Carl Jung

Archetypes and Synchronicity

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PAULI SHOWED THAT BENEATH MATTER, abstract pattern determines the behaviour of matter in a noncausal way.[i]

The ‘theory of synchronicity’ originally grew out of Jung’s psychotherapeutic experiences and his theory of archetypal symbols, as well as meanings in alchemy. While Jung had talked about “synchronicism’ as early as 1929, in particular with regard to Eastern philosophy and the I-Ching, it was thanks to the new quantum physics, particularly Heisenberg’s ‘principle of uncertainty’ and Pauli’s ‘exclusion principle’ that the theory could be expanded further with new scientific plausibility.[ii]

In collaboration with Pauli, Jung explored the question of hidden symmetry within the universe from the perspectives of both physics and psychology and published his ideas on synchronicity.[iii]

SYNCHRONICITY IS DESCRIBED variously as “the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning” and “acausal parallelisms”.[iv] As with archetypes, essential to synchronicity is meaning.

Jung’s position was that while causal explanations of natural events, inherited from the modern scientific view, are valid for explaining much of what occurs in nature and experience, they are insufficient to explain all.[v] Phenomena exist which “cannot be explained causally unless one permits oneself the most fantastic ad hoc hypotheses”.[vi] As Cosgrove states:

“Jung’s position would find some agreement from scientific ‘realists’ and critics like Paul Feyerabend. Relativity theory indicates that space and time may be reduced to zero under certain conditions where, logically, linear causality becomes impossible. It collapses distinctions between being and becoming. Only an enduring unity, or an inexplicable discontinuity make sense under these conditions, description becomes purely contextual. To accept this unity may render us silent. But characteristically humans seek to create meaning and do so through metaphor. The metaphors of synchronicity are those of harmony and correspondence… This principle of meaning cannot be grasped through empirical observation or measurement, but rather apprehended phenomenologically, below the intellectual level of formal science.”[vii]

Charles Card has argued that if quantum mechanics led to a revolution in physics, it is a revolution not yet completed. There is the mystery of non-locality at its heart – in other words the phenomenon where measurements made at the microscopic level refute local realism and are independent of our description of how nature operates. This may entail deeper and more fundamental changes to our scientific weltbild, world view, than those already taken place. Card concludes that quantum non-locality “is the most dramatic indication of the possibility of archetypal order in quantum phenomena”.[viii]

Archetypal Holographic Universe

THE ‘HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE’ idea, or holographic model, has also been suggested as a mechanism for explaining the existence of archetypes.[ix] Theoretical physicist David Bohm argues that behind the quantum lies an even deeper reality which he called the implicate order, which causes apparently random quantum processes to unfold as they do. The implicate order is “enfolded” in the explicate order or manifest reality detectable at the quantum level and the level of everyday experiences. Interestingly, de Quincey draws links between the theory of Bohm and Jung:

“Like Bohm, Carl Jung proposed that below the conscious mind lies the unconscious psyche, and that below causal matter lies the realm of indeterminate quantum events. Deeper still, below both the level of unconscious psyche and quantum events, lies the realm of a-causal archetypes. Jung called it the “unus mundus,” an indivisible continuum of “psychoid” events. (“Psychoid” means of the nature of both psyche and matter). The archetypes can never be known directly; they can only be inferred from their effects on the conscious psyche (eg. in dreams via the unconscious) and on material objects (eg. patterning of physical processes via quantum events).”[x]

Evidence from psychiatrist Stanislav Grof indicates that archetypal images can be modelled by the holographic idea; that holography’s success at modeling many different aspects of the archetypal experience suggests that there is a deep link between holographic processes and the way archetypes are produced; and that evidence of a hidden, holographic order surfaces virtually every time one experiences a nonordinary state of consciousness.[xi]

Holist physicist, philosopher and author F. David Peat, states that Pauli was fascinated with the idea that just as Jung had identified the objective element within the collective psyche, physics would have to come to terms with the subjective aspects of matter, which he termed “the irrational”.[xii] Pauli found this dualism between objective and subjective especially significant and indicative that there was a much deeper connection between mind and matter:

“Below the everyday appearances of matter, in which the scientist acts as an impartial observer, are encountered quantum processes in which observer and observed are intimately linked. Below this level, Heisenberg and others have hinted, there may no longer exist a fundamental ground of matter but, rather, fundamental symmetries and ordering principles.”[xiii]

At their deepest, the subjective layers of matter and the objective layers of the mind are hidden from direct perception. Their existence can only be inferred from their impacts at higher levels. It is possible that below quantum phenomena there is a new, nonmaterial level of symmetry. Could it be, asks Peat, that below the collective unconsciousness there is something beyond mind; “a fundamental dynamic ordering perhaps? … (whereby) … At such a level the division between mind and matter would no longer apply and the domain of creative ordering and objective intelligence would have their ground”.[xiv]

Recent support for Jung’s theory of archetypes has come from Christopher Isham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, whose main research interests are quantum gravity and foundational studies in quantum theory. He has linked space and time and the development in quantum theory of the space-time continuum with progress in philosophical and psychological thought from Plato to Kant to Jung.[xv]

‘Emergence Theory’ which involves the shift away from materialist, mechanistic reductionism that has dominated the modernist scientific world view, towards mental causation which is not reducible to physical causation, also gives further support for archetypal theory.[xvi] Also, Christopher Hauke argues that while the writing of Jung and post-Jungians has been ignored as “anachronistic”, “archaic” and “mystic”, it is more relevant now than ever before. Not only is it a response to modernity, it offers a critique of modernity and Enlightenment values which brings it into line with postmodernism.[xvii] As has been shown, postmodernism is inherent to both quantum physics and archetypal epistemology

[i] Peat (1988) Synchronicity, 17.
[ii] Ibid, 22.
[iii] Ibid, 34.
[iv] Ibid, 23.
[v] Denis Cosgrove, ‘Environmental Thought and Action: Pre-modern and Post-modern’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 15 (1990), 352.
[vi] Ibid, 352. Cf. C.G. Jung, Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle (Princeton, N.J., 1973).
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Charles R. Card, ‘The Emergence of Archetypes in Present-Day Science and its Significance for a Contemporary Philosophy of Nature’, 14.
[ix] Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996).
[x] Christian de Quincey, ‘Deep Spirit: Quantum Consciousness?’, 5.
[xi] Talbot (1996) The Holographic Universe, 71; Cf. Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1985).
[xii] Peat, ‘Time, Synchronicity and Evolution’, 3. http://www.fdavidpeast.com/biography/essays/text/saur.txt.
[xiii] Peat (1988) Synchronicity, 103.
[xiv] Ibid, 104.
[xv] See Christopher Isham, ‘Space and Time at the Edge of Mind’, Royal College of Psychiatrists: http://www.repsych.ac.uk/college/specialinterestgroups/spirituality/publications/newsletter”/
[xvi] See Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, The Re-Emergence of Emergence – The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (Oxford University Press, 2006).
[xvii] Christopher Hauke, Jung and the Postmodern – The Interpretation of Realities (Routledge, London, 2000).

Inner Spirituality

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WHILE TWENTIETH CENTURY behavioural psychology denies the existence of spirituality, soul and even consciousness, in line with scientific positivism,[i] there is a long historical tradition of locating spirituality or ‘God’ within the individual, in both psychology and religion – hence Jungian depth and archetypal psychology, world mythology, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Western and Eastern mysticism and the ancient primal and polytheistic religions of the world.

Depth and archetypal psychology maintain the idea of spirituality as being inner, inherent in the mind, or intrinsic to the psyche or soul. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), one of the greatest explorers of the human mind and a life-long student of world religions, both historical and cultural – is more than any other Western thinker in recent times associated with the search for inner spirituality. His thinking spans both modernism and postmodernism. English writer and broadcaster J.B Priestly (1894-1984), wrote of Jung in the Sunday Telegraph:

“He was on a giant scale…he was a master physician of the soul in his insights, a profound sage in his conclusions. He is also one of Western Man’s great liberators.”[ii]

Perceiving ‘spirituality as intrinsic to the psyche’ is both a recent phenomenon as well as having its roots in antiquity. However it has never been a mainstream focus of religion in the monotheistic West – and it is outside the orthodox religious establishments that it is again being seriously considered. Donald Broadribb argues that ‘God’ is increasingly being seen in terms of inner experience and process.

“In line with the more introverted religious philosophies of the East to which many Westerners are turning, “God” has come to be understood more and more as an inner experience and less and less as an identifiable “object” existing apart from the individual.”[iii]

Both Jung and the Gnostics of the early Christian period saw spirituality as an intrinsic property of the psyche. Self-exploration at the deepest levels, both believed, leads to spiritual wakening. In fact, “a true spiritual experience may be one of the most basic drives in the psyche, and may even be an essential psychological need.”[iv] Curtis Smith summarises Jung’s view that “the human position is supreme, with the psyche and its realization serving as the basis of religious meaning.”[v] To realise the psyche is to realise one’s interconnectedness with all things:

“At the farthest reaches of the self-realization process the boundary between psyche and world blurs to the point of extinction, so that rather than an impenetrable wall separating psyche and world, psyche and world appear as points on a continuum, forming an indivisible whole. For Jung, therefore human existence is simultaneously universal and particular… to realize the self is to realize one’s interconnectedness with all things.”[vi]

For Jung all religious experience is psychic in origin. While he is arguably the twentieth century’s greatest thinker on religion and spirituality as grounded in the psyche, and hence of depth or imaginative psychology, he is not the only thinker to link spirituality with the psyche. Even Freud (1856-1939), who made a devastating critique of religion on the “manifest” level as illusion, was on the “latent” level preoccupied with religion as mystery deep within the psyche.[vii]

THE INTERIOR JOURNEY into the depths of the psyche in search for the ground of all being, is inherent to both mysticism and depth psychology. Even within the Western monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which were not originally mystical, there are schools of thought and prominent individuals who have emphasised the subjective experience. ‘God’ and the Pleroma (representing a map of the soul) were not external realities ‘out there’ but were to be found within. Karen Armstrong, for example, points out that the Gnostics “showed that many of the new converts to Christianity were not satisfied with the traditional idea of God which they had inherited from Judaism.”[viii] Hippolytus in the Heresies admonishes:

“Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself.”[ix]

By concentrating on the divine energy within, rather than the nature of an external God outside, the mystic was better able to ‘untie the knots’ within the psyche and take ownership of personal ‘evil’, or the unrealised shadowside which conflicts with the ego, as Jung defined it. This was rather similar to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock complexes which impede mental health and fulfilled living. Karen Armstrong, theologian and a former nun, argues:

“One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves. It can then be pushed away and made monstrous and inhuman. The terrifying image of Satan in Western Christendom was such a distorted projection.”[x]

It is not hard to see that the mystic was often at odds with the certainties of mainstream and more dogmatic forms of religion. Since each individual had “had a unique experience of God, it followed that no one religion could express the whole of the divine mystery”.[xi] Donald Broadribb makes the point that:

“Judaism, Christianity and Islam in their main streams have at times during their history persecuted union mystics as heretics who deny the essential division between humanity and God, reserving the possible full union of human and divine for only one person (Jesus, in Christianity) or denying it altogether (as in Judaism and Islam).”[xii]

MYTHOLOGY which is a feature of primal religions, the pagan and the early matriarchal religions, has often been an attempt to explain the inner world of the psyche. However as Armstrong points out, the Gods and Goddesses of the myths were regarded as heathen, inferior and a challenge to the supremacy of the monotheistic God of the prophets of Israel:

“The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial sacred time of myth.”[xiii]

Mythology was reasserted however when some monotheists turned to mysticism. Inadvertantly or not, the mystics reissued the challenge to the supremacy of a monotheistic God idealised in dogmatic and politically orientated religious traditions. The mystical experience of “God” has characteristics common to all faiths and hence it tends to pull down the barriers separating religions. Armstrong further describes the mystical experience as being subjective, involving an interior journey.

“[It is] not a perception of an objective fact outside the self: it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind – often called the imagination – rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares.”[xiv]

Both Freud and Jung turned to the myths of the ancients to explain the inner world of the psyche and the unconscious.

The American Joseph Campbell’s (1904-1987) work in the study of world comparative mythology and comparative religion, also has strong affinities with Jung and depth psychology. As Armstrong points out, the current enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the West can be seen as a desire for some kind of mysticism because there are arresting similarities between the two disciplines.[xv]

[i] Behaviourism is a school of psychology that regards objective observable aspects of the behaviour of organisms as the only valid subject of study; cf. Collins English Dictionary, eds., Hanks, P., Long, T.H., Urdang, L. (London: Collins, 1977),132. See also; A Dictionary of Philosophy, eds., Speake, J., Isaacs, A. (London: Pan Books, 1979), 37; The Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed., Richard L. Gregory (Oxford University Press, 1987), 71-74 ; The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed., Ted Honderich (Oxford University Press, 1995), 81-2.

[ii] J.B. Priestly, Sunday Telegraph. See review C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Great Britain: Fount Paperbacks, 1977. First published, 1961)

[iii] Donald Broadribb, The Mystical Chorus – Jung and the Religious Dimension (Australia: Millenium Books, 1995), 127.

[iv] John Pennachio, ‘Gnostic Illumination and Carl Jung’s Individuation’, Journal of Religion and Health v.31, no.3, Fall (1992), 245.

[v] Curtis D. Smith, ‘Psychological Ultimacy: Jung and the Human Basis of Religious Meaning’, Religious Humanism v.25, no.4 (1991), 174.

[vi] Ibid, 178.

[vii] R. Melvin Keiser, ‘Postcritical Religion and the Latent Freud’, Zygon v.25. no.4 (1990), 433.

[viii] Karen Armstrong, A History of God (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1994), 115.

[ix] Hippolytus, Heresies 8.15. 1-2 as cited in Armstrong, Ibid, 114.

[x] Karen Armstrong (1994) A History of God, 287.

[xi] Ibid, 275.

[xii] Donald Broadribb (1995) The Mystical Chorus,122.

[xiii] Karen Armstrong (1994) A History of God, 244.

[xiv] Ibid, 253.

[xv] Ibid, 245.

Sophia and Quantum Physics

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THE ANCIENT DESCRIPTIONS which point to Sophia as Anima Mundi/World Soul – hence “wisdom that lies hidden or bound within matter”; “the reconciliation of nature and spirit”; “the pre-terrestrial vision of the celestial world” – have strong similarities with the descriptions made by quantum physicists about the quantum realities behind and within matter, the world and the universe.

Quantum physicists describe symmetries and archetypes beyond matter and enfolded in the material world. They speak of wholeness of matter and mind at the quantum level and nonlocal space-time. They describe consciousness within matter; active information directing matter. They talk of archetypes, acausal orderedness, as a basis for science, and quantums of information applicable to both mind and matter.

Some quantum physicists have explicitly acknowledged a return to the concept of Anima Mundi/World Soul with the discovery in science of quantum phenomena.

Shortly before his death Werner Heisenberg argued that what is fundamental in nature is not particles but the symmetries which lie beyond them. These symmetries can be thought of as the archetypes of all matter and the ground of material existence.[i]

Bohr’s theoretical physics emphasis on wholeness and the nonlocal nature of spacetime is compatible with Sophianic Anima Mundi/World Soul. This deeper nonlocal order has been found to be essential to thought processes. Here mind and matter appear to have something in common. “Indeed this leads to the general proposal that mind and matter are not separate and distinct substances but that like light and radio waves they are orders that lie within a common spectrum”.[ii]

Bohm’s theory that quantum processes could be interpreted as having what could almost be called a “mental” side – is also in accord with Sophianic Anima Mundi/World Soul – whereby active information has a directing effect on quantum processes, playing a formative role in unfolding the elementary particles out of their grounding quantum field.[iii]

Carl Friedrich Von Weizsacker is one who argued for the re-emergence of the World Soul motif on the basis that, indeed, quantum theory is to be understood as a theory of information – a holism that encompasses all that exists in both the realms of mind and matter:

“In his recent discussion of implications of his theory of ur-alternatives, von Weizsacker has drawn attention to the possibility for the re-emergence of the World Soul: he has argued that if quantum theory may be understood to be a theory of information, then it applies to information about mental events as well as physical events. According to the ur theory, res cognitans and res extensa must then enter into appearance together, and thus Cartesian dualism is theoretically strictly refuted. The consequence of this is a holism that encompasses all that exists in both the realms of mind and of matter that brings forth the question of the possibility of a World Soul.”[iv]

Sophia World Soul – Celestial Light 

JUNG WAS EXPLORING along similar lines to the quantum physicists when he introduced the idea of a psychoid archetype (unus mundus) which he said contains both mind and matter and yet goes beyond them both. Jung coined the term ‘psychoid unconscious’ to account for the unitary nature of psyche and world.[v] It is rooted in the unconscious, rather than being unified by an external metaphysical being or reality.

More precisely, “the ‘psychoid unconscious’ can be considered a further gradation of the unconscious where self and world meet, and where all opposites are reconciled”.[vi] The Anima Mundi/World Soul is very similar to the psychoid archetype or unus mundus.

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli took up Jung’s psychoid archetype because he saw it as a major contribution to understanding the ‘laws’ of nature:

“For Pauli, the psychoid archetype represented a sort of ‘missing link’ between the world which is the legitimate study of science, and the mind of the scientist who studies it. Jung’s postulate was not just ‘the bridge to matter in general’ but to ‘a cosmic order independent of our choice and distinct from the world of phenomena’.”[vii]

Sophianic Wisdom and individuation, as we have seen, are closely identified, if not identical. Individuation, to embrace the whole, both the known and the unknown in oneself, is also associated with Anima Mundi/World Soul and Jung’s psychoid archetype, or unus mundus.

In alchemy Sophia is associated with the evolution of one’s conscious. This transformation process is individuation.Sophia is here associated with symbols which express the depths of the self, psyche and soul in the world, where body becomes spirit and spirit becomes body.

One of these symbols is of Sophia as a Tree, another is of Sophia as Salt.[viii] Light, lightning, illumination, shining, gold, ‘incarnated light’, are also associated with Sophianic Wisdom and individuation; where body becomes spirit and spirit body, where heaven and earth are connected in the depths of self, psyche and soul in the World, World Soul.[ix]

Henry Corbin describes Sophianity from Mazdean to Shi’ite Iran, as “for the human being to accede here and now to the Celestial Earth, to the world of Hurqalya, world of ‘celestial corporeity’, which is that of the subtle bodies of Light”.[x]

In a strikingly similar description, scientist Darryl Reanney also writes of light and consciousness. Reanney points out that those rare moments when consciousness breaks free of ego are described as “moments of illumination”; the “inbreaking of light” and “the metaphor of consciousness as a light-bringing agent is widespread in all mystical literature”.[xi]

Individuation is a breaking free of ego consciousness into a realisation of Anima Mundi/World Soul: “Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to one’s self”.[xii] Individuation here is self-realisation which involves the psychoid archetype – unus mundus – in other words, Anima Mundi/World Soul.

The enfolded and implicate in Anima Mundi/World Soul becomes unfolded and explicit. Individuation becomes the self-realisation of the psychoid archetype. Whitmont describes it this way:

“The new Aquarian view, ushered in by twentieth-century physics, no longer thinks in terms of discrete objects; rather it conceives of a continuous flux of process, vibrational fields, quantum pulses of an undefinable, nonmaterial substratum. This is a universal consciousness, perhaps, yet prior to what we call consciousness. Prior to energy and matter, it results in both. It is a self-directed flow that gives form. The dynamics of our world, in the view of the modern myth, do not flow from a maker or director outside of it, who manipulates it like an object. The world is inner or self-directed, an immanense groping for self-realization in the three dimensions of space, and in the fourth dimension of time as well. Consciousness and conscience now discover self-direction. They find themselves in relation to the newly emerging Feminine – the Yin – as inner-directed awareness, with its growing transformative aspect – time.”[xiii]

This is a description of the new, yet at the same time ancient, Sophia Anima Mundi/World Soul Archetype.

Archetypal Philosopher James Hillman maintains that we need “an aesthetic response to the world. This response ties the individual soul immediately with the world soul”; indeed they are inseparable as “(a)ny alteration in the human psyche resonates with a change in the psyche of the world”.[xiv] The return of the Anima Mundi/World Soul should therefore be a therapeutic goal both for the individual and the world.

Geographer Peter Bishop influenced by archetypal psychology, maintains that the study of a country or a place and its people should be a task that contributes “towards the return of soul to the world, to an anima mundi psychology”.[xv]While there has been a long tradition of locating the psyche somehow within both the individual and the world, this has been lost in recent centuries. However, as Hillman warns, “the more we concentrate on literalizing interiority within my person the more we lose the sense of soul as a psychic reality… within all things”.[xvi]

In his study of Tibet, for example, Bishop found that the place had a logic and coherence of its own, its genius loci: it was not a ‘silent other’ but alive, substantial and compelling. “It was part of the world calling attention to itself, deepening our soulful appreciation of mountains, of deserts and rivers, of light and colour, of time and space, of myriad peoples and their cultures, of fauna and flora, of the plurality of imaginative possibilities”.[xvii]  

This is an instance of a return of perception of Anima Mundi/World Soul; and a return of the Sophianic Wisdom Archetype. In short, spirituality is to be sought in individuation, the opening up to the unus mundus; or in other words the Sophianic Anima Mundi, World Soul. This deep realisation of Self lies at the heart of all religious intimations of the essential oneness of life.

[i] F. David Peat, Synchronicity — The Bridge between Matter and Mind (N.Y & London: Bantam Books, 1988), 94.
[ii] Ibid, 185-186.
[iii] Ibid, 186-187.
[iv] Charles R. Card, ‘The Emergence of Archetypes in Present-Day Science and its Significance for Contemporary Philosophy of Nature’, Dynamical Psychology (1996), 26-27.
[v] C.G. Jung, ‘Mysterium Conjunctions’ in: The Collected Works, vol.14, para. 552.
[vi] Curtis D. Smith, ‘Psychological Ultimacy: Jung and the Human Basis of Religious Meaning’, Religious Humanism, vol.25: 4 (1991), 177.
[vii] Stevens (1982) Archetype, 74.
[viii] Damiani (1998) Sophia: Exile and Return, 76-77.
[ix] See Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. (London: Stuart & Watkins, 1967), 82-83.
[x] Henry Corbin (1981) ‘Towards a Chart of the Imaginal’, 32-33.
[xi] Darryl Reanney(1991) The Death of Forever – A New Future for Human Consciousness, 220.
[xii] C.G. Jung, ‘The Structures and Dynamics of the Psyche’ in: The Collected Works, vol. 8, para, 226.
[xiii] Whitmont (1982) The Return of the Goddess, 221.
[xiv] Hillman, ‘Anima Mundi – The Return of the Soul to the World’ , Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought ( 1982),79.
[xv] Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La – Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (University of California Press, 1989), 251.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Ibid.

Trickster Hero

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THE HERO AND EGO are more developed in the Trickster than in the Anthropocentric Landscape of the Heavenly God-Father Archetype.

While the hero myths vary enormously in detail, structurally they are very similar. There is a universal pattern even although the myths were developed by groups or individuals without direct cultural contact.   

The special function of the hero myth is the development of the individual’s ego consciousness and his exploration and coming to awareness of his own strengths and weaknesses, which equips him for later challenges of life.[i]   Joseph L. Henderson argues:

“Over and over again one hears a tale describing a hero’s miraculous but humble birth, his early proof of superhuman strength, his rapid rise to prominence or power, his triumphant struggle with the forces of evil, his fallibility to the sin of pride (hybris), and his fall through betrayal or a “heroic” sacrifice that ends in his death.”[ii]

Erich Neumann states “The hero is always a light-bringer and emissary of light … The hero’s victory brings with it a new spiritual status, a new knowledge, and an alteration of consciousness”: the heroic age is characterised as the “predominance of individual personality”.[iii] All are characteristics of the Trickster Hero.

The heroic culminates in the Technological/Materialist Landscape in the development of science and the world as object:[iv]

“The activity of masculine consciousness is heroic in so far as it voluntarily takes upon itself the archetypal struggle with the dragon of the unconscious and carries it to successful conclusion… The correlation of consciousness with masculinity culminates in the development of science, as an attempt by the masculine spirit to emancipate itself from the power of the unconscious. Wherever science appears it breaks up the original character of the world, which was filled with unconscious projections. Thus, stripped of projection, the world becomes objective, a scientific construction of the mind.”[v]

THE TRICKSTER HERO PITS HIMSELF AGAINST THE OLD GOD. Neumann maintains that in the modern world the disintegration of the old system of values is in full swing.[vi] In the modern world the hero with his human ego pits himself against the old deity. Thus:

“the hero ceases to be instrument of the gods and begins to play his own independent part as a human being; and when he finally becomes, in modern man a battleground for suprapersonal forces, where the human ego pits itself against the deity. As breaker of the old law, man becomes the opponent of the old system and the bringer of the new, which he confers upon mankind against the will of the old deity.”[vii]

[i] Carl Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols (London: Picador, Pan Books, 1978).
[ii] Joseph L. Henderson, ‘Ancient Myths and Modern Man’ in: Carl Jung (ed.),  Man and His Symbols, 101.
[iii] Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (New York: Princeton University Press,  Bollingen Series XLII, 1973), 160-161.
[iv] Ibid, 340-341.
[v] Ibid, 340-341.
[vi] Ibid, 390.
[vii] Ibid, 177.

Archetypal Theory and Carl Jung

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BECAUSE BOTH JUNG and archetypal theory have come under attack in recent years, it is worthwhile to briefly clarify the epistemological parameters, controversial issues, and answers to challenges. In essence, archetypal theory is associated with the life-long thought, work and research of Carl Jung. As James Hillman argues, it was Jung “who reintroduced the ancient idea of archetype into modern psychology”.[i]

THE EVIDENCE given for archetypes in this chapter is largely based within the parameters of Jung’s archetypal theory – ‘archetypes of the unconscious’. This is not to say that Jung is the only archetypal theorist. Henry Corbin, James Hillman and others, throughout history, are also important. Corbin is particularly seminal in regard to archetypal landscapes, as we shall see in the last chapter. Hillman is an important contemporary archetypal philosopher and theorist, who “offers a way into Jung – and a way out of Jung, especially his theology. For to stay wholly with this one thinker is to remain a Jungian, which as Jung himself said is possible only for Jung”.[ii]

By calling on Jung to begin with, Hillman states he is acknowledging the fundamental debt archetypal psychology owes to Jung. Jung is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through to Plato and to Heraclitus, with even more branches yet to be traced. But Hillman also acknowledges “the second immediate father of archetypal psychology”, namely Henry Corbin (1903-1978).[iii] Hillman argues that for Corbin the fundamental nature of the archetype is accessible to imagination first and presents itself as an image; hence the entire procedure for archetypal psychology as a method is imaginative.[iv]

Jung’s Challenge

JUNG’S THINKING SPANS both modernism and postmodernism. Jung is now recognized as an important postmodernist. Of course, Jung and his theory of archetypes are controversial in some quarters. Perhaps this is not surprising. Jung implicitly challenged the patriarchy and the ideologies behind patriarchal hegemony. He challenged Freud, the undisputed ‘Father of Psychoanalysis’. Jung wanted to go beyond Freud’s foundationalist theories of sexuality – for example the ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘penis envy’ – to an exploration of spirituality.

Jung was a life-long student of world religions, both historical and cultural. He challenged head on Western monotheistic cultures with the concept of an inner spirituality within the archetypes of the collective unconscious. This spirituality was pluralistic and had many potential ‘Gods’. In this, it was more akin to Paganism, alchemy, Gnosticism, the hermetic traditions and the mystical and esoteric wisdom streams. Jung challenged the monotheistic ‘God/Father’ concept. This was just one archetype among many; hence Jung challenged the hegemony of the traditional religious institutions and their foundational disciplines. In particular, he challenged fundamentalism and modernist theology. For Jung the God image, or Imago Dei, comes from within the psyche. It is an archetype. It displays the struggle of the psyche for self-realisation; which is the spiritual goal of the individual and all of humanity.

THE SOUL AS THE FEMININE PRINCIPLE or anima archetype within the human being, was emphasized by Jung. It is perhaps because of this that he was well regarded by educated and independent women, both in his time and after his death.

As well, the anima archetype within is congenial to openly gay men, and those heterosexual men secure enough in their personhood and masculinity to be happy to enjoy and acknowledge their feminine side. This recognition of the archetypal power of the anima, redeemed the feminine, long derogated within traditional patriarchal monotheism. For example Jung argued that the “whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually.” [v]

 

[i] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), xiii.

[ii] Ibid, xii.

[iii] James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology – A Brief Account (Dallas: Spring Publications,Inc. 993), 2.

[iv] Ibid, 4.

[v] Carl Jung, ‘Two Essays in Archetypal Psychology’, in: Collected Works, vol. 7, 188.

Evidence For Archetypes

/ Janice Antill / Leave a comment

EVIDENCE FOR ARCHETYPES can be divided into several different categories: (1) ‘associative evidence’, similar or associative theory which overtly supports archetypes or bears a resemblance to archetypal theory; (2) ‘scientific evidence’, where it is argued Jung’s method which is descriptive and phenomenological is not unscientific, and ‘archetypes’ are given theoretical support from the theory of other scientists; (3) ‘evidence from quantum physics’, which is support from the theory of quantum physicists.

Complicating the issue of evidence for archetypes is that acceptable evidence is dependent on how archetypes are defined. Different theorists have defined archetypes in different ways. For example, while the leading Romanian and latterly American academic historian and philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) and James Hillman define archetypes in similar ways to Jung, there are also differences. Jung, a self-described empiricist, wanted a naturalistic theory of archetypes which had scientific credibility. Hillman would abandon the scientific approach to archetypes altogether and advocate instead that we see science from the viewpoint of archetypes. For Hillman, science itself is a sort of myth and fantasy of the soul.

Even within the archetypal theory of one thinker, most notably Jung, there can be many strains of thought which can appear contradictory. Jung, however, is acknowledged as the pre-eminent thinker on archetypes in the twentieth century – and it is precisely because his theory encompasses both modernist scientific perspectives and evidence from quantum science and postmodern and mystical perspectives that his thought is so compelling, evocative and complex.

Walter A. Shelburne philosophy professor and founding member of the Applied Philosophy Institute, California, has studied and examined the scientific and logical evidential parameters of Jung’s theory of archetypes in depth. He concludes:

“even though there are these many strains of Jung’s thought – a philosophical emphasis, a mythos emphasis, as well as a scientific emphasis – this is not to say that everything Jung said has to be evaluated from the critical standpoint of any one particular point of view. For…in spite of the confusion that Jung creates by working over his material from these methodologically divergent perspectives, a legitimately scientific perspective can nonetheless be reconstructed from his thought.”[i]

[i] Walter A. Shelburne, Mythos and Logos in the Thought of Carl Jung – The Theory of the Collective Unconscious in Scientific Perspective (State University of New York Press, 1988), 10.