Thomas
T. Lawson, Carl Jung, Darwin of the Mind
London, Karnac, 2008.
The thought
of Jung moves forward in time, lighting the way for us
-- even astonishing us -- by varied paths and voices,
sometimes unexpected. Thomas T. Lawson was finishing law
school at about the time he discovered Jung’s work and,
throughout a long career as a trial lawyer he returned
continually to Jung's writings, deepening thus an understanding
of a body of thought sometimes obscure and difficult to
penetrate. Studying Jung's writings from the perspective
of one outside the field of psychology, and putting together
what he learned of analytical psychology with his experiences
as a trial lawyer, as a painter, and as a father of a
family, Lawson was all the better able to amaze himself
and in so doing to amaze us by juxtaposing his reading
of Jung upon Darwinian evolutionary theory.
In a writing
style both direct and accessible, Lawson lays out and
explains key Jungian concepts such as "archetype", "the
collective unconscious", "individuation", and "synchronicity",
definitions which will provide the ground for the development
of his argument. In his opening pages he weaves into the
explication of these concepts examples of the hereditary,
genetic nature of the instincts. From the time of the
first appearance of Jung's researches, we have known that
psychical, archetypal images make their appearance throughout
the ages and across cultures, in our myths, our fairy
tales, our religions and rituals, and our deliriums. It
follows from this that the collective unconscious transmits
from generation to generation certain patterns or motifs
by which the psyche expresses itself. Lawson recalls to
us also that Erich Neumann, one of Jung’s closest disciples,
in his study of universal themes in world mythology, advanced
the hypothesis of a progression or evolution recognizable
in mythic imagery through time. Neumann's argument supports
Jung's thesis according to which humanity is heir to a
collective unconscious structured by the archetypes and
that the images “produced” by these archetypes bring to
consciousness that which had theretofore been unconscious.
This is what Neumann calls the "evolution of consciousness."
Lawson advances
that the Jungian concept -- of a collective unconscious
structured by archetypes of which every man and woman
is possessed at birth – can square with the strict science
of Darwinian evolutionary theory. His hypothesis is that,
over the ages, human consciousness evolved in a way similar
to the biological evolution of the species; this idea
may be implicit in certain of Jung’s writings and can
be found again in Neumann’s book. The novelty in Lawson
is in saying that consciousness undergoes, across time,
an evolution by a natural selection similar to that –
in biology – of the human species; there is a potential
"to become" conscious innate in the unconscious. The difference
between biological evolution of the species according
to Darwin and the evolution of consciousness according
to Lawson is that the former is done at the genetic level
(the evolution of the instincts) and the latter by another
sort of natural selection: that which expresses itself
in the diverse cultures of the world through the ages.
In connecting
biological evolution and the evolution of consciousness
Lawson is naturally led to confront "instinct" and "archetype".
He does so in a remarkable way, in particular in giving
numerous examples in human behavior that illuminate their
respective roles and the interlacing of the one with the
other. To my mind, this interrelation – between instinct
and archetype – is the most subtle and perhaps the most
interesting aspect of the book. In a late work, Jung wrote
that the instincts are rooted in the physical organism,
whereas the archetypes spring from the spirit. This and
similar passages permit Lawson to write that (p. 32) "the
archetypes, to sum up, and along with them the instincts,
are rooted in the central nervous system of the human
species". This assertion seems to contradict, at least
partially, the opposition between instinct and archetype,
but Lawson’s arguments are solid, and they have the great
virtue of allowing us to consider -- and even compelling
us to do so -- Jung’s work from a point of view that is
eminently scientific. I enthusiastically recommend the
reading of this book, particularly today, at a time when
pschoanalysis is taking into account the great importance
of the neurosciences for our practice and as testimony
moreover of the indissoluble link between psyche and soma.
Leslie de
Galbert, Cahier jungiens de psychanalyze, 129, Juin 2009:
112-13.
»
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