What I want to explore here are some ideas that seem at first glance inimical, but which seem to me related at a very deep level. The recent discipline of sociobiology, with its emphasis on laboratory research and careful speculative extension of ideas, may seem a polar opposite from the ideas of Jungian psychology and analysis.
What I want to explore here are some ideas that seem at first glance inimical, but which seem to me related at a very deep level. The recent discipline of sociobiology, with its emphasis on laboratory research and careful speculative extension of ideas, may seem a polar opposite from the ideas of Jungian psychology and analysis. But I think examination may reveal what one admirer has called "a surprise from sociobiology" (Barlow, 1997).The Unconscious
The unconscious is a difficult term. At its lowest common denominator, it means "stuff that I'm not aware of." But it can only include stuff that I could be aware of under the right circumstances. My unconscious would also appear to be something that is my inalienable possession, a part of me, like arms, feet, and organsparts which I may or may not be conscious of at any given moment. E. O. Wilson in another context quotes Oliver Sacks's account of something outside awareness, an injured and healing leg, returning to consciousness when he starts to use it again:
I was suddenly precipitated into a sort of perceptual delirium, an incontinent bursting-forth of representations and images unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Suddenly my leg and the ground before me seemed immensely far away, thin under my nose, then bizarrely tilted or twisted one way or another. These wild perceptions (or perceptual hypotheses) succeeded one another at the rate of several per second, and were generated in an involuntary and incalculable way. By degrees they came less erratic and wild, until finally, after perhaps five minutes and a thousand flashes, a plausible image of the leg was achieved. With this the leg suddenly felt mine and real again, and I was forthwith able to walk. (Wilson, 1978, p. 76)
What Wilson is exemplifying here is psychological schemata, configurations within the brain, "either inborn or learned, against which the input of the nerve cells is compared," which, he suggests, could serve as "the physical basis of will":
An organism can be guided in its actions by a feedback loop: a sequence of messages from the sense organs to the brain schemata and back to the sense organs and on around again until the schemata "satisfy" themselves that the correct action has been completed. The mind could be a republic of such schemata, programmed to compete among themselves for control of the decision centers, individually waxing or waning in power in response to the relative urgency of the physiological needs of the body being signaled to the conscious mind through the brain stem and midbrain. Will might be the outcome of the competition, requiring the action of neither a "little man" nor any other external agent. (p. 75-77)
This is highly speculative, as Wilson freely admits. It is summoned up as a way of explaining human behavior and evolution in a way that bypasses any necessity of a homunculus in the mind to make decisions and direct behavior. It also, perhaps unintentionally, shows a similar empirically-inspired statement of how the unconscious mind might work. The language itself"signaled to the conscious mind"reflects this idea.
Of course, unconscious mind is itself a problematical term in some frameworks. Extreme behaviorism claims that there is no consciousness whatsoever (Gregory, 1987). Also in another context, W. Freeman Twaddell remarks that "the scientific method is quite simply the convention that mind does not exist" (1935, note 8). Perhaps the unconscious, as it is usually listed in reference books, avoids these logical pitfalls, even if it is redundant.
At any rate, saying "the unconscious" or "the unconscious mind" need not be the equivalent of opening the door to astrology, divination, necromancy, and witchcraft. At least, not in the way those subjects are usually understood.
Archetypes
The notion of archetypes is associated for most of us with the study of myth and the search for analogous images, as in Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949, and many subsequent works), and that is how Jung, who originated the term in its current meaning, looked for them. The search for archetypes became a category of literary criticism that was popular before post-modernism took hold, and one that still attracts some followers.
For hard-headed types, this puts archetypes pretty much on the level of horoscopes, tea-leaf and palm reading, and fortune telling. Indeed, some Jungian analysts admit to coming to their vocations through, for example, astrology (Kulkarni, 1997). From the tough-minded point of view, Jung has become a guru for the soft-minded. Walker Percy's psychiatrist narrator of his novel The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) disparages Jung by contrasting him to Freud, who may have been wrong but at least was a scientist. Indeed, many are no doubt attracted to Jung because he appears to them unscientific and irrational, concerned with myth and dreams.
But here is what Jung says about archetypes:
Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. It can no more be a product without a history than is the body in which it exists. By "history" I do not mean the fact that the mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the past through language and other cultural traditions. I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind of archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal.
This immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind, just as much as the structure of our body is based on the general anatomical pattern of the mammal. The trained eye of the anatomist or the biologist finds many traces of this original pattern in our bodies. The experienced investigator of the mind can similarly see the analogies between dream pictures of modern man and the products of the primitive mind, its "collective images" and its mythological motifs. . .
The archetype is a tendency to form such representations ["archaic remnants" or "primordial images"] of a motifrepresentations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern. There are, for instance, many representations of the motif of the hostile brethren, but the motif remains the same. . .[The archetypes] are, indeed, an instinctive trend, as marked in the impulse of birds to build nests, or ants to form organized colonies. (1964, p. 67, 69)
It may be worth noting that this passage was composed by Jung in English not long before his death, rather than being translated from his German.
Old and New Paradigms
Jung's ideas have an old-fashioned flavor, but he was clearly thinking in terms of evolutionary biology when he formulated the concept of archetypes. Jung's initial training happened in the nineteenth century, and that means that the approach was historical. Darwin's ideas were essentially historical, or historicist, in the sense that he thought of evolution as a history of species: to understand the history of the species, finch or human being, was to understand the organism. This historical predilection gave nineteenth-century thinking a broad sweep and a preoccupation with the big picture that was inimical to the modernist movement that that sought to overthrow it (see Cantor 1997).
The paradigm of modernist science was the physics of Einstein, Bohr, and Planck. One did not look at the big picture, but at minute detail. Not at the universealthough Einstein attempted that, toobut at the atom. Coming from one of the founders of modernism, Jung's thinking looks both forward and back. After far-ranging surveys of nascent anthropology, folklore, fairy tales, myths, and the occult, Jung looked at dreams and saw the microcosm of the collective unconscious, archetypes shared by all people.
The paradigm of post-modernist science appears to be molecular biology. No longer is biology centrally concerned with the collection and classification of animals and plants, although those occupations are still important. The glamour is now in the biology of cells and their chemistry, and in DNA, which is conceived not as an organism, but as information. This is where the recent battles have been fought. Neanderthal people, for example, have been disqualified as the ancestors of modern Europeans on the basis of their DNA (see DiChristina, 1997, for a popular account). Mitochondrial DNA suggests that all modern humans are descended from a group which migrated out of Africa as recently as 100,000 year ago (for a summary of the arguments about human origins based on DNA data, see Bower, 1999). Post-modern biology, in the work of scientists like Candace Pert, may resolve the mind-body problem that has existed since the time of Descartes. This problem, Pert reminds us, is really the result of a turf deal that Descartes cut with the pope (1997, p. 18). Descartes, and science, got the body as its domain, and the church got the soul, which included the will and the feelings. Pert's research has found that there are molecules that give our cells the mood stimulation by their chemistry, and other moleculesreceptors, integral parts of the cellsto receive the stimulation. She tells the engaging story of how she discovered the opiate receptor, which receives the stimulation not only of opium and laudanum, but also of the body's own opiates, the endorphins. Not only may the feelings be in the body; they may be in the whole body, not just the hypothalamus.
The Approach of Sociobiology
Think of Jungian archetypes as constraints on behavior. Jung makes it clear that he thinks dreams, the angels of the unconscious, have a compensatory function. That is they try to pull conscious behavior into line with the unconscious and so to bring the parts of the personality, conscious and unconscious, into healthy alignment. This, as I understand it, is the goal of Jungian dream analysis.
From the sociobiological point of view, humans evolved as homo sapiens starting some 125,000 years ago. Our genetically formative stage came during the last ice age when all people were hunter-gatherers, a period which covers over ninety percent of the time humans as such have been on earth. E. O. Wilson says:
I believe that the influence [of the hereditary qualities of hunter-gatherer existence] has been substantial. In evidence is the fact that the emergence of civilization has everywhere followed a definable sequence. As societies grew in size from the tiny hunter-gatherer bands, the complexity of their organization increased by the addition of features that appeared in a fairly consistent order. (1978, p. 88)
The universality of changes from band to tribe, the appearance of leaders, and the appearance of rituals to mark the changes of season can be explained in terms of the genetic stock acquired during the ice age, but it would do no violence to the concept to call them archetypal.
As an example of the constraining effect of genetics, Wilson cites the ultimate failure of every instance of large-scale slavery. Where slavery has arisen for historical and economic reasons, in ancient Greece and Rome, in medieval Iraq, or in eighteenth-century Jamaica, human reluctance to be slaves takes over and, with other factors, eventually dooms the system (p. 80-81).
While those who wish to justify rape and the subservience of women can couch their arguments in sociobiological terms (see Bleier, 1984, p. 31-33), perhaps this need not disqualify the whole discipline from serious consideration. Logic serves any master, and, just as modernism served the purposes of fascists (see Cantor), sociobiological thinking may serve the purposes of any number of disagreeable people.
Nevertheless, in outline, sociobiology's genetic constraints on behavior appear consistent with archetypes as Jung conceived them, and arose in both theories from the same source. Archetypes relate the individual to the species for Jung. Sociobiology offers the possibility of relating the society to its own roots for balancing and centering.
From Opposite Directions
Do I think that Jung and Wilson are saying the same thing at some level? Yes and no. In his analysis of the style changes in poetry and the arts, psychologist Colin Martindale uses the terms primordial cognition and primordial content to indicate the kind of changes poets make between major style changes to increase the arousal potential of their work. Martindale uses the terms descriptively to avoid theoretical bias, but he points out that primordial cognition is roughly the same as Freud's primary process cognition, which is "free-associative, concrete, irrational, and autistic. . . the thought of dreams and reveries. In more extreme forms, it is the thought of psychosis and delirium" (1990, p. 56) Secondary-process cognition is everyday, logical, and abstract. Jung made a similar distinction between logos and eros, and earlier Nietzsche made his well-known distinction between the apollonian and the dionysian. Earlier still, as far back as the Pre-Socratic philosopers, the Greeks made a distinction between thymos, the active, context dependent, rational and mortal part of the person that controls day-to-day living; and psyche, the passive, receptive, and immortal part of the person (Ballard, 1971). The distinction seems to have been around for a long time in one form or another.
Jungian analysis clearly depends heavily on eros, primary process, dionysian, psyche, and their messages to the logos or secondary process. Jungians also see the conscious mind as a rider on a much larger unconscious, which it may cooperate with for a smooth ride, or fight against for a rough one. E. O. Wilson makes his position clear in his recent attempt at a unification of knowledge (Consilience, 1998) when he says, early on, that he thinks the Enlightenment had it almost all right. The effect of this position is that, with a number of psychologists, he is apt to think that the phrase "conscious mind" or "conscious thought" is redundant. If there is an unconscious, it resides in the genetic code and the chemical and neurological processes of the body. It is revealed by painstaking research and experimentation, conscious activities. The unconscious, whatever it may or may not be, is pretty much irrelevant to what the scientist actually does.
While, as it appears to me, Jung's concept of archetypes and Wilson's idea of biologically conditioned restraints on behavior may not be fundamentally contradictory, may even be able to coexist in the same mental space, so to speak, the emphasis could hardly be more different. For one thing, Jung's interest was in therapy. As a doctor, he was primarily interested in helping his patients, as Jungian therapists must remain with their clients. Wilson's entire ethos is that of the research scientist, and science is above all a way of knowing. The theory-hypothesis-experiment-revision model of the scientific method guarantees that only a limited kind of data-dependent knowledge will be generated. Wilson as a philosopher is in what Ballard identifies as the strain of modern philosophy deriving from David Hume, which culminates in scientific humanism and analytic philosophy.
[This strain] limits man's mind to preoccupation with discursive reason seeking technologically to master the cosmos and other men. It views man as an object among objects, his good as achievable by alteration of the external world, his history as subject eventually to control, his fate as "external." (p. 272)
This position clearly puts this kind of philosophy at odds with Jungian thought, since it serves thymos exclusively and in effect refuses to admit the existence of the range of human experience that was for Jung the most pervasive and important: psyche. When Wilson approaches what seem to be archetypes, he has to do it by a roundabout route through genetics and neurophysiology. To Jungians, this must seem like furtively searching birth records to find out how old your friends are when you could just ask them. Still, discursive reason must have its place in any discipline, and the insights of sociobiology may prove valuable, even stimulating, to people of other persuasions, even analytic psychology.
The other strain in modern philosophy departments, as identified by Ballard, are the existentialists, who recognize the irrational and see philosophy's purpose as primarily therapeutic, the fulfillment of the self. This emphasis on therapy would certainly align this strain of philosophy but for one fact. Jung was an essentialist. (1)
That is, he believed that there was an essence of human nature, which he called the self and which was manifest mostly in the unconscious. The motto of at least French existentialism, "existence precedes essence," doesn't mean exactly that we have no souls, but it does mean that we are born without them. The only souls we have are the ones we create for ourselves. There can be no hereditary, collective unconscious in the face of this dictum.
Bioesthetics, Bioethics, Bioreligion
In Consilience, his attempt to unify knowledge, Wilson attempts to lay the foundation for disciplines usually thought to be off-limits for science and analytic philosophy, usually placed in the humanities. And at least one large-scale attempt has been made to follow his lead in religion (Barlow, Green Space, Green Time: The Way of Science, 1997). The meaning of human life is stated in terms of evolutionary and molecular biology, and its goal is the preservation of biodiversity. Ethics seems to be a fairly evident part of this package.
However, "the most interesting challenge to consilient explanation is the transit from science to the arts," as Wilson says (1998, p. 210). Perhaps here Jung and Wilson have a true meeting of the minds. Here is Wilson's summary of the "narrative of coevolution of genes and culture:
During human evolution there was time enough for natural selection to shape the processes of innovation.
The variation was to some degree heritable.
Genetic evolution inevitably ensued.
Universals of near-universals emerged in the evolution of culture.
The arts are innately focused toward certain forms and themes but are otherwise freely constructed. (p. 217-218)
The goals and methods of this style of criticism is very nearly the same as the what used to be called archetype criticism. The language is at least similar: Wilson uses the word archetypes in the very next sentence. But there is a new interest, maybe even a new vigor, from biology. Here is Wilson's statement about metaphors, which actually comes in the last bulleted statement above:
The archetypes spawn legions of metaphors that compose not only a large part of the arts but also of ordinary communication. Metaphors, the consequence of spreading activation of the brain during learning, are the building blocks of creative thought. They connect and synergistically strengthen different spheres of memory.
Some years ago, I heard a young woman read a paper expounding the archetypes in I don't remember which work of literature. She faced an aggressive question from the floor which demanded to know, if there are archtypes, where are they? If there is an unconscious, where is that? In my memory, she didn't have a very good answer. Maybe now she does. They're in your genes, Bub, in your DNA.
Orestes had killed his mother and was pursued by the furies. At the end of the Oresteia, he argues, with the support of Apollo, that he has suffered enough; he has been purged. He is acquitted by an Athenian jury, and Athena is able to talk the furies down so that they become the Eumenides, or nice ladies. The trilogy surely reflects the heady confidence in the wake of the Athenian victory over the Persians. We can overturn the age-old archetype of vengeance and violence, it seems to say. We can do anything we want to.
Those who need to see human beings as totally malleable tend to throw in their lot with the existentialists, who make everyone responsible for his or her every action. Perhaps this explains the popularity of existentialism in the sixties, when I studied it, and when to the young everything seemed possible.
Are we then still acting out an archetype? Later in the fifth century BCE, with the Peloponnesian War looming, Oedipus tries to escape his fate by running away. Jocasta scoffs at prophecy and, by implication, at the gods themselves. And Oedipus becomes the willing sacrifice to those same gods, the old way, tradition. We can do anything we want to, says the Oresteia. No, says Oedipus. No, you can't.
1 I owe this insight to Dr. Gwen Sorrell Sell, who has been kind enough to read my work and discuss some of the issues with me.
References
Ballard, Edward G. (1971). Philosophy at the crossroads. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Barlow, Connie. (1997). Green space, green time: The way of science. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Bleier, Ruth. (1984). Science and gender: A critique of biology and its theories on women. New York: Pergamon Press.
Bower, Bruce. (1999, March 20). DNA data yield new human-origins view. Science News, 155 (12), 181. Georgia Library Learning Online, accessed 26 August, 1999.
Campbell, Joseph. (1968, c.1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cantor, Norman F. (1997). The American century: Varieties of culture in modern times. New York: HarperCollins.
DiChristina, Mariette. (1997, October). Distant relations. Popular Science, 251 (4), 36. Georgia Library Learning Online, accessed 27 August, 1999.
Gregory, Richard L., ed. (1987). The Oxford companion to the mind. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Jung, Carl G. (1964). Approaching the unconscious. In Carl G. Jung, et al. Man and his symbols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Kulkarni, Claudette. (1997). On being a lesbian Jungian: A self-interview. C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, and Culture. Website. http://www.cgjungpage.org/kulkar1.html. Accessed 9 August, 1999.
Martindale, Colin. (1990). The clockwork muse: The predictability of artistic change. New York: Basic Books.
Percy, Walker. (1987). The thanatos syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
Pert, Candace B. (1997). Molecules of emotion: Why you feel the way you feel. New York: Scribners.
Wilson, Edward O. (1978). On human nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
__________. (1998). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Thom Harrison
Division of Humanities
Macon State College
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