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 a quarter of that time. On the one hand, pessimism: psychoanalysis, in its several varieties, was a major cultural force in the twentieth century but has waned significantly in recent decades. Its standing as a "science" -- once loudly proclaimed but always somewhat questionable -- has become precarious with recent advances in brain research. [1] Furthermore, within the world of psychoanalysis, Jung has generally been marginalized as a "mystic" who dispensed with science in favor of dubious superstitions. Today he is known, perhaps primarily, as the psychologist of the New Age, that congeries of light-headed, even crackpot, claims. [2] Despite such good reasons for pessimism, however, I am also optimistic. Recent developments in evolutionary biology -- brain organization and function, animal behavior, genetics, and evolutionary psychology -- 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 recently been given prominence by Harvard sociobiologist, E. O. Wilson, to mean that when facts and theories from different disciplines all point in the same direction, they implicitly support one another and jointly contribute to their mutual likelihood of being proven correct. They "create a common groundwork of explanation" (Wilson, 1998: 8).

          Jung has not been understood, certainly not by critics who are satisfied to dismiss him for being a mystic, and not even by most of his followers, among whom I count myself: serious-minded, trained analysts who frequently cite chapter and verse of Jung's Collected Works to defend the wisdom of what we do with our patients day-in and day-out. Historian Sonu Shamdasani has recently taken us to task on this point in what is surely the most complete and challenging study yet produced on the origins and intentions of Jung's work:

Analytical psychology today is largely a professional psychotherapeutic discipline with a problematic relation to the widespread non-professional readership of Jung. His attempt to establish a general psychology has taken a back seat, though it lingers in the background, playing a legitimating role. On a number of instances, Jung also expressed himself very critically concerning some of his followers, such as in the following statement: "There have been so many pupils of mine who have fabricated every sort of rubbish from what they took over from me" [3] (Shamdasani, 2003: 14).

          My contention is that Jung dreamed the dream of the biological and human sciences at a time when a synthesis of those disciplines had little empirical justification. But he did so with amazing prescience. By the hundredth anniversary of his birth, a decade and a half after his death, evidence was finally beginning to appear that the human body-and-mind is organized by inherited structures that are essentially indistinguishable from what Jung called archetypes. In the last thirty years, the evidence has become overwhelming. Therefore, the time has come to tell the story of this 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."

          Among the 200 or more books outside the field of Analytical Psychology that I have read in preparation for this account, only E. O. Wilson's Consilience mentions Jung's doctrine of the archetypes as a possible contribution to the synthesis of knowledge that is presently going on. But Wilson adds that archetypal theory has never been sufficiently developed (Wilson, 1998: 85). Among Jungian analysts, only the British psychiatrist Anthony Stevens has 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 can today "command more than esoteric interest if it fails to take account of biology, physics, and neurophysiology" (Ibid., 32). Jungians like ourselves, however, have been reluctant to investigate the biological and behavioral foundations of the archetypes. We have never searched for their "phylogenetic roots." Instead, we have been "mesmerized by archetypal symbols" (Ibid., 29).

          In the end, however, Stevens has been too much a specialist, too much focused as a psychiatrist, to do the work that needs to be done to (a) show the broad consilience between Jung and the modern biological synthesis and (b) use this knowledge to begin the process of rethinking the doctrine of the archetypes and developing it on the basis of this consilience. [4] The job requires a shameless dilettante, hard-working and curious, someone who has a yen for facts and the patience to sift through mountains of them and for theories from differing disciplines. Jung viewed himself as a dilettante of this type, "constantly borrow[ing] knowledge from others." [5] Indeed, only someone who is familiar with archaeology, anthropology, evolution, ethology (the study of animal behavior), sociology, neurology, genetics, mythology, and philology could hope to establish a reliable psychology of the type to which Jung aspired

Jung's Dream of a Fundamental Science [6]

          Jung's scientific ambitions manifested as soon as he finished his medical degree and accepted an appointment to the Zurich mental asylum, Burghölzli, where he apprenticed himself to Alexander von Muralt and began studying cross-sections of the brains of schizophrenics under a microscope. Von Muralt, however, was apathetic, eventually stopped visiting the laboratory and took up photography. He told Jung that brain dissection was "just a sport." Jung took the hint and also gave up brain anatomy (Shamdasani, 2003: 45f). He then turned to the Word Association Experiment, where he first made a name for himself by establishing the empirical foundations of neurotic dissociation. The patient was to say the first word that came to mind after one of a hundred common, everyday words had been pronounced (table, bed, mother, good, etc). Jung recorded the time elapsed between pronouncing the stimulus word and receiving the patient's response, thereby uncovering emotional blockages that organized themselves into "complexes" or sub-personalities. 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). The success of this work and the fact that it seemed to support Freud's theory of repression 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 this period was heralded 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. . . .

My then historical interests had developed from my original preoccupation with comparative anatomy and paleontology when I worked as an assistant at the Anatomical Institute. 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 [7] (CW18: 485f). [8]

          This account claims for the dream a clear description of the layered psyche of Jung's theories, as they developed over the following two decades. There was the "personal unconscious" with its lived-in familiarity, and layers of a cultural unconscious: everyone was talking about Darwin's theory of evolution, but Kant and Schopenhauer belonged to previous centuries and contributed in a manner that worked in the background of Jung's childhood world. Then there was the medieval theocracy that reigned in the pastor's quarters, where Jung lived with his parents: both a dimension of his personal unconscious as well as a deep cultural strand that had survived for many centuries. Finally, at the bottom of the house, were the skulls of hominid species -- one a recognizable species of Homo and the other a precursor, literally an "ape-man" (although Pithecanthropus is now classified as Homo erectus, an "archaic human" who lived more than one and a half million years ago). A layered psyche more-or-less like this one, and the lifeworld it describes, was not peculiar to himself, Jung believed, but belongs to everyone.

          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, only weeks after his formal break with Freud, Jung 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.

. . . The collaboration of all these forces points towards the distant goal of a genetic psychology, which will clear our eyes for medical psychology, just as comparative anatomy has already done in regard to the structure and function of the human body (Letters 1: 29f).

          In a lecture to the Association for Analytical Psychology in 1916, Jung declared that the collective psyche is inherited (Shamdasani, 2003: 232); and two years later he clarified that it is not ideas that are inherited but "the innate possibilities of ideas, a priori conditions for fantasy-production, which are somewhat similar to Kant's categories" (CW10: 14). In 1919, he used the word archetype for the first time in a symposium on "Instinct and the Unconscious" organized by the British Psychological Association, the Aristotelian Society, and the Mind Association (Shamdasani, 2003: 241). In 1932, the publisher of Rhein Verlag invited Jung to edit a new journal, to be called Weltanschauung, which Jung described in a letter to the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer:

I have been thinking that in view of the tremendous fragmentation of the sciences today we might well have an organ that could 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. . . . The fact that I am supposed to head such a project will show you in what sort of spirit it ought to be conducted. It should be an instrument of synopsis and synthesis -- an antidote against the atomizing tendency of specialism which is one of the greatest obstacles to spiritual development (Letters 1: 106f).

By the time he wrote to Zimmer, Jung had already lined up sub-editors for Indology, nuclear physics, Buddhism, philosophy, psychotherapy, and modern literature; he was looking for editors for biology, astrophysics, geology, physiology, Egyptology, Assyrian-Babylonian archaeology, and American archaeology (Shamdasani, 2003: 21).

          Although the journal 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, the Casa Gabriella, on the shore of Lago Maggiore, near the town of Ascona in the Italian canton of Switzerland (Bair, 2003: 412ff). Almost simultaneously, Jung established a Psychological Foundation for a lectureship at the ETH, the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute, in Zurich. The conditions for the lectureship were as follows:

The treatment of psychology should in general be characterized by the principle of universality. No special theory or special subject should be propounded, but psychology should be taught in its biological, ethnological, medical, philosophical, culture-historical, and religious aspects (Shamdasani, 2003: 15).

          In the 1930's, while all these "universalizing" activities were going on, Jung inaugurated a shift in terminology. He stopped calling his school "Analytical Psychology" and began to call it "Complex Psychology." By that shift, he meant to de-emphasize his therapeutic interests in favor of his aspiration to found a general psychology, one that would be broadly inclusive as the above quotations suggest, one that would be characterized, not by the distinctiveness of its doctrines, but rather by the openness of its complexity. Shamdasani found a description of what Jung had in mind, written in 1954 in Jung's own hand, in the margin of an article by the American psychologist, Calvin Hall, "Jung's Analytical Psychology." The article, with Jung's marginal notes, resides in the collection of Jung's papers kept at the Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, Boston. The note reads: "Complex psychology means the psychology of `complexities' i.e. of complex psychical systems in contradistinction from relatively elementary factors" (Ibid., 14). As we shall see in subsequent chapters of this book, only an open-endedness of this type can do justice to the nested and overlapping "mental modules" (archetypes) described by evolutionary psychology and the "emergent processes" by which a relatively small number of genes underlie complex patterns of anatomy, physiology, and behavior.

          Finally, in 1948, in his inaugural address at the opening the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Jung listed the important projects that he felt he had left unfinished in the course of his life. Some items deal with the collection and categorizing of world-wide symbolism, but most deal with collecting empirical data on case histories, dreams and the waking life of the dreamer, comparative symbolism in the hallucinations of paranoid patients, the nature of emotional stressors in the manifestations of the complexes, childhood dreams, dreams related to catastrophes and death, the psychic structure of the family and its relation to heredity, the history of literature, the psychology of religion, ethnopsychology, epistemology, and more (Shamdasani, 2003: 346f). It is an impressive list, the regrets of a dilettante with an enormous curiosity and capacity for work who knew his project would never be done, that it would require an army of assistants to carry out his dream of an architectonic science of the mind. Apparently he had hoped the students and faculty of the Jung Institute would take up the work; but they have done little in the past sixty years. What is encouraging at this point, however, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, is that there is already a vast army out there working on the evolutionary biology underlying the human sciences. It is just that most of them have no idea they are working on the fulfillment of Jung's dream.

A Look Back at Twentieth Century Social Science

          A century ago, in 1900, little had been established that might have formed a scientific foundation for psychology. Neurology was making a few discoveries that did not yet hold together to comprise a consistent picture -- even the nature and function of the neuron was poorly understood. Evolution as a theory was established only in the most general sense; the rules that govern it were not yet guessed; and the crucial role of genetics in the process still awaited the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work with pea plants together with his intuition of dominant and recessive genes. [9] The scientific study of animal behavior (ethology) had gone little beyond the phenomenon of Clever Hans, the calculating Austrian horse. Ethology had to wait till the 1930's when Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen established it foundations. The French hypnotists (Charcot, Janet, and before them Azam and Despine, early in the nineteenth century) had learned that the psyche is constituted by a conscious portion and an unconscious portion and that splits between them are variable and somehow related to pathological factors, possibly 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, but rather isolated from the scientific main stream. Jung clearly thought that Freud was on to something, but he believed such pre-scientific speculations ought to be made upon the basis of solid biological facts, especially upon what little was known of evolution. 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. Darwin's classic opponent has always been seen to be Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) and his theory of "acquired characteristics" -- for instance that the giraffe gradually "stretched" its neck, passing on the gain from one generation to the next. 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). The critical development that first suggested how the theory of natural selection could be established scientifically was the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work during the first decade of the twentieth century. Until it was realized that the units of inheritance are relatively unchangeable entities (genes), the vehicle that selection acts upon had not been identified. The "modern synthesis" of genetics and natural selection was forged between the years 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 and that psychology needed was not established until Jung was seventy-eight years-old. 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.

          The scientific hopes of psychologists, however, did not await these developments; and they certainly did not follow Jung. Lacking a dependable biological foundation onto which to build a psychology, a sociology and an anthropology, social scientists developed what has come to be known as the "Standard Social Science Model." [10] The SSSM, as it is often called, assumes that biology has a negligible effect upon human behavior. Animals are moved biologically, by their instincts, while human behavior is determined by culture. Culture controls us far more than we wish to acknowledge, but it is "mental" and not "biological. Our mind frees us from the determinism of matter, but shackles us with psychological determinism. The job of psychology, within the SSSM, was to discover the laws by which we are driven to behave as we do. Since everything we know is cultural, we are born knowing nothing, with only rudimentary reflexes to protect us. At birth our mind is a "blank slate" (tabula rasa), [11] waiting to be written upon, nearly indelibly, by our culture. Behaviorism asked what inputs from culture would cause an individual to behave a certain way. The behaviorists measured inputs (stimuli) and outputs (behaviors) and ignored the mind itself. They thought of it as a "black box" whose unfathomable innards would simply be a distraction from the inputs and outputs that could be measured. They aspired to a science as clean and hard as physics to free themselves from the stickiness of biology.

          Lying behind the tabula rasa assumption in the Standard Social Science Model, lies the famous nature/nurture debate. Behaviorism took a firm stand: everything interesting about us is the result of nurture, of what happens to us in the course of our lives. Jung opposed this view as strongly as present-day evolutionary psychologists do; for once armed with the notion of archetypes or "mental modules," psychology can no longer draw a line between nature and nurture. It is no longer a question of which one of them is responsible for a given behavior, genes alone or experience alone. It is also not a question of what percentage of our behavior is due to each. Rather, everything is both. We inherit the structures that make our experience what it is and give it a species-specific shape. But these inherited structures can only be used in the particular cultural context into which we are 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).

          Jung's notion of archetypes belongs to this discussion. For the archetype is "a biological entity . . . acting . . . in a manner very similar to the innate releasing mechanism much later postulated [in the 1930's] by the ethologist, Niko Tinbergen" (Stevens, 1983: 39). The study of animal minds, too, had been brought to a halt during the academic prominence of behaviorism, when social science was allowed to study only the stimulus/response patterns of overtly observable behavior. Ironically, what restored the notion that animals may also have minds was the development of computers and the change in mental paradigms they inspired (Griffin, 1992: 6f). As we shall see in succeeding chapters, however, the maturation of the Darwinian paradigm has restored the continuity of humanity's place within the Animal Kingdom. Archetypes, as Jung intuited eighty or ninety years ago, are universal in living beings. Every human archetype has evolved from a pre-human precursor. As a result, what goes on in animal minds is highly relevant to our understanding of our own.

The Task Ahead

          The failure of the Standard Social Science Model has become evident in the past quarter century, as biology and the social sciences -- armed with evidence for the inheritance of neuronal tracts and associated behavior patterns -- can no longer isolate humanity from the rest of the living universe and treat the mind as a tabula rasa. Now the biochemical processes taking place in and between the neurons, and the way bundles of them communicate with others shows us what is occurring inside the "black box" of the mind. We can no longer overlook such sets of complexities, or where they come from -- their millions-of-years-long heritage. Now it is not only possible, but 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.

          Anthropologists are starting to sound so much like Jung that it should not be hard for Analytical Psychologists to listen in and see if we might have something to contribute to the conversation. 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 has a special interest in how humans build societies while relying on such inherited propensities. He insists that no account of the human condition can be taken seriously if it ignores the five million and more years of natural selection that have made us what we are (Ibid., 207). He lists more than twenty patterns human society would be sure to manifest if some new Adam and Eve, kept separate from the rest of humanity, were to be allowed to propagate new generations of humans 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 (Ibid., 22).

          Analytical Psychologists nod knowingly when they hear such claims. Jung said pretty much the same things eighty years ago. He did not do the research, and he did not know many who agreed with such notions. He just had a damn good hunch. In the end, however, it is not enough that Jung dreamed the dream science was dreaming and did so with prescience. Science does more than dream; it tests the hypotheses it conjures up, discards some of them, and refines others as the evidence suggests. Hunches always lead the way; it is the testing and refinement that keeps them viable. A theory of archetypes risks becoming nothing more than a "folk theory of psychology" [12] if its consilience with the other fields in the grand Darwinian synthesis is not tended to.

          Consilience is the key. When theories are consilient with an era's reigning paradigms, they may be taken seriously by other specialists and by the intelligent public. "Exotic" theories, those that appear untestable -- even if they speak the truth -- have to be held in mental brackets. We say they have "their own sort of truth," the kind that lives in the world of hunches and mystical transports. Not the kind of truth an ethologist living beside a troop of baboons learns about how they organize their political life and whether they practice adultery.

          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 America, 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).

          Although it can hardly be denied that Taylor has accurately described much of what Analytical Psychology has become -- and even what Jung deliberately crafted -- Jung's aspirations for Complex Psychology are rather different. A psychology that contributes to the quality and meaning of our lives by reshaping the cultural dialogue rather than shunning it -- surely the sort of psychology that both Freud and Jung dreamed of creating -- can do so in one of only two ways: by seducing the world or by joining the conversation. The seduction ploy works when a new cultural force manages to change the dialogue, luring culture down new pathways with new language, new metaphors and new rituals. Psychoanalysis tried this course first, and succeeded marvelously. But it never completely shed the suspicion that it was just a damn good set of hunches rather than a self-evident truth, a transparent description of reality. Today, the seduction is faltering, the affair is cooling off. All schools of psychoanalysis, perhaps especially Analytical Psychology, are in danger of being relegated to what Eugene Taylor calls the "shadow culture." Cultural forces that persist for centuries generally do so by joining the conversation, if not right from the beginning, then eventually.

          Thus, Analytical Psychology runs the risk not only of becoming a "folk theory" of psychology but of becoming 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, the underground religions -- usually spin-offs from rural regions, especially those in the East -- 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 very likely they are 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 right to do so; for such words and such metaphors may harbor a great wisdom.

          It seems that Jung foresaw this dilemma seventy years ago, when he was making all those efforts 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 must have seen that Analytical Psychology was in danger of becoming an alternative worldview, something destined to live underground like the mystery religions of late antiquity. 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. In this first decade of the twenty-first century, it seems that the time for Complex Psychology has finally arrived.

          Archetypal hypotheses may someday become testable; but if so, the tests will likely be performed in the laboratories or digs or observation centers of other academic specialties that are at work under the cultural 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: whether they are truly consilient or how they might be modified to increase their consilience. In keeping with this aim, I shall no longer speak of Analytical Psychology, but rather of Complex Psychology or the psychology of complexities.

          The first step in this program will be to sketch in some detail a single human archetype: language. Language is an ideal starting point because it is familiar, easily defined, easy to observe, and broadly studied. Much can be said about language as an "innate propensity" that requires "environmental input" in the form of one's mother tongue. Brain tracts have been identified and DNA is implicated. Finally, its hereditary background has been traced into our primate lineage. Chapter Two will consist in a wide borrowing of evidence regarding the shape of the language archetype and will conclude with an outline of what may be expected of any archetype.

          Chapter Three explores our primate heritage and the patterns within patterns that comprise the complexity of primate life. Specifically, we will concentrate on three major patterns: sociality, attunement to the physical world, and attunement to the world of living beings. What distinguishes humans from other primates is the ability to talk about and to abstract the principles that lie behind our embeddedness in the world. Human creativity exploded in the High Paleolithic (roughly 40,000 years ago), when our ancestors learned to integrate those three central archetypes with the fourth, language. The Ice Age cave paintings represent the high point of this development.

          Chapter Four takes up the problematic issue of the cultural archetypes, patterns that retain an identity of structure from one culture to another, although their imagery, rules, and rituals may differ. Here, we have to distinguish the effects of genes from those of what Richard Dawkins (1976/89) calls "memes," a distinction Jung expressed by distinguishing between the collective unconscious (which is inherited and rests ultimately on the genes) and collective consciousness (which is the result of social inducements, memes).

          Chapter Five looks to research on the patterns of neuronal activation in the brain that make consciousness possible. Such research permits us to ask questions about whether there is any evidence of central organization: something like a decision-making ego and the center of a larger whole -- the entire psyche, comprising both conscious and unconscious portions -- what Jung calls the "self." This investigation allows us to ask in what sense Jung's dream of the several-layered house accurately describes the patterns of complexities discovered by other specialties under the Darwinian umbrella.

          Now that we have roughly sketched the structure of the psyche (Chapters Three to Five), we shall put everything in motion and speak of psychodynamics in Chapter Six. The archetype of the Great Mother represents a ubiquitous pattern -- not only in human psyches, but in those of primates, indeed of all mammals and even of birds. The Great Mother is rich in patterns nested within and overlapping with others. Only a psychology of complexities is capable of describing such things, including the myriad patterns of relationship by which we, women and men, engage with "the feminine."

          Humans have been deliberately altering their consciousness, at least since the last Ice Age, if theories of cave art have any credibility. Chapter Seven borrows evidence from several fields to show how varied and ubiquitous altered states of consciousness are. Science has been reluctant to investigate them in a purely descriptive and curious manner. They have been studied mostly as pathological states. The fact that Jung took a broader view has much to do with his reputation for being a mystic.

          Jung's challenge to the scientific mainstream is supported by philosopher/historian Bertrand Méheust (1999, 2003), biologist Rupert Sheldrake (1995, 2003) and psychologist Kenneth Ring (1982, 1986, 1992), among others. The crucial shift they recommend is to stop asking whether a given behavior is "normal" and begin asking why it is what it is. Humans must have something to gain in changing their consciousness. What advantages do these altered states of consciousness provide?

 

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1. There have been neurological studies that aim to support fundamental Freudian positions (cf. Solms & Turnbull, 2002), though I am not sure they are any more convincing than Dollard & Miller (1950) were a half century ago, when they tried to reconcile Freud with behaviorism.
   
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2. Elsewhere (Haule, 1999) I have shown that, contrary to prevailing notions, there is a cultural foundation and unity behind New Age claims that extend more than 2000 years into our Western past. Fully understood, New Age phenomena point to a kind of "truth" that science has not wished to investigate. It is a sector of reality, however, with which Jung was passionately concerned and which will be discussed in later chapters of this book.
   
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3. Citing a letter to Jürg Fierz, January 13, 1949, Letters 1: 518).
   
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4. Stevens has been satisfied with the support of his first analyst, the biologist Irene Champernowne, who told him "Archetypes are biological entities . . . archetypes evolved through natural selection" (Stevens, 1983: 17).
   
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5. The octogenarian Jung, said: "I am the most cursed dilettante that has lived. I wanted to achieve something in my science and then I was plunged into this stream of lava, and then had to classify everything. That's why I say dilettantism: I live from borrowings, I constantly borrow knowledge from others" (Shamdasani, 2003: 22; citing the "protocols" of interviews and written material that Aniela Jaffé used to produce Jung's "autobiography," Jung, 1961).
   
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6. My argument in this section is heavily indebted to Sonu Shamdasani (2003).
   
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7. In fact, Freud fainted on two occasions when Jung brought up such matters. He said (not without cogency) they symbolized Jung's unconscious wish to "kill the father."
   
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8. References to Jung's Collected Works will be given as volume number (CW18) followed by the paragraph number of the passage.
   
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9. Johan (Gregor) Mendel (1822-84), an Augustinian monk in Brno, who published the results of his pure-bred and cross-bred pea-plants in the 1860's. "His greatest conceptual innovation was to regard heritable factors determining characters as atomistic and material particles which neither fused nor blended with one another" (Thain & Hickman, 2000). These "atomistic" particles that neither fuse nor blend are essentially what we mean today, when we speak of genes.
   
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10. Credit for this phrase belongs to psychologist Leda Cosmides and her anthropologist husband, John Tooby, who established the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1994 (Horgan, 1999: 170).
    
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11. The notion of tabula rasa, which Jung never failed to ridicule, originated with the philosopher, John Locke in the mid seventeenth century, as a deliberate rejection of Plato's notion that we have innate ideas (Plotkin, 1998: 172).
    
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12. A theory of heredity without genetic data, says "molecular anthropologist" Jonathan Marks, is "not a scientific theory of heredity, but a folk theory of heredity" (Marks, 2002: 91).