that gives depth to our lives, and that this will never be found so long as we continue to "resent the irrational." We have to open our culture to poly-phasic living, cultivate altered states of consciousness and allow our perspective to be transformed.
Part III will begin addressing these issues. We will consider the history of consciousness from monkeys and chimpanzees through the modern humans of the West. We begin with Jung's views on that history and then follow with what the evolutionary sciences have been able to discover about it. The evidence is quite strong that we have slowly extricated ourselves from a sleepy embeddedness in myth to the point of believing ourselves to be identical with our empirical egos and their monumental accomplishments through science and technology. But we have been left longing for what seems no longer to exist, the sort of meaningful discoveries available in a maximally polyphasic environment such as is common among simple hunter-gatherers. There is much we have to recover.
Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution and Archetype by John Ryan Haule (Routledge) excerpt: The preceding twenty chapters have sought to demonstrate that Jung's dream of psychology as an architectonic science—linking the various biological specialties and setting the whole on a reliable empirical foundation—can now, in the twenty-first century, finally be realized. An evolutionary perspective now really can under-gird a dependable psychology, and we can finally appreciate what Jung meant to accomplish with the idea of "archetype." The research and the writing of this volume has been guided by the aim of Complex Psychology, namely to identify di and appreciate the patterns nested within patterns that characterize the data of the human sciences and pursues this aim much the way Jung envisaged in his unsuc- cessful journal project, Weltanschauung—by extracting the leading ideas from the I sciences, archaeology to zoology, and making them available to non-specialists. This book has pulled a great deal of material from a variety of specialties in imitation of Jung's own propensity to borrow material shamelessly, like the "accursed dilettante" he confessed himself to be.
The original purpose of all this has been to rescue Jung from his undeserved reputation as an irresponsible and muddle-headed mystic, and demonstrate that he was trying to build psychology on a firm scientific foundation, despite the sketchy nature of biological knowledge a century ago. He did so by making some very astute choices. Archetypes are the intentional dimension of instincts and structure everything we do. They are not images, as is popularly believed; and they are not found exclusively in mythology. They are the products of evolution and evidence of our place in the natural world. They do not reside in some separate spiritual substance resembling Descartes' soul—for that idea is really theological, a claim that we humans stand above and outside of nature by virtue of our immortal destiny in a Christian heaven. We all have psyches, every living organism on earth; and archetypes are patterns in the intentional process (i.e. psyche) by which every organism not only survives but seeks to thrive. Since evolutionarily we are primates, human archetypes are probably 98 percent identical with those of our cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos.
Although warmly embraced by some, these ideas have proven to be scary for other Jungians who have attended lectures I have given on this material or who have engaged me at academic meetings. If Jung's psychology has a biological basis, some have said, "Where is the magic?" Clearly they assume biology to be as devoid of "soul" as Descartes' machine-like picture of the body. Paradoxically, however, even as they apparently believe they need the hypothesis of a Cartesian soul to preserve the special numinous and magical nature of the archetypes, some also wax evangelical over the romantic idea of "embodiment." Implying that Jung was "too much in his head" (or possibly his "soul") like the mystic of popular legend, they attempt to save Analytical Psychology with techniques designed to assist people to "get into the body." They fail to realize that it is their own philosophical baggage that stands in the way of their discovering the real Jung.
An accurate reading of Jung's intentions does not begin with his brief association with Freud and conclude that he went off the rails on a mystical rampage. On the contrary, it finds his origins where he always said they were, in the "French School" of somnambulism and its investigation of altered states of consciousness. By clarifying the trend of thinking that underlies his more careful definitions of "archetype," an accurate reading of Jung discovers how rooted it is in biology and evolution. Psyche (or soul) is not some esoteric dimension of human nature, it is a universal and essential dimension of every organism. All animals have psyches, even the protozoa. Psyche is the intentional aspect of every living process. Therefore, it is inseparable from the body—inherent in every living creature and dependent upon the complexity of a creature' s anatomy and particularly its brain (if it has one) for its higher abilities.
It has been nearly three decades since Anthony Stevens (1983) diagnosed the problem with "Jungians as a group," that we have been "mesmerized . . . by archetypal symbols" and defensive about the biological implications of Analytical Psychology to the point of ignoring the "behavioral manifestations" and the "phylogenetic roots" of the archetype (Stevens 1983: 29). I would go further. We have been mesmerized by theories about symbols, as though they have no relationship to the body. Such a perspective fails to recognize the top-to-bottom structure of the archetype and the fact that the constellation of any archetype is above all a typical emotional body state. Those fascinated with symbols and their theories see only the very top of the archetypal configuration, missing the cortical and limbic changes in the brain, the alteration of autonomic nervous system balance, the dispatch of hormones and neuromodulators, bodily posture, facial expression and the like. They call for "embodiment" only because the filter of their mesmerized condition has hidden the larger physical portion of the archetype from their awareness. We have to open our eyes to the fact that symbols are the brain's interpretation of the bodily state itself and include that in our analysis of our patients. In the twenty-first century we can no longer afford to live in the stratosphere of the image alone.
We Jungians have lived, too, in the penumbra of Jung's authority. If that authority has been treated with skepticism in our monophasic society, we have chosen to view that fact with pride. Jung was a misunderstood genius who articulated insights the conventional world is not yet ready for. The effective magic of Jungian jargon-- anima, transcendent function, enantiodromia, inferior function, numinosity, ego-self axis—these words and phrases have become the secret language of initiati practicing a mystery religion, saving those blessed souls who have thought they were lost because they could not accommodate themselves to the comfortable mainstream. In working like this, we had no authority but Jung's to rely upon. We pulled sentences and images out of the Collected Works to justify our claims on the bare evidence that "Jung said so" and that it must therefore be true.
Now, however, that several scientific specialties have uncovered the biological basis for the phenomena Jung named nearly a century ago, we Jungians can begin to find the theoretical foundations of our own therapeutic interpretations, or perhaps discover that they are not as sound as we had long believed. The crucial scientific work is being "extracted" from its primary sources for us—not in a convenient single journal as Weltanschauung was designed to be—but in an endless series of well informed and well written books, many of them by the very scientists themselves who did the primary work. These are the secondary sources I have relied upon and summarized in this volume.
Widespread support from the biological sciences—as unexpected as it may seem to be—also forces us to shift some of our perspectives. Altered states of consciousness are a case in point. All Jungians surely employ them when we attend to complexes and dreams and when we practice active imagination. Jungians as a group are minimally polyphasic, but we have not recognized the wider implications of these activities—the fact that Jung, in encouraging us not to resent the irrational, has implicitly called for a much more vigorous polyphasic approach to life. In the last dozen or so years of my practice of Jungian analysis, I have found it extremely useful to attend to the spectrum of conscious states induced in me by the analysand (through limbic resonance) or implicitly reported by the analysand himself as he .describes crucial experiences from his childhood or just the past week. For to identify and experience—that is to feel—the altered states that our monophasic society denies or denigrates is to be in touch with corresponding body states. Every discrete body state generates or is induced by its own discrete state of consciousness. To feel that state is to be in touch with the archetype, top-to-bottom. Every "symbol" either induces or is the conscious evidence of a discrete state of body-and-mind. The reason for this is that the symbol appears in consciousness as a sort of report from the brain about the state of my body. This is why in the previous twenty chapters I have avoided speaking merely o