Archetypes

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Disclaimer!

Although the concepts of the collective unconscious and the archetype can't be described as having mainstream acceptance among evolutionary psychologists, and may seem aery-fairy or simply speculative to many practical people, they are helpful in describing how the human brain got its foot on the first rung of the symbolic ladder, and there are few if any competing theories which cover comparable ground.

Concepts very similar to those of the collective unconscious and archetypes are in fact used by many writers who don't seem comfortable in adopting such out-and-out Jungian terminology, as will be seen below.

Anyway, enough of apologizing. This section is intended to explain what archetypes are all about, but it is not essential to the main thrust of 'groupish' argument, and if a reader is not happy in this compromised territory, it can just be ignored.

The archetype, a word used in this context initially by Jung, and very much elaborated by his follower Ernest Neumann, is a numinous (potent, powerful) unconscious psychic content. In itself it is not to be thought of as having a specific form - it exists in a very deep layer of the brain - but it gives rise to images in the visual cortex which partially represent it.

Jung described the collective unconscious (itself being that part of the unconscious which is common to all members of a group) as consisting of mythological motives or primordial images to which he gave the name 'archetypes'. Archetypes are not inborn ideas, but 'typical forms of behaviour, which, once they become conscious, naturally present themselves as ideas and images, like everything else that becomes a content of consciousness.'

'When an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or a fascinating effect, or impels to action.'

One thing that is sure about archetypes is that, since they are not immediately available to consciousness or to any kind of rational analysis, but can only be known through their manifestations, there are as many proposals for archetypes as there are writers about the subject. Richard M Gray, in Archetypal Explorations, quotes a bewildering variety of possible archetypes.

Gray adapts a table from Mitroff which lists eight primary archetypes, the classical Gods who epitomize them, and the behaviours with which they can be particularly associated. The archetype is to be seen as in some sense the organising principle which delivers such behaviour, in each case. As Gray says: 'because the archetypes are capable of almost infinite articulation and extension, the multiplication of possible root symbols is potentially endless.'

Many concepts which are essential components of human (and group) thought originated as archetypes; later on, both in time and in terms of cognitive activity, they put on the clothes of visual imagery and verbal identity. But they began in the limbic brain as archetypes.

All people have the same archetypes, and they are the instruments of cultural evolution; but they express themselves differently in different cultural circumstances.

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Such is the theory. It is not an unavoidable part of explaining the evolution of thought, language, society etc, but it is certainly very helpful, and there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence for the existence of and the role played by archetypes.

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The Evolution of Archetypes

Archetypes, and the collective unconscious in which they are generated, are to be seen as a bridge between the non-symbolic cognitive processes of pre-human primate species, living in fairly unevolved groups, and the complex social and cultural exchanges that take place in human social groups and are based on symbolic communication (eventually, language).

Two million years ago, or thereabouts, the collective unconscious evolved as a kind of cognitive glue that binds together a set of individuals in a social group, defining a common set of behaviours which allow the group to develop greater sophistication and effectiveness. Archetypes evolved as a means of ensuring commonality of symbolic communication among the members of the group. A symbol is of course useless unless it is understood identically by all members of a group, and in the non-symbolic late primate brain two million years ago no means existed by which symbols could emerge. Archetypes provided this commonality of understanding, being delivered to the individual members of the group via the collective unconscious.

Although Jung may have been the first person to recognize and name archetypes in the human psyche, he had a rather Lamarckian view of how they came into being: '(Archetypes') origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.'

Jung admitted the possibility that archetypes exist in animals as well as people, which would fit well with the Lamarckian explanation; but it would also fit well with a Darwinian explanation - the moon seems to have an archetypal fascination for wolves, for instance (easier to hunt when there is moonlight?). Dogs dream, everyone accepts, and their dreams, just like human ones, are possibly populated by archetypes as well as remembered fragments of reality. Dreaming about hunting under the moon would increase the amount of psychic drive in the animal to do just that, which could be adaptive.

Although Jung does not display a clear understanding of Darwinian evolution, at least when it comes to archetypes, Richard M Gray accepts the idea that culturally determined patterns of behaviour can come to be incorporated in the individual genome. As usual, this does not entail 'group selection', but involves the impact of the group on the evolutionary success of its members - a member who does not conform to prevailing group mores will lose the chance to mate.

Lumsden and Wilson hypothesize that it takes about 1,000 years (only!) for a cultural element, or a propensity to express some culturall defined trait, to become established in the gene pool as an inherited trait. So Jung wasn't wrong in talking about 'endless repetitions of typical patterns of behaviour', he just didn't understand the mechanism which would give them a genetic basis. If Lumsden and Wilson are right, Dawkins's 'memes' may be more genetic than he dared to propose.

The importance of such speculations is that they provide a basis for the genetic development of culturally-determined archetypes, during the early evolution of human society in groups, and without requiring language to describe or maintain archetypal ideas or images. Memes, or at least certain sorts of meme, come to seem quite archetypal.

This line of reasoning also emphasizes the inseparability of social groups and archetypes; it's hard to imagine how one could have developed without the other. Does that go too far? Wolves may be social animals but their groupedness is not a pre-condition for 'howling to the moon' in some sort of hunting-connected behaviour. Unless they're howling as a demonstration to other wolves? What otherwise is the purpose of drawing attention to yourself?

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Archetypes In The Development Of Groups

In the transition from animal groups to human groups capable of communal self-knowledge and action, the key agent of change was the expansion of the ability to communicate, strongly associated with (and probably impossible without) increases in brain size and cognitive capacity.

While it is tempting to seize upon language as being the bed-rock of human communication, commentators are nearly unanimous in thinking that language could only have evolved from proto-languages such as signing, visual representations or signals, and indeed vocal sounds. In all of these the human mimetic capacity was crucial. In order to be more than a collection of interacting individuals, however, the group needed not only a means of communication, but also to develop concepts, not least that of itself, of the idea of leadership, the idea of rules (laws), and many other conceptual ingredients of the brew we call 'society'.

In thinking about the more or less simultaneous emergence of language, 'groupishness', and these early social concepts, myth played a large part, and myth itself was strongly linked to (and employed) visual images.

In trying to imagine how this set of advanced behaviours might have evolved, one of the greatest difficulties is their seeming inter-dependence. How could they all have evolved (more or less) together if each one depends on all the others so intimately?

While there is certainly no agreed-upon answer to this question, and there may never be, because brain tissue, unlike skeletons, doesn't survive for millions of years, it yet did happen; and archetypes are an important component of the puzzle.

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The group itself began in some sense as an archetype, since the individual members of a group would not be able to understand themselves as such unless they shared a collective (and of course unconscious) understanding of the concept of a group. Some writers suppose that the group has a psychic structure similar to that of an individual human, that is to say with a more or less conscious level and an underlying unconscious level of content.

A much more speculative idea is that the psychic structure of the individual in fact began as the psychic structure of the group, and that the conscious / unconscious division of the human mind as we know it is nothing but a group phenomenon copied into the members of the group. The problem of the evolution of individual consciousness has no adequate answers at this point, but it's easy to see how consciousness of being a member of a group could naturally evolve along with the psychic fact of the group.

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The Cognitive Nature of Archetypes

Richard M Gray describes archetypes as nodes of concentrated psychic content in the collective unconscious (an archetype is useless unless it is collective); that's not a bad way of describing groups, as well. You can never quite separate an archetype; you can never quite separate a group either.

In neuro-cognitive terms, archetypes are perhaps as widely rooted in the brain as other symbols, and more than that, they are seen by most writers who attempt to describe them as being more like statistical concentrations of psychic content than clearly delimited packets of content. Gray quotes Marie Louise von Franz as describing archetypes as 'excited points in the field of the objective psyche which behave like "relatively isolatable nuclei" '.

Archetypes are also highly connected to each other. Von Franz says: 'In studying any archetype deeply enough, dragging up all of its connections, you will find that can pull out the entire collective unconscious'. In this, archetypes are very similar to groups: if you pull at a human social group long enough, you get the whole of humanity. And that's because groups have a highly archetypal construction.

This is reflected in the essential bi-polarity of most archetypes and groups. Archetypes are almost always described in pairs, and it is of the essence of most groups that they define themselves not only in terms of what they are but also in terms of what they are not (eg motorists are not pedestrians, men are not women, and kin are not non-kin).

Maxson J McDowell, in The Three Gorillas: an archetype orders a dynamic system, sets out to relate the Jungian archetype to modern cognitive neuro-science. McDowell sees the archetype as an organizing principle, as does Jung, and says that Jung's intuitions about the existence of archetypes have been largely borne out by recent science, He explores differing schools of thought as to the location and time of development of archetypes ('genetically-transmitted patterns of behaviour' or 'culturally-determined symbolic forms', to take two of the competing visions of an archetypal organizing principle).

Hogenson (1998, Response to Pietikainen and Stevens, Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol 43, 3) concludes that we inherit not a generalized image but the tendency or the potential to form the image. Perhaps that is a reasonable mainstream position: archetypes are inherited in the form of organizing principles ('containment', 'penetration', 'union', 'sets', 'cleavage' are some examples); but they are expressed in the psyche using the experiential material to hand in a particular individual, or maybe one should say in a particular collective.

Noam Chomsky accepts that some symbolic ideas are innate in the human psyche; of course, that is part and parcel of his proposal of a generative linguistic grammar, so he could hardly say otherwise, although inbuilt 'generative grammar' is now on the back foot.

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It is interesting that many writers describe archetypes as mathematical principles, which therefore didn't need to evolve, any more than the symbolic idea that 2 + 2 = 4 needed to evolve. What evolved was perhaps the accretion of human psychical content around the organizing principle. So the idea of containment (mathematically a closed circle) became attached to the idea of mother's arms enfolding the child, and the various emotional affects associated with that. That could have happened in primates, or even before, without needing any advanced symbolic abilities.

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Archetypes and Myth

Myth is one of the main evidences for the existence of archetypes; as an integrative mechanism during the development of early human society myth was as important as language, and indeed may have been a key component of the emerging human ability to symbolize. A myth amounts to a joined-up sequence of symbolic visualizations, each of which may have had its origin in an appropriate archetype.

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The scanty evidence that is available to us about the ethical basis of early societies, and the characteristics of modern survivals of primitive ways of life in Africa, Australia and South America, together suggest that myth played a large role in controlling the behaviour of social groups from a very early stage.

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Myth has all the appearance of being a universal feature of human social life, strongly associated with archetypes. Just as, in the case of archetypes, the visual or conceptual instantiation of the archetype may vary across cultures, but the underlying archetype is invariable (genetically hard-wired), so with myth: the forms that myths take vary widely, but the meaning of the myths, their social and psychological purpose, remains constant.

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For example, all primitive societies seem to have had witches, and they almost always fly. A witch is a mythical creature, based on an archetype, and figures prominently in the mythical life of early societies. A witch is an anti-group figure; but that doesn't mean the group didn't invent witches - external threats are helpful in binding groups together.

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As with music, it is arguable that myth might not have been necessary as a means of creating a kind of ethical skeleton for early societies had conceptual language developed to the point at which a body of laws and religion could be expressed and understood by group members. Be that as it may, myth is alive and well in modern society, in artistic monuments such as Wagner's Ring Cycle, in 'folk' influences on writing and the arts, in religion itself, and in countless other ways. Myths are hard-wired into the human unconscious.

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The Role of Archetypes

Richard M Gray, in Archetypal Explorations, following Jung, describes how archetypes are involved in the development of the different layers of human unconsciousness and consciousness. 'The most primitive levels of the collective unconscious are almost indistinguishable from instinct, but these are uniquely human responses that not only link humankind to the animal world but also distinguish it from it. The archetypes define at the most primitive level what it means to be human. On the next higher level, the unconscious is characterised by patterns that are typical of specific racial or national groups . . . As we move more towards the conscious psyche, the next layers become more specific to national and linguistic groups and tend to be mediated less through the biological mechanisms that order the collective unconscious as by linguistic and cultural processes.'

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Richard Gray characterizes archetypes as 'part of the survival repertoire of mankind'. 'They function first to co-ordinate the linkage between the organism and the environment through perception, and then to ensure the bonding of mother and child, child and family, individual and society.'

Archetypes also have a major role in the development of religious sentiment in humans, either directly as with their expression as classical God-figures, or indirectly through mythic behaviours which became assimilated to religions when they emerged.

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Another use of archetypes in early human groups was probably as a basis for generating symbolic characterisations of differing descent groups. Distinctions between groups (largely kin-based distinctions) had considerable importance; prior to the development of language as such, which could be used to express such distinctions, it could be done through dress, or through totemic, ritual and mythic symbolic expression. Everybody has to believe in the importance of dance movements before variation in them can come to have expressive power, and it is here that the archetype has its use. But we're up against the usual 'group selection' problem: how can a mutation that benefits the group survive and spread if it occurs only in isolated individuals? The answer appears to be that the group 'sharpens' genetic evolution by choosing members who conform to a required standard and excluding those that don't. This would make evolution happen very quickly, at least within the currently available pool of variation, since excluded individuals would not survive or mate.

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Kathrin Asper in The Inner Child In Dreams, writing within the Jungian tradition, demonstrates how archetypes can assist a child to survive or at least accommodate to bad parenting - and by the way retain a satisfactory mother or father image to assist parenting in the next generation. Mother and father archetypes therefore have direct benefit in terms of 'generation-hopping' parental attitudes.

'This means that a child's experience of the father, for example, is dependent on (a) the inner father image possessed by the individual from birth and (b) the personal father and the fatherly qualities of the people to whom the child relates most closely. Thus a father complex always has, aside from its personal significance, a general archetypal root and meaning. . . . This makes it possible for an individual not to remain stuck in accusations against his parents . . .'

The archetypal concept of 'The Fathers', as the fount of accumulated group wisdom and the source of law needs to be accepted as at least partially genetic in nature; later on, with the development of conceptual language, much of the controlling and law-giving apparatus surrounding 'The Fathers' came to be culturally transmitted, but in the early stages at least there was a major genetic component.

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Later on, when conceptual language became available, The Fathers were the natural originators, guardians and transmittors of the law, and they became leaders, priests, educators, lawyers etc; but initially they merely represented a guidance principle.

'The Fathers' are always men, even in a matriarchal society, which is a sure sign that they stem from an archetypal original.

Jung links spirituality with paternal authority and the archetype of the wise old man. This equates to the concept of 'the Fathers', reasonably widely agreed to have been the source of ethical rules in early human groups.

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