The

Two Million-Year-Old Self

Number Three CAROLYN AND ERNEST FAY SERIES fN ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY David H. Ro en, General Editor

The

Two Million-Year-Old Self

, S'"

Anthony Stevens

POREWORD BY DAVID H. ROSEN

Texas A&M University Press College Station

Copyright © 1993 by Anthony Stevens Manufactured in the United States of America All fights reserved

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The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Stevens, Anthony.

The two million-year-old self I Anthony Stevens; foreword by David H. Rosen. - 1St ed .

.p. em. - (Carolyn and Ernest Fay series in analytical

psychology; no. 3)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89°96-536-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN r-58544-495-1. (pbk.)

r. Archetype (Psychology) z. Self. 3. Civilization, Modern-e-aoth century-Psychological aspects.

4· Dreams-Therapeutic use. 5. Jung, C. G. (Cad Gustav), 18754961. I. Title. II. Series. [DNLM: I. Alternative Medicine. 1.. Dream s+-psychol ogy. 3· Jungian Theory.

4. Psychoanalytic Therapy-methods. 5. Unconscious

(Psychology) WM 460·SD8 S844t]

Bf,!7S·S·A72S75 1993

155·~-dc~o

DNLMIDLC

for Library of Congress

Number Three CAROLYN AND ERNEST FAY SERIES IN ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

David H. Rosen, General Editor

The Carolyn and Ernest Fay edited book series, based initially on the annual Fay Lecture Series in Analytical Psychology, was established to further the ideas of C. G. Jung among students, faculty, therapists, and other citizens and to enhance scholarly activities related to analytical psychology. The Book Series and Lecture Series address topics of importance to the individual and to society. Both series were generously endowed by Carolyn Grant Pay, the founding president of the C. G. Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas. The series are in part a memorial to her late husband, Ernest Bel Fay. Carolyn Fay has planted a Jungian tree carrying both her name and that of her late husband, which will bear fruitful ideas and stimulate creative works from this time forward. Texas A&M University and all those who come in contact with the growing Fay Jungian tree are extremely grateful to Carolyn Grant Fay for what she has done. The holder of the Frank N. McMillan, Jr. Professorship in Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M functions as the general

editor of the Fay Book Series.

Together the patient and I address ourselves to the two millionyear-old man that is in all of us. In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old mall ill us? In our dreams.

+C, G. lung, Psychological Reflections

Two million years ago, our ancestors with brain sizes ranging from 435cc. to 68occ.-only a little better than the gorilla-were doing human things, cultural things .... They were hunting, building shelters, making tools, treating skins, living in base camps, and possibly doing many other things ....

- Robin Fox,. The Search Jor Society

Contents

Foreword, David H. Rosen Acknow ledgmen ts Prologue

Chapter I. Knowing the Unknowable Chapter 2. Dreaming Myths

Chapter 3. The Healing Wound Chapter 4. The Therapeutic Quest

Epilogue

Notes Bibliography Index

page xi XVll

3

121

124 130 135

Foreword

ANTHONY Srsvans is a bridge builder. In this quintessential product from his pen, he makes connections between analytical psy~ cholo gy, anthropology behavioral biology, dream psychology, psycholinguistics, psychiatry, and alternative modes of healing. Stevens once wrote to me: "Since childhood I have had a love of building bridges. Being a psychiatrist and an analyst as well as having been trained in experimental psychology, I am naturally interested in bridging the gaps between these three disciplines. In particular, 1 feel drawn to examine ways in which their disparate findings and theoretical constructs may parallel, cornplernent, and ultimately fertilize one another .. "

Like Jung before him, Stevens meaningfully links analytical psychology with related developments in other disciplines, thus making the hypothesis of archetypes amenable to empirical study. This process began with the publication of his Archetypes: A Natural History oj the SelJin 1982, in which Stevens argued that comparative studies (mainly between ethology and analytical psychology) can throw light on the ways in which the archaic influences our lives in such fundamental areas as the develop' ment of attachment bonds; the contribution of myth, ritual, and religion to the development of personality; and the maintenance of group solidarity .. In that book, he also began to as-

FOREWORD

xu

sociate basic Jungian concepts with structural elements of the human brain.

In his second book, Withymead: A jungian Community Jor the Healing Arts, published in 1986, Stevens examined the primal need for community and the capacity of a group for constellating the archetype of the extended family in order to. heal psychiatric illness. In his third book, The Roots of VUlr: A jungian Perspective, published in 1989, Stevens drew attention to the ease with which the primitive masculine leads us into armed conflict and killing. This volume, one of his best, also offered us ways to bring about peace.

In his fourth book, On jung, which came out in 1990., he applied analytical psychalogy to Jung himself in a uniquely creative, biographical, and developmental treatise. In this work, he highlighted how the twa million-year-old Self had helped lung to heal his awn wounds,

The Two Million;'iear-Old Self is thus the product of years of excavating by Stevens in his pursuit of psychic archeology. He reveals how the archetype af the Self becomes manifest in our dreams, myths, and illnesses, and he shows U5 how its elemental wisdom holds the key to apen the door to. the therapeutic quest and the healing af our wounds.

In chapter I, Stevens focuses an "knowing the unknowable," which is similar to. exploring the "reality of the unseen" a la William James. Stevens looks at Jung's life-long objective of making the unknown known and pushing back the frantiers of the unknowable. Stevens, as a cartographer of the psyche, takes us on a journey into the mysteries o.f the collective unconscious where we encounter archetypes that are unknowable in themselves-in other words, not accessible to direct knawledge. Like atoms, their existence can only be inferred from their manifestations. Stevens postulates that the two million-year-old

Foreword

xiii

Self lives within the dark subterranean labyrinth of the psyche. He reveals how dreams illuminate the blackness of the primeval underworld, allowing us to discover the ageless Self in this prehistoric archetypal world.

Often our egos want to know only the knowable and to dismis s the unknowable. However, as J ung experienced ~ and as is built into the training of all Jungian analysts-we can also know the unknowable. In order to do this, the conscious ego must surrender to a higher force, the Self (the Imago Dei or center and totality of the psyche); then through the experience of symbolic ego death, we can know the numinous mvsterium. Paul Tillich arrived at this point of spiritual affirmation by having the courage to be in the face of nothingness. If we are pa· tient, the light of the holy glows in the vast darkness of the seemingly chaotic collective unconscious of our inner world or psyche, which is a mirror of our outer world or universe. We can know (in the sense of gnosis) that we are a mere creative and animated spark in the never-ending process of divine evolution. How do we glimpse this?

In his second chapter, entitled Dreaming Myths, Stevens helps us open the window to our psyches and our experiences of this inner world when we dream. Stevens argues that the dream is attempting to bridge from the inside world of the psyche to the outside world. He maintains that the inner bridge builder responsible for this enormous undertaking is none other than that original genius, the two million-year-old Self. Stevens demonstrates that this supposition is in keeping with neuroscientific evidence that dreaming activity begins in the phylogeneticaUy ancient parts of the brain. According to Stevens, "to encounter the two million-year-old within is to experience the phylogeny of our species as a personal revelation." He asks, "What could be amore amazing adventure?" Yet Ste-

r-ORBWORD

xiv

vens laments that for most of us this primordial figure, who is the constant companion of our every waking and sleeping moment, is entirely unknown.

The Talmud says, ''A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read," and Stevens unravels a most interesting contemporary dream produced by Gary, a young farmer and one of his patients. He deciphers its archetypal components, showing how an ancient myth was dreamed and how it relates to Gary's situation and problem. This patient dreams a myth that allows him to transcend his neurotic conflict and proceed with his own individuation process.

People who ask "What is my personal myth and how do I live it?" have embarked on their own individuation processes to seek answers. These answers involve healing wounds as part of in-depth therapy, as suggested by Sir Francis Bacon's maxim that "wounds cannot be cured without searching." Stevens finds in his third chapter, The Healing Wound, that the search involves the two million-year-old within, who is struggling to adapt to the present world. Stevens maintains that this struggle provides us with a fundamental principle of psychopathology. He contends, "Where contemporary circumstances permit the archetypal needs of the two million-year-old to be fulfilled., the result is that form of psychic adjustment we call health, but where contemporary circumstances frustrate the archetypal needs of the two million-year-old, the result is maladjustment and illness."

To illustrate his thesis, Stevens describes the complicated psychiatric case of Jennifer. She presents with multiple psychiatric symptoms: anxiety, phobia, depression, obsessive thoughts and compulsive acts, and schizoid withdrawal. Stevens shows how all these symptoms are comprehensible as pathological exaggerations of entirely normal patterns of response for the twomillion-year-old survivor. He shows how by uncovering, be-

Foreword

xv

friending, and casting light on the dark mysteries of this archaic inner being, Jennifer was able to overcome almost all of her obstacles. For all of us, he concludes, acceptance, empathy, bonding, and affiliation with this aboriginal Self residing in our psyches is the key to adaptation and health. In this way the socalled disturbed individual can become individuated and have a trusting and more fulfilling life.

Elisha Bartlett once wrote: "Therapeutics is not founded upon pathology. The former can not be deduced from the latter. It rests wholly upon experience. It is, absolutely and exclusiveiy,an empirical art." In his fourth chapter, The Therapeutic Quest, Stevens considers the empirical art of healing. He looks into the success of alternative methods of treatment, such as acupuncture, chiropractic, aromatherapy, and homeopathy in the light of the two million-year-old's understanding of what it means to be ill and what is required for healing .. He argues that modern medicine and psychiatry, with their emphases on science and technology, leave the two million-year-old feeling disoriented, unsupported, and misunderstood. Stevens uses data from comparative anthropology and analytical psychology to elucidate the archetype of the healer and to identify the basic principles and practices of healing that have been known to our species since the beginning of time. Stevens echoes jung's position that the psyche represents a natural healing force. Stevens relates this to helping our inner two million-year-old Self to feel more at home in our outer contemporary world. He COI1- jectures that we have to change our attitudes, our institutions, and our environment in order to bring the natural life of our species once more into harmony with the natural life of our planet.

This book connects a personal myth of Anthony Stevens to an archetypal myth of healing - healing ourselves and our world. It is a profound exposition, comprehensive in its breadth

FOREWORD

xvi

and inspiring in its depth. This volume is an important and timely reflection on how we must befriend the two millionyear-old within and put this ancient collective wisdom into action to save ourselves, our entire human family, and OUI earth. We need to realize that the two million-year-old Self will continue to survive only if we survive.

I believe that in Anthony Stevens's insight lie the seeds for making the adjustment of the two million-year-old Self complete. Greater consciousness of our incarnation of the collective experience of not only humankind but other life as well would transform us and our world into a healthier state and place. Then we would truly be a united human family-harmonious and at peace with ourselves, each other, and our planet.

DAVID H. ROSEN

College Station, Texas

Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE TO EXPRESS MY WARMEST THANKS to Carolyn Fay and David Rosen for their kind invitation to deliver the Fay Lectures, based on a draft for this book, and for their royal hospitality while I was in Texas in April, 1992. The party that Deborah Voorhees Rosen prepared the night before my fust lecture was very special, and the whole visit was, for me, lifeenhancing and unforgettable.

I am immeasurably grateful to "Gary" and "Jennifer" for permitting me to tell the most significant parts of their histories. The privilege of working with such patients has made my life worth living and this book possible.

I must thank Routledge and Princeton University Press for, permission to quote from The Collected .Works of C. G.Jung, Routledge, William Collins, and Random House for permission to quote from Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, and the University of Toronto Press for allowing me to use Dr. P. D. Maclean's famous diagram of the triune brain.

My special thanks go to Norma Luscombe for her unfailing care, diligence, and good humor in word processing my original manuscript and to Mary lenn Dixon for her zeal in editing the finished product.

The

Two Million-Year-Old Self

Prologue

Every civilized humarl being. however high his conscious development, is still atl archaic m{Hl at the deeper le!leisofMs psyche.

=C. G. lUNG, Collected Works, vol. IO

AT THE HEART OF JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY is the idea that beneath our conscious in teIligence a deeper intelligence is at work - the evolved intelligence of humankind. By personifying this phylogenetic component of the psyche as an archaic being, or "the two million-year-old man that is in us all,' lung lay himself at the mercy of any beady logician wishing to accuse him of falling into a homuncular fallacy-namely, that he believed he had a little old man in there sitting at the controls. But Jung labored under no such delusion. To him, the two million-yearold was a vivid metaphor for an age-old dynamic at the core of personal existence, there by virtue of the evolutionary heritage of our species. He applied it in the same spirit as Neils Bohr, who referred to the atom as a "miniature solar system": both are valid attempts to create a working image of what cannot otherwise be seen.

Jung discovered that the archetypal units of which the phylogenetic (biologically evolved) psyche is composed personate in dreams and fantasies. We do not encounter masculinity, femininity, evil, or wisdom as intellectual abstractions, but as hu-

TWO MILL!ON'YEAR-OlD SELF

4

man figures with personalities and intentions of their own. When Jung met them in his patients and in himself, he named them the animus. the anima, the shadow, and the wise old man and woman. The two million-year-old was another such personification: this archaic presence does not have a physical existence inside our heads. any more than the "soul" or the "unconscious." but as the phenomenological embodiment of our evolutionary inheritance, it can be understood as playing an indispensable role in the drama of our personal lives, "personating" as a companion whom it is possible, as I have learned, to recognize, cherish, and befriend.

A strength ofJungian psychology (also a grave danger) is its love of the esoteric, its willingness to go its own way. Unfortunately, this self-reliant intrepidity can lead to the kind of psychic parochialism for which James Hillman is so staunch an advocate. In his fascinatingly provocative book The Dream and the Underworld be proclaims, "The tradition of depth psychology is to stay at home and create its own ground as it proceeds." This is treacherous ground 00 which to build a psychology: vaporous ground, ground fit only for building castles in the air, Wishing to sustain this somewhat agoraphobic tradition, Hillman asserts that Freud and lung both "abjured anatomy, biology, natural science, and theology for their basic premises. "1 But this is not entirely true; certainly not of the first three disciplines named .. Freud elected to stay at home faute de mieux because neurophysiology was not sufficiently advanced for him to develop his "Project for a Scientific Psychology" as he originally intended. As it was, his psychoanalytic formulations were profoundly influenced by the neurophysiological knowledge he acquired working for six Iormative years in the laboratory of the great Ernst Brticke, lung, like Freud, acknowledged the fundamental importance of "the 'psychic infra-red', the biological instinctual pole of the psyche," which "gradu-

Prologue

s

ally passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its chemical and physical conditions.t's This biological pole of the archetype lung compared to the ethological "pattern of behaviour" and declared it to be "the proper concern of scientific psychology,">

Rather than stay at home, I would have us journey far into the past and way over the horizon into cultures remote hom the traditions of Western psychology. And rather than restrict ourselves to historical parallels from the relatively recent Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, or Roman past, I would ga back much further, back to the hunter-gatherer existence far which our psyches were formed, back to the archetypal foundations of all human experience, hack to the hominid, mammalian, and reptilian ancestors who live on in the structures of our minds and brains .. To do this is to discover within lung's two million-yearold person, a 140 million-year-old vertebrate, which supports our finite existence and animates our dreams.

1.

Knowing the Unknowable

"* must constantly bear in mind Ihal what we mean by "archetype" is in itself irrepresl!ntabie, but has effects which make visualizations oj it possible, namely, the archetypal images and ideas. "* meet with a si milar situation in physics: there the smallest particles are themselves irrepresentable bu: have e.ffectsJrom the nature of which

we can blliid up a model.

-c. G.JUNG, Col/ected Works, vol. 8

A PASSIONATE URGE TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING

As EDUCATED MEMBERS OF WESTERN SOCIETY, we share a number of common assumptions: one of these is that we are potentially capable of knowing everything that is knowable. We are shaken out of this illusion only when we begin to push knowledge to its limits and ask such questions as what is "knowledge" and how can we "know" anything? What existed before the universe came into being? What is the essence of all creation? Why does anything exist at all? When we pose questions like this, the possibility begins to dawn on us that there may be things that lie beyond our capacity to grasp, know, or even imagine, let alone understand.

Yet these are the sort of questions that intrigue children ..

Just as all children are natural artists, so they are also natural metaphysicians. The naive questions they ask often possess a pro~

TWO MlLLlON-YBAR-OLD S.HI'

8

fundity that a lifetime of dedicated research could not fathom_ Why is the earth? Where did God come from? What is death? Why do we have to die? What makes us live? Mommy, where was I before Daddy put me in your tummy? When I asked my mother that question at the age of five, her shocking answer"I don't know darling"-sent me off on my first experience of active imagination; I had spent eternity waiting on a cloud, waiting for the summons to my parents' bedchamber-it was extremely boring. That experience taught me how miraculously fortunate I am to be here, how precious life is, how one must cherish it and savor every day as it passes_

Their preoccupation with origins makes children mythologically and epistemologically inclined. Most of them lose this inclination because most adults in our society do not share it. However, a few never cease the epistemological quest. They are the ones who go on to become scientists, philosophers, psychologists. They are driven to find answers to naive questions. When they find them, the answers only give rise to more questions, and they are hooked for life on their own speciality. One such was Jung.

When, at eighty-two, he began his autobiography with the words "My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious," it is significant that he wrote the unconscious, not my unconscious, for what fascinated him was the universal human unknown that, generation after generation, seeks incarnation in the world. Looking back on his life, he wrote: "In my case it must have been a passionate urge towards understanding which brought about my birth. For that is the strongest element in my nature."! He accepted that we are all born with "a need to know," but be felt he had been endowed with a special gift in that direction.

This special gift enabled him to perceive the archetypal patterns at work behind typical events. The fact, which he Ere-

KIIOIving Ihr Unbrowable

9

quently acknowledged, that archetypes are transcendent, irrepresentable, and therefore unknowable in themselves, merely enhanced their fascination for him.

Jung's epistemological mission-his need to know-gave him a lasting affinity with the Gnostics. The early Christian sect of gnosticism (Greek gnostikos,. one who knows) held that gnosis (knowledge), must be distinguished from sophia (wisdom) and episieme (general knowledge), since gnosis differs from other kinds of knowledge: it is derived not from ordinary sources or via the senses but directly from God through special revelation .. J ung believed that he had received such a revelation in his adolescen t vision of God defeca ting on the roof of Basel Cathedral. And it made him intolerant of his father's timidity in confronting his own loss of faith. Whenever Jung tackled him, his father became irritable and defensive: "You always want to think," he would complain. "One ought not to think, but believe." Jung couldn't stand this: "No," he thought, "one must experience and bow!" These encounters with his spiritually bankrupt father confirmed Jung in his gnosticism - as one dedicated to knowing and experiencing the reality of the psyche .. 2

It also went along with a need to test and to question. AI· though deeply attracted to Freud, who was in all important respects his father's opposite, Jung could never accept Freud's formulations of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis as ex cathedra statements of established wisdom. He had to test them, first with the word association test, then later through his observation of schizophrenics and his studies in mythology. Despite Freud's extreme displeasure, he questioned two of the fundamental hypotheses of psychoanalysis, namely, (1) that libido is exclusively sexual (lung didn't think it was) and (2) that the unconscious is entirely personal and peculiar to the individual (lung carne to see that it was much more than that and that all human beings share a common psychic structure).

IO

Jung's discovery that schizophrenic delusions had mythic parallels was for him an intellectual watershed. It convinced him that Freud's view was so narrowly personalistic that it blinded him to the existence of the suprapersonal psyche shared by us all by virtue of our humanity. Jung called it the natural mind, a dynamic and universal substratum on which our private world is built. To define and establish this basis on which personal awareness grows was the task that absorbed the rest of his life, and his hypotheses of the archetype and the collective unconscious. were the "guiding fictions" (to use Adler's phrase) that, after his break with Freud, enabled him to proceed on his way.

When J un g stated that the archetypes - the fundamen tal units of the natural mind-were essentially unknowable, what exactly did he mean? He meant that they were not accessible to direct knowledge. For jung, private experience, inner knowledge, gnosis were primary. All else was inferential, in that the existence of an archetype could only he inferred from its manifestations in myths, psychotic delusions, and dreams; especially "big" dreams, or "culture pattern dreams" as the anthropologists call them.

Jung's own "experiment with the unconscious," conducted between 1914 and 1918 in neutral Switzerland, was later validated and interpreted in the light of his expeditions to the EIgonyi in East Africa and the Indians of New Mexico. These researches confirmed for him the validity of three crucial hypotheses: (I) that the psyche is the primary datum-not only of psychology but of our lives; (2) that it is objective inasmuch as we do not construct OUI psyche or will it into being: it exists a priori, a product of nature, or evolution; and (3) that the basic unit of the objective psyche is the archetype- the archetype of the collective unconscious. It choreographs the basic patterns we dance to throughout life. It is the archetype, not our con-

Krwwing the Unknowable

II

scious ego, that pays the fiddler and calls the tune, as Matthew Arnold understood:

Born into life-we bring A bias with us here,

And, when here, each new thing Affects us we come near;

To tunes we did not call our being must keep chime. =Empedocles 011 Etna, 1852

TIlE ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

As the basic concept of Jungian psychology, the archetype is of comparable significance to gravity in Newtonian physics, relativity in Einsteinian physics, or natural selection in Darwinian biology. It is psychology's quantum theory: one of the most important ideas to emerge in the twentieth century, possessing far-reaching implications for both the social and the natural sciences-though practitioners of these sciences have been slow to acknowledge the fact. As we shall see, they are beginning to catch up.

As Heraclitus justly observed, "The real constitution of each thing is accustomed to hide itself." Jus tas the physicist investigates particles and waves and the biologist genes, so it is the province of the psychologist to investigate archetypes: for archetypes are the functional units of which the collective UDCOD~ scious is composed, and together they make up "the archaic heritage of humanity." lung described them as "a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual's life in invisible ways."3

The problem with this formulation was that it savored too much of Darwinism for social scientists and the academic establishment to accept. As a result, Jung's announcement of his

TWO MILL!ON·YEAR·OlD SELP

I2

theory of archetypes was never granted the attentive recognition it deserved. Why should this be?

To understand the reasons for this neglect, we must turn briefly to the history of ideas since Darwin's time. Unfortunately, the early sociologists embraced Darwin too eagerly, misapplying such concepts as the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest to political phenomena, thus giving rise to the disreputable movement known as Social Darwinism. There is no doubt that Social Darwinism was put to evil use. Imperialists used it to justify the extermination of primitive populations, Marxists used it to incite massacre in the service of the class struggle, Hitler used it to fuel his fantasies of world domination and to justify his genocide of the Slavs and the Jews, criminologists used it as an argument in favor of capital punishment and castration, eugenicists used it as a justification of selective euthanasia, and militarists used it everywhere as a justification for war,

With this catalog of crimes to its discredit, it is not hard to understand why there should have been a revulsion against all aspects of Social Darwinism and that it should result in a rejection of biological concepts in the study of human psychology. So the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction and the "innate" became a taboo subject in university departments throughout the world. Liberalism meant environmentalism, behaviorism, and the apotheosis of the tabula rasa - the blank slate on which life, through some disembodied miracle, contrived to inscribe all its lessons without any assistance from the evolutionary past.

As the pendulum swung, so the clock turned back - back to that pre-Darwinian empiricism so beloved of our Anglo-Saxon in tellectual tradition: the notion that all concepts are derived from experience and that the "innate" plays no part in the matter whatever. How does the human mind come "to be furnished

Krlowing Ihe Ullknowa.b/e

13

with that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it?" asked John Locke, the arch-empiricist, who answered himself, "in one word, from experience/"

In this climate, Jung was unlikely to get a fair hearing, nor did he. It was in vain for him to protest that he was not arguing for innate ideas, Archetypes, he said, are not inherited ideas but inherited possibilities of ideas - a statement any biologist would fmdacceptable, but, until recently, no psychologist. Instead ~f receiving a sympathetic hearing, Jung was accused of being a fascist, an anti-Semite, and a Nazi sympathizer, while the behaviorists, with a clear conscience and in the service of liberal democracy, continued to develop their "laws of learning," apparently unaware that every tyrant in the world had promptly misappropriated these very laws so as to torture, brainwash, and intimidate their hapless subjects. "Of course Behaviourism works!" snorted W, H. Auden, "So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs and simple electrical appliances, and in six months 1 will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public."!

Though few seemed to realize it, Jung's hypothesis of the archetype in fact transcended the nature-versus-nurture debate and healed the Cartesian split between body and mind, He proposed not only that the archetypal structures were fundamental to the existence and survival of all living organisms but that they were continuous with structures controlling the behavior of inorganic matter as well. The archetype was no mere psychic entity but "the bridge to matter in general." It was this "psychoid" aspect of the archetype that was taken up by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who believed it made a major contribution to our ability to comprehend the principles. on which the universe bad been created.s

Since archetypes precondition all existence, they are manifest in the spiritual achievements of art, science, and religion,

TWO MILLION'YEAR-OLD SELf

as well as in the organization of organic and inorganic matter. The archetype thus provides a basis for a common understand, ing of data derived from all sciences and all human activitiesnot least because of its implications for epistemology, the study of knowledge per se.

ARCHETYPAL MANIFESTATIONS

Since archetypes-as-such are unknowable, their existence can only he inferred from their manifestations. The manifestations of primary interest to psychologists are those typically human attributes which the archetypes give rise to in the course of the life cycle - the parallel thoughts, images, mythologems, feelings, and patterns of behavior that occur in people everywhere, irrespective of their class, creed, race, geographical location, or historical time.

''Although the changing situations of life must appear infinitely various to our way of thinking," wrote Jung, "their possible number Dever exceeds certain natural limits; they fall into more or less typical patterns that repeat themselves over and over again. The archetypal structure of the unconscious corresponds to the average nm of events. The changes that may befall a man are not infinitely variable; they are variations of certain typical occurrences which are limited in number. When therefore a distressing situation arises, the corresponding archetype will be constellated in the unconscious, Since this archetype is numinous, i.e., possesses a specific energy, it will attract to itself the con ten ts of consciou sness - conscious ideas that render it perceptible and hence capable of conscious realization."?

Just how indispensable the archetypal concept is in practice can be judged from the manner in which researchers in many other disciplines keep rediscovering the hypothesis and reannouncing it in their own terminology. So numerous are the in-

15

stances of this, that it is possible to examine only a. fraction of them here. I will confine myself to examples of archetypal functioning that are to be found in anthropology, behavioral biology, dream psychology, psychiatry, and psycbolinguistics.

ANTHROPOLOGY: CULTURAL UNIVERSALS

AND THE ARCHETYPAL SOCIETY

There is a principle that I believe should be elevated to the status of a fundamental law of anthropology, and 1 am glad to say that shortly before his death I was able to persuade the great anthropologist Victor Turner of the validity of this laws It can be stated as follows; whenever a phenomenon is found to be characteristic of all human communities, irrespective of culture, race, or historical epoch, then it is an expression olan archetype of the collective unconscious.

The fact of the matter is that all cultures, whatever their geographical location or historical era, display a large number of social characteristics which are in themselves absolutely diagnostic of a specifically human culture. These have been cataloged independently by George Murdock and Robin Fox. According to these anthropologists, no human culture is known that lacks laws about property, procedures for settling disputes, rules governing courtship, marriage, and adultery, taboos relating to food and incest, rules of etiquette prescribing forms of greeting and modes of address, the manufacture of tools and weapons, cooperative labor, visiting, feasting, hospitality, giftgiving, the performance of funeral rites, belief in the supernatural, religious rituals, the recital of myths and legends, dancing, mental illness, faith healing, dream interpretation, and so on.?

All such universal patterns of behavior are evidence of archetypes at work. The point is that what anyone of us experiences in life is not determined merely by our personal histories.

TWO MILLION~Y"AR-OLt> SELP

1.6

It is also fundamentally guided by the collective history of the human species as a whole. This collective history is biologically encoded in the collective unconscious, and the code owes its origins to a past so remote as to be shrouded in the primordial mists of evolutionary time.

The archetypal endowment, with which each of us is born, guides and controls the life cycle of our species- birth and being mothered, exploring the environment, showing' wariness of strangers, playing in the peer group, being initiated as an adult member of the community, establishing a place in the social hierarchy, bonding between males for hunting and outgroup hostilities, courting; marrying, child-rearing, participating in religious rituals, assuming the social responsibilities of advanced maturity, and the preparation for death. lung summed it all up in a memorable aphorism: "Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species." 10

The cross-cultural evidence is fascinating and overwhelm, ing in its implications. But for most of this century, anthropologists have displayed little interest in cultural universals, preferring to stress the differences between cultures and relating these differences not to biological factors but to child-rearing practices and geographical, climatic, and economic characteristics. This again is an example of academic prejudice in favor of environmentalism and in hostility to evolutionary biology. However, there have been notable exceptions. During the years when lung was growing up in Klein Htinlngen and later attending the university in Basel, a German ethnologist named Adolf Bastian was traveling all over the world studying the myths, folklore. and customs of widely differing peoples. What greatly impressed Bastian was the similarity he noted between the themes and motifs he encountered wherever he went. He noticed, however, that these universal themes, which he called Elementargedtmken (elementary ideas), invariably manifested them-

Kno!Vilig the UllkrlOwable

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selves in local forms, peculiar to the group of people he happened to be studying at the time. These he called ethnic ideas. It

Bastian's finding corresponds to lung's that archetypes constitute the basic themes on which different people and different cultures work out their own individual variations. Most of the time we are blissfully unaware of the existence of these basic themes, believing that our individual expressions are entirely of our own making.

The French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has also devoted his life to the study of cultural universals and the unconscious processes underlying them. "If, as we believe to be the case," he wrote, "the unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing forms upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for all minds-ancient or modern, primitive or civilized," then we are able to derive a principle of interpretation that is valid for all institutions and customs. The ultimate concern of Levi-Strauss and the school of anthropology with which he is associated is with "the unconscious nature of collective phenomena." U oder lying these collective phenomena, and responsible for them, are what Levi-Strauss calls unconscious infrastructures. These are so dearly related to lung's archetypes as to require no further comment. Yet curiously enough, Levi-Strauss has always affected to dismiss Jung's theories. In doing so he has completely misrepresented lung's position, as both Eugene D'Aquili and Paul Kugler have pointed out_l2

For example, Levi-Strauss accuses lung of biological naivete in identifying the archetype with psychic contents and not with the unconscious forms underlying them. In fact, Jung's position is the exact opposite of the one Levi-Strauss arraigns him for. As lung was writing as early as 1935: "It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then

TWO MILLlON-YllAR-OLD SIlLF

only to a very limited degree, A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience __ .. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a focultas praeformandi."13

As Kugler tellingly observes: "Jung's description of the formal relationships in the unconscious antedates Levi-Strauss's Structura I A nlhropology by nearly fifteen years! " Both French structuralism and Jungian psychology maintain that "the basic function of the unconscious is to impose forms (infrastructures, symbolic functions, or archetypes) upon content, especially myths, dreams, social institutions, psychopathology, and Ianguage."14

Among anthropologists in America, virtually the sale champions of an evolutionary approach are Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger of Rutgers University. They are contemptuous of the cultural relativism that has obsessed anthropology for most of this century. "How can we study the variables without the constants?" Fox demands. "Don't anthropologists time after time in society after society come up against the same processes carried out under a variety of symbolic disguises?" Fox's attitude is very close to Bastian's; he argues, "Once one gets behind the surface manifestations, the uniformity of human social arrange' men ts is remarkable." Like J ung, Fox sees the human being not as a tabula rasa, but as "a bundle of potentialities." He continues, "These potentialities or predispositions or biases are the end products of a process of natural selection peculiar to the human species." Further, "man has the kinds of cultures and societies he has because he is the kind of species he is. "15

Fox's statements strike me as axiomatic, but they have brought him nothing but contumely from his peers. However, like Jung in his lifetime, Fox continues to swim hard against the academic tide, which makes him all the more interesting

Knowing lile UnknoUltlble

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asa person and as a thinker. After all, only dead fish swim constantly wilh the tide.

When the intellectual history of the twentieth century comes to be written, I believe it will be seen that the social and behavioral sciences have sadly failed to live up to their original promise. This is almost certainly because they have striven to erect a theoretical edifice on the basis of political ideology rather than evolutionary biology. To me, it is a gratifying irony that Jungian psychology can claim a more sound scientific basis than the social science that has consistently derided it, for Jungian psychology is based on an essentially biological hypothesis: the collective unconscious. The archetypes, of which the collective unconscious is composed, are biological entities; they evolved through natural selection. This is a fact of the greatest importance, for in the archetype we possess a theoretical orientation that is capable of revolutionizing not only psychology but psychiatry and anthropology as well.

What we have to do, it seems to me, is to ex.tendJung's work to the point where we can say with some certainty what the fundamental parameters of our archetypal potential may be and what kinds of environmental and social circumstances that potential requires if optimal personal development is to occur (or, asJung would have put it, for individuation to proceed). Collating evidence from other disciplines isan indispensable means to furthering this objective. It is another intriguing irooy that the strongest scientihc support of Jung's archetypal hypothesis has come from a most surprising quarter: behavioral biology-or ethology, as it has come to be known. We must now turn to this evidence ..

BEHAVIORAL Bro.lOGY

In 1951, the ethologist Niko Tinbergen published a book which I have no hesitation in describing as one of the most important

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books of the century. It was called The Study oj Instinct. In it he proposed that every animal species possesses a repertoire of behaviors. This behavioral repertoire is dependent upon structures evolution has built into the central nervous system of the species. Tinbergen called these structures innate releasing mechanisms, or IRMs. Each IRM is primed to become active when an appropriate stimulus-called a sign stimulus-is encountered in the environment. When sucha stimulus appears,. the innate mechanism is released, and the animal responds with a characteristic pattern of behavior which is adapted through evolution to the situation.Is

When I was working on my doctoral thesis back in the 1960$, it suddenly struck me one evening that, when due allowance is made for the greater adaptive flexibility of our species, Tinbergen's position was very dose to Jung's view of the nature of archetypes and their mode of activation. A mallard duck becomes amorous at the sight of a mallard drake (the green head being the sign stimulus that releases in her central nervous system the innate mechanism responsible for the characteristic patterns of behavior associated with courtship in the duck), and a ewe becomes attached to her lamb as she licks the birth membranes free of its snout. In the same way, a human mother presented with her newborn infant perceives its helplessness and its need for nurturance, and during the hours and days that follow she is overwhelmed by feelings of love, attachment, and responsibility. All such patterns of response have been prepared for by nature. As Jung himself insisted, the archetype "is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a 'pattern of behavior'. This aspect of the archetype, the purely bio-

KnowiNg the Unknowable

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logical one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology.?"

Tinbergen's original ideas have been greatly extended by sociobiologists Charles Lumsden and Edward Wilson, who argue that all behavior, both human and nonhuman, depends on what they call epigenetic rules that control the psychosocial development of the individual. This idea is. itself an extension of an earlier proposal by biologist C. H, Waddington that the development of all living organisms is determined by epigenetic pathways, Waddington even directly affirmed the relevance to biology of "the notion of archetypes, .. the idea, that is, that there are only a certain number of basic patterns which organic forms can assume."18

All these concepts - innate releasing mechanisms, patterns of behavior, epigenetic rules, and epigenetic pathways -are clearly compatible with the archetypal hypothesis Jung had proposed decades earlier to virtually universal derision. The vast wealth of the observations collected by the ethologists and the sociobiologists thus provides us with an invaluable resource with which to amplify the archetypal hypothesis and to push hack the limits of our ignorance. By combing through all this material we can extract evidence that indicates how the archetypes, responsible for the crucial patterns of behavior urn versall y present in their various forms in all mammalian and primate species, actually evolved. For in the course of human evolution, at no time have we ceased to be mammals or primates. Indeed, as neuroscientist Paul Maclean has demonstrated, the human brain incorporates still-functioning and much earlier mammalian and even reptilian brains (see Figure 1).19 It is said, very truly, that a patient entering the consulting room brings a crowd of people along. What Maclean has shown is that the patient also brings in a horse and a crocodilel

Ethology, therefore, enables us to claim our ancient heritage not only from OUT hominid but from our much older ver-

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N,OMAMMALIAN

Figure L The Triune Brain, courtesy Paul Maclean

tebrate past. To establish for the archetype such a hallowed lineage is to put it on an unassailable scientific footing.

I should like now to look at another source of insight into archetypal functioning, namely, the study of dreams.

DREAM PSYCHOLOGY

Freud believed that dreams weave themselves out of memory residues from two sources: from events of the previous day and from childhood. lung accepted this, but went much further, maintaining that dreams draw on a third, much deeper source belonging to the evolutionary history of our species .. It was lung's startling and original discovery that our dreams actually grant us access to this ancient substratum of experience - that in our dreams we participate in our phylogeny. Or, to put it another way, in our dreams we speak to the species, and the species answers back.

This idea was considered fantastic when lung proposed it, but now it .is proving more acceptable ... The discoveries that all

Knowing rile Unkr/OwaMe

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mammalian species dream and that ell human fetuses spend milch of their time dreaming have inevitably given rise to speculation as to what on earth they can be dreaming about. Important dues have been found in sleep laboratories since Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman published their revolutionary finding that dreaming is reliably correlated with REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. In particular, one researcher, a Frenchman named Michel jouvet, has made two outstanding contributions: (1) that dreams arise &om bursts of activity in biologicaUy ancient parts of the brain, and (2) that both animals and humans get up and act out their dreams when the brain centers responsible for inhibiting movements (these centers are normally active during sleep and keep us virtually paralyzed) are damaged or incapacitated. For example, dreaming cats that have had these centers removed surgically will, in their sleep, "stalk" hallucinated prey, "pounce" upon it, "kill" it, and start to "eat" it. 20

Already, before jouvet published his findings in the 1970S, biologists were in agreement that dreams are an essential part of our biological heritage. They declared dreams to be ancient means of adaptation, which evolved 140 million years ago. The presence of REM sleep in .50 many species and over so many millions of years establishes by all evolutionary criteria that dreams perform a survival function in all mammals .. To account for this, it was suggested that dreams are the means by which animals update their strategies for survival by reevaluating current experience in the light of strategies formed and tested in the past. This vital work is done when the animal is asleep because it is only then that the brain is free of its outer preoccupationsrather like bank clerks doing their sums after the public is locked out and the blinds drawn down.

Jouvet carried this idea a step further. He advanced the hypothesis that in dreaming sleep an animal is updating its strategy for survival not only in the light of its own previous ex-

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perience but in the light of the experience of its species. In other words, dreaming is the means by which the entire behavioral repertoire of the species is integrated with the recent experience of the individual, thus promoting its capacity to survive the demands and exigencies of the following day. What is so fascinating about Jouvet's hypothesis is that it is Jungian theory in biological dress. It exactly parallels Jung's idea that dreams compensate for one-sided attitudes of the conscious ego by mobilizing archetypal components from the collective unconscious.

There are thus good scientific reasons for supposing that dreams are, in a sense, living fossils. in which we trace the primordial preoccupations of our kind. They relate the paleolithic to the present. They are biohistory incarnate, re-evoking the timeless reality implicit in the phenomenological world as we perceive it,

On the whole, it is true to say that Jung's theories have stood the test of time far better than Freud's. Thus, it is now fair to conclude that dreams are om, as Freud maintained, guardians of sleep; they are not predominantly the disguised manifestations of repressed sexual wishes; and they are not primarily responses to outer stimuli. On the contrary, they are, as Jung and Jouvet independently proposed, the result of spontaneous activity in the central nervous system and are transpersonal expressions of patterns involved with crucial life events-vthat is to say that they are archetypal expressions.

That these archetypal expressions should give rise to universal symbols should not, therefore, be a source of surprise. Not that Freud denied that universal symbols occur. He recognized the ubiquitousness of certain symbols not only in different fields of thought but among different civilizations and through different times.

So when Freud and Jung quarreled, the difference between them was not as to whether universal symbols occurred in dreams

KrlOwillg tlie ul1ktwwable

but as to what these universal symbols signified, Freud's reduction of them to basic sexual forms struck Jung as artificial and altogether too dogmatic. At the time, lung had difhculty in proving his point. There were insufficient data for him to draw on to make out a convincing case' for his archetypal hypothesis. Since then, innumerable dreams have been collected from members of different cultures in most regions of the world. This vast collection of material points to the truth of Jung's assertion that dream symbols are linked to all the fundamental patterns of human existence and that they reach much further. in their implications than a concern with mere sexuality. Before examining some of this evidence, I should like to consider the implications of archetypal theory _for contemporary psychiatry.

ARCHBTYPAL PSYCHIATRY

In Book I of his celebrated Ethics, Aristotle postulated three levels of life: (I) the hedonic life, governed by pleasure; (2) the political life, devoted to honor and the exercise of power; and (3) the contemplative life, devoted to wisdom and truth. The first two of these are extroverted and approximate to the governing preoccupations of Freudian and Adlerian psychology, while the third is introverted and in accord with the Jungian orientation. There seems to be something of fundamental importance about these three areas of human activity, and Aristotle was not the only thinker to anticipate the great triumvirate of twentieth-century analysts. For instance, Samuel Butler observed, well over a hundred years ago, that a man's most important possessions are his religion, his money, and his private partsagain pre-empting lung, Adler, and Freud!

As he framed it, Jung's archetypal hypothesis emerged as a fundamentally introverted concept: its extroverted implications have been explored, as we have already noted, by the anthro-

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pologists and behavioral biologists (the ethologists). In addition, some vitally important work has been carried on in this direction by a small number of ethologically oriented psychiatrists-whom 1 shall refer to as ethopsychiatrists, for short. The most gifted members of this select groupindude Brant Wenegrat and Russell Gardner in the United States and Paul Gilbert and John Price in Great Britain. Each of them has discovered and announced the existence of neuropsychic structures indistinguishable from Jungian archetypes, labeling them with their own jargon in such a way as to make them sound more scientific and more up-to-date. Wenegrat,. for example, borrows the sociobiological term "genetically transmitted response strategies." These strategies are held responsible for crucial, species-specific patterns of behavior that developed in order to maximize the fitness of the organism to survive in the environment in which it evolved-what biologists call the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. These strategies are inherently shared byaH members of the species, whether they be healthy or ill. Psychopathology intervenes when these strategies malfunction as a result of environmental insults or deficiencies at critical stages of development - the process I have termed "the frustration of archetypal in ten t, "21

Similarly, Paul Gilbert in England dubs archetypest'psychobiological response patterns," and Russell Gardner in the United States calls them "deeply homologous neural structures." All conceive these archetypal components as dependent on genes acting as conveyors of human potential, providing individuals with the primary motives and goals typical of human beings. These genetic factors achieve healthy or unhealthy expression in response to variations in the social or physical environment, facilitating or pathogenic as the case may be.

The importance of this work is. not only its extension of archetypal theory to psychiatric etiology but the historic fact

Knowing .Ihe UI/knowable

27

that it represents the first systematic attempt to acknowledge the phylogenetic element in psychiatry and to put psychopathology on a sound evolutionary basis.

Though some ethopsychiatrists recognize their connection with Jung, most nevertheless stress their extroverted biosocial orientation, insisting that social goals are the crucial ones for psychopathology. Nearly all mental distress, in their view, is caused by difficulties experienced by the self in relation to others .. We shall return to consider this work further, but at this point I should like to consider the implications of the archetypal hypothesis for the study of language and speech.

ARCHETYPAL LINGUISTICS

Have your ever stopped to consider the miraculous ease with which all children everywhere begin to speak-at an extraordinarily early age - the language, dialect, or patois spoken by the people around them in their environment? The behaviorists put this down to learning, reinforced by the reward of being understood and the punishment of not being able to ask for what you want. But you do not have to give much thought to the matter to realize that there is much more to it than mere learning. How is one to explain, for example, the amazing spurt in linguistic progress that occurs in children everywhere between eighteen and twenty-eight months of age? Why is the sequence through which linguistic functions develop similar in all children in all cultures? Why is it that toddlers playing round your seat in the Tuilleries Gardens in Paris have a virtuoso command of French vocabulary, idiom, and inflection while you ,after years of study in classes and language laboratories, have difficulty in asking for a stamp?

The answer proposed by specialists in linguistics is that children are born with a brain fully equipped with the capacity

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for speech -with what Noam Chomsky calls a language acquisition device, which primes them to develop the knack of using words and building sentences, In other words, the acquisition of speech is archetypally determined as part of the blueprint for development that is genetically encoded in the collective unconscious of the child. Though grammars differ, their basic forms-which Chomsky calls their deep structures (yet another name for archetypes) - are universal. That is to say, at the deepest neuropsychic level, there exists a universal grammar on which all individual grammars are based.22

This brings us to the paradox inherent in archetypal eheory: it combines the universal with the particular. In thisrespect, archetypes resemble Plato's ideas. For Plato, ideas were mental forms whichexisted above and beyond the objective world of phenomena. They were collective in the sense that they ernbodied the general characteristics of groups of individuals rather than the specific peculiarities of one. For example, your dog has qualities it.shares in common with aU dogs, which enable us to classify it as a dog. But in addition it has peculiarities of its own which enable you to pick yours out from dozens of other quadrupeds at a dog show. So it is with archetypes: they are common to aU humanity, yet we all experience them in our own particular way.

It is reasonable, therefore, that a distinction should be made, as is made in French linguistics, between langue (language) and parole (speech). The point is that language is like the proverbial river: we may come and we may go, but it goes on forever. Language is astable, collective, social institution; but each speaker of a language brings to it personal idiosyncrasies of speech; and each writer uses the language with a personal style. That is what style means.

The acquisition of language, therefore, is dependent upon the archetypal predisposition to acquire it and the existence, in

the environment, of a language to acquire. To put it .in the jargon of the present, if the language acquisition device is a computer, then culture provides the linguistic data the computer is programmed to proce.ss.

The purpose of this excursion into linguistics is to throw light on what occurs in dreams, for dreams have a language of their own, which enables us to speak to the species and the species to speak back to us. Like verbal language, the symbols of dream language are the products of the archetypal assimilation of experience. We can represent this thus:

Archetype + experience - symbol.

It follows that every symbol is a condensation (to use Freud's term) of the personal and the collective, the individual and the universal. The relative contribution of each differs from symbol to symbol: some symbols are so ego-referential that it is hard to recognize any archetypal contribution; others are so archetypal that one is unable to elicit any "free" associations to them.

Nancy Burson's picture entitled ''Androgyne,'' a composite of twelve photographs, six men and six women, illustrates the point I am trying to make. There is something hauntingly familiar about it, as jf it could be somebody we have known but can't quite place. It is a set of twelve variations on the archetypal theme of the human face all condensed to one image. It is this kind of condensation between the archetype and its many possible evocations which goes on every night in our dreams.P

Dreams are extraordinarily rich communications: they deal in feelings, intuitions, and sensations as well as thoughts. And dreams show that complex modes of apperception can be communicated just as well in images as they can in words. Indeed, images must carry precedence over words, for as any analytic session demonstrates, dream images invariably reflect more than the dreamer has previously understood or has ever attempted

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to express verbally. This is why dream analysis balds the central position that it does in classical Jungian therapy.

Thus, analytic practice calls into question the statements of laboratory dream researchers who insist that we can image only what we already know. There are numerous instances of scientific discovery and literary creation originating in the visual imagery of dreams: Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring, Howe's invention of the sewing machine, and Robert Louis Stevenson's composition of The Strange Case oj Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are probably the best-known examples. The transformstive power of dreams is the work of that inner magician, the imagination. Our inventiveness is never more acute than in the creation of images. Images are the imagination at play, and it plays with the delight and ingenuity of a boisterous child. Images can suggest things that the ego would never think of. Hence Kekule's advice: "Learn to dream."

We can see now how inadequate was Freud's understanding of the language of the unconscious as essentially primitive and infantile .. To lung, on the other hand, it was the language of Nature herself In tune with Jung's insight, Paul Kugler in his dazzling book The Alcherny oj Discourse seeks to establish a new discipline of archetypal linguistics-which he defines as "a linguistics of the poetic imagination." Stating his manifesto, he declares, ''Archetypal linguistics is the speech of the soul. "24

The language of dreams is, as George Orwell might have put it, nature-speak, for nature speaks to us directly in dreams and myths .. In our dreams we enter the natural world of our kind: it is the archetypal world, and the archetypal world is the natural world of the dreamer. In dreams we enter tbe paleolithic caves of our ancestors, and, God help them, bring them up-to-date,

What do our ancestors make of the contemporary world?

Much of it, I suspect, they rather like-the ready availability

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3I

of food, drink, comfort, entertainment, and sexual gratification. But they miss the close ties of kinship, the intimacy of smallcommunity life, the shared responsibilities of hunting, gathering, and defense, the working interaction with nature, the rites and rituals, the myths and legends of heroes, gods, and goddesses, and the magical sense of living in an animated world. Sometimes the disparity between their world and ours is more than they can bear, and they break down and become ill. We shall return to this theme.

ENTERING PREHISTORY

Jung's own anthropological researches in the 19205, his visits to Algeria and Tunisia, Kenya and Uganda and to the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, were much more than intellectual tourism. They were part of his need to achieve the self-realization of the unconscious, and they brought him into contact with what he called the two million-year-old within. Of his visit to North Africa he wrote: "Just as a childhood memory can suddenly take possession of consciousness with so lively an emotion that we feel wholly transported back to the original situation, so the seemingly alien and wholly different Arab surroundings awaken an archetypal memory of an only too well known pre-historic past which apparently we have entirely for·gotten. We are remembering a potentiality of life which has been overgrown by civilization, but which in certain places is still existent. "25 U nfortuna tely, the number of places in which it is still existent have dwindled to such a drastic extent since Jung visited them that there are precious few of them left.

Having entered the archetypal realm during his confrontation with the unconscious between I914 and 1918, he sought during the I920S to corroborate his introverted researches from the outside, throwing objective light on the prehistoric layers

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of collective experience and potential: "I unconsciously wanted to find that part of my personality which had become invisible under the influence and the pressure of being European."26

Apart from providing valuable insights into the age-old patterns of human Hfe, these journeys provided him with a standpoint from which he could take a more objective view of Western civilization. It confirmed his impression that Europeans had become alienated from their own humanity .. Because their rationalism had been won at the expense of their vitality, the more primitive nature of Europeans had been "condemned to a more or less underground existence." His travels made lung deeply aware of his consanguinity with the people he encountered, and he came to believe that Europeans despised primitive peoples in order to defend themselves against the recognition of how spiritually impoverished, how lacking inanimal vitality they were by comparison. "Knowledge does not enrich us," be wrote; "it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth ... "27

In particular, he was overcome by a powerful sense of deja vu on his arrival in Kenya, when he was traveling from Mombassa to Nairobi and saw a tribesman standing on a rocky promontory in the early morning sun.

When the frrst ray of sunlight announced the onset of day, 1 awoke. The train, swathed in a red cloud of dust, was just making a turn around a steep red cliff. On ajagged rock above us a slim, brownish-black figure stood motionless, leanmg on a long spear, looking down at the train. Beside him towered a gigantic candelabrum cactus.

I was enchanted by this sight= it was a picture of something utterly alien and outside my experience, but on the other hand a most intense sentiment du dija uu. I had the feeling that I had already experienced this moment and bad al-

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ways known this world which was separated from me only by distance In time. 1t was as if I were this moment returning to the land of my youth, and as if I knew that darkskinned man who had been waiting for me for five thousand years.

The feeling-tone of this curious experience accompanied

me throughout my whole journey through savage Africa.

lung concluded: "I could not guess what string within myself was plucked at the sight of that solitary dark hunter. 1 knew only that his world had been mine for countless millennia .. »zs

He traveled to the north of Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Elgon to stay among the Elgonyi. There he experienced complete happiness. "Our camp life proved to be one of the loveliest interludes of my life. I enjoyed the 'divine peace' of a still primeval country .... My liberated psychic forces poured blissfully hack to the primeval expanses. "29

He had come home. This was his world. When the time for departure came, he could barely tear himself <iway and swore that he would come back at the first opportunity. When he did eventually return, ten years later, it was to find that this previously pristine Eden had been transformed into a gold mine. The timeless world of beauty, passion, and spirit was no longer accessible.P Such are the crippling and disfiguring wounds our century has everywhere inflicted.

lung never forgot a conversation that he had with an EIgorryi medicine man, who told him that the Elgonyi had always paid great attention to their dreams, which guided them in .all the important decisions of their lives ... But now, the old man added sadly, his people no longer needed their dreams because the English, who ruled the earth (this was the 19205, remember), knew everything, and dreams were therefore no longer necessary.

lung saw parallels in the cultural patterns of peoples wher-

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ever he traveled, In America, for example, he was fascinated by the way in which the initiation ceremonies of American college fraternities directly resembled those of American Indian tribes; that the deadly seriousness with which modern Americans played their sports embodied the heroic ideal of the Native American; and that the rituals of secret societies such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of Columbus resembled the practices of American Indian mystery religions, Jung believed that immigrant Americans had been influenced by the traditions of the indigenous population to a much more profound degree than they realized, Not only did Christian Science echo American Indian shamanism in its beliefs and modes of healing, but the skylines of Chicago and New York, the "houses piling up in towers towards the centre," were just like those of the Indian pueblos of the Southwest, "Without conscious imitation," commented lung, the American unconsciously hlls out the spectral outline of the Red Man's mind and temperament.t's!

lung's expeditions were symbolic journeys as well as field trips. They were yet another descent into the underworld in search of the treasure hard to attain. Par jung, as an his writings make abundantly clear, the unconscious was no mere concept to be studied in academic seclusion: it was a demon pos~ sessing immense authority and overwhelming energy of its own, It was something to be confronted, grappled with, and contained, Hence his designation of the individuation process as the opus contra naturam. The unconscious is nature, but we have to confront its contents if weare to become conscious of them.

His own confrontation with the unconscious brought him face to face with two archetypal ligures.: the anima (Salome) and the wise old man (Philemon). While he was to spend much time later in researching both these ligures in the literature of myth, religion, and alchemy, it is typical of him that his primary knowledge of them was derived from direct personal ex-

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perience: gnosis. The rest was mere circumambulation. To lung, true knowledge was, and had to be, revelatory.

So, as Jung knew, we may increase OUI intellectual understanding of the archetype by studying all the different sources of knowledge about it, but if we wish to experience its vitalizing energy, then we have to risk making ourselves vulnerable to the influence of the primordial survivor in our own lives.

2.

Dreaming Myths

Not for a moment dare we sucwmb to the illusiol1 that an archetype can be finally explai·ned and disposed of ... The most !l1e carl do is to dream the mytb onwards and give it II mDdern dress. -c. G. JUNG, Collected Worh, vol. 9, part I

A myth is a public dream, a dream is a l'rill(lte myth.

- JOSBPH CAMPBELL

ThERE ARE CERTAIN AREAS OF AGREEMENT between Jungian psychology and behavioral biology, with particular reference to the role of the collective unconscious and the function of dreams. The ethological view that dreaming sleep is necessary for an animal to update its strategies for survival by integrating the ethograrn (the total behavioral repertoire of the species encoded in the brain) with the recentexperience of the-individual is in close accord with the Jungian view, proposed forty years earHer, that our dreams nightly put us in touch with the wisdom of the two million-year-old human being who exists as living potential within the collective unconscious of us all.

In strictly biological terms, dreams are genetically determined behavioral rehearsals which, like play, prepare the organism for the eventualities of daily life. Thus, we can translate Alfred Adler's insight that "dreams are dress rehearsals for life" into the terminology. of contemporary ethology= narnely, that

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dreams play an indispensable role in organizing the ethogram (in OUI terms, the archetypal program for life) into the com' plicated behavioral and psychic sequences involved in the crucial life performances of all mammals, such as courtship, mating, hunting, dominance striving, and territorial acquisition and defense.

That phylogeneticaUy ancient structures play an important part in the dreams of human beings can be deduced from statistical studies that focus on the content of dreams. In one study of the common dreams of college students, for example, the following themes were reported, in descending order of frequency: falling, being pursued or attacked, repeated attempts at performing a task, experiences connected with academic work, and sex.! All these types of dreams, with the exception of those concerned with academic work, have fairly evident phyloge netic links. It is not surprising, for example, that a creature which in earlier stages of its evolution spent much of its life in trees should experience anxiety dreams of falling .. Similarly, nightmares of being pursued or attacked are to be expected in a species whose primordial conflicts have involved hunting, fighting, and striving for dominance. Furthermore, the vital need to master changes in the environment, to acquire physical skills, perform religious and social rituals, and so on require repeated attempts to learn and perform such tasks. Finally, the contribution of sexual behavior to the survival of the species requires no comment ..

Calvin S. Hall and Vernon]. Nordby, those intrepid collectors of dreams in the 1950S and 19605, also concluded, on the basis of their examination of more than fifty thousand dreams, that a number of typical themes are repeated over and over again. By a theme they meant the same basic plot or event. "This is true for individual dream series as well as for sets of dreams obtained from groups of people," they wrote .. "These typical

TWO MILLlON-YEAR-OLD SELP

dreams, as we shall call them, are experienced by virtually every dreamer, although there are differences in the frequency with which these dreams occur among individual dreamers and among groups of dreamers .. "2

The typical dreams reported by Hall and Nordby involved aggression, predatory animals, Hying, falling, being pursued by hostile strangers, landscapes, dreams of misfortune, sex, getting married and having children, taking examinations or undergoing some similar ordeal, traveling (whether on foot, horseback, car, airplane, or ship), swimming or being in the water, watching fires. and being conhned in an underground place. ':AU people living in Western civilization will have these dreams at some time in their lives," they wrote, "and many of them will be repeated again and again." Though Freudian by orienta' tion, Hall and Nordby concluded: "These typical dreams express the shared concerns, preoccupations, and interests of all dreamers. They may be said to constitute the universal constants of the human psyche."3 Dreams thus provide us with copious evidence in support of lung's hypothesis of the collective unconscious.

One of Hall and Nordby'S more interesting findings is that "many more bad things than good things happen to the dreamer in his dreams ..... We infer from it that people conceive of the world asa predominantly threatening, unfriendly .. hostile place."4 This conliicts sharply with the Freudian view that dreams are disguised wish fulfillments. And although they don't make this interpretation, their finding is susceptible to the biological explanation that one function of dreams is to alert and prepare the dreamer to encounter the kind of threats that were usual in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (that is to say, the environment in which our species evolved and in which we have lived for 99 percent of our existence).

Although Hall and Nordby insist that their research is un-

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influenced by Freudian assumptions, these assumptions are nevertheless apparent. For example, they interpret dreams in which predatory animals with big teeth pursue the dreamer as castration dreams. They do not for one moment consider the possibility that such dreams could be phylogenetically determined. One dream that they cite as a castration dream in fact expresses the archetypes of landscape, predation, and escape. A young man reported the following: I dreamed that 1 was in a large open space and huge animals of all sorts with wide open mouths and big gnashing teeth were chasing me. I ran from side to side trying to escape. The huge animal monsters finally hemmed me in. They were going to claw and eat me. I awoke .. "s

From the point of view of Jungian psychology, the finding of most interest is that certain symbols occur again and again in dreams of people from differing cultural and linguistic backgrounds. At about the time that Han and Nordby were conducting their research, a fascinating study by Dr. Richard Griffith in the United States in association with Drs. 0. Miyagi and A. Tago in Japan compared the dreams of 250 college students in K.entuckyand 223 in Tokyo. More than seven thousand dreams were collected, and when they were examined to discover how often certain themes recurred, it was found that remarkable similarity existed between the two groups. Moreover, the recurrent themes detected are very similar to those described by Hall and Nordby. 6

It seems that dreams return. repeatedly to those themeswe would call them archetypal themes - which have typically concerned human beings always and everywhere. Again Jung's axiom is confirmed: "Ultimately, every individual life is at the same the eternal life of the species."?

What is crucial to the survival of every mammalian species is that basic reflex processes (what ethologists call fixed action patterns) become efficiently organized into appropriate behavior

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in the course of ontological development, The basic four Fs of fixed action ate feeding, fighting, Seeing, and fornication, If Miche}Jouvet is right and REM sleep is indeed a "genetically determined behaviour rehearsal," then the vital significance of dreams is that they enable the animal to respond appropriately to food, threat, attack, and sexual encounters even before the gustatory, threatening, or erotic stimuli are encountered. As J. Allan Hobson puts it in his indispensable book The Dreaming Brain, the neural program for behavioral acts must be put in place before certain behavior is demanded .. a

Hobson reports an incident &om his own experience which convinced him that this must be so, and that we are indeed prepared by our dreams and by our heredity to defend ourselves and to fight even if we have never been trained to do so. "Three men once cornered me in the parking lot where I had parked my car, II he writes.

It was eady one spring morning, and I was going to the lab to monitor a sleep-lab experiment .. An of my wit and wile were unsuccessful in protecting me from assault. Only after I had been knocked to the ground unconscious, and was being kicked and pummelled, did some primordial urge rise up within me. I remember feeling what seemed at the time to be inhuman strength, probably surges of adrenal hormone, I threw the three men off and, with two of them chasing me, ran with Olympic speed up an alley .. I recall that, at the peak of my aggressive strength, I thought, "these men want to kill me."

Where did this primordial surge of.aggressive energy and strength come from? This particular set of behaviors had never before emerged, yet I was somehow capable of it. I certainly did not have time to learn it on the spot! I would not deny the value of childhood and adolescent play and the ritualized aggressive games of boyhood; but to look back even further,

Dremniug Myths

my guess is that the brain basis of many of these acts had been put in place and maintained over time for just such an occasion. It did not save my nose (which was broken into smithereens), but it did save my Jife.9

Hobson comments that, as with aggression, the sexual act is dependent upon fixed-action patterns that have a life of their own, and are, apparently, in constant readiness so that, even after long fallow periods, an erotic encounter can result in instant performance. This fact could have reassured Oscar Hamrnerstein II, who married early. His future father-in-law demanded to know if he was a virgin, and Hammerstein readily asserted that he was. "You mean you're going to practice on my daughter?" retorted the irate parent .. His anxiety was probably unnecessary. REM sleep erections and wet dreams, particularly in puberty Or adolescence, are outward signs of the role played by dreaming in the activation and maintenance of the psycho-physical infrastructures responsible for sexual experience and behavior. As we know, it was this aspect of dreaming that was of primary interest to Freud, who overemphasized its significance and attempted to subsume all dream activity under its influence,

Hobson's suggestions; like those o fJou vet, are entirely compatible with Jungian theory. And although Paul Maclean proposed his concept of the triune brain several years after lung's death, lung had already anticipated it, maintaining that dreams about mammals or reptiles related to phylogenetically ancient mammalian and reptilian structures in the brain and were expressions of the deeper intentions of nature itself. "The evolutionary stratification of the psyche," wrote lung, "is more clearly discernible in the dream than in the conscious mind. In the dream, the psyche speaks in images, and gives expression to instincts, which derive from the most primitive levels of nature. There-

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fore, through the assimilation of unconscious contents, the momentary life of consciousness can once more be brought into harmony with the law of nature from which it .a11 too easily departs, and the patient can be led back to the natural law of his own being."IO

Our difficulties, neurotic, psychotic, psychopathic, or otherwise, lung argued, "come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams."l1 Dreams, therefore, are the language used in the lifelong dialogue proceeding nightly between the ego and the unconscious: they are the means by which the individual becomes psychically related to the life cycle of the species ..

The truth of this statement becomes dear when we examine a long series of dreams from the same dreamer. Bach individual dream is an act of compensation, "a momentary adjustment of one-sidedness or an equalization of disturbed balance. But with deeper insight and experience," wrote lung, "these apparently separate acts of compensation arrange themselves into a kind of plan, They seem to hang together and in the deepest sense to be subordinated to a common goal, so that a long dreamseries no longer appears as a senseless string of incoherent and isolated happenings, but resembles the successive steps in a planned and orderly process of development .. I have called this unconscious process spontaneously expressing itself in the symbolism of a long dream-series the individuation process."12

A DREAM INTERPRETED

let us now look at a dream and interpret it in the light of what I have been saying. Gary, a farmer in his early thirties, had this dream:

"It was a golden evening of late summer. A feeling of great

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ripeness was in the air .. The landscape glimmered in the sharp evening light with an intensity that struck me as supernatural. I stood in the yard behind our farmhouse waiting for someone to return from the fields after a day's harvesting.

"Suddenly, I hear the sound of a tractor coming down the lane. An elderly man - I think my father~ is at the wheel. As he approaches the big seventeenth-century gate piers marking the entrance to the farm, I notice my Uncle John lurking in the shadows of a nearby chestnut tree. In his hand he holds the broadsword, dating from the [English} Civil War, which normally hangs in the hall of the farm. To my horror, I realize he means to attack my father. I try to cry out and run towards him, but some force paralyzes me and I can't shout and I can't move, Feeling totally he1plessand impotent, I watch in anguish as my uncle leaps onto the tractor and drags the elderly figure (who is now clearly my father) from the driving seat, throwing him to the ground. Then with sickening brutality, Uncle begins to hack at him with the sword. 'Stop!' I scream, but the word gets no further than a gurgle in my throat. A dreadful sadness takes hold of me as I realize that my father can never survive this terrible assault.

"Then I am with a woman in a woodland nearby. It's nearly dark. Somehow she knows what has happened and tries to console me. She is like my fiancee, but darker and taller and older, a bit like my mother in fact. She tells me 1 must never forget what I have seen and must spend my life putting it right.

"I wake feeling drained, full of disturbed emotions. My heart thuds loudly and I fear I'm having a heart attack. This passes but the dream disturbs me for the rest of the day,"

In working together on this dream, Gary and I approached it in the classic Jungian manner. That is to say, I asked him to do some active imagination ~ to dream the dream onwards, so to speak-and also to provide his personal associations to the

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events and personalities in the dream. We then examined the cultural and archetypal backgrounds to the dream and shared, as fully as possible, the insights and feeling.s that emerged. Let us take each of these stages in turn.

Active imagination: The first thought that struck Gary was that his uncle was a survivor; he could always justify and get away with anything he did, however shady, so there is 110 question of his owning up to the crime or facing up to the consequences of his terrible action. Since John had no idea that his attack had been observed, his first concern was burial of his brother's remains in a place where they would not be discovered .. Gary said, "I can hear his voice saying, 'A murderer's first concern is to get rid of the body.'"

Personal associations: Gary's father, Andrew, was the oldest of his siblings, and being the eldest, inherited the family farm when Gary's grandfather was killed in a tractor accident at the age of sixty-three. Andrew's brother John (the dreamer's uncle) was only a year younger than Andrew, and an intense rivalry had always existed between them. Although John'S senior, Andrew was more sensitive, slighter of build, and less aggressive. As a boy, John had quickly learned to use his size and greater physical strengtb to intimidate Andrew and made little secret of the fact that he despised his elder brother. Moreover, John had always been their father's favorite, and when the older man was killed, John bitterly resented the fact that it was Andrew who inherited the farm and not he. To add insult to injury, he considered Andrew to be totally unworthy of his position. For unlike John, Andrew was very "green": he hated to use chemicals on the land and would have nothing to do with mechanized farming of animals. John, on the other hand, advocated the use of all the very latest scientific discoveries to maximize profits and productivity, as his father had left him an interest in the farm.

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So what did this family conflict mean to the dreamer? Gary loved his father and rather feared his uncle, but he had to admit that there were times when his father seemed misguided and it was true that the farm was going downhill financially. Gary had often been present when rows flared up between his father and unde, and latterly he had come to feel that his uncIe was getting the better of the argument. However, his father stubbornly refused to be moved from his principled position. In the past, Gary had kept quiet during these rows, but increasingly he felt he should intervene and support some of the proposals ad vanced by his U ncle John. Gary worried a bout the effect this intervention would have on his father and was in considerable conliict about this at the time of his dream.

The dream clearly represents this conflict in the dreamer.

It is as if he realizes that by siding with his uncle he would in fact be killing his father. That the sword dates from the Civil War reflects the nature of the war taking place within the family and within the dreamer's psyche. That the ego is paralyzed and unable to intervene may be due to the actual paralysis experienced by everyone in REM sleep, but it could also symbolize the emotional paralysis experienced by Gary in waking reality when he confronts the conflict between his two seniors.

The dream is telling him that if he resolves the conflict by adopting the attitude of his uncle, he must be prepared to kill both his actual father and his inner father (i.e., that part of himself that is identified with his father's attitude and personality).

The female figure, in part his fiancee, in part his mother, is au fond his anima. She understands the profound significance of this masculine conflict and tells him that he will have to spend his life resolving it. This is true enough, since Gary will himself run and later inherit the farm as his father passes on into old age and death. There is also a death wish implicit in the

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dream: his father is on a tractor, and it was on a tractor that his father's father died ..

Now all this seems dear and straightforward enough, and I imagine that most schools and analysis would go along with what I have said about the dream so far, though they would probably stress some details more than others. For example, Freudians would doubtless call attention to the sword asa phallic symbol, pointing out that through his closer relationship and identity with his father, Uncle John possessed greater phallic power than father Andrew and consequently symbolized this power in the psyche of the dreamer. Also the uncle's murderous action represents the parricide in Gary-his desire to slay the father and inherit the kingdom (i.e., the tractor association). Freudians would doubtless interpret this Oedipally, especially in view of the resemblance between Gary's anima and his mother. What would a Jungian add to this? Inevitably, the culturaland the archetypal dimensions.

Cultural associations: The seventeenth-century farmhouse, the gate piers, and the broadsword are all contemporaneous with the English Civil War (1642-46). Like all civil wars it was about power: who rules? The King or Parliament? Oliver Cromwell cuts off King Charles's head and usurps his power. Cromwell's government is eventually removed and the King's sou restored, but he is now a constitutional monarch who rules with the consent of parliament and the people.

This history provides Gary with an allegory of what is happening in his own case: he is in the process of becoming a coostitutional monarch who succeeds to the strife-tom kingdom ravaged by the struggle between his father (the King) and his uncle (Cromwell).

Archetypala.ssociations: Are there any parallels to chis drama in mythology? Indeed there are! Many of them. The myth which leaps most immediately to mind, almost in its entirety,

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is that of Osiris. Osiris is far and away the most appealing of the Egyptian gods. The peaceful bringer of civilization, he taught people how to cultivate grain and the vine and to make bread, beer, and wine. He built the first cities and temples and gave all these benefits to the known world, together with the delights of music and the arts. All this was achieved without violence but with goodwill and by example.

But, alas, tills is an imperfect world. Osiris has a jealous brother, Set, who wishes to seize power from Osiris and put it to his own egocentric ends. Together with a g.ang of accomplices, Set kidnaps Osiris, nails him up in a wooden coffer, and casts him into the Nile. The coffer is carried out to sea and across the Byblos on the Phoenician coast, where it comes to rest at the foot of a tamarisk tree.

Enter Osiris's wife, his sister Isis. She goes to Phoenicia and recovers the body of Osiris .. To deceive Set, she hides it in the swamp of the Nile Delta. But there it is discovered by Set one night when he is out hunting by moonlight .. Set attacks the body with his knife, dismembering it into fourteen pieces, which he then scatters far and wide.

Not to be outwitted, Isis seeks out the precious fragments and collects them together, except for one very important part: the phallus. She reassembles the pieces and, for theIirst time in history, performs the rites of embalmment, which restore the murdered god to eternal life. The phallus is replaced by the Djed pillar, symbol of eternal generativity.

Osiris is an example of the Great Individual, the Anthropos, and can be understood as representing humankind and the total archetypal endowment of the Self. He is the embodiment of that creative genius in our species which transformed the huntergatherer into the civilized agriculturalist. He also represents the principle of death and rebirth, for he is a vegetation spirit animating the corn, the vine, and the trees.

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Set is altogether different. If Osiris is the Self in all its lileenhancing creativity, then Set is the grasping ego, high-jacking Osiris's power for his own greedy and destructive purposes. It is significant that Set was not born naturally. He tore his way violently out of his mother's womb. Moreover, he had white skin and red hair, both of which the Egyptians disliked, especially the latter which they compared to the pelt of an ass. So Set is a kind of prefiguration of Nordic man, who does violence to nature to satisfy his own ego-needs.

The parallels between the Osiris myth and Gary's dream are so striking as to require little comment. The dream casts Gary's father in the role of Osiris, his Uncle John in the role of Set, and his mother/fiancee/anima in the role of Isis.

That the quarrel between the two brothers is over two contrary modes of farming - the organic and the technologicalmerely means that the myth has been brought up-to-date .. In this dream Gary has produced a. contemporary myth, his own myth, tailor-made for our times,

A further mythological parallel to the relationship between Gary's father and his Uncle John is that between Prometheus ("he who knows in advance") and his brother Epimetheus ("he who learns after the event"). Prometheus stole fire from the gods to compensate humanity for the prodigal stupidity of his brother, who dissipated the gifts of the gods and left humanity with few resources. Per his brave act of defiance, the gods punished Prometheus by binding him to the Caucasus and sending an eagle to feed on his liver every day .. They also sent Epimetheus the beautiful but treacherous Pandora, who brought death and destruction into the world.

This myth tells in different guise the story of the Fall. By defying the gods, the man becomes conscious of the laws of nature and subjugates them to his will. Emerging from the

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hunter-gatherer state, he seizes all the goods of the world for his own gratification. Epimetheus is an impulsive bon viueur who, like Set, has no concern for the morrow. His motto is Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Needless to say, Gary had never heard of Osiris, and, although he knew of Prometheus's gift of rue to humanity, he had no idea of Epirnetheus's part in this sad history. When I told him of these things, he was visibly shaken and sat silent in his chair for five minutes before he could trust himself to speak.

The outcome of this dream, and our work on it, was that his entire understanding of the conflict both inside and outside himself was transformed, and he was enabled in one session to see a way forward., which transcended the polar standpoints adopted by his father and his uncle. This also had the effect offunhering his personal growth and individuation.

By relating the dream to its mythic context, Gary was suddenlyable to see that his intrapsychic drama was part of the greater drama being played out ona global scale, and this thought allied him in renewed sympathy with his father's cause, giving it a metaphysical, almost religious intensity. In Western civilization, Osiris lies slumbering in the depths of the collective unconscious, a sleep so profound as to resemble coma, while in the collective conscious Set is both in command and on the rampage. Set has no time for the eternal cycles of nature or for a civilized adjustment to them: he subverts everything to his own selfish needs in the here and now, with no concern for ecology or the morrow. When the bulldozers move in to rip up the countryside, Set is at the wheel. When a thousand square miles of rain forest are to be laid waste, Set lights the fire. When a multitude of Iraqi conscripts is to be incinerated on the road from Kuwait City, Set is at the controls. For Set puts himself against the laws of nature, and like aU true outlaws, rapes and

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pillages with no thought of the consequences. Set is anecological psychopath, and in our world he rules. Put in psychological terms, Set is the selfish ego divorced from the selfless Self. For what we do to the environment is a direct consequence of what we do to ourselves. "There is only one thing wrong with the

ld " id J "d hac i "'13

war, saic ung,an _ t _at 1S man. "

Gary serves as a good example to us all because he demonstrates a means of healing the split between the ego and the Self, so that Set and Osiris may be reconciled: we should attend with great seriousness to our dreams; dreams are the pillow talk of the ego and Self. Essentially, this is an alchemical conversation because dreams are the prima materia of our psychic life. In the interaction of conscious with unconscious, personal with archetypal" a magical transformation occurs, and the quest for psychic wholeness is brought a stage nearer, Attention to such dialogues on a nightly basis can alter how we perceive our role in life and how we deal with the world about us.

Before we pass on to other matters, let us consider a few more parallels to Gary's dream, The drama of Set and Osiris is anticipated by the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, which dates from the dawn of history. Enkidu, is the embodiment of nature and the Self, and he grows up in the wilderness with animals for his companions. On the other hand, Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, the first great city of the world, with its ramparts and enormous wealth, is the heroic ego who casts off the ancient modesty of the hunter-gatherer living in harmonious balance with his surroundings and bya bold exertion of his will, slays the monster Humbaba and lays waste the great forest of cedar trees stretching ftom the Lebanon to the Euphrates. He coerces Enkidu into assisting him in this gigantic task-displaying the discipline, determination, and iron will through which the ego can so successfully annex the energies of the Self and put them to the service of its own inflated ambitions ...

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For the King of Ramparted Uruk Has altered the unalterable way, Abused, changed the practices. 14

The words speak to us of a truth even more familiar now than when they were impressed on the ancient day tablets all those thousands of years ago. Great civilizations come and go, but the human psyche goes on grappling with the same issues, gen~ eration after generation.

The aggressive power-hunger of the hero-Gilgamesh, Heracles, Odysseus- is always balanced by figures carrying the opposite values of peace, love, and attachment to the divine, as Frank Cawson points out in an important manuscript on the hero archetype, "The Hero Must Die.' Instead of a weapon, Dionysus carries a wand sprouting an ivy leaf, Orpheus strums his lute, Christ holds a shepherd's crook, while the Buddha sits in quiet meditation, his hands open and unarmed. Contrast with these Heracles, shouldering his great phallic club ("every weapon of war, from Heracles' club to the nuclear bomb and Scud rnissile, replicates the shape and something of the mechanism of the phallus," says Cawson)lS and Odysseus with his enormous stake putting out the eye of Polyphemus, the Cyclops, who like all his kind lives in ignorance of civilization, incapable of agriculture and organized productivity, inhabiting a pre-Fall Eden, depending entirely on the bounty of nature. Telling us of these creatures, Homer sings:

.. . they neither plow

nor sow by hand, nor till the ground, though grainwild wheat and barley-grow untended, and wine-grapes, in clusters, ripen in heaven's rain. 16

The symbolism of Odysseus's act in blinding Polyphemus is a violent piece of psychic repression, rendering the creature of nature unconscious.

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The problem of Set, Gilgamesh, and the rest, also appears in the second part of Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles is the dealer, procurer, entrepreneur, who can get you anything you wantprovided you sell your soul to the devil, The theme also surfaces in art, as in Bruegel's great picture The Fall of Icarus in the Musee des Beaux Arts, in Brussels. And again, in the numerous representations of the warrior-hero on his horse.

The hero's association with the horse is richly symbolic of his. whole attitude to natural things, A beautiful creature of elemental power, of speed and grace,. the horse is something to be captured, possessed, mastered, and exploited. The hero harnesses it to his chariot, shackles its mouth, breaks it in, whips it, forces it to obey his will. Alexander the Great, riding Bucephalus, conquers the known world from Macedonia to the Hindu Kush and beyond; Genghis Khan and his marauding gang of bloodthirsty heroes gallop across the Steppes of Asia, looting, pillaging, raping, murdering" spreading terror and misery wherever it pleases them to go, Horse breaking can stand as a symbol for what the masculine ego does to nature when it goes alter fame, fortune, and the other Fs in the hero's vocabulary,

As the warrior-hero treats his horses, so he treats his women (and the feminine in himself), The anima is rigorously repressed, as it is in the training of young soldiers to this day, There can be no place for gentleness or compassion when killing's to be done. "The greatest happiness for a man," declared Genghis Khan, "and the greatest joy, is to defeat and exterminate the enemy, to destroy him in his very roots, to take all he possesses, to force his wives to weep, to ride his best and beloved horses, and to have the joy of possessing his beautiful women," Women are objects to be enjoyed as much out of a sadistic desire to humiliate their menfolk as out of the urge for sexual gratification.

Yet even in the hero, the Self still works to express all its potential in life, including relationship with the feminine, Even-

53

tually, the most warlike Mars will seek his Venus, Ares his Aphrodite, Odysseus returns to Ithaca to drive out the suitors and be reunited with Penelope, Usually, the anima has to wait for the warrior to weary of his material conquests before she can contrive to conquer him,

In Gary's case, however, there was 110 such waiting, The anima was alive to his problem, and when he shared his dream experience with his fiancee, she understood: it confirmed many feelings she had been keeping to berself. She was able to pledge him her loyal support as his consortand future queen, and the bond was strengthened between them,

As all this amplification serves to prove, Gary's dream was a "big" dream touching on profound archetypal themes and carrying great numinous power. It was a culture pattern dream, All dreams have implicit in them some archetypal component, but some dreams are more evidently archetypal than others, in that they are different-uncanny and eerie, They stir up the dreamer's feelings because they bring up the most important issues of life and death. Such dreams are private myths,

DREAM ECOLOGY

Before we leave Gary's dream altogether, I should say something about the landscape in which the drama unfolds, It is the familiar landscape of Gary's ordinary working life, yet in the dream it is "a golden evening of late summer," and the fields and bedgerows glow with an intensity that strikes him as supernatural,

There is more than a hint of the Virgilian Golden Age in this description. the innocence of Eden before the FalL The desire to evoke this paradise and lament its loss is the intention behind much poetry (William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A, E, Housman), music (Frederick Delius, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams), and art

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(Claude, Poussin, Constable, the Impressionists). Many would attribute such nostalgia to a fantasied idealization of childhood; but it clearly goes deeper than this, for such intense feelings begin early in childhood itself, presumably because children live so much closer to the archetypal realm of experience and so inhabit an animated world. Animals, plants, trees, streams, the wind, all are alive and self- aware, relished through a participation mystique of projective identification. Children share that "nature mysticism" common to all primal peoples, which the Romantic poets elevated into anaesthetic device and which jung discovered as a boy sitting on a stone in his father's garden ("Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is 51 tti n g?") .Y

One has but to make the effort of imagination to remember what it was like. As a child, I would look at a prospect of fields, woods, hills, and streams, marvel at the vivid variety of color, the dancing glints of light on leaves and water, and wonder, "Did it look like this in the eighteenth century?" A glow of delight would come with the answer, "Yes, it did." Years afterwards I wondered what that was about. I am sure that it was a glimpse of the timeless world=the world as our ancestors have always seen it. The sense that it is not "I" here perceiving this landscape as a private film show, but the primordial survivor gazing upon it through my eyes. At such moments I became vividly, transcendentally alive, inspired with a heightened awareness of unique selfhood within an eternally human context.

Landscape is numinous to us in dreams and waking reality because it is, to use Jung's phrase, born in us as a virtual image: it is an archetypal given, so to speak. In his childhood, Gary came to know and love every acre of meadow and woodland that had belonged to his family for nearly four hundred years. One reason why he sympathized so powerfully with his father

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SS

was that it caused him physical pain to think of the brutal transformations that full mechanization would bring. The sense of continuity was precious to him, and the idea that it all could change was intolerable.

Here, too, he shared in a collective predicament-one which we in England have endured since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution but which people in America, with its wideopen spaces, are only just beginning to comprehend. The nineteenth-century poets and painters warned us that what we were doing to our landscape would ultimately destroy OUI souls. Hopkins's poem InIJersnaid is a poignant example:

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, a let them be left, wildness and wet:

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

In the past, places changed so slowly that we could return to the scenes of our childhood for intimations of permanence and eternity. This is becoming increasingly difficult. Like a George Orwell hero searching for the magical pond where as a boy he saw an enormous carp, we find nothing but a shopping mall, a housing development, or an industrial estate. It seems that one of the unavoidable pains of growing older in the con temporary world is the anguish of loss - the willfull destruction of what one knew and loved as a child. The result is alienating, enraging, bereaving. One has lost not only a beloved corner of the earth but a precious part of one's humanity. The primordial survivor weeps.

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows.

What are those blue remembered hills What spires, what farms are those?

TWO MILLlON-YEAR-OLD SELF

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

-A. E. Housman

Later I shall argue that the forces in the contemporary world which are hostile to nature are also hostile to our dreams, and that we will continue to maltreat our environment as long as we maltreat ourselves. As far as Nature is concerned, inner and outer, psyche and matter are all one. No Cartesian dualist, she!

3·

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We, each and all of us, contain within us the entire history oJthe world, and jlJSt aSOHt body records Man's gelualogy as for back as the _fish and then some, so our soul encompasses ellery thing thai has ever existed in human souls, All gods and devils that have eller existed .arelvithin liS as possil}i lilies, as desires, as solutions,

- HERMANN HESSE, Reflectio,1S

ALL MY PROFESSIONAL LlFE, I've been interested in a subject that has conspicuously failed to engage the great majority of psychologists, social scientists, and historians throughout this century- namely, the evolution of the unconscious psyche. This preoccupation reaches a peak for me, as it did for lung, in the psychobiology of mental disorder, I shall focus now on the ways in which mental illness can afflict us when the two millionyear-old human being within becomes frustrated, frightened, or discontented.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, lung records that when he entered the psychiatric profession - to the dismay of his tutors and fellow students -it was because he realized that psychiatry was the one branch of medicine which embraced the two passiona te in terests of his life: nature 'and the life of the spirit. "Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed," he wrote. "Here was

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the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality."!

However, when, at the end of 1900, lung started work as ajunior psychiatrist at the Burgholzli Hospital in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler=-the man who introduced the term schizophrenia into psychiatry- he discovered that his senior colleagues were less interested in the subjective meaning of their patients' distress than in classifying their symptoms, establishing a diagnosis, and compiling statistics. Since then, not an awful lot has changed. Diagnosis continues to be the primary focus of psychiatric practice, and revised editions of the Diagnostl'c and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders are debated with a degree of hairsplitting pedantry worthy of medieval scholastics.

There have been advances, it is true. More is known about the genetics and neurophysiology of the major psychoses. Antidepressants and tranquilizers have been discovered which go some way to remove symptoms and relieve suffering. Many of the old mental hospitals have been dosed down-though this achievement has proved a mixed blessing for both society and the patients. Chairs of psychiatry have been established in most universities. There has been steady progress in neuroscience, with important studies of the lateralizarion of function of the two cerebral hemispheres, the neural basis of memory, and the ernotional implications of the limbic system. The development of brain imaging techniques using computers to construct threedimensional images from two-dimensional data, as in computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have led to a resurrection of Kraepelin's dementia praecox concept of schizophrenia and have advanced our understanding of cerebral changes in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and Korsakoff's psychosis.

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Psychiatry is now, perhaps, a more respected profession than it was when Jung entered it at the beginning of the century, but not aU the changes that have occurred would have met with his approval. What excited jung about psychiatry was the intense personal engagement demanded of the doctor in the therapeutic relationship with the patient. Yet in recent years the psychiatric interview has become less personal, clinical assessment of the patient being more dependent on the use of tests, questionnaires, inventories, and team meetings than on the traditional psychiatric examination conducted in the context of the doctor-patient relationship. Moreover, because of advances in pharmacology and neu.rology, patients often tend to be treated as assemblies of enzymes and neuronal circuits, while their personal spiritual needs are neglected ..

The Cartesian split between body and mind has been echoed throughout this century in a split between psychiatry (with its use of physical treatments) and psychotherapy (the treatment of mind by mind). Mutual hostility and misunderstanding have resulted, with the psychotherapists creaming off the rich neuTOties and leaving the poor psychotics to the psychiatrists. In general psychiatry, the overall emphasis continues to be organic, behavioral, and sociological, while the psychological and spiritual aspects of mental illness receive relatively little attention.

Further advances in neurophysiology are expected to demonstrate an organic basis for the "functional" psychoses - schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis. While this is, of course, to be welcomed, there is grave danger that it will lead to further neglect of the spiritual needs of patients and that psychiatry will become more and more reductionist-that is to say, that it will seek to explain all the joys and sorrows, the profound insights and extraordinary inspirations of human life in the language of genetics and chemistry.

All this, Jung would have regarded as a disaster. For him,

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both in his life and in his work with patients, psyche was primary, and he was convinced that no discontinuity existed between the mentally healthy and the mentally ill, that what we see in psychiatric patients is an exaggeration of processes which exist in psychia trists themselves - who, of course, consider themselves to be normal!

In the 1970sa crisis of confidence afflicted the profession, from which it has yet to recover .. Many practitioners are still demoralized by the onslaught of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 19605, which questioned the very existence of mental illness. and stigmatized psychiatrists as repressive agents of the state. The primary reason for this loss of conviction is, I believe, a fundamental failure of vision-psychiatrists generally lack a perspective wide enough to encompass the two realms of biology and psyche. Not only have psychiatrists too often failed to meet the spiritual needs of their patients, but they have also failed to establish the epistemological foundations of their discipline on the evolutionary subsoil out of which our species emerged. Intimidated by the anti-Darwinian prejudices of the behavioral scientists and fearing the contempt of their medical and surgical colleagues, psychiatrists have held onto their much hallowed medical model like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a raft.

It all looks rather depressing. Yet rescue is at hand. Although psychiatry has been in the doldrums, it could just be entering the most exciting episode in its history. The reason for this optimism is not just the evident advances in pharmacology and neuroscience, but the broader theoretical perspective being adopted by some of the brightest researchers working in the field. And to a psychiatrist steeped in the psychology of lung, the most fascinating and promising element in these new developments is their endorsement of the central importance of the archetypal hypothesis.

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I believe that a massive paradigm shift is under way, carrying us beyond the medical model with its inherent Cartesian split to an entirely new conceptual framework capable of dehning the basic components of human nature, their evolutionary origins, and their essential developmental needs, Since the archetypal hypothesis gives equal weight to psychic and physical events, the new paradigm would serve to correct the materialistic and soulless biases of contemporary psychiatry. It also provides a new insight into the genesis and meaning of psychopathological phenomena. Let me explain what I mean with a parable, which, unlike most parables, happens to be true.

TIm PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF THE Two MILLlON-YEAR-OLD

At the London Zoo there is a concrete mound, surrounded by a moat, known as Monkey Hill. It measures about thirty meters by eighteen. In 1925 the zoo authorities put 100 hamadryas baboons on this pitiful excrescence and expected them to settle in good-naturedly and entertain the public. They declined.

It was to have been an all-male population but, with a degree of care that proved typical of the operation, six females were accidentally included. Vicious battles for dominance took place between the males, which continued for months, and before two years had elapsed, forty-four of them were dead. But by then, a stable dominance hierarchy had been established, and an uneasy peace prevailed. However, the unfortunate creatures seemed unhappy, and in a wholly misguided attempt to cheer them up, the authorities put thirty more females on the island. Within a month, fifteen of these had been torn to pieces by the resident males fighting to possess them. By I930, only thirtynine males and nine females survived, and that year three males and four females were killed. 2

What does this say about baboon psychology? Are they such

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vicious brutes that they are incapable of controlling their passions and living in peace with one another? How on earth has this species survived? To answer these questions we must turn to the ethologists (those biologists who study animals living in their natural habitats), who have investigated the life of baboons in the sort of surroundings they evolved to live in. The ethologists tell us that, out of captivity, hamadryas baboons live in well-ordered social groups based on a stable dominance hierarchy; they respect each other's territories and seldom challenge heterosexual bonds once they have been formed.

Clearly, the behavior of the baboons on Monkey Hill was grossly abnormal. What went wrong? Quite simply, the circumstances in which the zoo required them to live constituted a monstrous frustration of their basic archetypal expectations. The ethogram of the hamadryas baboon - that is to say, the total archetypal endowment of the species - presupposes large areas of land on which to establish territories, win position in the social hierarchy, and, when successful in both these achievements, collect a harem of females. Instead of the 540 square meters af~ forded by Monkey Hill, a troop of one hundred baboons would normally require a range of 50 square kilometers - 50,000 square meters- an area nearly one hundred times as great.

In normal circumstances, baboons develop intense group loyalties and are hostile to strangers from other troops. That the animals on Monkey Hill fought each other with such psychopathic savagery was due to the fact that they had been trapped and assembled from different wild troops and crowded together in a tiny area where there were more males than females and where they couldn't possibly keep out of each other's way. We must conclude, therefore, that the zoo environment in which this tragic population was placed constituted what I have called the "frustration of archetypal in ten t. "3 The result was gross and unmistakable psychopathology.

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This sad story is an allegory of what can happen to another creature that evolved to live in the wild open spaces of the East African savanna, Homo sapiens sapiens, when made to live in that urban habitat which Desmond Morris called the human zoo. Directly comparable disasters to that suffered by the baboons in London Zoo occur in human communities forced to abandon their traditional way of life and live in circumstances alien to them. One such people was the Ik, a group of hunter-gatherers in Uganda who were excluded from their range of 40,000 sguare kilometers, placed in shack settlements, and taught subsistence farming. They rapidly became demoralized, depressed, anxious, and ill, and they behaved with psychopathic indifference to their children and their spouses.

Evidence such as this provides us with a model for psychopathology. Mental health depends upon the provision of physical and social environments capable of meeting the archetypal needs of the developing individual. Psychopathology can result when these needs are frustrated. This formulation gives rise to two fundamental questions: (I) What are the archetypal needs of the developing individual? (2) What environments, physical and social, are capable of guaranteeing their fu1611ment? These, it seems to me, are the two questions that psychology and psychiatry will have to address in the twenry-hrst century. The myth in terms of which the answers to these questions will have to be framed is that of Darwinian biology, for the Darwinian myth is the bedrock myth of our times, and no psychological explanation can hope to survive if it is incompatible with it. When I say this, I am speaking of myth as an account of human origins that accords with the knowledge prevailing at the time of the myth's emergence into consciousness.

Every living organism has an anatomical structure and a behavioral repertoire which is uniquely adapted to the environment in which it evolved (the "environment of evolutionary

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adaptedness"), This is the environment in which individuals have a built-in expectation that they will live out their life cycle .. .Any alteration in the environment has consequences for the organ~ ism. Some changes may be compatible with survival, others may not . .And changes which do not result in elimination of the species may nevertheless produce distortions in its typical modes of behavior which may lead, ultimately, to extinction.

Human versatility, coupled with a sophisticated capacity for innovation, has resulted in dramatic transformations in the environments human beings now inhabit. These environments display an astonishing diversity in comparison with the stable characteristics of the African savanna where we evolved and lived out the greatest part of our existence as hunter-gatherers. Indeed, the speed at which environments have altered in recent centuries has far outstripped the pace at which natural selection can proceed in the time-honored Darwinian manner. These considerations present problems to any researcher wishing to esrablish precisely what the characteristics of the environment of human adaptedness were actually like. Yet if we truly wish to understand what manner of creature we are, then the effort has to be made, for the challenges provided by our primordial environment selected the archetypal propensities still present in human beings to this day.

How can we proceed? How can we hope to establish the inventory of archetypal imperatives with which we have been equipped by evolution? One possibility is to study the lives of hunter-gatherer communities that have survived into the present century- people like the !Kung Bushmen of Botswana, so lovingly described by Laurens van der Post. But how can we know that such people were (when they were studied) as we were when we evolved? The answer is that we can't. If physical particles change their behavior when observed by physicists, then the behavior of hunter-gatherers is hardly likely to remain un-

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disturbed when scrutinized by bespectacled anthropologists in baggy shorts. Moreover, we can't know how much modern ways had already begun to influence them before the anthropologists arrived on the scene. It is only an assumption that surviving hunter-gatherers were living closer to the original human state than populations practicing agriculture and animal husbandry. But it is, I think, a fair assumption.

What other sources of information are there? Worldwide studies of cultural universals provide invaluable data when applied in. conjunction with the law I propounded earlier: that whenever a phenomenon is found to be characteristic of all human communities, irrespective of culture, race, or historical epoch, then it is an expression of an archetype of the collective unconscious.

How can we know that these consistencies are due to archetypes and not to cultural diffusion? We can't. Both factors are involved. However, there will be a bias for those characteristics which are archetypally dependent to diffuse more readily than those which are not. Whan a pattern or characteristic such as maternal bonding, dominance striving, or home building is found to satisfy three sets of criteria, it is likely to be archetypally based. These criteria are universality, continuity, and evolutionary stability.

(I) Universality: The pattern in question is found in all known cultural groups.

(2) Continuity: The record of evolution shows no sharp break between human and other mammalian species with regard to the pattern concerned. Thus attachment behavior between mothers and infants, between peers, and between mature males and females can be traced backwards from human beings through primates to their earliest mammalian origins. The major breakthrough of ethology has been to demonstrate that such patterns of behavior can be codified and their evolution studied in the same way as

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the evolution of anatomical structures, such as bones, lungs, and brains.

(3) Evolutionary Stability: Patterns that are evolutionarily stable result in the same selective penalization and ultimate elimination of individuals who fail to manifest them.

Since we are a supremely social animal, the most important characteristics of the evolutionary environment for us to define are the social characteristics. In what kinds of groups did we evolve? Astonishing though it is, remarkably few anthropologists have shown any interest in establishing the basic social parameters of the environment of human adaptedness. One brave exception is Robin Fox, who has attempted to define the kind of society that is typical of hunter-gatherer communities. He refers to this society as the basic state: "Where in time is the basic state to be found?" asks Fox. "The answer is straightforward: in the Late Paleolithic, some fifteen to forty thousand years ago. It is really that simple. We were fully formed modern Homo sapiens sapiens; we had reached the top of the food chain-we were doing quite a bit better than the other carnivores. Then with frightening rapidity, it all began to go wrong .... "4

Fox argues that in the Upper Paleolithic a balance existed between the organism, the social system, and the environment. Then two things happened to disturb this balance: (I) the ice age, which increased the density of human populations by squeezing large numbers of peoples into southwest Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Aisa; and (2) the discovery of agriculture and animal husbandry.

The improved economy and increased numbers which these developments produced led in turn to the emergence of the characteristics typical of civilized societies - e. g., classes, castes, power elites, armies, empires, and the exploitation of subject peoples. Ever since then, "these emergent properties -seized as their sub-

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ject matter by the social scientists-have been on a collision course with the social needs of the paleolithic hunter." What we call history, concludes Fox, is merely the most recent catalog of the products of this collision.f

Extrapolating from the extant ethnographic accounts of hunter-gatherer communities, Fox deduces that the organic groups in which our species lived for 99.5 percent of its existence consisted of about forty to fifty individuals, made up of approximately six to ten adult males, about twice that number of childbearing females, and about twenty juveniles and infants. These were "organic extended kinship groups," and they constitute what we might call the archetypal society of our kind.

Such groups did not, of course, function in. isolation. They came into frequent contact with other similar groups-hence the universal human rituals of greeting, visiting, feasting, making alliances, marrying, and warring. These compact, extended kinship groups of forty to £ifty members knew one another intimately and shared the same values, rules, customs, and mores, their beliefs being sustained by myth, ritual, and religion. In all of them the family was the central institution, whether polygamous, monogamous, or polyandrous.

It is in order to live in such societies as this that nature has equipped us. This is why it is that being born into the contemporary world can come as a nasty shock to the system. The archetypal endowment with which each of us is born prepares us for the natural life cycle of our species, in the natural world in which we evolved. A programmed sequence of stages, each mediated by a new set of archetypal imperatives, seeks fulfillment in the development of characteristic patterns of personality and behavior. Each set of imperatives makes its own demands on the environment. Should the environment fail to meet them, then the evident result is "the frustration of archetypal intent." For example, the infant-mother archetypal system will achieve

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fulfillment only if activated by the presence and behavior of a maternal figure; the paternal archetypal system can be ful.filled only by the presence of a father figure; and the heterosexual archetypal system can achieve fulfillment only through the presence of a suitable mate. Should any of these figures be absent, then the archetypal system concerned will remain dormant in the unconscious and development will be arrested or follow an aberrant course. Put in these terms, the purpose of life is the fullest possible realization of the archetypal program. Individuation is the realization of this program as consciously as possible ..

We are now in a position to define a basic principle of psychopathology: Psychopathology results when the environment fails, either partially or totally, to meet one (or more) basic archetypal need(s) in the developing individual. As far as 1 know, the first psychiatrist to propound this principle was.john Bowlby, who stated that the further the rearing environment deviates from the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the greater the likelihood of pathological development. 6

If we are to understand the psychiatric disorders &om which our contemporaries suffer, therefore, we have to consider in what ways Western society frustrates the needs of the two millionyear-old-v that is to say, the primordial man or wornan-swithin. Many possibilities immediately come to mind: the disruption of community-based kinship bonds as a result of migration, job mobility, experiments in town planning, and so on; the disruption of families through divorce and separation, together with the rapidly increasing incidence of single-parent families; the lack of adequate provision for the secure and intimate care of children whose mothers go out to work; the loss of myth, ritual, and religion; the lack of contact with nature, the seasons, and the primordial environment. All these factors are potentially productive of stress, insecurity, and anomie, as wen as

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skewed or distorted development. It seems likely that the various neuroses, psychopathies, drug dependencies. and the occurrence of child and spouse abuse, to say nothing of the everrising crime statistics. are not unconnected with Western society's inability to satisfy OUI archetypal needs.

However, I would not wish to imply that our society is an unmitigated disaster. In fact, the contemporary environment does not differ from the archetypal environment as radically as one might imagine when it comes to meeting the basic requirements of the Self (the term lung gave to the individuals's total archetypal endowment). For example, the physical requirements of warmth, shelter, and nourishment ate met in the West better than ever before in history. The social needs for parents, peers, and potential mates are also met in the majority of individuals. However, the number of people in whom these basic needs are not met is large and growing, as indeed is the psychiatric problem which they represent.

A key factor in most psychiatric illness is stress. The probability is that the greater the gap between archetypal needs and environmental fulfillment of those needs, the greater the stress and the more incapacitating the illness. Although many people suffering from stress come to the attention of psychiatrists, many of them, perhaps the majority, do not; nor do they necessarily manifest the signs of psychiatric illness. When lung gave up working with psychotic patients in hospitals in order to devote himself to his own research and to his private analytic practice, he noted that the people who came to consult him were not, on the whole, suffering from disorders susceptible to neat clinical diagnosis. Rather they were suffering from the aimlessness and futility of their lives. He came to regard this as a malaise typical of the twentieth century, which he caned "the general neurosis of OUt age." Jung had no hesitation in attributing this

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contemporary neurosis to the emergence of social institutions that alientated us from our archetypal nature. Secular urban life breeds disalliance with the unconscious, and "disalliance with the unconscious in synonymous with loss of instinct and rootlessness. "7

This insight has a long and respectable pedigree. In the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot maintained that the benefits of civilization had been acquired at the cost of natural happiness. The civilized person of necessity remained an unhappy creature. The theme that to be civilized we had to renounce our basic instincts was taken up by Nietzsche and developed by Freud in Civlllzation and Its Discontents, as well as by lung in Modern Marl in Search of a Soul. The great ethologist Konrad Lorenz compared our plight to that of a wild species that has been domesticated-like hens, cows, or hogs-living a wholly artificial existence that makes few demands of its instinctual equipment, while Desmond Morris, as we have seen, compared our lot to that of animals condemned to languish in a zoo of their own making.

Our sense of bereavement for the lost habitat of our species might explain the bouts of nostalgia which take hold from time to time for primitive life,. primitive people, and primitive art~ for the life of Rousseau's noble savage. It is one motive that leads many of us into a fascination with anthropology. But we should not allow it to encourage us to idealize the life of the hunter-gatherer, which, if not solitary, was often as Thomas Hobbes described it-nasty, brutish, and short!

Let me illustrate what I have been saying with an example from my own clinical experience, which shows how psychiatry and Jungian psychology can combine forces to promote insight, healing, and individuation in the face of severe frustration of archetypal intent.

71

"A PRETTY HOPELESS CASE"

Jennifer was twenty-one when she was sent to me by her family doctor: ''A pretty hopeless case, I'm afraid," he said in his referral letter, "but you may be able to do something for her .. " Although attractive, intelligent, and well-educated, Jennifer had never had a boyfriend or a job. She lived with her father in a large London Bat and kept house for him. Her mother had died from injuries in a car crash when Jennifer was six. As I was to discover at our first interview, she was a walking textbook of psychopathology. To list only the most obvious features of her condition, she was anxious, phobic, depressed, obsessivecompulsive, and schizoid. I win take each' of these in turn.

Anxiety: Throughout our initial interviews, she remained tense and anxious, her skin pale and beaded with droplets of sweat; there was a fine tremor of her hands.

Phobias: She had been a nervous child even before her mother died, afraid of the dark, water, loud noises, animals, strangers, and cripples. After her mother's death, she became frightened of all novel situations, Going to school was a terrifying experience, and by the time she was ten, she had developed full-blown school phobia, with the result that her father took her out of school and arranged private tutoring for her at home, Although her childhood phobias had subsided by the time she consulted me, she was nevertheless suffering&om claustrophobia: she could not use elevators or subway trains or sit comfortably in a worn unless the door was open. For the first year of ber treatment, the consulting room door had to be held open with a volume of Jung's Collected r.%rks asa doorstop.

Depression: The diagnosis of depression could be deduced from the fact that she expressed feelings of guilt and worthlessness and wished she could summon up the courage to kill her-

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self. She was disinterested in food and was as thin as a rake. She also woke early every morning in a state of dark despair.

Obsessive-compulsive neurosis: That she was obsessive was abundantly dear. She spent her life cleaning and scrubbing and was terrified that she might in some way contaminate her father's food. She was also afflicted by intrusive thoughts and images over which she could exercise no control. The most common of these were thoughts of stabbing her father and of shrieking obscenities at him. Whenever she left her apartment to do some shopping or mail a letter, she spent over an hour checking that the gas taps were turned off, all switches in the off position, all appliances unplugged, all windows shut and locked, all doors bolted and barred.

Schizoid personality: She was profoundly introverted and had withdrawn from virtually all contact with people other than her father. She compensated for this social isolation with a rich fantasy life and wrote extraordinary romantic-mythic tales, the composition of which was frequently accompanied by masturbation.

At the end of our first session I concluded that little analytic progress could be made until her symptoms had been reduced in intensity. I therefore prescribed an antidepressant and a tranquilizer and arranged to see her two hours a week for psychotherapy. The antidepressant 1 chose was Analranil (clomipramine hydrochloride), a tricyclic which is particularly effective in treating depressions complicated by compulsive symptomatology. At that time the sHT-uptake inhibitor flouxetine was not available.

When she came for her second session, she arrived four and a half hours late. What had happened was this: on her way to her first appointment with me (which, as she later confessed, she anticipated with a dread amounting to terror), she had

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counted the number of paces it took her to walk from her father's apartment to my consulting room. It took 2,452 paces. On her way to her second visit she knew she had to take exactly the same number of paces. She had arrived with half an hour to spare, but she had taken 2,498 paces. So she had to take a taxi home and start all over again .. Next time she took 2,475 paces,. so she had to go home once more. It took her four journeys to get it right, and she arrived in a state of extreme agitation.

The critical factors in her history were the early loss of her mother and the subsequent development of an exclusive relationship with her father, a brilliantly successful but emotionally unstable Lawyer, who was undoubtedly devoted to her but was also tyrannically possessive and prone to unpredictable bouts of rage, as if possessed by a powerful demon. Her obsessive rituals were in part acts of propitiation to avert his fury. At the same time, her fears of killing him were a reaction formation against her own murderous feelings towards him. Her depression and sense of personal worthlessness arose because her father made her feel chronically inadequate and incapable of living up to the image of the daughter she believed he wanted her to be.

Her fear of me, and the ritual of counting the number of paces necessary to come to see me, were the result of her transferring the father imago onto me as well as the archetype of the shaman, the medicine man, the healer." The counting ritual had to be gone through asa means of propitiating me and guaranteeing that I would not become incensed with her in the COUIse of her session. The door had to be left open for the same reason: it would guarantee a hurried exit should the demon become operative m me.

For her subsequent appointments I gave her an hour late in the day so that she would be able to sort out her counting rituals and get to my door in time. She got quite good at this

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after a while, though she" often had to hop the last twenty or thirty paces, much to the entertainment of passers by.

After she had been on Anafranil three weeks, her depression began to lift, and a week later she was able to come to see me by taxi, thus avoiding the need to count her steps, At this point, a conventional psychiatrist would probably have reduced her sessions to once a month, I, on the other hand, increased them to three times a week, With the subsidence of her more incapacitating symptoms, the analysis could begin,

What archetypal imperatives had been frustrated in Jennifer's personal history? The age of six is far too early for any child to lose its mother with impunity. This tragedy not only deprived Jennifer of the rich nourishment of a mother's love, but of a female role model to initiate her into womanhood, It also left her with an unresolved Electra complex and an inability to relate to any man except her father.

The absence of an extended family network further emphasized her exclusive dependency on her father. She had a grandmother surviving in southern Ireland, an aunt in northern Scotland, a cousin in los Angeles, and another in Perth, western Australia. She had no friends or acquaintances in london, There was, you could say without any fear of contradiction, a lack of kinship libido and community feeling in her life .. The absence of siblings and peers during childhood had contributed to her schizoid withdrawal, having deprived her of the oppor~ tunity which both peer bonding and play bring to the development of emotional spontaneity and the skills of social intercourse. Moreover, she had no contact with animals. (her father would not allow them on account of the mess), with nature (she seldom left London), or with religion (her father was an atheist). Her only pleasures were her fantasy life and music (she was a good pianist, and her father had a large record collection).

As a result of these frustrations of archetypal intent, her

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development had gone seriously awry. The loss of her mother not only predisposed her to depression and impaired her development of what Erik Erikson calls identity formation but effectively imprisoned her in the father-daughter rela tionshi p. 9

Why should her symptoms have become particularly bad as she entered her twenties? Well, this is the archetypal stage of courtship, marriage, achieving social position, and, in the modern world, getting a job. None of these had she achieved or even attempted, but the pressure of the Self towards realization of all this potential was increasing, and something had to give. The result was the emergence of this formidable array of symptomatology.

THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF SYMPTOMS

What can psychobiology tell us about the nature of her symptoms? How can we relate them to the two million-year-old woman in Jennifer's psyche? Let us turn to each symptom again.

Anxiety: In the course of the present century the idea has been current that anxiety is neurotic and that the well-adjusted person would never suffer from it. This, of course, is nonsense, Anxiety is a natural and universal experience, which human beings share with aU mammals. Since it is ubiquitous, it must serve a biological function, otherwise it would not have evolved or at least not have persisted. What then are the biological functions of anxiety?

Anxiety is a form of vigilance. To survive in this dangerous world, an organism has to be alert to environmental changes so that it can be prepared to meet whatever emergencies may arise. Pavlov considered this vigilance to be a reflex, and he called it the "What is it?" reflex. Vigilance or the "What is it?" reflex does not necessarily give rise to anxiety. Vigilance is merely alertness to the possibility of change in the environment. Vigi-

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lance shifts into anxiety when a possible threat or danger has been perceived. The actual experience of anxiety is directly associated with physiological changes that prepare the body for violent action. The heart rate increases, the blood pressure goes up, adrenaline is secreted, energy stores are mobilized in the liver and released into the bloodstream, blood is redistributed from the internal organs $0 as to carry oxygen and energy to the muscles and the brain. At the same time, the thyroid gland is stimulated to increase the efficiency of body metabolism. Labored breathing occurs, and the large muscles used in violent action are brought to peak efficiency. Red corpuscles are liberated from the spleen to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood. Small muscles at the base of the hair follidescontract causing goose pimples to form and the hair to stand on end, the sweat glands secrete profusely, and so on. All these changes are caused by activation of the sympathetic nervous system and have the effect of preparing the organism to fight like a demon or run like hell- the fight or Hight response.

In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, therefore, vigilance and anxiety are crucial to survival, In the modern world, however, they can seem exaggerated or inappropriate. When anxiety is exaggerated, inappropriate, and persistent, it becomes a symptom of interest to psychiatrists - and to the pharmaceutical industry (and its shareholders). A crucial question for psychopathology is why a natural psychophysiological response (anxiety) should become exaggerated into a persistent and inappropriate neurotic state (anxiety neurosis).

There have been a number of theoretical approaches to this question. The most influential of these has been the Freudian approach, which sees neuroses as the direct result of traumatic experiences in early childhood. This was certainly true in Jennifer's case. Life cruelly deprived her of a mother long before she was able to survive happily without one, and life failed

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to provide her with peers at the time when she needed them.

The consequences of separation from or loss of mother have received particular attention hom the British analysts Bowlby, Fairbairn, and Wirrnicott.10 Bowlby, in particular, was careful to base his work in ethology, and for this reason his formulations will guide us for many years to come. Throughout Bowlby's work one fundamental notion persists - the idea that noncorrespondence between the developing needs of the child and conditions prevailing in its environment contributes to its susceptibility to neurosis. lance gave. a paper in London comparing Bowlby's approach with Jung's when Bowlby was present. In discussion afterwards he agreed that he accepted the Jungian formulation that neurosis is liable to occur when the archetypal program unfolding in the psyche of the child is not met by correspondingly appropriate figures and situations in the environment. Essentially, he was in agreement with the proposition that neurotic anxiety results from the frustration of archetypal intent. And this, in my view, rather than any specific trauma suffered in infancy, is the cause of psychiatric disturbance in childhood, adolescence, and later life.

Phobia: Psychiatry makes a distinction between free-floating anxiety, which may be evoked by a variety of different situations, and phobic anxiety, which is specific to one situation, such as confined spaces, open spaces with no cover, snakes, spiders, predatory beasts, strangers, heights, and so 00. It is of the utmost interest for our theme that when the various phobias suffered by modem men and women are examined in detail, there is nothing modern about them. They are all exaggerated fears of objects, animals, or situations that were potentially lifethreatening in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness,

This vital point is invariably overlooked in textbooks of psychiatry, probably because it is not apparent until you think about it. Conditions that give rise to Bight, withdrawal, 0.[ other

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demonstrations of fear, both in animals and in humans, are not necessarily dangerous in themselves; but when you consider them carefully, it becomes clear that they are related, if only indirectly, to situations that actually are a hazard to life or limb. As Bowlby put it:

In a wide array of animal species including man, a principal condition that elicits alarm and retreat is mere strangeness. Others are noise, and objects that rapidly expand or approach; and also, for animals of some species though not for others, darkness. Yet mother is isolation.

Now it is obvious that none of these stimulus situations is in itself dangerous. Yet, when looked at through evolutionary spectacles, their role in promoting survival is not difficult to see. Noise, strangeness, rapid approach, isolation, and for many species darkness too - aU are conditions statistically associated with an increased risk of danger. 11

The tendency to react with fear to such common stimulus situations is due to genetic biases that possess survival value, in the sense that they prepare individuals to meet real dangers. The existence of these biases would explain how it is that in modern civilized environments fear can be aroused in a variety of situations that are not, in fact, dangerous. Thus, to show panic fear in response to finding oneself in an enclosed space like an elevator or a subway train, to react with terror in response to the perception of height or the realization that one is entirely alone in the dark may seem absurd to a normally adjusted person, but viewed from a biological standpoint, these reactions are understandable as manifestations of ancient response patterns. What the individual is responding to are the natural cues, or sign stimuli, commonly associated with danger in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, Often these cues do not signify any menace, but the fact remains that they could.

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Therefore, it is not altogether inappropriate for the individual to respond to them with wariness or fear, if only on the principle that it is better to be safe than sorry.

Now the form of phobia selected by the patient is usually full of symbolic meaning. You will recall that Jennifer's phobia was of confined spaces. Claustrophobia is evidently an exaggeration of the natural response shared by all mammals to being trapped in an enclosed area and deprived of all means of escape. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is found in clinical practice that claustrophobia commonly occurs in people who experience home as suffocating and parents as oppressors. Whereas agoraphobics experience the outside world as threatening and feel secure only at home, for claustrophobics it is home that arouses anxiety, and there is a desire to flee from the threatening enclosure that home represents. Characteristically, the claustrophobic flees not only from physical enclosure but imprisonment in social roles from which there is no means of escape. As a result, commitments such as marriage and a job are far too dangerous to be risked. This was precisely Jennifer's condition when she entered analysis.

Depression: People who are prone to depression are typically those who have experienced some form of parental loss, rejection, or neglect in childhood. Depressive illness tends to recur when the individual suffers some new frustration of his or her archetypal needs: this new frustration is experienced as a recapitulation of the original depressing or frustrating experience of childhood. Analysis reveals the nature of the original frustrating experience and points to the kind of analytic work that needs to be done during the rest of therapy.

As with anxiety, depression is also a natural and universal experience human beings share with all mammalian species. It thus must be a biological condition contributing to survival. What can its function be? On the whole it appears that depres-

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sian is an adaptive reaction to loss or deprivation. It OCCUIS, for example, in all young mammals when they are forcibly sepa~ rated from their mothers and in all individuals living in hierarchically organized groups when deprived of rank in the social hierarchy. How can this contribute to survival? Having lost its mother, and after the initial cries of protest are over, the depressed infant lies still, silent and waiting, conserves body energy, and avoids the attention of predators. By this strategy the animal can survive until reunited with its mother or adopted by a surrogate parent, moved by its depressed state. Similarly, a depressive reaction to loss of status enables the demoted individual to adapt passively to the lower rank, thus avoiding further attack from the more powerful individual who has displaced him or her. This in turn contributes to peace and social cohesion. 12 Depression, therefore, is linked with the ubiquitous mammalian tactic of submission, while its opposite, mania, is linked with the tactic of dominance. Manic-depression is thus inextricably tied into the dominance-submission archetypal system and its linked systems, aggression and defense. In Jennifer's case, her depression was linked to her submission to her father's dominance and to her perceived inability to make her way in the world.

Obsessive-compulsive neurosis: Obsessive-compulsive behavior is a by-product of the need to control potentially dangerous events, objects, people, thoughts, feelings, impulses, or situations. It is commonly associated with powerful emotions, particularly fear, anger, and guilt. Guilt, like anxiety, depression, and mge.r, is an emotion to which all social animals are prone. It evolved as an adaptive device designed to maintain social order and homogeneity. Like anxiety, it can be exagger· ated and become the symptom of neurotic illness. This occurs most markedly in the case of obsessive neurosis. Exaggerated guilt and obsessive-compulsive behavior are more likely to oc-