Ah, but I Was So Much Older Then…

midiguru

Jul 3

The other day, seeking something to read, I pulled down from my groaning bookshelf Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul. I opened it at random to a passage in Chapter Five, "The Stages of Life," and found an observation that seemed to apply pretty well to me, so I sat down and started reading at the start of Chapter Five.

What quickly became apparent was that Jung suffered from a severe (and, I'm sure, entirely unconscious) case of Eurocentric racism. Consider this passage:

"If psychic life consisted only of overt happenings -- which on a primitive level is still the case -- we could content ourselves with a sturdy empiricism. The psychic life of civilized man, however, is full of problems; we cannot even think of it except in terms of problems. Our psychic processes are made up to a large extent of reflections, doubts, and experiments, all of which are almost completely foreign to the unconscious, instinctive mind of primitive man. It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems; they are the dubious gift of civilization."

We might interpret Jung's use of the phrase "primitive man" either as referring to our own ancestors of a million years ago, or as referring to those who live in modern cultures but lack the Europeans' guns and the economic engines that buy guns and sustain armies. Unfortunately, it's not clear that Jung would have differentiated between the two. It was quite common a hundred years ago (the book was published in 1933) to assume that the dark-skinned natives of other continents were "primitive" -- simple childlike beings who lacked the sophisticated mental and cultural endowments that graced the residents of Germany, France, and England.

In any case, we have no clear idea what the minds of our ancestors were like a million years ago. We can make only shadowy inferences based on the science of evolutionary psychology, which didn't exist during Jung's lifetime. So if he intended to refer not to modern residents of far-off places but to our ancestors, what basis could he have had for making any assumptions at all about them?

In support of this rather scathing criticism of Jung, I would point also to his use of the word "civilization." The root of this word is "civis," which is Latin for "city." Until the arrival of the white men with their guns, there were few cities in the Americas or in sub-Saharan Africa. There were certainly cities in India, but the British were busy looting them. To Jung, "civilization" could only have meant "European civilization." He would, I imagine, have been aghast to learn that the cultures of Bali and the Congo were just as "civilized" as his own in terms of their complexity and subtlety.

For that matter, it's not even clear whether nonhuman animals are "unconscious," since we can't ask them, or whether they lack the capacity to formulate and solve problems. I've read that an octopus can be quite adept at solving problems it has never before encountered -- opening a jar to get at a bit of food, for instance. I recall also a story about a deer whose nose had been pierced by porcupine quills waiting by the side of a road for a human to drive by, knowing, though it was clearly terrified of a human encounter, that only a creature with hands would be able to remove the quills. That deer had a problem and envisioned a novel way of solving it.

Problems are not exclusively a product of "civilization," nor even of human biology. Nor is it clear that our consciousness allows us somehow to evade the operation of our instincts. On the contrary: Recent studies in evolutionary psychology strongly suggest that our more complex mental operations exist not in order to evade our instinctive drives but rather to enable our instincts to operate more effectively in the complex context of a social life that includes language and tool use.

If there had been no evolutionary advantage in this type of conscious mental processing, we wouldn't have it. And our genetic heritage, needless to say, is not different in any significant way from the genetic heritage of the indigenous cultures of Bali, the Congo, or the Amazon basin.

I'd like to look to Jung as an inspired and inspiring figure, but I'm afraid this one passage drives a full complement of nails in his intellectual coffin. Sic transit gloria mundi, say the old folks -- it goes to show you never can tell.