BRAIN, PSYCHE, AND SELF: A DIALECTIC BETWEEN ANALYTICAL

PSYCHOLOGY AND NEUROSCIENCE

A dissertation submitted

by

KESSTAN C. BLANDIN

to

PACIFICA GRADUATE INSTITUTE

in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the
degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

This dissertation has been

accepted for the faculty of
Pacifica Graduate Institute by:

•ennis P. Slattery,
Chair

Jennifer L.~Selig,
Reader

(/tyjz
Susan E. Mehrtens, PhD
External Reader
 UMI Number: 3519792

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 ii

JANUARY 25, 2011

Copyright by

KESSTAN C. BLANDIN

2011
 iii

ABSTRACT

Brain, Psyche, and Self: A Dialectic Between Analytical Psychology and Neuroscience

by

Kesstan Blandin

Although much of C. G. Jung's work is not compatible with neuroscientific

methods or perspectives, his ideas on the structure of the psyche and self overlap with

attempts to understand the phenomenon of a self in consciousness through mapping

correlates with brain functions and processes. They are therefore appropriate to engage in

dialogue with neuroscience. Through these dialogues we can further understand the

construction of the self and identity in light of current findings in neuroscience and the

theories of C. G. Jung, particularly the collective unconscious and archetypes. In this

exploration we discover how the boundaries of the self in the imagination of the psyche

are revealed as the horizon of the self in the brain emerges.

This dissertation employs a dialectic methodology with a dual-aspect monism and

complex systems theory perspective. Dual-aspect monism understands brain and mind as

different aspects of the same phenomenon, whereas complex systems theory holds that

the emergence of the psyche is of unique integrity and relative autonomy.

Research on implicit consciousness and the right brain hemisphere indicates that

the subjective experience of the collective unconscious is autonomous and thus outside

the boundaries of the ego. Temperamental predispositions manifested through

neurobiological profiles are analyzed through Jung's theory of typology, which is found

to be the first subjective manifestations of physiological predisposition. A discussion of

 iv

the role of experience and the external world is provided for balance and clarity in light

of the self s construction through the interchange of brain, psyche, and experience.

The theory of archetypes is analyzed through a current dialogue within analytical

psychology in light of an emergent perspective in neuroscience. Further exploration

considers the role of memory as the bridge between neuronal functions of the brain and

imaginative functions of the self. Primary conclusions are that identity is the mythic skin

of the self, whereas archetypes are emergent symbols of the potential becoming of the

self.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1. Introduction 1

Statement of Research 2

The Dialogue 8

Fear of Reduction 16

Pathology and Souls in Distress 18

Essays on Definitions 24

Subject, self7Self 24

Identity, Ego, Persona 26

Provisional, Habitual, Conditioned self 27

Chapter 2. The Modern Self: Introduction to the Literature Review 29

Metaphysical Self. 31

Historical Self 35

Physiological Self 40

Fictive Self 44

Summary: The Clearing of the Research 50

Chapter 3. Methodology 52

An Archimedean Point 52

Dialectics and Interiority 56

Dual-aspect Monism 57

Delimits 58
SECTION I. THE BRAIN 60

Chapter 4. The Ground 63

The Collective Unconscious 64

The Evolution of the Brain: Phylogenetic 67

The Evolution of the Brain: Ontogenetic 70

The Limbic System 71

Prefrontal Cortex 77

Case Study: Borderline Personality Disorder 79

Chapter 5. The Other Within 91

Core Consciousness 92

Implicit Consciousness 95

Cerebral Hemispheres 100

Conclusions 109

SECTION II. FATE 113

Chapter 6. Temperament and Typology 116

Temperament 116

Typology 128

Chapter 7. A Confluence of Events 139

Biological Predisposition 140

Temperament and Parental Conditioning 145

The Other Environment: Social Adaptation 147

Parents and Culture 154

Public and Private Selves 159

 vii

Conclusions 164

SECTION III. IMAGINATION 171

Chapter 8. Imagine the Archetype 173

A Continuum of Existence 184

Archetypes are Emergent 189

Archetypes are Numinous and "Not-me" 198

Archetypes are Subjective, Distinctly Human, and Transformative 200

Chapter 9. Memory's Cleave 209

Memory in the Brain 209

Imagination and Memory 219

Misattribution 221

Suggestibility 222

Bias 225

Memory's Cleave 227

Chapter 10. Psyche's Remainder 230

Self Memory System 230

Nodal Points 233

A Congregation 236

Archetypes Revisited 240

Mythic Skin 245

Chapter 11. Concluding Thoughts 248

Critique of Jungian Theory 248

Brain and Psyche: Structures of the Self. 250

 Vlll

The Joy of Discovery 253

References 254

The style used throughout this dissertation is in accordance with the Publication Manual
of the American Psychological Association (6th Edition, 2001) and Pacifica Graduate
Institute's Depth Dissertation Handbook (2010-2011).
 Chapter 1
Introduction

Identity has been a life-long fascination of mine, primarily because I wanted to be

someone else. I remember the day that a favorite fantasy came into being: I was 7, alone

and lying flat on my back against cool earth in the middle of a rhubarb patch. It was late

spring in Vermont: a saturated, fragrant, and lush world of green, warm wind, humming

insects. In my fantasy, I suffered a terrible accident that left me with complete and

irreversible amnesia. I remembered no thing and no one. A tabula rasa. I would quickly

move, as only a 7-year-old can, through the obligatory letting go of sad family members

for whom I was as lost as my memories, and begin the glorious task of rebuilding myself

from the inside out. Without memories, I had no evidence of known qualities or

characteristics. I began from scratch. This took quite some time, and as I repeated the

fantasy through the years, I would try on different qualities from people I admired like a

Potato Head doll. When my personality was rebuilt, I went about constructing new

memories from my new life to gird my personality; sometimes pre-amnesia memories

would reappear like ghosts. I would decide whether to keep each one or not, and how I

would treat it, as though it were a guest. I relished this fantasy and told no one about it.

Although the construction of identity from the world is plainly obvious—family

conditioning, cultural and historical influences—it is plainly not complete either.

Always, a navel of mystery remains; for example, why do people respond so differently

to similar life circumstances? Even my siblings, who were raised with the same familial

conditioning factors, in the same part of the country at the same time in history,

incorporated those conditioning influences differently than I did.

Each self, it appears, does the same thing uniquely.

 2

How did you come to be? Have you ever wondered how much of who you are

has been imagined? Put another way, have you ever considered if who you think you are

is somehow constructed or made up? And if this is so, who or what constructed you?

What aspects of identity can be reconstructed, recreated, or changed, and which cannot?

It is possible, and the current research posits, that our identity is a product of imagination

as much as of physiological processes and conditioned experience. This dissertation

searches into the nature of identity as an imaginative and physiological construction—a

historical fiction. The intention is to deconstruct the literalness of identity—the certainty

of who we think we are—by examining its construction in early experience employing an

interdisciplinary analysis of neuroscience and Jungian psychology.

Statement of Research: Importance and Contribution

Western culture values self-knowledge, beginning with the Greeks and the

examined life of Socrates and the Oracle at Delphi's famous dictum, Know Thyself, and

this charge being taken up by centuries of philosophers. Still, Western culture, and

particularly American popular culture, has been accused of promoting a high degree of

self-involvement and even narcissism. Is research into the construction of identity

contributing to anything other than turning the gerbil wheel of self-absorption? Andre

Gide, in a famous reference, denounces self-knowledge: "Whoever observes himself

arrests his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never

become a butterfly" (quoted in Nersoyan, 1969, p. 58). An ironic statement, indeed, for a

novelist and philosopher, one who must spend considerable time in reflective thought on

his own interiority and that of others if he is to connect with readers, a necessity of a
 3

successful writer, which Gide certainly was. Still, it is a comment worthy of response.

Why know yourself?

The construction of subjectivity, a question that inquires into how we know at all

and therefore how we know the world itself, has been central to psychology and

philosophy for more than the last century. However, the 20th century has seen an

increased and compelling interest in identity in many fields, perhaps in large part due to

the dangerous and precarious state of the world and the essential role played by human

beings in creating this state. Scholar Nick Mansfield's description of the subjective

experience of the modern self reflects this precariousness:

Things and events are now understood on the level of the pulsing,
breathing, feeling individual self. Yet at the same time, this self is reported
to feel less confident, more isolated, fragile and vulnerable than ever. ... It
is this ambivalence and ambiguity—the intensification of the self as the key
site of human experience and its increasing sense of internal fragmentation
and chaos—that the twentieth century's theorists of subjectivity have tried
to deal with. (2000, p. 2)

We are torn between two poles of our own nature, a potential for both greatness and

great destruction. In our anxiety we ask, but cannot answer: is the nature of human being

essentially creative or destructive? The response to this question determines more than

the quality of the individual life; collectively our answers will determine humanity's

future. Jung emphasizes the significance of the self this way:

Nobody seems to have noticed that without a reflecting psyche the world
might as well not exist, and that, in consequence, consciousness is a
second world creator, and also that the cosmogonic myths do not describe
the absolute beginning of the world but rather the dawning of
consciousness as the second Creation. (1975, p. 487)

The research takes this opinion seriously. In an age of world wars, terrorism,

global violence and genocide, the Holocaust, and nuclear weapons, the significance of the
 4

creative or destructive potential within individuals that comprise societies can hardly be

overstated, nor does it need to be demonstrated. Therefore, a sound understanding of

how identity is constructed that leads to an understanding of how an individual can

intentionally participate in the evolution of her own being and potentials can reveal a

horizon of possibility for human beings; a most significant threshold at any given time

and particularly so in our moment in history where the largest threat to human life is the

destructiveness of human nature itself. It is precisely because identity as the construct or

filter of subjectivity determines the world that we live in at any given time, both

individually and collectively, that serious thought into the nature and construction of

subjectivity has been explored through religion, philosophy, psychology, and science for

centuries, and why it is taken up again here. To Gide, then, I say, "Know thyself because

thyself creates and destroys thy world and butterflies don't have nuclear bombs."

Jung was known for not being as interested in the psychic development of

childhood itself as he was with the individuating adult psyche. However, his work is

peppered with statements as to the obvious significance of early experiences:

We know that the first impressions of childhood accompany us inalienably

throughout life, and that, just as indestructibly, certain educational
influences can keep people all their lives within those limits. In these
circumstances it is not surprising that conflicts break out between the
personality moulded by educational and other influences of the infantile
milieu and one's own individual style of life. It is a conflict which all
those must face who are called upon to live a life that is independent and
creative. (1955/1967, p. 136)

Still, the vast majority of Jung's works are devoted to the transformations and

expansions of consciousness towards wholeness through individuation in the second half

of life. Further, Jung wrote significantly about therapeutic, clinical techniques and

theories as well as abstract, theoretical, empirical, and philosophical treatises on a wide

 5

area covering the self, the objective psyche, and its archetypal processes, such as

alchemy, myth, religion, and others. In the vast field of Jungian discourse, there are

Jungian clinicians, Jungians who are more interdisciplinary or humanities-based, and

some who are both. One intention of the research is to further develop the links between

Jungian theory and the neurosciences outside of clinical practice or techniques.

Although a growing field of Jungian psychoanalysts contribute rich work to the

dialogue between analytical psychology and neuroscience, there is ample room for a

cultivation of the ideas between Jungian ideas of psyche, soul, and self and the functions

of the brain and mind in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. An example is Jean

Knox's Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind

(2003), in which she presents a revision and reinterpretation of Jung's theory of

archetypes, a text designed for the psychotherapist and intended to bridge theory and

practice in those areas of overlap between analysis and science. Knox's text represents

the current work in analytic psychology establishing links between Jungian theory and

the neurosciences in that it is written by and for clinicians.

There are notable exceptions, however, to the lack of clinical integration of Jung

and neuroscience, such as Ginette Paris' Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology After

Neuroscience (2007). Paris claims her text has two voices: (1) an objective critique of

her field by a psychotherapist through which she draws a circle around the discourse of

depth psychology and makes a case for depth psychology separating from the sciences

and claiming itself part of arts and humanities, where it has always belonged; and (2) the

personal relation of her near-death brain injury which brought Paris "to test all the

theories against my own experience of suffering" (p. xiv). In order to accomplish this,
 6

Paris turned to literature and the imagination. "It was so liberating that I began

questioning myself: what if, all through my career, I had written my patients' case

histories with the same literary attention that I am now giving my own experience?" (p.

xv). The research explores a similar theme in seeing identity as a historical fiction, that is,

one emerging from the history of the body yet crossing over to be a story of the psyche.

A niche is carved in an under-represented area of the dialogue between Jung and science

outside of clinical perspectives but accompanied by a particular focus on the construction

of the psychic layer of identity, an object curiously born of the brain but psychic,

imaginative, and immaterial.

The research makes several basic inquiries: What is a depth psychological

understanding of how identity emerges from the meeting of biology and circumstance?

How does the nature of psyche, archetypes, and complexes influence or structure one's

storied identity? What is the distinction between identity and character? What aspects of

identity are of imagination? Essentially, the research turns an aesthetic eye towards

identity as it emerges in the interstice between the brain and experience.

Aesthetics in this sense is the creative, imaginative psychic process that produces

works of art, those objects which curiously represent subject and object. Art works are

the subjective, idiosyncratic expression of the artist, and as Rank (1932) argues, it is an

objective channel of the internal conflicts and wounds of the artist in the same way that

neuroses are the expression of the neurotic's internal conflicts and wounds. The research

employs this perspective with identity as well, that identity is an imaginative, aesthetic

working-through of internal conflicts that is at the same time subjective and objective.

Many influential texts have been written analyzing identity psychologically as a story and
 7

making literary analyses of identity. Some of these texts are discussed in relationship to

the research in the literature review below. The aesthetic lens that the research employs

is distinct in that it does not see identity as a story, literally, comparing identity as a

psychological construct to literature; nor does the research conduct a literary analysis of

identity. Rather, the research understands identity as an object of an aesthetic process

natural to the psyche, to produce an aesthetic object via the imagination. That is, identity

is not held as if it were a work of art or an aesthetic object, but as an aesthetic object.

Identity is not like art as though art were something produced from a psychic process

separate from the psychic processes that lead to identity. It may be clearer to say that art

is an object of the identity process as identity is an object of the aesthetic process.

Joel Whitebrook, commenting on Michel Foucault's psychological conflicts from

childhood, points to the aesthetic working-through of internal conflicts when he states:

The pertinent question, however, is not whether such primary experiences

exist, for in important work they are almost always present. It is rather
whether one remains "stuck in" them or is able "to think them through"
and "go beyond them" in order to create works that can stand on their own
merits. (2005, p. 316)

It remains to be seen if this current research on identity will have any

influence on others outside of the dissertation committee and academic tradition it

is written within, but it is clear that the topic is of great personal significance to

me because it is the site of my deepest wounds, my noblest efforts, and my

grandest illusions. My analyses, like Foucault's and those of many others who

theorize about the nature of the subject, are products and consequences of the

processes and truths that have healed me. This research is connected to my

struggles and liberations from a negative identity, the personal wounds of

 8

childhood, and the interpretations that sourced me. Although I do not propose

complete healing that sees with absolute clarity through the veils of identity,

nonetheless I have traversed enough terrain and pierced enough self-delusions to

know the edges of transferences and projections I may have on the work. Again, I

do not claim absolute clarity but rather the humble recognition that I am blind

without my glasses, limited though they may be.

The Dialogue

The self is complicated; most people on this planet have a definite sense of

self, and yet no one discipline can adequately capture its nature, essence, or even

location. I do not even pretend to be able to offer answers to this conundrum, but

will provide some initial explorations into the relationship between two

fundamental aspects of the self: its subjective and objective realities. I bring

together two fields of knowledge that exemplify the subjective and objective

perspectives: Jungian analytical psychology and neuroscience.

It is not an easy conversation for several reasons, not the least of which is a

mutually dismissive attitude of each field towards the other represented in a lack of

interdisciplinary explorations between analytical psychology and neuroscience. The

dialogue is incipient, yet growing, as evidenced in Pacifica Graduate Institute's graduate

programs emphasizing somatic studies, including neuroscience and Jung. Yet we must

keep in mind that Pacifica is a unique program with few peers. As for the number of

Jungian scholars beginning to explore the links between Jung and neurobiology, there are

few again, though this number is growing. Yet, I believe an argument can be made that

it is a necessary, or at least significant, conversation to broach. In declaring his intention

 9

not to make too strong a boundary between the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences,

and the Geisteswissenschaften, the human sciences, scholar Mark Freeman in Rewriting

the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (1993), claims:

If there is anything that has served to compromise and diminish the

discipline of psychology over the course of the last century or so, it is its
persistent difficulty in accommodating adequately nature and spirit—
broadly taken—into its scope, (p. 4)

In this historical separation, human nature has been distorted on both sides, as

Freeman succinctly states it: "Human beings ... are either reduced to objects like any

other (which is to say dehumanized) or elevated into the status of the very gods they

dethroned" (1993, pp. 4-5). In the various theories of the self, no one has come out ahead,

no one has figured it out yet. This is not because "the various theories proposed to date

are all wrong, but because many are at least partly correct. If this is true—and I believe

this is the case—then the best way to construct a view of the self might be not to pit the

various theories against one another but rather to synthesize across them" (LeDoux, 2002,

p. 26). Current trends in interdisciplinary theorizing between science and the humanities

support the premises held here: that not only can we do better in imagining and knowing

human nature, but the reality of human nature will become clearer as we bring seemingly

incompatible views into dialogue.

For most of their history analytical psychology and neuroscience have

been exploring two different entities: the psyche and the brain-mind. The psyche

and the brain-mind remain two different phenomena, yet today the containing

discourse they are held in is changing to be inclusive of both. Specifically, they

are understood more and more as differing perspectives on the one same

phenomenon: consciousness.
 In The Three Cultures, developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan muses

on the popularity of Freudian psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century:

We still do not completely understand why a small cult on the fringe of

European society created a broad and influential intellectual movement,
which dominated psychiatry and psychology, without the advantage of
empirical data to support most of its core concepts and principles. (2009,
p. 110)

He further speculates that the combination of Puritanical attitudes towards sexuality, the

cultural movement of individuals towards self-actualization, and women seeking gender

equality were all important for the dominance and acceptance of Freudian theory.

Historical success on this scale is overdetermined, and these factors most certainly

contributed, but I think a subtle yet primary reason why Freud's ideas met that moment in
history, and not the many others making similar discoveries, was that he bridged the gap
between science and subjective experience. For a short time, psychoanalysis made

meaningful links between the objective reality that science discovered and the subjective

reality that we actually live. Previously, Christianity had performed this linking function
for the majority of men and women in Western culture, providing a containing myth

through which people had a direct relationship to the cosmos and the scheme of creation.
Freud's theories had a foot, for a while, in each camp to bridge science and the
humanities through the Oedipus myth, through case studies that read like literature, and

through a focus on the metaphoric, imaginative passions of the irrational Id.

But the 20th century has seen a widening gulf between science and technology on

the one hand, and the humanities, in particular depth psychology, representing subjective

experience on the other. The following comment about psychoanalysis in The

Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology could just as well be stated about

analytical psychology.

The diminished influence of contemporary psychoanalysis is largely a

product of theory mis-management: Rather than looking forward (to the
evolving demands of science and practice) and outward (to ideas and
 11

findings in other areas of psychology and medicine), many psychoanalysts

have chosen to look backward (at the seminal but dated contributions of
early psychoanalytic practitioners) and inward (at their like-minded
colleagues' own analytic writings). (Cloninger, 2009, p. 17)

Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms (2002) demonstrate convincingly that

Freud's move from neurology was due to insufficient scientific knowledge and

technology to validate methodologically what he was observing. As a result, Freud

turned to the psyche itself. However, he maintained that one day science would be able

to validate physically the psychoanalytical observations of the psyche. Yet as scientific

knowledge of the brain and human nature advanced, psychoanalysis, and all of depth

psychology, fell to the margins, not necessarily because the representations of the psyche
were inaccurate but because an active relationship with scientific knowledge was not

maintained.

In Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology After Neuroscience (2007), Ginette

Paris makes a strong stand for not forging these couplings between neuroscience and

depth psychology, stating that science in its factual perspective literalizes the imaginative

psyche and asserts that the theories of depth psychology in general, and Jung in

particular, have always been guiding myths. The time has come, Paris asserts, to separate

depth psychology from neuroscience. As a primary piece of evidence in this argument,

Paris argues that Freud and Jung sought scientific affirmation and approval of their

theories as a necessity of their time and the radical nature of their ideas. This is an

assumption that many conversations among Jungians, including the faculty and students

at Pacifica Graduate Institute where Paris teaches, stem from; that is, the theory of

courting scientific approval in analytical psychology's past is not discussed as much as it

lends context and reasoning as to why neuroscience is not integrated into contemporary

Jungian thought. I think it may be a gestating myth, perhaps too a fiction, but a partial
 12

one, that those within the Jungian discourse have literalized to justify certain intellectual

stances towards science. As mentioned previously, although Pacifica is unique in offering

somatic and Jungian studies that integrate neuroscience and Jung, this program is recent

and rather rare in graduate psychology programs. An integration of neuroscience and

analytical psychology was not offered just a few years ago when I was a student, nor did

the curriculum involve serious critiques of established Jungian concepts and discourse.

However, if Pacifica is a litmus of the evolving conversation, then the current research

aligns itself with the interdisciplinary thrust of intellectual exploration of consciousness

represented in the Imagination and Medicine conference hosted by the Institute.

Freud's desire for psychoanalysis to be a scientific psychology is well

documented, but Jung's courting of the medical-scientific establishment is decidedly less

clear. In fact, Jung more often intentionally kept from associating or correlating his ideas

with medical research on the brain. Considering M. L. von Franz's comments below,

Paris' argument that Jung sought medical or scientific approval for his theories should be

challenged.

Jung from the beginning had consciously avoided creating any such
premature equivalences between the unconscious and physical and
material processes. Indeed this was not because he did not believe in such
relationships, but rather because he was convinced that the phenomena
should first be investigated much more in the psychic realm per se before
connections to somatic processes were established. In this way, he was
also seeking to counter the materialistic prejudice of his time, which was
inclined to draw the hasty conclusion that the psyche was an
epiphenomenon of physiological processes. Jung was convinced that a
link with physiology would manifest itself naturally when both fields had
gone far enough in their research. (Von Franz, 1988, p. 2)

On a surface level, this explanation of Jung's rejection of neuroscience may be accurate,

but it is also a cool rationalization of an intellectual stance that was actually based on

tumultuous and intensely personal emotions between Freud and Jung. The time has come
 13

for a link with the body and analytical theory as well as a platform to question the reasons
why Jungians have so actively dismissed the brain as relevant to their work.
What is interesting here to consider is the insightful theory posed by Peter

Homans (1979) in Jung in Context, in which he makes an articulate and persuasive

argument that Jung's split from Freud was initiated by a powerful narcissistic crisis in

which Freud played the unconscious role of an affirming and approving Father for Jung.
Freud's rejection propelled Jung into his infamous confrontation with the unconscious

and Jung's resulting "writings on introversion and the moral task of individuation ...

betray a preoccupation with what can only be called a 'struggle with narcissism'" (p. 50).

In this context, Jung's rejection of science is intimately related to his rejection of Freud
and psychoanalysis. Paris' assumption of desiring scientific approval and von Franz's

rationalization are common interpretations in analytical circles of Jung's resistance to the

medical-scientific establishment of his day, and I do not here claim that they don't
accurately reveal Jung's intellectual motivations. Rather, in the spirit of depth

psychology that seeks to know the underlying, unconscious motivations, which are
always personal, Homans' thesis of Jung's psychic development of analytical psychology

is especially influential and cogent. Including it in our understanding of Jung's

motivations gives a fuller, more complete understanding of the origins of analytical

psychology and its historical relationship to neuroscience.

Homans looks closely at Jung's period of creative illness after his break with

Freud as the origin of analytical psychology, as do many other theorists, including Jung

himself in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961). Yet he understands this as initiating

from Jung's early narcissistic attachment to Freud as a father figure, which Jung was

missing psychically in his relationship with his father and with a religious tradition he
could not idealize. Homans bases his analysis of Jung's relationship to Freud as

primarily narcissistic on Kohut's theories of narcissism. If a "child's narcissistic needs

are not gradually embraced and tamed, however, the wish for an idealized, powerful
 14

parent imago will become split off or repressed, as will the child's grandiosity" (Homans,

1979, p. 40). Whereas a grandiose self with delusional claims may incapacitate a lesser

ego, Kohut believed that in a gifted individual this grandiosity may compel the

development and use of their talents into exceptional performance; this, Homans argues,

is the case with Jung (pp. 40-41).

In the Freud-Jung Letters, the correspondence between the two men begins "rich

in the language of idealization and of merger and, on Jung's part, in confidences"

(Homans, 1979, p. 51) and end with each man "struggling to maintain a positive
relationship" (p. 50). Homans, again applying Kohut's theory of narcissism to the

transference between the men demonstrated in the letters, argues that Jung attempted to

idealize Freud and psychoanalysis in place of the disappointment of his father and

religious tradition. In 1910, in response to an inquiry from Freud as to whether

psychoanalysis should form a fraternity to protect it from the state, Jung's reply indicates
clearly a religious idealization, if not infatuation:

I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for psychoanalysis ...
we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to
revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently
t o transform Christ back into the soothsaying G o d o f the v i n e . . . . A
genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but
must grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony
and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god. (McGuire, 1974, p. 212)

For his part, Freud resisted Jung's attempts to idealize him or psychoanalysis and

"their fusion with mythology and religion" (Homans, 1979, p. 56) and directed Jung not

to "regard me [Freud] as the founder of a religion. My intentions are not so far reaching
. . . . I a m not thinking ofa substitute for a religion; this need must be sublimated"

(McGuire, 1974, p. 222). From there ensued the infamous rupture and lifelong animosity

between them. If truth be told, Freud also experienced a narcissistic rupture in the break

with Jung which may have spurred his plunge into the psychological problem of

narcissism shortly after their break (Homans, p. 50). But it was especially determinant
 15

for Jung's ideas. Jung discovered the cost of seeking or needing approval by a venerated

figure, as we all eventually do with father figures as part of the discovery and claiming of

our own voice, when Freud began criticizing his movement into the symbolic and
religious psyche. He was literally dumped into the unconscious through his split with

Freud when he first comes to terms with the reality of the unconscious and the

assimilation of the personal unconscious—the parental imagoes and the shadow.

Then, a confrontation with the collective unconscious mediated by the anima

brought him eventually to a confrontation with the self archetype, or God imago.
Homans understands individuation as a method of overcoming narcissistic inflation.

Individuation involves de-identification with the various unconscious inflations one holds

as a natural consequence of psychically coming into being or into ego-consciousness.

Jung's psychology locates individuals "at the center of a cosmological epic and

encouraged them to view their past traditions and surrounding culture exclusively in

terms of the structures and processes of their own consciousness" (Homans, 1979, p.

111).

Germaine to this discussion is not how Jung's narcissistic overcoming into

authentic selfhood gave rise to analytical psychology—Homans' thesis—but how it

unconsciously shaped his attitude of rejection towards Freud, science, and the brain.
Jung was thinking and writing in a time of threat to the individual by "mass man," whom

Jung saw as unconsciously identified with the social persona and collective norms. He

associated the rigid persona of modern men and women "with extraversion and excessive

rationality" (Homans, 1979, p. 178). This association not only accurately reflects the

imbalance of the time that analytical psychology sought to address, but serves as a

description of Freud himself and of psychoanalysis. And we need to reflect on the

timeliness of this imbalance: is it still accurate today that the primary collective

imbalance to address is the dominance of rationalism? It seems to me that the major ills

of our world—fundamentalism, terrorism, violent crimes, excessive greed—are due to an

 16

influx of the irrational, not the rational. It is possible that in the 21st century we have

crossed the cusp of an enatiodromia and are being called to bring the rational and

irrational into balance by shoring up the irrational emotional impulses of the collective
unconscious through rational and reflective thought.
Fear of reduction. At the heart of Jung's rejection of Freud, rationalism,

materialism, and neuroscience is a fear that illuminates a current and unconscious fear

that I believe the humanities holds towards science today. Homans cites a key document,

a letter in 1915 from Jung to Dr. Hans Schmid, in which he "lamented how destructive of

human integrity was Freud's extreme and exclusive emphasis upon analytical-intellectual

understanding" and that the methods of psychoanalysis were "a form of excessive

intellectualization that snuffed out that mystery of life which is the unique, individual
self' (Homans, 1979, p. 94). In the desire for understanding itself, Jung responds:

there lurks the devil's will.... Understanding is a fearfully binding

power, at times a veritable murder of the soul.... The core of the
individual is a mystery of life, which is snuffed out when it is "grasped."
. . . That is why symbols want to be mysterious; they are not so merely
because what is at the bottom of them cannot be clearly apprehended. The
symbol wants to guard against Freudian interpretations.... With our
patients "analytical" understanding has a wholesomely destructive effect.
. . . It is a technique w e have learned from the d e v i l . . . . The menacing a n d
dangerous thing about analysis is that the individual is apparently
understood: the devil eats his soul away. (Jung, 1973, pp. 31-32)

These statements have a powerful affective charge even now. On the one hand I

applaud Jung's intellectual stance of remaining in the discomfort of the unknown when

confronting the mystery of the self, yet he is clearly motivated by a compulsive emotional

bias against Freud as well; I believe this prejudice was then projected onto and

rationalized against medical science, especially neuroscience, not only by Jung but by his

followers. Current Jungian discourse is replete with reverence for the unconscious that at

times loses a sense of discernment and discrimination; a mystery does not equal

infallibility or superior knowledge. Although it is true that rationalism taken to an

 17

extreme snuffs out the soul, the unconscious can be quite seductive and capable itself in

squashing independent and critical thought, making mindless followers of entire

countries of souls.

I believe this fear of reductionism that Jung gives voice to so movingly is at the

heart of the chasm between faith and reason: that science, as it solves mysteries, will

reduce the mystery at the heart of the subjective experience of the human being to

physical matter. The experience of our aliveness as ineffable, mysterious, and

idiosyncratically precious is a subjective reality. It can only be known in subjective

terms and cannot be expressed by objective reality. Meaning is not the domain of science;

it is the domain of the humanities and one's subjective experience. Just as the

metaphorical truths of religion are made absurd when literalized, the objective knowledge
of science used to express a metaphoric truth can only distort by reduction. Even if

neuroscientists can one day point to a glowing red dot on a functional magnetic resonance
image (fMRI) and say "we've determined this is the cluster of neurons in the brain that
fire excitedly when we realize or experience the mystery at the core of our being," they
have not discovered or explained what that mystery is, only a physical correlate of it. For

neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, the distinction between subjective experience and

objective matter is clear.

You do not see what I see when you look at my brain activity. You see a
part of the activity of my brain as I see what I see.... We have seen that
our knowledge of the biological mechanisms behind the formation of
images and their experience is one thing and our experience of those
images is another. (1999, pp. 306-307)

Neuroscience could map all of the structures of the self and consciousness—how

it is constructed, manipulated, and transformed in the brain—and we would still need the

imagination, its myths, stories, and images, to express what is true about our subjective,

lived experience. This unique subjective experience is uniquely human.

 18

It is worthwhile to reflect on the fact that most scientists do not feel a lack of the

sacred in their lives or the world due to their pursuits of scientific knowledge of the brain
and the self. Their pursuits of the rational and ordered in our world do not squelch a

sense of mystery and sacredness; indeed, many would likely attest to the fact that these

intellectual pursuits open them up to mystery and a sense of the sacred. For scientists

working on the brain, mind loses none of its power or beauty when
experimental methods are applied to human behavior. Likewise, biologists
do not fear that mind will be trivialized by a reductionist analysis, which
delineates the component parts and activities of the brain. On the contrary,
most scientists believe that biological analysis is likely to increase our
respect for the power and complexity of the mind. (Kandel, 2006, p. 9)

Meaning, mystery, and a sense of the sacred is not the sole province of depth psychology,

the unconscious, or the psyche. There are those who are certainly more reductive and
vituperative towards the humanities, such as Richard Dawkins, but they are not the
majority perspective. Just as Jung was repeatedly accused of reducing theological or

ontological realities of God to psychology, and he repeatedly defended himself as making

no comment on theological or ontological realities of God, preferring to stay with the

psychological correlates of the experience, our dialogue between analytical psychology

and neuroscience does not reduce the psyche to the functions and processes of the brain
but finds neurological representations. And by understanding the nature of the

neurological and cognitive functions that correlate to specific psychological experiences,

we may learn something new about them.

Pathology and souls in distress. Scientific affirmation and acceptance are not the

only reasons to cultivate a dialogue between the two perspectives; this is where Paris is
short-sighted. I agree that depth psychology is a powerful and important guiding

contemporary myth of psychological growth and realities, but it cannot be reduced to

this, or any, one purpose. Depth psychology in general and Jungian theory in particular
span a breadth and depth of knowledge overlapping with many fields—science among
 19

them—and we would miss out on many rich insights into the human condition to separate
neuroscience and depth psychology so rigidly. Though there is truth in Paris' statement

that "the money poured into research [by pharmacological companies] for these 'mental

disorders' shapes the DSM and blurs the line between a symptom that is due to brain

pathology and the expression of the soul in distress" (2007, p. 35), it is also true that there

are levels of psychological dysfunction or pathology without known direct or primary

neurobiological factors for which a psychotherapy that focuses on the imagery of dreams
and mythological metaphors is not effective. An example is Borderline Personality

Disorder (BPD), a DSM-IV-TR classification that fits Paris' distinction of a mental

disorder without brain pathology that is a soul in distress. BPD has been demonstrated to

be most effectively served in reaching states of stability and healing through therapies
such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that focus on

mindfulness, or attention to the present, coupled with cognitive and behavioral structures
and disciplined actions (Lieb, Zanarini, Schmahl, Linehan, & Bohus, 2004):
Borderline individuals in particular may request Jungian work because
they are drawn to the idea of working with archetypal material, of which
they may have an abundance, but they are actually too fragile to be able to
deal with it. (Corbett, 1996, p. 29)
As Corbett further points out, if the structures of the personality are too weak or fragile,

an experience of the intensity of the archetypal psyche can be "the production of

excessive, unmanageable anxiety, or even psychosis" (p. 23).

It may be the case that higher levels of functioning in this personality disorder can

be served through analytical psychology. Nathan Schwartz-Salant (1989), for instance,

wrote an excellent and insightful text of his experiences with borderline analysands. Yet

Paris casts too wide a net to consider mental disorders not due to brain pathology as

separate from a soul in distress, or, that a soul in distress is the province of a
psychological perspective that does not include the brain; as though psychic connection

with the brain does not exist outside of brain pathology.

 20

Hysteria has long been considered a purely psychological disorder that can now
be demonstrated to have important nonpathological neurobiological correlates.

Researchers gave positron emission topography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance

imaging (fMRI) brain scans to a hysterical male patient with a paralyzed leg. When they
asked him to move his leg and he stated that he was actually intending for it to move

though it did not, the motor cortex in the brain that should have lit up remained dark. The
areas that lit up were the anterior cingulate and the orbitofrontal lobes, the former being a
structure of the limbic system involved in emotional decision-making and the latter an

area of inhibition of behavior. The speculation from the researchers is that the activity in
the anterior cingulate and the orbitofrontal lobes inhibits the motor action of the leg
through unconscious emotional decisions. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran thinks this

makes sense "because the anterior cingulate and the orbitofrontal cortex are intimately

connected to the limbic emotional centers in the brain, and we know that hysteria

originates from some emotional trauma" (2004, p. 86). Ramachandran adds that this
proves that one of the oldest cases of psychological disturbances studied by Freud "has a
specific and identifiable organic cause" (p. 86). I don't agree that the neurobiological
correlates in the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex are necessarily causal; this is

an assumption of Ramachandran. It could be that the emotional trauma occurred first and
then exhibited influence on the brain in what is known as "top-down processing."
However, there is a powerful and unmistakable connection between the brain and the

psyche that cannot be ignored or sectioned off from one another any longer for those who

want to know what is in fact functioning in the mind.

Consciousness is far too complex to cut it cleanly into brain pathology and

spiritual suffering. All psychological states of pathology may accurately be called a soul

in distress; all suffering is a soul in distress, why limit depth psychology to address

suffering outside of identifiable brain pathology? Jung himself suggests:

 21

The separation of psychology from the basic assumptions of biology is

purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union
with the body.... Although psychology rightly claims autonomy in its
own special field of research, it must recognize a far-reaching
correspondence between its facts and the data of biology. (1936/1969, p.
114)

The intellectual error made by Paris and other Jungians, as well as Jung himself at times,
is that in their dealings with one aspect of the psyche that is relatively autonomous from

the brain, their thinking is severed from the biological base of the mind though the psyche

never is.
Paris also notes that "scientific modeling works beautifully for scientists, but fails
miserably when trying to 'explain' the psyche as one would explain the night sky with

current findings in cosmology" (2007, p. 23). True, to explain the poetic reality of the

night sky with the knowledge of cosmology is absurdly limiting, yet the scientific
discoveries of the cosmological night sky can bring insight into the nature of the night
sky itself, deepening our poetic understanding of it. In Re-visioning Psychology, Hillman

also makes this claim, writing that "it is impossible for a psychology based on the psyche

to imagine itself as a science" (1975, p. 169). It is not accurate to classify all work finding
meaningful relationships between depth psychology and neuroscience as attempting to

imagine itself as a science. In these instances, Paris and Hillman employ rigid black-and-
white thinking to carve out the territory of archetypal psychology. The reality of the self
exists on many levels: biological, psychological, mythological and poetic. While

agreeing with the gist and mythic claims of Paris' stand, my criticism—which could just
as easily be leveled at other depth psychological theorists and practitioners —rests on her
tendency to reduce depth psychology's relevance to the field she practices, which is,

ironically, the same offense neuroscience and the DSM often make against the psyche. In

short, the mystery of the psyche and the self is too complex to be rigidly split between

either a brain camp or a soul camp; the body is as soulful as the images she generates.
 22

In the essay, "Contents of the Psychoses," Jung remarks on the criticism a

previous essay of his on dementia praecox (schizophrenia) gathered regarding its

scientific validity. He is gratified that a psychiatrist of the stature of Bleuler accepted all

the points that Jung made on the disease, but he notes that the chief difference between
him and Bleuler is "whether the psychological disturbance should be regarded as primary
or secondary in relation to the physiological basis" (1914/1960, p. 155). Clearly, Jung

differed from psychiatrists of his time in that he felt the psychological disturbance was

primary over the neurobiology of mental disease. In contradiction to the predominant

physiological view, Jung chose the view that "an unadapted psychological function arises

which may develop into a manifest mental disturbance and secondarily induce symptoms
of organic degeneration" (p. 156). He further states that there was, at that time, no

evidence of the primary nature of an organic disturbance but "proofs in abundance of a

primarily psychological failure of function whose history can be traced back into early

childhood" (p. 156).

Jung's viewpoint on schizophrenia has been proven untenable; it indeed has a

neurobiological etiology and secondary psychological disturbances (Solms & Turnbull,

2002, p. 204). The psychiatric science of his time could only measure gross brain lesions
and anatomy, not the intricate and more intimate movements of regional areas—the white

matter of the ventromesial prefrontal cortex—and neurochemistry such as dopamine,

leading Jung, reasonably, to assert that since the majority of patients of the asylum were

suffering from dementia praecox in which "anatomical changes are practically non­

existent ... [a] psychiatry of the future ... can only be by way of psychology"

(1914/1960, p. 162). The position that psychological disturbance is primary and

physiological functions secondary does suit what is known of personality disorders; even

though we are able to correlate dysfunctional brain processes or neuro-anatomical

measurements with personality disorders, their etiology still leans predominantly in the

realm of psychological conditioning. The point here is that Jung could not have known
 23

his assessment of dementia praecox was inaccurate at that time, and we need to update

our knowledge of psychological disturbance and structures with the discoveries of the

working of the brain. The truth is, both Freud and Jung were ahead of the science of their

time and had to explore the psychological elements of mental pathology alone until

neuroscience could technologically catch up. As Von Franz was quoted above, Jung
believed that one day there would be a natural link between psyche and physiology when

both fields had advanced enough. That day has come.

In 1914, Jung was still referring to psychiatry as "the art of healing the soul,"

(1914/1960, p. 158), whereas in 2004 neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran claims that

psychiatry will soon become "just another branch of neurology" (p. 83). Things have

changed. Analytical psychology, however, remains a healing modality of the soul; this is

its great distinction with psychoanalysis and other fields of psychotherapy. In this sense,
it would do damage to the soul and to the essence of Jungian theory to reduce it to

neurobiological functions. Therefore, a great deal of Jung's work cannot be correlated or

compared to neuroscientific findings of the brain-mind in a fair manner that would reveal

the psyche; instead it would only reduce it. For the most part, Jung was truly working

with the psyche as an autonomous function holding its own integrity, as noted when he
states that in psychiatry "function has become the appendage of its organ, the psyche an

appendage of the brain" (1914/1960, p. 160). This seems to be the position from where
Paris asserts her opinions on the separation of neuroscience and depth psychology. I

agree that the psyche is not an appendage of the brain; I do not agree that there are not

valuable and even necessary conversations between analytical psychology and

neuroscience.

To be sure, the self is an autonomous psychic being with roots in the body, just as

the individual is rooted in her ancestral history and an iris rooted in the soil. Poetry is

written about the iris that knows nothing of its roots, as poisoned soil destroys an iris

without any knowledge of the poem.

 24

Essays on Definitions

Subject, self/Self. In Subjectivity, a philosophical treatment of the

development of the modern sense and understanding of subjectivity, scholar

Donald Hall states:

Subjectivity as a critical concept invites us to consider the question of how

and from where identity arises, to what extent it is understandable, and to
what degree it is something over which we have any measure of influence
or control.... In this way, subjectivity is the intersection of two lines of
philosophical inquiry: epistemology (the study of how we know what we
know) and ontology (the study of the nature of being or existence). (2004,
pp. 3-4)
A differentiation among scholars of modern from pre-modern identity is the role

of participation and responsibility for creation of one's selfhood. The research is

definitely aligned with this modern concept of the self as having a capacity for self-
transformation and creation as well as sitting at the threshold of epistemology and
ontology.

Current discourses of subjectivity make a key distinction between subject, self,

and identity. "Although the two are sometimes used interchangeably, the word 'self

does not capture the sense of social and cultural entanglement implicit in the word
'subject'" (Mansfield, 2000, p. 2). Hall suggests that identity is that set of qualities and

traits that comprise personality and social roles, while subjectivity is reflection and self-

consciousness of identity (2004, p. 4). Michel Foucault's understanding of the subject as

a cultural and historical construction is similar to depth psychology's "ego" except that
ego brings with it unconscious antecedents; the postmodern subject, by contrast, is

constructed entirely from the external world. In this work, the concepts of self and

subject are used relatively interchangeably, both pointing to the experiences of a

personal, subjective, separate, and individual being, while understanding that subject, as

compared to self, does impart a more idiosyncratic, irrational, and personal sense of being
 25

than self alone. Both subject and self encompass conceptually terms such as ego,

identity, and persona, defined below, and understood as aspects, layers, or portions of the

whole sense of being a subject or self. That is, a subject and self have identities, egos,

and personas, but the latter do not have selves as much as they express portions of a self.

The research relies on Jung's understanding of the self as an unknowable totality.

As an empirical concept, the self designates the whole range of psychic

phenomena in man.... But in so far as the total personality, on account
of its unconscious component, can be only in part conscious, the concept
of the self is, in part, only potentially empirical and is to that extent a
postulate. In other words, it encompasses both the experienceable and the
inexperienceable (or the not yet experienced). (1921/1971a, p. 460)

Jung himself did not distinguish between a self with small "s" from a Self with a

capital "S," as for him, the use of self always "expresses the unity of the personality as a

whole" (1921/197la, p. 460). This distinction is maintained in the dissertation in spite of

widespread and common usage in not only depth psychological literature but in various

other fields as well (e.g., transpersonal psychology, consciousness studies, metaphysical

and religious discourses, among others) to denote the particular, ego bound, and worldly

self with a lowercase "s" and the existence of a containing, numinous and mysterious,

higher quality of being with an uppercase "S." It may be worthwhile to compare Jung's

concept of self with his definition of psyche in Psychological Types, when he writes: "By

psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as

unconscious" (1921/1971a, p. 463). Of course, this appears almost identical to his

definition of the self. The subtle but essential distinction is that the psyche is the

container or medium of those processes that house the self, the ego and all of the myriad

processes, archetypes, and complexes of the whole. The self is, paradoxically, the
 26

archetypal subject of the psyche, the archetype of wholeness, and the totality that

contains itself.

Identity, ego, persona. Jung's distinction of identity is as an unconscious level of

being; it is more of a state of consciousness than an object:

I use the term identity to denote a psychological conformity ....

Psychological identity presupposes that it is unconscious. It is a
characteristic of the primitive mentality and the real foundation of
participation mystique, which is nothing but a relic of the original non-
differentiation of subject and object, and hence of the primordial
unconscious state. It is also a characteristic of the mental state of early
infancy, and, finally, of the unconscious of the civilized adult, which, in so
far as it has not become a content of consciousness, remains in a
permanent state of identity with objects. (1921/1971a, p. 441)

Where Jung presents identity as a state of being, the research employs identity as
the storied or aesthetic aspect of the self. This is distinct from the process of
identification.

Ego is understood as a construct and psychic function of consciousness that has

an identity, from which the subject emerges, and that relates to the world and the
unconscious. I rely on Jung's description of ego:

By ego I understand a complex of ideas which constitutes the centre of my

field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity
and identity. Hence I also speak of an ego-complex. The ego-complex is
as much a content as condition of consciousness, for a psychic element is
conscious to me only in so far as it is related to my ego-complex. But
inasmuch as the ego is only the centre of my field of consciousness, it is
not identical with the totality of my psyche, being merely one complex
among other complexes. (1921/1971a, p. 425)

Jung understood persona to be a

mask, i.e, the ad hoc adopted attitude ... the name for the masks worn by
actors in antiquity.... The persona is thus a functional complex that comes
into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience ...
exclusively concerned with the relation to objects. (1921/197la, p. 465)

His explanation calling the persona a "functional complex" can confuse it as one more

complex among complexes, stated above in the definition for ego. In the context of the
 27

current study, the persona, in its concern exclusively with objects, is a function complex

of the ego itself, concerned and related only to the world of society. Considering the ego,

the persona is an aspect of the ego, which is, in turn, a function of the self. Each

represents the other in a deeper, wider, and more inclusive context, as layers of an onion,

with the outer layer being the persona, the middle layers where the ego lives, while the

self is the entire onion.

Provisional, habitual, conditioned self. In Marcel Proust and the Creative

Encounter, literary and Proustian scholar George Stambolian writes of Proust's

distinction between the habitual self, an attribute of the ego, and identity. In a chapter
discussing the Proustian theme of suffering, Stambolian explains the nature of habit in

self-consciousness:

Because it is an "instinct of self-preservation," habit opposes the action of

time and tries to establish and preserve fragile islands of stability in the
general flux .... Being automatic, the action of habit does not bear any
moral weight, yet a moral dimension is added whenever a deliberate
turning toward habit represents a conscious flight from suffering . . . . In
the Proustian world there is no such thing as the passive endurance of
suffering, for to endure means to resist the desire to escape suffering, and
such resistance, requiring as it does the strength of the will, is closer to a
truly moral act than the decision to seek out the more passive existence of
habit. To resist the temptation of habit means to accept the destruction of
the old self, and, therefore, to play a more active part in the birth of the
new self. (1972, p. 51)

There are several links with Jungian theory: the moral implications of Jung's

theory of individuation, suffering the integration of the shadow, and the transformation of

unconsciousness. The research explores the conditioning of consciousness that forms

into the structures of the habitual self: ego, complexes, identity. Identity comes into

being with the intention to establish stability in the overwhelming inundation of sensory

perception.
What I name the conditioned, and Proust the habitual self, Jungian James Hollis

calls the provisional self. Essentially, this is a self wired in early childhood conditioning,
 28

filtered through an identity that is a defense system to protect wounds, a defense system

built on misinterpretations. As Hollis defines it,

the provisional personality, that is, the acquired as opposed to natural sense
of self, as an assemblage of behaviors, attitudes toward self and other, and
reflexive responses whose purpose is to manage the anxiety suffered by the
child. Such an assemblage is repeated, reticulated and reinforced, becoming
the provisional vehicle of the soul, even as it is also the instrument of
progressive estrangement from it. (2001, p. 41)

The research will explore the boundary and processes that separate what Hollis refers to
as "the natural sense of self' and the provisional self in the chapters on temperament and

conditioning.
 29

Chapter 2
The Modern Self: Introduction to the Literature Review

Many sources contribute to the modern concept and experience of being a self;
most treatments, such as Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989), trace the trajectory

of philosophical ideas that shape the historical horizon of the self. Most contemporary

understanding of the self is predicated, explicitly or implicitly, on the collapse of

traditional religion roughly from the Enlightenment forward. "Modern philosophy begins
when the generally accepted basis upon which the world is interpreted ceases to be a

deity whose pattern is assumed to have already been imprinted into the universe"
(Bowie, 2003, p. 1). Reflection, discussion, and analysis of the cultural and existential

consequences of the collapse of the over-arching narrative provided by Christianity are so

ubiquitous as to be foregone conclusions; indeed, the collapse of the containing myth of

Christianity is the pre-cursor that sources and defines modernity and leads to the legacy

of the Enlightenment to understand the self as the ground of knowledge and meaning, as
the starting point of the world (Mansfield, 2000, p. 20). Rather than the self being
defined by traditional and religious beliefs, the self defines the world.

The contemporary experience and understanding of the self as autonomous, self-

determined, progressing or developing, possessing a rich, narrative interior, being unique

and uniquely talented—these characteristics which we may take as always already
existing—have actually appeared in modern Western culture since the Scientific
Revolution's great rupture of the Christian tradition. Many scholars have written on this

trajectory of the self to the point that it is a presumed historical development when

entering the discourse on subjectivity. Murray Stein succinctly sums it up: "The loss of

religious life is a central problem of modernity" (1998, p. 62). And Paul Kugler sees this
historical happening as predicating the emergence of a new subject:

Prior to Descartes, existence was predicated on a transcendent God,

matter, or Eternal Forms .... But, in the 21st century, we find ourselves
once again at a critical moment in the history of Western psychology.
 30

Today we are witnessing a transformation in our underlying system of

thought that is every bit as dramatic as the movement in the 17th century
out of scholastic and medieval assumptions about human nature. (2005,
pp. 67-68)

The broad sweep of the self through modern Western history is a movement from

a "natural" self with a divine essence to an increasingly separate, historical, talented yet

destructive individual in a discontinuous cosmos of meaning. The headiness of our talent

and genius exploded in the Scientific Revolution, became intoxicated with itself in

Romantic and Transcendental idealizations, and crashed into the 20th century in a full-on
confrontation with the destructive, even evil, aspect of human nature as manifested in two

world wars, the Holocaust, and the atom bomb. The cultural development of the modern

sense of subjectivity has received prolific scholarly attention and is not re-worked or

analyzed in this research; rather, it is relied upon as the a priori historical pre-

understanding informing current discourses about subjectivity.

From this history, the nature of the self has become a significant site of inquiry.
Due to this, the questions of whether the individual has an essence and what sources it,

how subjectivity is constructed, and the individual's relationship to a "greater than" or

grounding reality, has become a primary question in cultural studies, consciousness

studies, and philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st century, not to mention many fields

of psychology. Scholar Nick Mansfield claims:

The 'I' is thus the meeting-point between the most formal and highly
abstract concepts and the most immediate and intense emotions. This focus
on the self as the center both of lived experience and of discernible meaning
has become one of the—if not the—defining issues of modern and
postmodern cultures. (2000, p. 1)

The contemporary conversation is whether the subject is essentially historical, as viewed

in postmodern, constructivists perspectives, essentially physiological as seen from the

scientific perspective, or essentially metaphysical, as viewed in new age and spiritual

perspectives.
 31

The following literature review discusses those texts that have generated the

inquiry of the current research. Some have contributed to questions regarding the nature

of identity through eliciting critical disagreements, whereas others have presented an

affinity with personal experience and thinking. This review is not intended to be an

exhaustive representation of each perspective on subjectivity, nor is it meant to be

exhaustive of the larger discourse on identity. Rather, it is presented as the intellectual

and textual foundation that led to the questions that the research extrapolates and to give

a range of the various ways the self is configured in current culture. I find the concepts

of self in modern Western culture roughly break up into four categories: the

metaphysical, historical, scientific, and fictive concepts of self. It is my intention to offer

a sound, fair, and basic representation of each perspective's concept of self that together
create the horizons from which this dissertation on identity carves out a space for itself.

The Metaphysical Self

In current popular culture, there is a concept of self that I call "the metaphysical

self," concocted from a pastiche of cultures and perspectives; modern in that it is

inherently cohesive, progressive, and purposive; Eastern in its dismissal of temporal

reality as maya, or ego illusions; and new age in its source from a transcendent, divine,

omnipotent and loving source. It is heady stuff and exactly opposes the postmodern

historically and culturally constructed self. This genre is not particularly intellectually

rigorous or even particularly reflective, and is found in popular culture—through self-

help and new age mediums and genres—whereas the other concepts of self presented

here—postmodern, neuroscientific, and depth psychology—are primarily academic. Yet,

the metaphysical self is ubiquitous and influential, demonstrated aptly by the fact that

Oprah regularly features authors and topics that promote the metaphysical self on her
 32

show and in her magazine. This perspective offers and contributes something that is

lacking for many people: meaning, sacredness, and purpose.

In 1996, Australian Rhonda Byrne produced a documentary and published an

accompanying book called The Secret, based on the Law of Attraction, essentially a tenet

that thoughts create reality. It has been wildly popular—yes, Oprah has dedicated more

than one show to it—though it is transparently one dimensional.

People who have drawn wealth into their lives used The Secret, whether
consciously or unconsciously. They think thoughts of abundance and
wealth, and they do not allow any contradictory thoughts to take root in
their minds.... They only know wealth, and nothing else exists in their
minds. (1996, p. 6)

Of course, people who have become wealthy do not hold pure thoughts or

intentions without contradiction; this is an absurd and unobtainable goal. The perspective

of The Secret is one that dismisses the reality of the human being almost entirely and

relies instead on pure potential. The book and documentary are laden with these types of

comments.

Another popular author of the metaphysical self is Deepak Chopra, a prolific

writer, healer, and speaker. His perspective is decidedly new age metaphysical in that it

is an eclectic blend of Eastern philosophy and religion with new age divinity. Chopra's

subject is uniquely talented and designed to serve and love. "Expressing your talents to

fulfill needs creates unlimited wealth and abundance" (1994, p. 96). Chopra promotes a

basic tenet of the metaphysical self in that we are primarily divine and spiritual and our

humanity is secondary. "We're not human beings that have occasional spiritual

experiences—it's the other way around: we're spiritual beings that have occasional

human experiences" (p.97). Our spiritual reality is "pure potentiality" (p. 99), and when
 33

we can transcend the distortions of the ego we access our spirit, our pure potential,

manifesting unlimited abundance. The intellectual weaknesses of these examples of the

metaphysical self do not need to be extolled. However, Byrne and Chopra are not trying

to be intellectually rigorous; they are fulfilling a real need for meaning, transcendence of

worldly dominance, and the sacred in people's lives. They speak to the embodied sense

many individuals have at some time in their lives that there is more to the world than the

history of forms; usually it happens in specific or unusual moments that are typically kept

private because they are not congruent with the agreements of mainstream reality.

The criticism of The Secret and Deepak Chopra is not that what they're saying is

based on lies, but that their presentation is so distorted as to be a lie. These authors

promote the self as spiritual in essence, not of this material world, while dismissing the

significant impact of embodied experience as a primary shaper of the self s attitudes,

beliefs, wounds, and ways of being. Yet their texts also openly support and encourage

the pursuit of the fruits of this material world as the primary pursuit of the self. In this

way, they appear unconscious as to their role as mouthpieces for the materialist cultural

reality that they treat dismissively as an illusion while representing the self as enlightened

in its consumerist, capitalist pursuit of all the temporal world has to offer. That is, the

metaphysical self as portrayed in popular culture is precisely a spiritualized consumer, an

ego whose guilt for self-serving desires is cleansed in its association with serving others

and with a transcendent source. Transcendence in this movement annihilates the

particular. Ironically, the popular metaphysical view of the self intends to transcend the

limited and illusion-driven ego, yet ends up unconsciously validating the desire-driven,

consumerist, materialistic world of the ego.

 34

A more grounded and realistic text from the popular metaphysical perspective is

Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Discovering Your Life's Purpose (2005). Essentially,

Tolle's text constructs a self that has a "true" center, a core reality he calls "being,"

equated with a conscious awareness and distorted by faulty cognitive-emotional schemes

erected throughout conditioning. "The new spirituality, the transformation of

consciousness, is arising to a large extent outside of the structures of the existing

institutionalized religions" (2005, pp. 17-18). A key distinction in the metaphysical self

is that "how 'spiritual' you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to

do with your state of consciousness" (p. 18).

This idea of a true core encased in ego defenses is a popular perspective in the

self-help genre and one that in its basis is aligned with depth psychology. Jung noted a

distinction between the personal psyche and the collective or objective psyche from

which the transcendent archetypes, including the archetype of the Self, radiate into the

personal psyche as numinous experience. Tolle is not a depth psychologist, though he

does use the ego concept and one could argue also the concept of Jungian complexes

renamed as "pain bodies"; he is grounded in an Eastern meditation inspired method and

Western psychological structure and spiritual, philosophical traditions of Being. Tolle

states:

And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior
to any words, thought, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you
need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has
become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. (2005, p. 26)

This 'I' is described as an illusion. "In normal everyday usage, 'I' embodies the

primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is

the ego" (Tolle, 2005, p. 28). Tolle represents the metaphysical self perspective in that he
 35

extols a divine source as the "real reality" and the core of human being, that suffering is

essentially separation from this source, causing confusion about who one really is, and in

his intellectual dismissal of the embodied reality of history.

In Tolle, self transcendence is immanent. "In fact, at the heart of the new

consciousness lies the transcendence of thought, the new found ability of rising above

thought, of realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than

thought" (2005, pp. 21-22). As we consider the historical self—a culturally constructed

self—below in Michel Foucault's thought, it is proposed that this immanent position of

transcendence is unconsciously relied upon in their theories.

Historical Self

The historical self refers to the general view that our sense of subjectivity and

identity, who we think we are, is constructed entirely from external sources (e.g., culture

and familial conditioning). A significant distinction within this perspective is that

conditioning forces of culture instill within us our sense of uniqueness, autonomy, and

interiority; that is, culture's construction of the self includes the internal conviction that

one is not constructed but spontaneously unique. This viewpoint is decidedly

postmodern and constructivist. One could say that the postmodern worldview points out

the ironic and curious fact that through our prodigious intelligence and talents that gave

rise to industry, technology, and culture, we have created a carapace of culture, a

systemic matrix, that now has the upper hand in creating the selves whose ancestors

created the system in the first place.

There is an appreciation of the plasticity and constant change of reality

and knowledge, a stress on the priority of concrete experience over fixed
abstract principles, and a conviction that no single a priori thought system
should govern belief or investigation. (Tarnas, 1990, p. 395)
 36

From this appreciation comes postmodernism's characteristic relativity.

The postmodern attitude towards reality is that of an open-ended, fluid, and

interactive field of possibility in which the subject is already and always enmeshed, and

therefore it is a falsity, an illusion and impossibility to view the subject and the world

from a transcendent perspective. For scholar Linda Hutcheon,

postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and

inescapably political.... Because it is contradictory and works within the
very systems it attempts to subvert, postmodernism can probably not be
considered a new paradigm.... It may mark, however, the site of the
struggle of the emergence of something new. (1988, p. 4)

This brings to mind Kugler's statement above that the 21st century marks the period of a

new subject emerging into history. Richard Tarnas, among others, has noticed that "the

twentieth century's massive and radical breakdown of so many structures ... suggests the

necessary deconstruction prior to a new birth" (1990, p. 440). Whether we believe that

this new birth is one more contingent phenomena or the result of a transcendental process

matters not: something new is appearing on the horizon of the 21st century. In Tarnas'

conclusion I find an impetus for the research: "For the deepest passion of the Western

mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being" (p. 443; italics added).

However, before we turn to the birth of a new subject, let us first understand more fully

the historical self.

Philip Cushman's Constructing the Self Constructing America: A Cultural

History of Psychotherapy (1995) is a hermeneutic study concerned with putting the 20th-

century development of psychotherapy in its cultural and historical context. But what

makes it a postmodern study is Cushman's view that "each era has a predominant

configuration of the self, a particular foundational set of beliefs about what it means to be
 37

human" (p. 3). This configuration is a "self [that] is a product of the complex, awe-

inspiring cultural process that weaves together various elements of a society in order to

perpetuate the status quo" (p. 7). This construction of a subject designed to perpetuate

the standards and aims of the system that constructed it is echoed in Foucault's statement

about power's subject: "The individual which power has constituted is at the same time

its vehicle" (1980, p. 98). Cushman further argues, lucidly, that 20th-century American

culture specifically configures what he terms the empty self. "The empty self is a way of

being human; it is characterized by a pervasive sense of personal emptiness and is

committed to the values of self-liberation through consumption" (1995, p. 6). It is

precisely this pervasive sense of personal emptiness that can find liberation through

consumption that the metaphysical perspectives, discussed above, are, in part,

unconsciously motivated by.

In the metaphysical perspective there exists an unconscious contradiction between

the belittling of historical antecedents of individuality, even an eclipse of individuality—

the I—by spirituality, all the while holding a focused pursuit of happiness and wealth

through materialist means at the same time. In other words, the metaphysical perspective

tells you not to identify with the lesser things of this world—a separate identity, historical

woundings, circumstantial injustices—but to pursue the offerings of this world for

happiness, and that in fact, as you become spiritual you will have more of the rewards of

this world.

In comparison, Cushman's postmodern perspective is that "humans do not have a

basic, fundamental, pure human nature that is transhistorical and transcultural" (p. 17).

Yet, this does not lead him to Foucault's more extreme stand that there is no need for
 38

self-reflection, since the subject is a pure construction of the institutions of power; for

Foucault, there's no one to reflect upon. For Cushman, and neuroscience and others as

well, there is the reality of reflective awareness within the individual that transcends its

construction. This immanent-transcendence, found in Tolle, is within the Foucauldian

subject as well, discussed below, though it remains unconscious.

Foucault sees the self as historically constructed by an essential force he simply

names power. Power organizes the discourses of knowledge, hierarchies of institutions

and systems, and standards of behavior in culture. Foucault does not discuss power itself,

but only its effects. However, power was not necessarily the point of Foucault's

inquiries, as he has said:

I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during
the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power,
nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective,
instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in
our culture, human beings are made subjects. (1984, p. 208)

The construction of the subject, Foucault's real goal, is born from and existing

within cultural power structures that effect its own regulation. Foucault has an interesting
response to the system of subjedification called the aesthetics of existence. The aesthetics

of existence is about intentionally resisting, thwarting, and frustrating the norms and
institutions that define and construct subjectivity by mining the margins of socially

acceptable ways of being: the pathological, deviant, taboo, rejected, and abnormal.

At the end of his life, Foucault recommended that the best way of
managing subjectivity was to be rigorously aware of the forces that had
constructed our inferiority for us, and then to undertake an aesthetic
renewal of ourselves by experimenting with the infinite possibilities of
feeling and the artifices of identity. (Mansfield, 2000, p. 179)
 39

This aesthetic renewal goes deeper than experimenting with lifestyle choices and risk-

taking with egotistically uncomfortable expressions. The aesthetics of existence involves

a transformation via intentional self-creation. As Foucault himself explains it:

What I mean by the phrase ["art of existence"] are those intentional and
voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct,
but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their
singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain
aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (2000, pp. 365-66)

Clearly, in order for one to transform himself in his singular being, Foucault finds

a force primary or transcendent to the system that constructs subjectivity that can be

marshaled in a self-creative enterprise. Yet Foucault does not ask who sees the subject's
construction through power and who transforms herself in her singular being? Though he

does not raise these questions, still his work necessarily posits a transcendental viewpoint

in reflective self-awareness from which to understand one's condition and to enact an

autonomous aesthetic process; reflective self-awareness is not divine or otherworldly, but

an, at times, objective viewpoint that can take a new action detached or independent from
what it sees, beyond the historical situation.

Understandably, this question of who sees and chooses leads to metaphysical

speculations, which Foucault did not indulge in, yet "Foucault's work... does present a
portrait of a heroic self-creating force, challenging the restrictions of conventional life"

(Mansfield, 2000, p. 56). Foucault does not consider that this heroic self is also a

construction of power in order to give the subject room to express its resistance; that is,

he does not consider that the system itself usurps the power of revolution by creating

within the system room to resist and be autonomous to it. And yet, unless one supposes a

position in the subject's consciousness transcendent to culture and history, the heroic

response of the aesthetics of existence must be another effect of power internalized and
authenticated by the subject.
 40

Physiological Self

Our rich history of inquiry into the nature of the self has been pulled between two

major modern perspectives commonly referred to as nature versus nurture. This classic

debate asks: what shapes the development of identity more, external circumstance or

genetic endowment and physiological structure? Most scholars from either camp

acknowledge that these polarities form a necessary whole and that the construction of
identity is a dance requiring the tension of opposites the way a spider only spins her web
when the silk is taut, anchored on two opposing ends. Internal a priori psychic

structures, though rudimentary, are the driving impulses seeking and meeting external

circumstance, weaving and organizing the resulting experiences into an identity. The
nature/nurture debate is no longer an either/or tug of war but an inquiry into how these

realities push, repress, confront, and negotiate as they weave an individual self. In this
way, identity is a bridge between worlds understood as being parented from both camps:

forged through historical circumstance yet sourced from the body.

Genetic inheritance is thought to account for about 35% of the variance in
individuals along a broad range of traits, more in cognitive ability and less in personality

traits (Plonin & McClearn, 1993, p. 20), whereas others estimate between 30 - 50%
(Cozolino, 2006; Siegel, 1999). And in yet other sources genetic effects in personality
characteristics are thought to account for 22% - 46% of variance and "the remaining
variation, 44% - 55%, presumably represents some combination of environmental effects
unique to the individual, genotype-environment interaction, and measurement error"

(Goldsmith, 1993, p. 156). While genetic inheritance represents a significant and

influential component, "the answer to the nature-nurture question appears to be that

environment is more important" (Plonin & McClearn, 1993, p. 21). At the conclusion of

a large, longitudinal study of emotionally high-reactive and low-reactive infants through

2 years old, in which the sensitivity of amygdala arousal in the child was measured, the

mother's discipline and affection styles were recorded and analyzed. The authors
 41

conclude that "the biology of the child and social environment both contribute to the

evolution of the psychological phenotype, which the 19th century called character"

(Ancus, Kagan & Snidman, 1993, p. 205). This conclusion, so commonsensical, seems to

be stating the obvious for us nonscientists, but is important nonetheless to establish a

scientific, biological basis of personality development.

A point that constructionists and science agree on is that there is not a pre-existing
essential self before an individual is forged through confrontation with experience.
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker states that "cognitive neuroscience is showing that the

self, too, is just another network of brain systems" (2002, p. 42). The disagreement is

where that self is sourced from: the brain or culture. Where science sees the predominant
influence in physiology, constructionists, such as Cushman or Foucault, assert the
nonexistence of an a priori essence of the self. I don't know if this would include

rejection of an inherent neurobiological structure; I suspect that if asked directly, they

would of course acknowledge genetic or neurobiological predisposition—how could they

deny it?—but negate its significance in shaping the subject.

The Blank Slate (2002) is Pinker's metaphor for the postmodern understanding of

the self as forged and conditioned entirely by the external world of circumstance and
culture. A concept sourced by Romanticism (the essential purity of Rousseau's noble

savage), Locke's empiricism (the blank slate), and Descarte's Ghost in the Machine

(separation of body and mind). Pinker claims that the combination of these ideas led to
"the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by

society or ourselves" (2002, p. 2). Where individuals of various cultures differ, Pinker

asserts, is in the specific cultural conditioning and standards (e.g., the actual content that

arouses our anger is specific but the capacity for anger is universal). Culture forges our
expression and matures our "lower" unconscious nature but doesn't create or source the

self; that is done via instinct and biology. However, culture can and does distort, mangle,

repress, oppress, or support, contain and channel nature. "Behavior may vary across
 42

cultures, but the design of the mental programs that generate it need not vary.... And all
people may have good and evil motives, but not everyone may translate them into

behavior in the same way" (p. 41).

For Pinker, postmodern constructionist attempts to see behavior as determined by

culture are due primarily to a fear of the prejudices of determinism that biological

perspectives engender, such as sexism or racism.

Postmodernists and other relativists attack truth and objectivity not so much
because they are interested in philosophical problems of ontology and
epistemology but because they feel it is the best way to pull the rug out
from under racists, sexists, and homophobes. (2002, p. 202)
After explaining the basic argument of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel,

essentially that geography shaped the world distribution of wealthy, dominating nations,1
Pinker believes "the best explanation today is thoroughly cultural, but it depends on
seeing a culture as a product of human desires rather than as a shaper of them" (2002, p.

69). This insight that culture, however influential it may be in shaping identity, is a
product first of human consciousness and desires, is lacking in the constructionist

viewpoint.
A friend who is also a scientist once said to me, "It is easier to disprove an idea
about reality than to prove one." This is the tack of geneticist and psychologist David
Rowe in The Limits of Family Influence: Genes, Experience, and Behavior (1994). Rowe

slogs unimaginatively through loads of statistical studies and data on twins and adoptive

children to demonstrate that the rearing environment—the family home—has negligible

influence on the development of personality. Rowe's demonstration involves finding no

statistical correlation between character traits in parents and their offspring in
comparisons of adoptive children, their adopted parents, and the parents' biological

offspring. "Individuals who share genes are alike in personality regardless of how they

1 Eurasia, an east-west latitude allowed successful animal, plant, and technology migration from

culture to culture much easier than in north-south continents such as Americas and Africa; also, the river
networks in Eurasia were/are superior to Africa and Australia.
 43

are reared, whereas rearing environment involves little or no personality resemblance "

(1994, p. 64; italics in original). Rowe has a slight misunderstanding of the nurture end

of the nature/nurture dichotomy: environmental influences do not create personality traits

as much as shapes and conditions the existing traits given by genetic endowment. That
is, one's rearing environment determines the expression, repression, and value assigned

to one's traits and given qualities rather than creating those qualities ex nihilio.

There is always the opportunity for the child to learn to control the urge to
withdraw from a stranger or a large dog.. .Indeed, the role of the
environment is more substantial in helping the child to overcome the
tendency to withdraw than in making that child timid in the first place.
(Ancus et al., 1993, p. 209)
The rearing environment does not create personalities, but shapes them, and the fact that

Rowe finds similar personalities among siblings who were not raised in the same familial

home does not indicate that rearing environment has no influence. To state that one's
early environment has no influence on one's developing sense of self is such an extreme

statement as to seem absurd.

This relationship between genetics and environmental conditioning in personality

development appears to have escaped Rowe: that the individual is born with certain

innate tendencies and qualities but the amplification, overcompensation, repression, or

direct expression of these innate endowments will be forged through experience.

Nurturing does not create character as much as shape it, a proposition to be discussed
further in the dissertation, where the research will attempt to delineate clearly the level of

conditioned identity and innate character.

Neuroscience understands the sense of self as an emergent phenomenon of the

brain, which adapts sensory input to existing structure and processes. The development

of the mind happens at the interstice of neurobiological processes and interpersonal

experience, particularly of the parents and early environment. Contemporary

 44

neuroscience is a balance of nature and nurture where the majority of the neuronal wiring

in the brain is experience-dependent and established during the early years of life.

Early experience shapes the structure and function of the brain. This
reveals the fundamental way in which gene expression is determined by
experience .... Therefore, caregivers are the architects of the way in which
experience influences the unfolding of genetically preprogrammed but
experience-dependent brain development. (Siegel, 1999, pp. 84-85)

In developmental neuroscience, the focus is on two ends: the early years of life when

primary caretaker relationships forge the neuronal pathways of the brain, and in
adulthood when brain plasticity can provide for healthier expression and experience.

Even though many longitudinal personality studies have demonstrated that

character traits remain stable throughout life (Pinker, 2002; Rowe, 1994), a primary

characteristic of the brain is its plasticity (Cozolino, 2006; Siegel, 2007). These are not
contradictory realities; the brain is always responding to experience and retains the ability
to re-learn and re-structure itself, but what is being re-wired is conditioning not

character. Again, this distinction will be extrapolated further in the research.

We also know that the brain is capable of change at any time and that
social interactions are a primary source of brain regulation, growth, and
health. Those of us who study interpersonal neurobiology believe that
friendships, marriage, psychotherapy - in fact, any meaningful
relationship - can reactivate neuroplastic processes and actually change
the structure of the brain. (Cozolino, 2006, p. 8)

The brain, and therefore the self that emerges from it, is always able to adapt and to learn.

Fictive Self
The development of identity and its storied structure have been worked through in

narrative and developmental psychology and literary theory. However, some depth

psychologists do give a nod or discussion of the fictive level of identity, and two of them,

James Hollis and James Hillman, are discussed in this review of the storied or fictive

level of self. A basic distinction between these perspectives of the storied self and the

preceding concepts of self is that the following discussions do not center on the question
 45

of whether there is an a priori reality to the self. The main point of the review of these

texts is to understand the perspective of the storied nature of identity itself which the
viewpoints reviewed thus far have not commented on in detail, and to compare these

ideas of the fictive identity with the intention and trajectory of the research.
Early in The Soul's Code, Hillman states his intention to show that "despite early

injury and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we bear from the start the

image of a definite individual character with some enduring traits" (1996, p. 4). The

research, too, will delve into character as the primary mover in the development of
personality. Hillman employs a teleological perspective that the development of a self is

pulled by the future as much as, and at some point more than, it is pushed by the past.

The mythological view of The Soul's Code has metaphysical vibrations, as does much of

Jung's work. Hillman's acorn theory can be understood as his metaphoric and
mythological representation of Jung's theory of the self archetype. This is how he states

it, "I am answerable to an innate image that I am filling out through my biography" (p. 4).
The innate image is the self and biography is the storied identity.
A tenet of the depth psychological viewpoint is that the mistakes or crises

experienced in one's unconsciousness and youth are necessarily related to the fated

unfolding of happenings within the larger trajectory of one's life as guided by the self.
There is a sense that the ego identity spins a story explaining why one is so, why life
happens so, and this story reflects well on the ego. If the ego is out of alignment with the

intentions of the self, it will be necessarily adjusted through crises, shadow, or fate. For

Hillman it is a matter of reframing or re-casting one's story. "We are ... less damaged

by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time

of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us" (1996, p. 4).

Hillman's acorn experiences nothing that the larger story does not require of the

individual and nothing is given that the self cannot incorporate in such a way as to
 46

manifest one's fate. It is a matter simply, but not easily, of being in alignment with one's
fate (i.e., the telos of the self) or not.

James Hollis also speaks to the role of mistakes and unconsciousness when he says

One may say, without ironic intention, that most of the first half of life is a
gigantic, unavoidable mistake. Not a mistake of deliberate intention, but a
set of intentions which are governed by the unconscious mythologems of
the provisional personality. As one serves these mythologems, so one is
obliged to digress further and further from the natural, instinctual teleology
whose becoming is our life purpose. (2001, p. 50)

Depth psychology focuses on the emergence of a deeper, non-ego structure of self

in later life. Hillman's stance is to see the traumas of circumstance as necessary for fate

to unfold. This is a rich, meaningful, and powerful re-orientation but if it is gripped by a

weak and unstable ego desperate to escape its compulsions and unconscious wounds,

then this level of depth psychology can become an escapist sublimation. It is easy, when

overwhelmed with one's own flaws and suffering, to reach around one's antecedents to

the untarnished future. The research looks with detail at the construction of identity as a

testament to the importance of doing one's ego work before moving on to the more

sophisticated, subtle, mythological, and numinous work with the objective psyche

directly.

Hillman's intentions are transparent; he does not pretend to hold an essential truth

about the development of personality or a life story. Rather, he theorizes from the

aesthetic psyche which sees through all stories as stories and posits more stories.

More deeply, however, we are victims of academic, scientistic, and even

therapeutic psychology, whose paradigms do not sufficiently account for
or engage with, and therefore ignore, the sense of calling, that essential
mystery at the heart of each human life. (1996, p. 6)
 47

This allegiance with the mysterious and marginal aspects of the individual aligns Hillman

with both aesthetic and metaphysical perspectives; both are discourses loyal to the

imaginative yet intangible experiences of being a self.

Hillman desires to see through the story of our lives and ourselves, not in a

dismissive way as some New Age metaphysicians do, but rather as situated within the

context of a larger story. Hollis speaks to this when he states that "finding one's story,

the examination of how it has played out, and the recognition of possibly another story

which seeks to emerge, is the task of therapy, or any pretense toward the examined life"

(2001, p. 35). Where Jungian psychology sees the ego's story as either a filling out

(Hillman) or a false cover (Hollis) to the larger story of the self, the perspective of the

research does not see such a dramatic demarcation of false and real, but rather, aspects of

the self as a whole that come together to create identity, and all are plastic in nature.

Narrative psychology overlaps with some views of depth psychology—such as

McAdams' statement that "stories are less about facts and more about meanings" (1993,

p. 28)—has at least one significant difference: it does not see identity-as-story as false,

but indeed, the very way we come to know ourselves. "The central idea of this book is a

disarmingly simple one: in the modern world in which we all live, identity is a life story"

(p. 5; italics in original). Specifically, McAdams "presents a new theory of human

identity. The theory is built around the idea that each of us comes to know who he or she

is by creating a heroic story of the self' (p. 11).

McAdams basically breaks down the story of identity into its literary components:

narrative tone, ideological themes, and mythic structures. There are many accurate

insights into identity as story, such as the experience of childhood setting the narrative
 48

tone of our lives and how this develops into mythic themes (McAdams, p. 45). Yet when

the discussion of childhood experiences, which McAdams understands through

neuroscience's attachment theory, leads to further questions into character and innate

attributes, McAdams appears to reach the limits of his inquiry. In noting that according

to literary scholars mythic forms of life story break up into four general forms—comedy,

romance, tragedy, and ironic—optimistically toned narratives will be predominantly

comedic or romantic, pessimistically tone narratives will be primarily tragic or ironic, he

confesses that a bad childhood does not necessarily lead to a pessimistic story form and

vice versa.

Psychologists do not know exactly why some choose optimistic and others
pessimistic forms. It is tempting, of course, to say that narrative tone is
determined by the events of a life. If, in general, good things happen to us,
then our myth is comic or romantic, and if not, then tragic or ironic. But
there is no simple correspondence between narrative tone and life history.
(McAdams, p. 52)
The research inquires into this curious reality directly: why do individuals respond

with such variance to similar life experiences? Is it accurate for McAdams to say that
individuals "choose" the literary forms of their story? Who chooses? And is there a level

of unconscious and conscious choosing?

The limits of narrative psychology are the limits of literary analysis of identity:

they treat the story of identity as the reality of the self and therefore exempt themselves

from inquiries into innate character. This is humanities and literary scholar William

Randall's basic tack in The Stories We Are: An Essay on Self-Creation (1995). Randall's

statements such as "the inside story is something we create from the outside story" (p.

67) indicates that we are empty before the story begins, pointing to Pinker's theory of the

blank slate, revealing the lack of reflection or incorporation of possible innate, biological,

or inherited potentials and qualities to the self. Not that Randall, or anyone, needs to

agree on the matter of innateness, but it would add edge to a curiously large but flaccid
 49

text to demonstrate that opposing viewpoints were reflected upon. And Randall's

understanding of the complex concept of the unconscious is a one-dimensional image of

a bottomless waste bin: "The unconscious contains all that I have ever been, done,
thought, or felt in my life but that is largely lost to conscious retrieval" (p. 59). Since the
unconscious is by definition that which is not known to consciousness, and we can only

know it through its conscious manifestations, how can we possibly assert that it holds all

one has "ever been, done, thought, or felt"? Randall reveals a limit, perhaps, of crossing

over disciplines without having enough depth of the field outside of one's area of

specialty.
He goes on to describe two full pages of eventually unanswered questions as a

"litany [that] testifies to the untested nature of a poetic perspective on personal change"
(1995, p. 257). But they reveal more of Randall's own uncharted waters than untested

scholarship. He asks:

Is there a limit to how much re-storying we should encourage in others? ...

Do we sometimes try to wrest people's stories from them before they have
indicated a desire or readiness to disclose them, however convinced we are
that those stories are in need of renewal? (p. 256)
It feels as though these questions come from an unresolved confrontation Randall had

with a pushy friend, relative, or therapist. While Randall appears to have forgotten at this

point in his lengthy essay the gem of insight he quotes by psychologists White and

Epson, '"as persons become separated from their stories, they are able to experience a
sense of personal agency'" (p. 250), it does not prevent him from producing the most

elegant and insightful question in his entire text:

How can I find a story big enough, that has a horizon broad enough, to
account for, accommodate, and re-member the events of my life so that as
much of my life as possible is available to me as a coherent whole? (p. 250)

Unfortunately, he does not provide satisfactory response to these provocative questions.

 50

There is a tendency in Randall's analysis to see the story of identity with great

simplicity, flatly, linear, as constructed purely from external events and that the
incorporation of these events into a story creates who we are. While identity-as-story

obviously displays literary qualities such as narrative tone, themes, mythic battles, heroic

struggles, and bounded linear progression, as well as many other similarities with works

of fiction, and while conferring that fiction and identity are primarily produced by the
imagination, a strict literary analysis of identity falls flat when confronted with the depth,
mystery, and complexity of the self. The self is more than the story she tells of herself,
and the story she tells is much more complicated, layered, and nuanced than revelations

of themes and plot will ever enflesh.

Summary of the Literature: The Clearing of the Research

The secular and the sacred have become polarized in Western culture, and this is
reflected in the various oppositions of the concepts of self. When the self is polarized we

are either impossibly powerful or impossibly empty. The challenge is not to prove one

viewpoint as more accurate; the challenge is to see that the opposition itself is an illusion.
The research enters through the space between the oppositions, holding identity as the
filter that mediates the external world, makes sense of it, and expresses the inner world.
Identity is a portal between worlds. This research reflects on and investigates identity as a
crucial player in subjectivity and an individual's ability to be in touch with both worlds of

the sacred and the secular, of subject and object.

The theorists reviewed do not exhaust the perspectives they represent; most

thinkers are interdisciplinary, straddling both depth psychology and neuroscience as in

attachment and self-object theories, or psychology and aesthetics as in narrative

psychology or Hillman, or, metaphysical perspectives of psychology, such as Tolle. Each

perspective on the concept of self detailed here is seen as a different section of an organic
whole. Each perspective, metaphysical, historical, scientific, depth psychological, agrees

that identity is constructed, and, each looks for meaning within the limits of their system.
 51

In addition, each perspective leans towards a type of self-creation, some action or stand

that the individual can take within the discourse, even the postmodern constructivist

perspective. Self-creation, to interpret one's self rather than be the interpretation of

others, an aesthetics of existence in which the individual chooses one's way of being in

response to constructed being is something we all seek.

Neuroscience demonstrates that the brain learns responsively throughout life, sees
consciousness as emergent from physiology and that this consciousness can become

aware of itself objectively, being able to direct its energy towards change or growth,

towards breaking through patterns of thought, emotions, and behavior. These themes—
Identity as construct, meaning, and self-creative properties—are the deductive premises

that the research builds upon as it inquires into how the construct of identity is grounded
in the body and emerges as an aesthetic object through the imagination.

There is disagreement among the theorists and texts on whether there is anything

beyond the constructed identity; specifically, is there an a priori Being or consciousness?

I respond: does it matter? But I give Jung the final word:

One should not be deterred by the rather silly objection that nobody knows
whether these old universal ideas - God, immortality, freedom of the will,
and so on—are 'true' or not. Truth is the wrong criterion here. One can
only ask whether they are helpful or not, whether man is better off and feels
his life more complete, more meaningful and more satisfactory with or
without them. (1939/1954, p. 326)

While the question of the existence of an a priori Being is meaningful for each
individual to answer for him or herself, in this research it is not addressed. The research

brings all of the perspectives to bear on the self: neuroscience and the brain, depth

psychology's self objects, complexes, and archetypes, metaphysical meaning, sacredness,

and a containing consciousness, and the Active construction of identity via memory and

imagination.
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Chapter 3
Methodology

An Archimedean Point

Depth psychology has an innate methodological problem in that the object of

research is also the subject performing the research. Von Franz brings up this problem in

Psyche and Matter (1988) and finds that a correlation with quantum physics grounds the

depth psychological inquiries in a body of objective physical knowledge.

Jung considered his psychology to be empirical in method and therefore

part and parcel of natural sciences. However, what is problematical about
this method is that psychology describes psychic contents with psychic
means. Its knowledge or process of explanation does take place in the
same medium .... It lacks an Archimedean point outside of itself, and in
this respect it is critically limited, (p. 17)
But Von Franz is not the only one to recognize this inherent methodological

problem in psychology; Jung himself recognized it. Researchers Devos and Banaji note

that William James saw the same epistemological problems of studying the self and

identity in 1890 as they recognize that:

The object of scrutiny, the self, was also the agent doing the scrutinizing.
This illicit merger of the knower and the known has created an
epistemological unease that philosophers have worried about and
psychologists have either ignored or turned into an assumption of their
theorizing. (2003, pp. 177-178)

This epistemological issue is why having an objective field of knowledge to ground

observation and theory is important methodologically, and why Jung considered the

objective psyche, especially as it manifested in dreams, just such an essential internal

ground. The authors also refer to this same function of the unconscious. "When

knowledge about oneself resides in a form that is inaccessible to consciousness but can

indeed be tapped indirectly, the self-as-knower and the self-as-known can be dissociated

in a manner that is epistemologically more pleasing" (p. 178). Neuroscientific

experiments separate consciousness and unconsciousness in exactly this manner,

providing a potential supplement and complement to analytical knowledge.

 53

British analyst Jean Knox (2003) draws attention to the fact that analytic

interpretations are "shaped, not only by the patient's material but also by the theoretical

models that we draw on to understand the material" (p. 2). It is important, not only for
intellectual accuracy but also for therapeutic responsibility, that analysts be up-to-date on

the latest models of consciousness, even if they do not agree with them, as this keeps our

own knowledge fresh and sharp. Many psychotherapists believe that sharing technique

and case studies in seminars and papers is sufficient to keep them apprised of the human

mind and how it works. This approach to research and education is solipsistic—a method

that finds evidence for the model of the mind and therapy used by practitioners of the
same model; this "enumerative inductivism" (p. 3) is known colloquially as "preaching to

the choir." Simply stated, "checking the findings of one method against those of another
makes it possible to minimize the bias associated with a single method" (Solms &

Turnbull, 2002, p. 182). In analytical psychology this same principle is captured in the

value in consciously dialoguing in relationship with the opposite; this is a tenet of Jung's
thought. In this regard, the dialogue between analytical psychology and neuroscience can

be compared to a conversation between an intuitive and a sensation type. For these

reasons, we need to extend the objective grounding of subjective insights and experiences

of the self into the brain. We know too much about the connection between the brain and

mind to analyze one separately from the other any longer.

To come to conclusions about the self or psyche through analysis that doesn't

consider the brain is like applying classic Freudian analysis to Capgras delusion, a
method originally used in older psychiatry books. In Capgras delusion, after suffering

head trauma, a patient can recognize the face of a familiar loved one, such as one's

mother, but believes her to be an imposter. If the mother calls on the phone, the patient
immediately recognizes her voice as her, but if she walks into the room the patient will

tell the doctor that this woman looks like his mother but is an imposter. Classic

psychoanalysis claims the trauma damaged the inhibitory effects of the cortical layer
 54

allowing taboo Id urges to surface, in this case Oedipal sexual urges for the mother.
Consciousness provides a rationalization, albeit an absurd one, but as we'll see in later
chapters, absurd rationality is quite in line with ego-consciousness, to protect it from
knowing the contents of the unconscious. But what actually happens in the brain to

produce the effects of Capgras delusion is a severance of the neuronal connection from

the visual areas in the parietal cortices that process familiar faces to the emotionally
appraising amygdala in the middle of the brain. The individual has the dissonant

experience of recognizing his mother or familiar people visually but not experiencing the
emotional recognition of them at the same time (Ramachandran, 2004, p. 80). In this odd

situation, it feels to the patient as though the familiar other is an imposter.

Jung, in his wisdom, saw that individuals need an objective ground for
psychological subjectivity; he found this ground in the objective psyche and the process
of individuation. Individuation guides the ego in the process of de-identification with

people, objects, and circumstances in both our outer and inner worlds. "The aim of

individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona

on the one hand, and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other" (Jung,
1943/1953a, p. 172). Neuroscience implicitly asks us to de-identify the self from the
movements and processes of the brain. Understanding the neurobiological correlates of
consciousness does not reduce the self to the processes of the brain but deepens the de-

identification process where more of what is self and not-self is discovered. An objective

ground is methodologically necessary for our subjective experiences, for "like historians,

personality psychologists may be able to make sense of almost any observation after the

fact" (Corr & Matthews, 2009, p. 17). Interdisciplinary research involving a "blending of
research across fields is not just a luxury to behold, but increasingly a necessity to make
genuine progress" (Davidson, 2010, p. xi).

In using neuroscience as an objective ground for depth psychology in the

exploration of identity, generally accepted theories and knowledge from scientific fields
 55

are included and analyzed in the dissertation. Like depth psychology and most fields of

study, there are many subtle, advanced arguments within the various subfields of

neuroscience. This dissertation does not make an argument in these areas but rather

argues the finer points of Jungian theory in light of consensual knowledge of the brain.

As stated above, the truth is that both Freud and Jung were ahead of the science of

their time. Neurology at the turn of the 20th century simply could not explain or correlate
the close, empirical observations of the psyche they were making. Now, at the turn of the

21st century, neuroscience is leaping ahead of depth psychology; the clear distinctions

and assumptions made between the psyche and biology in Freud and Jung's time are no

longer viable. Although it is true that this relationship between neurobiology and

consciousness exists on a spectrum—with neurodegenerative diseases such as

Alzheimer's at the biological end and discovering the myth and purpose of one's life
journey on the imaginative end—there is a wide band of enmeshment, relationship, and

dialogue between the snaps of the brain and the crackle of the imagination. Along the
spectrum of consciousness there is a relationship of psyche and matter, where the

psychic functions merge into the physiological processes of the body ....
Thus it is to be suspected that our division into material versus mental, that
which is observable from the outside versus that which is perceivable from
the inside, is only a subjectively valid separation, only a limited
polarization that our structure of consciousness imposes on us but that
actually does not correspond to the whole of reality. In fact it is rather to
be suspected that these two poles actually constitute a unitary reality. (Von
Franz, 1988, p. 11)
Her observation may explain the irony that as science has gone further and further

into the world of matter it discovered objective, universal principles and structures, just

as Jung went further and further into subjective experience and found objective, universal

principles and structures of the psyche. Unknowingly, each discipline worked in

complementary fashion, according to the nature of the psychic medium that contains

both.
 56

Dialectics and Interiority

The dialogue between analytical psychology and neuroscience embodies a

dialectic methodology. Classic dialectics is a systematic weighing of conflicts and

contradictions with an intention of reaching resolution or synthesis at a new level.

Hegel's change process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is traditionally considered a

dialectic, as is Jung's confrontation of conscious and unconscious in the transcendent

function. Essentially, a pair of opposites meet in antagonism, and as the contradictions

are worked out in dialogue, a synthesis is forged.

However, according to Jungian analyst Wolfgang Giegerich, dialectics is not

about conflicts and their resolution; this position necessarily begins with opposing

external forces and dialectics is about interior contradictions. "But dialectics does not
start out with opposites, and not with Two. Rather, dialectical thinking begins with one

single idea, notion, phenomenon and then shows its internal contradiction" (Giegerich,
2005a, p. 2). Further, Giegerich tells us that "dialectical thinking thus has a lot to do with

'making conscious' and getting inside the topic at hand" (p. 3). In this process, there is
not pursuit of a solution and not necessarily a movement to a higher understanding.

Dialectics is a deepening that "reveals that the opposites had been united all along in a
common Ground. There is no need for a solution here, but rather the insight and

realization that the experience of the opposites was due to a superficial and preliminary

view" (p. 5). The trajectory of dialectics is a moving under and interior. There is not a
solution to be created or generated, but an understanding, a making conscious of the

original unity or common Ground.

Dialectics is our methodology; considering psychology as does Giegerich, as the

discipline of interiority (and the soul as the experience of interiority and the imagination

as the medium of interiority), the topic of the dialogue is the interior of the self. In this
interior experience we have two primary perspectives: the body and the psyche. It is

from both of these sources that the self and identity is generated. While I discuss the
 57

influence of conditioning external forces—family, circumstance, culture—these factors

do not generate identity; rather, they shape it. When a subjective focus of identity is

maintained, the content and dynamics of the self are comprised of the body and the

psyche, both of which takes the stimulus, movements, influence, and intrusions of

experience and sublimate it into an identity.

Dual-aspect Monism
This work holds that the psyche emerges from the body, and in particular,
processes of the brain. Though consciousness cannot be reduced to the brain, it remains

intimately related to it and reflects neurobiological structures and processes. "As we scale
up from the physics to biology to psychology, each successive level of complexity is

sustained by regularities that are manifest on the level below" (Kugler, 2005, p. 142).

However, Kugler also notes that the behavior of content or processes at more complex
levels is neither explainable nor reducible to levels below. Agreed. This truth of
nonreducibility poses a challenge to psychology expressed by both Kugler and Otto

Kernberg. "Psychology's theoretical challenge is to explain how macroscopic psychic

regularities emerge out of microscopic physiological elements, such that the

psychological regularities exhibit a certain degree of autonomy" (Kugler, 2005, p. 142).

Otto Kernberg (2009) captures the same sentiment, writing that "we still have to clarify

how neurobiological disposition and structures relate to psychological development and

its derived structures" (p. 506). In this endeavor, I hold a perspective of dual-aspect
monism, which accepts that we are made of only one type of stuff (that mind and brain

are not separate as in the classical dualist position of Descartes) but that this stuff is

perceived in two significantly different ways. This implies that

in our essence we are neither mental nor physical beings .... Dual-aspect
monism implies that the brain is made of stuff that appears 'physical'
when viewed from the outside (as an object) and 'mental' when viewed
from the inside (as a subject).... This distinction between body and mind
is therefore an artifact of perception. (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 56)
 58

In other words, the psyche is a wave of light collapsing into brain matter.

The mind and brain are equally real, but they exist at different levels of
complexity. Just as water ... emerges from a particular combination of
hydrogen and oxygen and has distinctive properties of its own (properties
that do not characterize hydrogen or oxygen alone), so, too, mental
phenomena emerge when the neurons of the human brain are connected or
activated in a particular way. (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 54)

And just as we do not know how matter jumps from hydrogen and oxygen to water, we

do not know how the mind leaps from synaptic sparks to image and thought.
Opening up analytical psychology to scientific discoveries may well transform it

in important ways. But isn't this excitingl As noted previously, I concur with Paris that

Jungian theory is a good story and guiding myth of the psyche with a permanent home in
the arts and humanities, but do not agree that all of Jung's work can or should be defined

this way. Jung knew well that opening one's self up to a relationship with an Other offers
both danger and reward. "For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical

substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed" (1931/1954, p. 71).

This is as true for the relationship between analytical psychology and neuroscience as it is

between lovers.
Delimits
This dissertation critiques Jung's theories of the structure of the psyche, in
particular the collective and personal unconscious, archetypes, and complexes. It does

not incorporate theories of alchemy, religion, or synchronicity nor touch on other

important structures such as the shadow, anima, or animus. Further, this work is not a

depth psychological reading of neuroscience and the brain; this may be difficult for a

humanities-oriented, Jungian reader. A valid and rich criticism of scientific

methodologies is to see them symbolically, recognizing a guiding myth that determines

the methods of measurement and to a large extent the results achieved. This is true, not

only for science but for all fields; we will all find what we're looking for. Analytical
 59

psychology is historically an insular field of knowledge; not only does Jungian

psychology not participate in scientific methodologies to test its theories, but most of the

interdisciplinary work in analytical psychology is with the humanities, which provide

lush imagery and discussions but due to the high compatibility between the fields, but do
not provide as sharp an edge of definition as neuroscience can. The intent in this work is

to ground the valuable subjective experience of the psyche from Jung's work in the

objective processes of the body.

Discussions in the previous chapters about the fear of reduction, dialectics, and

dual-aspect monism are meant to remove from the work a sense of reduction or

competition in the dialogue; while there is criticism and a standard of intellectual rigor, it
is not intended to reduce Jung's thought or the reality of the psyche to biological

principles or processes. Indeed, in one chapter I suggest that analytical psychology needs

to claim a shadow projection of its own in reducing archetypes to biology. But that is for
later. For now, understand that this work, like all long, creative, inspired research, had

many options at several points to take different pathways in thought. I have chosen to
stay close to the latest, relatively uncontroversial findings of neuroscience, the brain, and
consciousness, while applying a close critique of the Jungian structure of the psyche,
especially the collective unconscious and archetypes. This close critique is not due to

elevating neuroscience above Jungian psychology. I have lavished my attention, with

intense detail, on the ideas I love the most.

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Section I: The Brain

In order to understand what elements of identity are of the imagination or psyche,

we must first know what parts are not. To this end, this first section explores the nature

of the brain systems and structures that operate outside of ego-consciousness. These

processes quite often are made aware to consciousness, though some aspects of the brain

are not accessible to consciousness at all. These forms of consciousness—called either

implicit or nonconscious in neuroscience—are both phylogenetically and ontogenetically

older than ego-consciousness. To explore identity's interiority, we must start with the

ground of our experience of being an individual; this ground is the brain in neuroscience
and the collective unconscious in analytical psychology. Both are as interior as you can

get, and both existed before the "me" we each know as ourselves existed.
There are various ways to understand the collective unconscious, and I propose
three models or perspectives. The first model is our evolutionary legacy as expressed in

our genes and biology. The second perspective is as an autonomous realm or medium
that is not dependent on ego-consciousness and has its own functions and processes. The

third is the manifestation of what Jung called the psyche: a subjective, imaginative realm
that operates in our individual lives and in our culture. The first model is what I term the
phylogenetic collective unconscious; it is the collective unconscious molded through eons
of evolution. The second model is an ontogenetic collective unconscious or implicit

consciousness. This aspect of the collective unconscious within an individual brain and

psyche developmentally precedes ego-consciousness. The third and last perspective is

the archetypal collective unconscious. An understanding of the archetypal collective

unconscious that Jung so closely studied and articulated is the imaginative representation

in the psyche of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic neurobiological structures of the brain.

Jung's work with the archetypal collective unconscious is sometimes confounded

in his work with the phylogenetic collective unconscious, a confusion carried over into

the work of some contemporary Jungians. In this first section, the phylogenetic and
 61

ontogenetic collective unconscious are delineated from the collective unconscious of

analytical psychology, or, we could say, the mysterious evolution of human being in the

brain is separated from the ancient stories we tell about it.

Memory researchers Markowitsch and Welzer summarize the work of Merlin

Donald, who theorizes that there were three evolutionary steps in human primate

consciousness and memory that led to our great differences and divergence from other

primates. He calls these three additional qualities mimetic, mythic, and theoretic.

Mimetic is the ability, first emerging two million years ago in Homo habilus, to plan,
practice, and transmit knowledge to others, as in the example of fashioning stone tools for

hunting. This ability means that humans began to cope with the demands of the external

world through delay; "it opens up a space in time between a demand and then coping
with that demand. Such a cognitive technique also has the potential for the uniquely

human ability of representing one's own self in the form of thoughts" (Markowitsch &
Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 40). This key mimetic ability, Markowitsch and Welzer explain,

leads to the recognition of intention in one's self and in others, such as drawing
conclusions of another's intentions when watching them form a hunting spear.
The next stage in cognitive evolution, mythical, "is characterized by the

development of forms of symbolic communication. This is the stage at which Homo

sapiens appeared, approximately only 200,000 years ago" (Markowitsch & Welzer,

2005/2010, p. 40). At this time in history funeral rites emerge indicating a clear

awareness of time, past and future, marking the end of immediate presence characterized

by other primates. The theoretical stage, which we are still in now, is marked by an
intense acceleration of the cultural transmission of knowledge initiated by the invention

of writing and highly symbolic forms of communication. This transmission of cultural

knowledge is called an "externalization of memory" (p. 40), where the neuronal coding

of experience in one individual, which Donald terms an engram, is projected out in the

form of an exogram, a building block of culture.

 62

The phylogenetic collective unconscious is conceivably timeless; one could say it

begins with the stars or when primates formed a unique evolutionary branch from reptiles
some 65 million years ago. The ontogenetic collective unconscious is equated with the

emergence of a reflective space in the mind, appearing in history roughly 2.5 million
years ago, that transformed a stone into a tool and carved a niche for a self. The

archetypal collective unconscious would conceivably have begun some 200,000 years
ago when the first funeral rites and symbols of human culture were established.

The time of totems, taboos, and ritual is the historical period that anthropologist

Alondra Oubre (1997) speculates that the first experiences of numinous revelation

occurred. Actually, her reverie is that it began before the funeral rites and totems and
taboos took form in early culture, in huddles of wailing and swaying hominids during the
time of Homo erectus. She imagines them starving, cold, frightened. Perhaps one of

their tribe, a child, a young one, has been killed or lost. Perhaps the winter is descending
and they have nowhere to go and nothing to eat. It is possible, she imagines, that as they

wailed and swayed in unison in their collective grief, a rain storm began, a sunbeam
broke through, or some other natural movement appeared as though in response. And she

wonders, is it too far to speculate that one of them, the proto-shaman among them, had a
flicker of numinosity in linking their subjective, collective state and actions with the
external happening?

In this telling, the ontological threshold of the self is the sublime. It is a story that

could be true.
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Chapter 4
The Ground

In his work, Jung was essentially exploring and writing about the subjective,

imaginative layer of the psyche. He admonished his students in the Tavistock lectures to

remember the relationship of subjectivity to unconscious contents; we will do well to

heed it here and throughout this work.

Whatever we have to say about the unconscious is what the conscious

mind says about it. Always the unconscious psyche, which is entirely of
an unknown nature, is expressed by consciousness and in terms of
consciousness, and that is the only thing we can do. We cannot go beyond
that, and we should always keep it in mind as an ultimate critique of our
judgment. (Jung, 1935/1950, pp. 7-8)

And again in the introduction to Esther Harding's Woman's Mysteries, Jung makes this

subjective distinction clear:

Of course this term [archetype] is not meant to denote an inherited idea,

but rather an inherited mode of psychic functioning .... In other words, it
is a "pattern of behavior." This aspect of the archetypes is the biological
one .... But the picture changes at once when looked at from the inside,
that is, from within the realm of the subjective psyche. Here the archetype
presents itself as numinous, that is, it appears as an experience of
fundamental importance. (1955, pp. ix-x)

And finally, Jung clarifies that "the archetype does not proceed from physical

facts but describes how the psyche experiences the physical fact" (Jung, 1951/1959, p.

154). This distinction of the subjective experience of the psyche—personal and

collective—is important; it clearly sets our task not to reduce the collective unconscious
or archetypes to the brain, but to understand the nature of the areas and functions of the

brain that might give rise to these psychological structures that generate our subjective

archetypal experience. Consciousness as an emergent property of the brain does not

necessarily translate into the mind being reduced to and explained by the functions of the

brain.
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The Collective Unconscious

The concept of the collective unconscious has a long history in cultural religions,

myths, and ideas of "a 'world-spirit,' as it was postulated by the Stoics, or of a 'world-

soul' that animates the universe and flows from the divine or demonic 'in-fluences' (in­
flowings) into the human subject" (von Franz, 1988, p. 78). Jung describes the images

and figures of the collective unconscious as being "expelled from the psyche into cosmic

space" (1954/1959, p. 12) and says that "we should really have guessed long ago that

myths refer to something psychic" (p. 6). Note here that he does not reduce myths to
psychology. The classical Jungian view, expressed by von Franz, understands that

''''myths and mythical religious systems. . . are the first and foremost expression of

objective psychic processes, " (1988, p. 79; italics in original) yet the first experience of
the collective unconscious is subjective.

The collective unconscious can be described as the subjective experience of

unconsciousness that is felt to be transpersonal in origin and yet intimately related to the
subject. In discussing the function and development of neurobiological structures that I

correlate with the archetypal psyche, it is important to keep a clear distinction between
the formation of the collective unconscious and a region of the brain such as the limbic

system; the limbic system is far older than the collective unconscious. The collective
unconscious is the subjective awareness, my argument goes, of certain regions and

systems of the brain, not the regions themselves. The quality of numinosity, a sense of

ancientness, and an intelligence outside the boundaries of the ego—what I call the not-me

or non-self—are correlated in experience and function with the limbic system and the

implicit consciousness of the right hemispheres of the brain.

The unconscious is often thought of as a container of the repressed, forgotten, or

dissociated material incomprehensible to consciousness. It is also accurate to think of the

unconscious as a continuous process which sometimes generates material and content

into consciousness awareness. "We have stated that the lower reaches of the psyche begin
 65

where the ftmction emancipates itself from the compulsive force of instinct and becomes

amendable to the will, and we have defined the will as disposable energy" (Jung,

1954/1969, p. 200). To understand the collective unconscious conceptually as the

psychic realm and reality that gives birth to archetypal images, we need to look to the
lower reaches of the psyche, referring to the physiological edge of the collective
unconscious. This level of the psyche is not conscious in an egotistical, reflective

manner, though it is, as we will see, intelligent and autonomous in function and process.

Jacobi explains that this experience "must be taken not as a metaphysical concept but
empirically as signifying 'beyond consciousness'" (1959, p. 50) where consciousness is
understood as ego-consciousness.
The ego has two aspects: it is formed by both conscious and unconscious

processes and contents. The personal unconscious, distinct from the collective

unconscious, is derived from personal experience and is the unconscious aspect of the
ego. The ego, as a psychic object, is the totality of reflective consciousness and personal

unconscious contents. The personal unconscious is constructed, along with the ego,

primarily through experience in early infancy and childhood. In this sense, the ego is
constructed of both self and others, or, more specifically, of self and self s relationship
with primary, significant others. In essence, the collective unconscious is distinct from

the personal unconscious in its impersonality; it is a realm beyond the ego that belongs to

all human beings and its primary manifestation is in the archetypes. "The archetype is a

fundamental organizing principle which originates from the objective psyche, beyond the

level of the empirical personality" (Corbett, 1996, p. 15).

While Jung found clear theoretical distinctions between the personal and

collective level of the unconscious, it is not as easy to separate them experientially as it is

intellectually. Both concepts are subjective in nature in that they are the ego's

description and felt experience. Therefore, the first distinction of the collective

unconscious is that it exists outside the boundaries of the ego. "The instincts and the
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archetypes together form the 'collective unconscious.' I call it 'collective' because,

unlike the personal unconscious, it is not made up of individual and more or less unique
contents but of those which are universal and of regular occurrence" (1948/1969a, pp.

133-34). And Corbett affirms that "our felt sense is that we are addressed by

transpersonal levels of the psyche" (1996, p. 1).

In analytical psychology the collective unconscious is typically discussed under

the rubric of the archetypes: its primary content and manifestation. In this way, an
understanding of the nature of the archetypes is an understanding of the nature of the
collective unconscious. However, the collective unconscious as a concept, reality, and

realm, though represented by archetypal images and affects, is not contained by them.

One can say that the collective unconscious is an archetypal realm or region, whereas
archetypal images and affects are the manifestations known to consciousness. However,

on a practical level, this is theoretical separation; what marks the collective unconscious
is its affective intensity. Corbett, like Jung and the Jungians, links this with the
experience of the numinosum. "The numinous grips or stirs the soul with a particular

affective state, which [Rudolph] Otto describes as a feeling of the lmysterium

tremendum," (1996, p. 11). This affective experience imparts a sense of profound

importance and is the basis of religious experience.

The archetypal experience of the collective unconscious is not necessarily a

regressive state to the primitive though the emotional experience certainly can invite this

description. Key in the experience of the collective unconscious is the attitude and

strength or flexibility of ego-consciousness. If the structures of the personality are too

weak or fragile, an experience of the intensity of the archetypal psyche can be "the
production of excessive, unmanageable anxiety, or even psychosis" (Corbett, 1996, p.
23). A too fragile ego will be inundated, fearful, and perhaps regressive, whereas a too

rigid or rational ego will be calcified, made brittle and rejecting. With a healthy and

stable ego, the experience of the collective unconscious may be awesome and dreadful,
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including intense affect, but there is not confusion of the personal identity with the

moment; in more vulnerable, fragmented ego states, there is likely to be great confusion
and enmeshment with the experience as one's own personal material. The emotional

regulatory system of the psyche is important here in mediating archetypal experience. It

is especially important in the fact that the collective unconscious often enters our life

through our weak points, wounds, and pathology. This is because ego-consciousness is

typically a rather well woven object, and as with a dam, it is at the weak points under the
water line—points one does not tend to because they are unseen—that the pressure of the

water is most dangerous.

As we correlate the phenomenology of the collective unconscious with the brain,

we will be looking particularly for experiences of the numinosum or intense affect that

appears to be transpersonal and outside of the boundaries of the self. We will look

towards a sense of ancientness, of otherness, and of autonomy. These will be the core
experiences that we link with brain regions and systems that are the likely site of these
experiences in the body.

The Evolution of the Brain: Phylogenetic

The earth is about 5 billion years old. Reptiles originated 300 million years ago;

mammals, 200 million. "Molecular data comparing monkeys, apes, and humans (the only

living hominid species) indicates that all these groups are descendants of a common,
primate-like ancestor which originated over 65 million years ago" (Oubre, 1997, p. 37).
By comparison, bipedal hominids, from which modern humans are descendents, have a

history of about 5 to 6 million years. The bipedal hominid ancestor of the Homo species,
Australopithecus afarensis, lived 3.5 million years ago, had ape-like consciousness and a

brain the size of a chimpanzee (about one-third the size of our brains).
In the first 3 to 4 million years of bipedality there was practically no change in

brain size. About 2 million years ago (mya), however, in the time of Homo habilis,

simple stone tools appear. In a sudden punctuation of evolution, over the next 1 million
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years the brain expanded rapidly to about two-thirds the size of present-day brains. The

appearance of simple stone tools between 2 to 2.5 mya in the lower Paleolithic period and

the emergence of symbolic art around 100 thousand years ago (kya) in the middle

Paleolithic period, spans the range of appearance of the genus Homo to fully modern

humans, though anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerged out of Africa about 200
kya (Allen, 2009, p. 49). In terms of brain size, Homo habilis, considered the first

species of the genus Homo, who lived 2.3 to 1.8 mya, had a brain approximately 40% the

size of modern brains. While there is controversy in anthropological fields as to the

ancestor of Homo sapiens—there is speculation that Homo sapiens did not evolve from a

single species of Homo erectus but evolved independently from different species—the

majority of biological anthropologists agree that Homo erectus evolved from Homo

habilis, and, that Homo habilis is the Homo species that made a punctuate evolutionary
leap from ape-like consciousness to quasi-human cognitive capacity (Oubre, 1997, p. 31).
Neanderthals (a species of Homo erectus that was extinct by 35 kya) and archaic Homo
sapiens, who both lived about 300 kya, had brain size ranges equivalent to modern men

and women.
As history moved from the Middle Paleolithic to Upper Paleolithic periods of the

Stone Age, stone tool technology made a catalytic shift. "The precipitous transformation

in tool manufacturing that occurred during this and even earlier phases of human
evolution reflected a momentous transition in consciousness" (Oubre, 1997, p. 69). It is

thought that the capacity for symbolic thought, evolving into ritual and abstraction,

catapulted the evolutionary development of the brain and the human being. And the

simple stone tool, emerging in history 2 mya, is itself a symbol of the capacity to think

reflectively. In comparison to the pace of evolution before the simple stone stool—there

was not significant increase in brain size or material culture for up to 4 million years after
the emergence of bi-pedal hominids—the appearance of simple stone tools is followed by
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a rapid increase in brain size and evolution in consciousness, ritual, invention, and culture
over the 2 million year period since Homo habilis.

It is seductive to equate gross brain volume with complexity of consciousness. To

a certain extent this may be correlated accurately enough but the brain also increases in

proportion to the body and the body of Homo sapiens grew larger than the body of
hominids. At some point, a larger brain becomes a liability; many more neurons with
longer fibers connecting across longer distances would create congestion and
sluggishness. This is known as "the connection problem" in the encephalization of the

brain through history, and it was resolved through the functional reorganization of the

brain.

Modern homo sapiens evolved in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago

and subsequently became a global species, with no surviving hominid
competitors. Clearly, there was some sort of cognitive element in the
human advantage, but it seems likely that it was one that resulted from
functional reorganization rather than a gross increase in brain size. (Allen,
2009, p. 80)
This functional reorganization led to, among other things, a cognitive capacity for
symbolizing. Jungian analyst Paul Kugler finds language and the imagination deciding

factors in the sudden and complex evolution of our species.

Cultural artifacts and human language have been around for only a brief
period of time in biological terms, and yet, our species has used its newly
acquired symbolic ability to transform our planet, as well as our biology.
The development of the capacity for imaging forever altered human
evolution, transforming the process into an interactive dynamic between the
forces of biology and symbolic representation. (2005, p. 143)

Not only for Kugler, but for anthropologists, biologists, scientists, psychologists,

and indeed for all of us, is this moment in our evolution the fateful one for humans: when

the imagination emerged from a complex psychic soup and began to consciously

represent the meeting of the inner and outer worlds in emotional and personally

meaningful images.
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Yet, we cannot know for sure why Homo sapiens became the evolutionarily

favored selection over other species, as "the diversity of species being discovered

indicates that there were many different ways to live successfully as a biped with a more-

or-less ape-sized brain" (Allen, 2009, p. 276). The mystery is in the moment about 2 mya

when Homo habilis made a tool out of a stone, and brain size began its fateful increase.
We lcnow that it happened and we know the consequences of this happening; but we still

do not know why one day, one of our ancestors saw a symbol in a stone.
The Evolution of the Brain: Ontogenetic

In evolutionary terms, there are three brains: the reptilian brain, which ensures
vital functions and organismic survival and goes through little change; the limbic or

primitive brain, which has phylogenetically old areas (some can be seen in salamanders)

but goes through considerable ontogenetic development, particularly in its functional

relationships with other brain regions; and the neocortex, which goes through the most

alteration in interaction with the environment (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p.

90).

When we are born our brains weigh 400 g and increases to 1200 g by one-year-old.

It is estimated that five sixths of brain growth is post-natal and continues until a person is
2 years old (Schore, 1994, p. 11). The infant's brain has an intact brain stem (reptilian)
and primitive brain, as the limbic brain was once called because these structures are

evolutionarily quite old and process basic emotion, appraising our environment for

danger, among other things. The brain develops in critical stages through the first two

years and the frontal lobes—the lobes that house our higher, executive and reflective

functions—are the last to mature.

A significant aspect of the evolutionary functional reorganization of the brain that

led to the level of complex consciousness that we enjoy today is the relationship between

the prefrontal cortex (portion of frontal lobe behind the forehead) and the limbic system.

This prefrontal cortex—limbic relationship will be discussed first, and a case study of
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Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) will be analyzed as an example of a limbic and

archetypally dominated personality. Then, in the following chapter, the second

significant functional reorganization of the brain that led to our complex, reflective

consciousness—the specialization of the hemispheres—will be explored and analyzed in

connection with the collective unconscious. Not only did the limbic system and the

prefrontal cortex experience functional reorganizations: research evidence points to

reorganization of other brain systems, such as visual regions (Allen, 2009, p. 118). But

our focus is on the limbic system of the brain because it is a likely site of a key
experience of the collective unconscious: an inner sense of a primordial Other and non-

self.
The Limbic System
The term limbic system is often lamented by neuroscientists as a simplistic

concept, yet it is used repeatedly anyway, by scientists and nonscientists, because it is

also useful. The limbic system has been called the visceral brain, the primitive brain, and
the emotional brain. Many if not all neuroscientists note that emotion is the ground and
quality of consciousness, just as many if not all depth psychologists would say emotion is

the valence of the unconscious or the soul. The limbic system is "really a theoretical

concept about a group of structures that, many neuroscientists feel, are linked together in

a functionally significant way" (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 17) and is primary in

processing emotion, especially in mediating fear and emotional appraisal.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux's criticism of mainstream descriptions of the

limbic system as "the emotional brain" is that it has not been demonstrated that the limbic

regions are the seat of conscious emotions. Instead, he refers to it as "an emotional-

processing system" (2002, p. 210) and makes a distinction, which he claims too many

theorists do not, comparing emotions—instinctual, somatic, and few—with feelings—

cognitive, descriptive, and many. However, there are some points about the limbic

system as regulator of emotions that seem correct to LeDoux:

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The notion that emotions involve relatively primitive circuits that are
conserved throughout mammalian evolution seems right on target. Further,
the argument that cognitive processes might involve other circuits, and
might function relatively independent of emotional circuits, at least in some
circumstances, also seems correct. (LeDoux, 2002, p. 212)

Although there is disagreement on which structures are part of the limbic system,

there are some which practically all neuroscientists agree on: the cingulate gyrus, the
parahippocampal gyrus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus (Allen, 2009, p. 30). The

limbic system is evolutionarily much older than the neocortex, and the neocortex is

crucial in sophisticated cognition, yet "the production of sophisticated and complex

behaviors depends on diverse structures working in conceit" (Allen, p. 92). Again,

intelligence and complexity are products of functional relationships, not a heroic layer of

cortical bark.
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp uses the concept of a basic emotion command

system which represents the underlying universal affects of all mammals. "Needless to
say, the 'basic-emotion command system' evolved over eons of time" (Solms &
Turnbull, 2002, p. 113). Basic emotions have survival value and are shared by all

mammals; these universal affective reactions are innate yet modifiable and located in the
limbic system and brain stem. There are four basic emotions: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR,

and PANIC (always capitalized when used by Panksepp, and here, to indicate their
conceptual context). "This shared evolutionary heritage literally embodies the primal
experiences of our ancestors, which, even if we cannot re-experience them, have left

traces in our 'procedural-memory' systems" (p. 113). Strikingly similar to Jung's

repeated descriptions of the primordial images of the collective unconscious being the

deposited experiences of our ancestors over eons, the basic emotions generated by the

limbic system are the neurobiological equivalent of the collective unconscious.

Like the body, the brain is not finished growing when a baby is born; indeed,

much of what we consider our humanness is correlated with the frontal lobes and the
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orbital (behind the eyes) prefrontal cortex in particular: self-reflexive consciousness;

conscious inhibition and judgment; logical, rational planning; and language. "The

maturation of the prefrontal cortex, the largest area in the human cerebral cortex (Uylings

& Van Eden, 1990), is essentially postnatal" (Schore, 1994, p. 13).

Three structures—the orbital medial [in the middle] prefrontal, insula, and
cingulate cortices—are the most evolutionary primitive areas of the
cortex .... In one of the parallels between ontogeny (development of the
individual) and phylogeny (evolution of the species), the more primitive
cortical regions develop earlier than the rest of the cerebral cortex.
(Cozolino, 2006, p. 51)

Our species-specific limbic brain is intact when born, and the paralimbic cortex

areas develop first postnatally, providing the ground from which conscious individuality

emerges in the prefrontal cortex. This development is a simple yet symbolic relationship
of the layer of the collective unconscious—limbic—underneath the personal unconscious
and ego-consciousness represented in the brain regions that develop postnatally. When

we are born the limbic system is processing, organizing, and responding to experience,

but though considered intact, its postnatal development is crucial, and most significantly
by 3 years old, in the neuronal wiring of the limbic brain with the frontal lobes, especially
the orbitofrontal cortex. Schore (1994) argues that it is in this time period that the
humanness of the infant is born through the development of emotional regulation, self-

recognition, and a consistent inner experience of being which becomes the scaffolding of

autobiographical memory and a conscious identity.

The first basic emotion system, SEEKING, is a reward system aroused by bodily

needs and underlies the other emotions. It is characterized by curiosity, interest,

expectancy, and seeking in the outer world the stuff of somatic satisfaction; its emotional

domain is appetitive states, play, and predatory ("cold") aggression. The SEEKING

system is objectless and when activated (which happens by various different types of

stimulus) it simply seeks in a nonspecific way. "The mode of operation of the SEEKING
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system is therefore incomprehensible without reference to the memory systems with

which it is intimately connected" (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 199). It is the coupling of
blind appetitive drives with the conditioning of memory and learning that provides us
with our objects of appetitive desire.

LUST, a subsystem of the SEEKING system, is demarcated when the object of

satisfaction is attained and consumption is activated. Stimulation of the brain regions

correlated with LUST produce orgasmic feelings. In experiments with animals whose
LUST brain regions are electronically stimulated through learned self-stimulation

behavior—such as mice learning to push a lever to activate the electronic stimulation—

they rapidly learned the movements that produced self-stimulation and perform these

stimulations to exhaustion and to the near exclusion of all other activities including

eating, drinking, and having sex. The parallel with addictive behaviors is obvious.
(Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 121)

Perhaps the most well-known structure of the limbic system is the amygdala.
Notoriously, the amygdala is responsible for fear regulation and the flight-fight response.

The prime directive of the amygdala is to pair stimuli with a fear response
to protect us .... On the other side of the fear regulatory system is the
orbital medial prefrontal cortex (OMPFC), [behind the eyes and in the
middle] which has a reciprocal relationship with the amygdala in that the
OMPFC can inhibit the amygdala based on conscious awareness (Beer et
al., 2003). (Cozolino, 2006, p. 60)

At the same time, too high threshold activation of the amygdala will shut down the

OMPFC, preventing rational, reflective thought and conscious encoding of memory in

the face of overwhelming fear. Damage or ablation to the amygdala is associated with a
loss of fear of objects, hyperorality, and hypersexuality. Because the amygdala is the

structure "most responsible for the mediation of fear," loss of amygdala functioning

produces a "loss of cautionary behavior that has been shaped by millions of years of

evolution" (Allen, 2009, p. 94).

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The amygdala receives sensory input from the thalamus, which sits atop the brain

stem and is considered the gateway to the cerebral cortex through which all sensory data

passes; this thalamatic connection provides the ability of the amygdala to bypass cortical

processing in dangerous or high fear arousal. Its connection to the hippocampus

(memory encoding) and cerebral cortex link memory and context to fear responses. A

specialized function of the amygdala's mediation of fear, performed in cooperation with

other structures, is the assessment of emotional content of faces. The left amygdala

appears to be more important in processing emotional linguistic messages (Allen, 2009,

p. 95). Recent research is suggesting "significant reorganization in the amygdala in the

context of cognitive evolution in the neocortex" (p. 97) and in particular the orbitofrontal
cortex. That is, a significant evolutionary development in human consciousness is the

neuronal connections between the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex. Damasio

(1999), Schore (1994), Siegel (1999) and others maintain that the emotional pressure
from the body coupled with the developing neocortex create a somatic sense that leads to

an eventual recognition of the self. Damasio calls it "the feeling of what happens" (1999,
p. 29) marking the moment the self recognizes that it is a self having a feeling.
In the basic emotions command system, the amygdala is intimately involved with
producing and regulating FEAR and RAGE. The RAGE system is activated by states of
frustration, when the goal-directed activities of SEEKING and LUST are thwarted. It

initiates the fight response, although not all aggressive behavior is activated by the RAGE

system. RAGE emotions are considered hot aggression, whereas cold aggression is
predatory. The key structure in triggering RAGE is the medial nucleus of the amygdaloid

complex. A low-level activation manifests as irritability (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p.

125).

The FEAR system generates feelings of fear-anxiety and the flight response. The

basic emotion command system makes a distinction between fear-anxiety (paranoid) and
panic-anxiety (depressive). The FEAR system is also centered in the amygdaloid
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complex but in the central nuclei. Mild stimulation of this area produces a freeze

response (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 127). In extreme neurological disorders where the

amygdala is destroyed, the patients become hypersexual, even finding nonhuman or

inanimate objects attractive, hyperoral, and hyperdistractable because everything is of

equal interest. This points to the role of the RAGE and FEAR systems activated by the

amygdala in helping to prune, shape, and channel our conscious attention towards what is

important.

Organized like a map of the body, the insula cortex and anterior cingulate
connect primitive bodily states with the experience and expression of
emotion, behavior, and cognition; both structures are involved with
mediating the gamut of emotions from disgust to love (Bartels & Zeki,
2000; Calder et al., 2003; Carr et al., 2003; Phan et al., 2002). (Cozolino,
2006, p. 266)
The cingulate cortice, a para-limbic structure, synthesizes emotional appraisals from the

amygdala, hippocampus, and other limbic structures with cognitive reality-testing and is
therefore considered a crucial brain structure in decision-making. In addition, the

cingulate cortice is involved in feelings of connection and bonding.

The PANIC system of the basic emotions is the separation-distress system

associated with feelings of loss and sorrow. The operation of this system is intimately
linked to social bonding and parenting. The core brain region is the anterior (front)

cingulate gyrus (fold in the cortex). The neurochemistry of this system is dominated by

opioids, oxytocin, and prolactin; the latter two are involved in feelings of connection and
bonding, linking the PANIC system and maternal behavior. Stimulation of this system

produces panic attacks and depression. When PANIC is first activated it provokes the

SEEKING system, but after a time interval of not being found, withdrawal from the

environment occurs and depression sets in. Separation from the loved object reduces

opioids in the system producing, literally, a feeling of pain (which opioids serve to

decrease or reduce) (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 131).

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The basic emotion systems demonstrate the automaticity of our species that is on­

line when we are born, producing FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, and LUST: the primary

elements of all drama, tragedy, and comedy in our actual stories and in art. The PANIC

system indicates that our anticipation of and longing for an Other, to be protected and

taken care of is an innate expectation of our species. Even though the prefrontal cortex,
the region of the frontal lobes that our "humanness" in the form of autonoetic awareness

is held, has not developed in our infancy, these limbic systems are alive, seeking, driving,
expecting, and responding. From a perspective of dual-aspect monism, the limbic

structures of the brain can be considered the tightly coiled primitive cortex of the
collective unconscious in its pre-conscious state. That is, until there is awareness of the

self, the collective unconscious as we know it in depth psychology—the third,

imaginative perspective—does not exist yet. What does exist is its soma-affective reality

and imaginative potential.

Prefrontal Cortex
The prefrontal region of the cortex "is an important site for the integration of
information from different parts of the brain" (Allen, 2009, p. 99) and is considered "the

seat of those cognitive faculties that underlie the basis of human intellectual supremacy
among all other animals" (p. 101). The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive
planning, abstract reasoning, self-awareness, empathy, and modulation of emotional
reactions, as well as "hosting some of the primary language areas of the brain" (Allen,
2009, p. 101). The "prefrontal cortex is the critical cortical regulatory system, especially
early maturing orbitofrontal cortex ... with its unique extensive connections with lower

limbic structures in the brain stem, midbrain, and diencephalons and with all other parts
of the cerebral cortex" (Schore, 1994, p. 34). So although the prefrontal cortex itself is

not a part of the limbic system, the orbitofrontal cortex is "the major cerebral system

involved in social, emotional, motivational, and self-regulatory processes" and is the

"hierarchical apex of the limbic system" (Schore, 1994, p. xxx).

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The orbitofrontal cortices inhibitory and regulating functions are important in

relation to the basic-emotion command systems. Although the basic emotions do have

hard-wired responses, "the representational (or 'object') aspect of the system is left

largely blank, to be filled in by early experience" (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 134). The

connections between stimulus and emotion systems are made with extreme rapidity and

are maintained afterward outside of consciousness. Using the FEAR system as an

example, "Once a stimulus (thing or place) is associated with a painful experience ... the

FEAR system is immediately and automatically activated whenever that stimulus is

encountered again, even before it is consciously recognized as such" (Solms & Turnbull,
2002, p. 134). Yet reflective consciousness, in the prefrontal cortices, is also synaptically

wired to this system, able to exhibit a learned, inhibitory effect leading to a taming of

affects. Once a neuronal connection in these basic systems is linked with an external
circumstance or object, it is considered indelible, though reflective inhibition can modify

behaviors. This modification through reflection and will demonstrates the plasticity of
the brain. Depth psychology is built on the recognition that these links are deeply

unconscious and can be maladaptive, and its response—the "talking cure" and coming

into conscious, de-identified relationship with unconscious material—recognizes the

inherent ability of the brain to learn, re-channel, or transform its affects.

The subjective experience of the limbic system—intense affect, autonomous

activation outside the prefrontal cortex, primordial, survival-related emotional

appraisal—runs parallel with the expressions of the collective unconscious as an ancient,

not-me, mythological aspect of the psyche involved in epic struggles of survival. In the

phylogenetic evolution of the brain in our species, and in the ontogenetic evolution of the

brain in each one of us, the ancient limbic system and basic-emotion command systems

exists first and is active upon, and even before, birth. The fact that the frontal lobe

cortices develop postnatally—literally in material form as well as in synaptic, functional

relationship with the limbic system—symbolizes the subjective, imaginative experience

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we each have of a much older, numinous, primordial part of ourselves within us, but not

us. Jung named this phenomenon the collective unconscious and suggested that it may be

the part of our psyches that we meet in our dreams. Now, in order to understand further

the relationship of these two general regions, of the brain, we will look at the relationship
between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex in the phenomenological
manifestations of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
Case Study: Borderline Personality Disorder

Clinically, BPD is considered a disorder characterized by a failure of emotional

regulation; in analytical terms, BPD can be understood as an individual psyche possessed

by the collective unconscious, a personality with a weak ego-identity structure unable to

mediate archetypal material. In neuroscientific terms, this is a brain in which the

neuronal wiring between the limbic system and the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex is

weak; in this sense, we can call the borderline a limbic personality for whom the

prefrontal cortex is unable to mediate and successfully inhibit the affective storms of the
limbic system. Primitive defenses of splitting and projective identification are primarily

employed to manage overwhelming emotional states. The neurobiological underpinning

in BPD as theorized by Schore (1994) and others below describes a dominance of the
limbic system, and, matched with the phenomenological manifestations of symptoms as

described in clinical reports, BPD represents the link between the subjective experience
of the collective unconscious and the limbic regions of the brain.

BPD became an official personality disorder in 1980 when it was first included in
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the

American Psychiatric Association. In the most recent edition of the DSM-IV-TR, a

clinical diagnosis includes at least five of the following symptomatic descriptions:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. (Do not include

suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in criterion 5.)
 2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships
characterized as alternating between extremes of idealization and
devaluation.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self image or
sense of self.
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging
(e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating).
(Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in
criterion 5.)
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats or self-mutilating
behavior.
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense
episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours
and only rarely more than a few days).
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g.,
frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
9. Transient stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative
symptoms. (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 710)

In the clinical description, we see the symptoms and effects of emotional

dysregulation, unstable identity or sense of self, and intense fears of

abandonment. An intolerance of being alone, a heightened neediness and

dependence on others and on circumstances for stability, and a haunting sense of

shame all characterize the borderline individual. Psychologists who work with

childhood borderline syndrome call

attention to the presence in these impaired children of a discrepancy

between their private, personal selves and their shared selves in terms of a
lack of ease in communication .... These children seem to sense that
there is something ... wrong with them, and they feel a deep sense of
shame about themselves as a result. One of the consequences of this
awareness is alienation and withdrawal. Another is the development of a
true-self/false-self dichotomy (Winnicott, 1960). (Grotstein, 1994, p. xxv)
The behavioral symptoms of BPD—anger, suicidal, self-mutilating, and self-

destructive behaviors—are all attempts to manage overwhelming negative affect,

specifically, shame, fear of abandonment, and chronic emptiness. This failure of

emotional regulation erodes the glue in the construction of a cohesive self, resulting in
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chronically unstable and porous sense of self; yet the causation is a two-way street, where

the failure to develop a cohesive identity structure results in dysregulation of emotion. At

the core of BPD is a polarity of these two failures—emotional regulation and identity—

that elicit destructive behavioral and relationship patterns.

As with other mental illnesses, the etiology of BPD is a complex confluence of

predispositions and circumstances. It is generally agreed upon by clinicians and

researchers that in order for BPD or any personality disorder to develop, a combination of

neurobiological, developmental, and circumstantial factors must be present; none of these

factors are sufficient criteria in and of themselves. The genetic heritability of BPD is
about 68%, and most borderline persons report a history of abuse or neglect in childhood.
These rearing environment conditions vary from documented severe abuse, including

sexual abuse, to a sense of "mismatch" with the parents that results in a subjective feeling

of neglect. No matter the actual conditions and occurrences in early childhood, the
borderline individual emerges with a sense of being emotionally and psychologically

abandoned or neglected, and this leads to a belief in being inherently unlovable and even

evil.
It is also generally agreed that BPD represents a failure in attachment. A diagnosis

of BPD "is linked with insecure, preoccupied, ambivalent, and perhaps fearful attachment

patterns." (Fonagy, 2005, p. 192). Attachment theory focuses on the early development

of secure or insecure relationships that infants establish with caregivers and emphasizes

how children come to perceive themselves and others. Anxious or preoccupied

attachment styles are characterized by separation anxiety, clinginess, and an inability to

be soothed upon reunion due to intense affect and anger in the infant towards the

caregiver. An anxious attachment style can be clearly correlated with the anterior

cingulate of the limbic system and PANIC, discussed above, through which social

bonding and emotional decision-making are rendered. In the borderline person, the

"frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment" (American Psychological

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Association, 2000) arise from a dysfunction in attachment and thus the PANIC system

and anterior cingulated, not to mention a possible hypersensitivity of the amygdaloid

structure. (Coccaro & Siever, 2005; Fonagy & Bateman, 2005)

In the first years of life, an infant's brain produces a gross excess of synaptic

connections between neurons in the brain. During critical stages a pruning process,

known as parcellation, eliminates synapses that are in excess of neuronal patterns "most

effectively entrained to environmental information (Tucker, 1991)" (Schore, 1994, p. 19).

What this means is that the neuronal imprints in the brain that will be retained are those
that adapt to and represent the environment the child is reared in. It is precisely the

functional relationship between the right hemispheric orbital prefrontal cortex and the

limbic system that mediates emotion and produces self-reflective consciousness. The
critical stage for this maturing of the prefrontal cortex is between 10 and 18 months,

which has been extensively validated through research. Schore (1994) has demonstrated
that this neuronal wiring is accomplished by imprinting the nervous system via
attachment relationships with primary caregivers and rearing environment. If successful,

the right prefrontal cortex attains inhibitory dominance over the subcortical limbic
system, making the right prefrontal cortex primary in socioemotional functions (p. 15). It
is this stage that is speculated to fail in the borderline individual's history, thereby
leaving her vulnerable to the powerful, primordial affects of the limbic system due to a

weak inhibitory force in the prefrontal cortex.

Between 10 and 18 months, in what is known as the early practicing period, there

are repeated "reunion transactions" with the mother as the infant goes through a cycle of

separation-individuation. The mother plays a crucial role in modulating affect of the

sympathetic (arousal) and parasympathetic (conserving) nervous systems. The child's

sympathetic nervous system arouses motivation, self-expression, and exploratory
behaviors that lead him or her into the world, eventually causing separation anxiety. The

conserving parasympathetic nervous system is active when the infant seeks reunion with
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the mother and her excitement and energy activate sympathetic arousal, producing

positive affect in the infant who then has the energy and security to explore and play
more. It is thought that these reunion transactions imprint through the nervous system

onto the developing brain in which the structural system for assessing the affective and

motivational environment—the orbitofrontal cortex—is maturing. These repetitive

imprinting experiences then become a part of the deep structures of the affective-

motivational psyche. "The mechanism of imprinting, a very rapid form of learning

which underlies attachment bond formation, has been understood to involve an

irreversible stamping of early experience upon the developing nervous system" (Schore,
1994, p. 116).

During this phase, the mothers' attunement to the infants' over-excitation soothes

them and keeps a premature activation of the parasympathetic nervous system from

occurring. In the borderline person, there is a significant failure in the mediation of

separation anxiety, "either by the mother discouraging separation and/or rejecting the
child when she returns for support" (Dougherty & West, 2007, p. 118). It is theorized
that the attachment failure experienced by the borderline individual results in a premature

activation of the parasympathetic system leading to "a phenomenon of excessive shame"

(Grotstein, 1994, p. xxiii). This failure in the mediation of separation anxiety, displayed
through an anxious attachment style, results in a weak reflective function—ego—unable

to contain and sublimate intense affect manifesting in the characteristic emotional

dysregulation and unstable identity in the borderline person's experience. In

neurobiological terms, the primitive affects of the limbic system have dominance over the

reflective and inhibiting orbital prefrontal cortex.

This neurobiological dominance of the limbic system is reflected in the brain

structures of individuals with BPD; these differences in neuroanatomy are both inherited

and developmentally conditioned, although the percentage of contribution from each is

unknown and most likely varies in each borderline individual (Cozolino, 2006; Paris,
 84

2005; Schore, 1994) That is, some borderline persons may have had milder early

conditioning experiences but a stronger genetic predisposition to vulnerabilities, whereas

others are reversed with a more severe conditioning history and less physiological

vulnerabilities to emotional regulation. This is true, of course, for all of us, including
those within a normal range of personality structure. We all represent a point of collapse

on the spectrum of personality from the convergence of genetic potential, neurobiological

predisposition, and conditioning experiences.

"Traditional neuropsychological testing has demonstrated frontal and temporal
lobe dysfunction in borderline patients .... Borderline patients have smaller hippocampi,

amygdala, left orbital medial and right anterior cingulate cortices" (Cozolino, 2006, p.

261). These neurobiological dysfunctions have been repeated in other studies as well
(Coccaro & Siever, 2005; Schore, 1994) indicating that brain differences in BPD center

on the inhibiting and processing functions of the frontal lobes in combination with the
size and activity levels of limbic regions such as the hippocampus, amygdala, and
cingulate cortices—the smaller structures are more easily overwhelmed. The frontal

lobes, especially the right hemispheric prefrontal cortices, are responsible not only for

emotional and instinctual inhibition but also in mediating motivation and judgments of
social appropriateness or context. Thus, much of what we consider to be manifestations

of the personality are held in the functions of the frontal lobes, as demonstrated in the
famous case of Phineas Gage, a railway worker who suffered brain damage when an iron

rail tie went through his forehead, obliterating his prefrontal lobes. Psychologists

witnessed first-hand the sudden and extreme change in personality that occurs from

frontal lobe damage, which initiated knowledge of the link between the brain and
personality. Gage survived, miraculously, with much of his mental cognition intact—

memory, language, motor skills—but his personality was completely changed. Once

mild mannered, dependable, and well-liked by his peers, he became impulsive,

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aggressive, and self-centered on his own desires and needs (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p.

4).
As mentioned, the limbic regions of the hippocampus, amygdala, and anterior

cingulate cortices measure out to be both smaller and overactive in the brains of

borderline individuals.

In the case of borderline personality disorder, hypersensitivity to negative

stimuli and excessive activation of negative affect, linked to hyperactivity
of the amygdala and related structures of the limbic system, and at the
same time, a lack of the capacity for cognitive contextualization and affect
control, linked to the decreased functioning of the prefrontal and orbital
cortex and the anterior cingulate area, represent significant
neurobiological correlates of this pathology. (Kernberg, 2009, p. 506)

Again, the limbic structures are involved in reality testing, modulating fear and
emotionally important events and social bonding, and in processing emotional decision

making. In BPD, limbic dominance is expressed by its specific symptoms of maladaptive

emotional regulation and a failure of the cognitive, reflective inhibition. Studies report
volume reductions in the borderline population of not only these limbic structures but

also of the right orbitofrontal and the right anterior cingulate cortices. "Given the role

these structures are thought to play in emotional information processing, it is tempting to

speculate that these structures represent anatomical correlates of the emotional
dysregulation ... seen in patients with BPD" (Coccaro & Siever, 2005, p. 163).
In response to emotionally laden images or events, the borderline limbic system is

hyperactive, yet in modulating heightened affect in order to be cognizant of reality and

learn, it is hypo-aroused. Cozolino speculates that "the core of the borderline experiences

may be organized and stored within the early formation of the insula, anterior cingulate,

OMPFC [orbitomedial prefrontal cortex], and amygdala" (2006, p. 265). Research on

brain imaging and function consistently points to a dysfunctional relationship between

the orbital prefrontal cortex and the limbic system in BPD, which are the systems

involved in the functional evolution in the brain theorized to have brought about modern
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consciousness and sense of self (Allen, 2009). As we will now see in the analytical
descriptions and analyses of BPD, this dysfunctional relationship between the orbital
prefrontal cortex and the limbic system manifests in the dysfunctional relationship

between the self and the archetypal psyche.

In The Matrix and Meaning of Character: An Archetypal and Developmental

Approach, authors Dougherty and West state that the "archetypal other has the power to

possess an undeveloped psyche" (2007, p. 11). This is the situation of the borderline

individual who has an underdeveloped ego and experiences himself as possessed by

overwhelming affective, psychic forces. Schwartz-Salant explains this possession as a

power dynamic with the unconscious:

The borderline person has a power problem; he or she is possessed by the

need to control the unconscious. Its constellations are so negative that a
flexible attitude, or one of proper reverence, is very difficult to establish.
This power complex is a source of great distress to the borderline patient,
for he or she knows that it blocks access to an authentic life based upon
relationship to others and to the unconscious. (1989, p. 131)

Dougherty and West explain that an "experience of the mysterium tremendum ...

lies at the core of the borderline dynamics. Chaotic, intense affects and crowded, fast-
paced, overpopulated and enmeshed interactions tend to govern borderline reality"
(2007, p. 108). Breaking character structures into groups based on Karen Homey's

categorization of three primary relational patterns—seeking, withdrawing, and

antagonistic—Dougherty and West place borderline patterns in seeking patterns:

The core anxiety in the seeking relational pattern revolves around

dismemberment.... This person lives with an insistent/persistent anxiety
about being dismembered and devoured .... [Borderline individuals] are
object-full rather than object-less. Borderline experience tends to revolve
around chaos, too-muchness, crowdedness, unstoppable bombardment—
bombardment that leads to dismemberment. (2007, p. 129)

This echoes Bion's (1967) theory of psychosis, in which the psychotic parts of the

self attack links between subjective and objective realities, thereby eroding the
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mentalizing, reflective functions of consciousness. Indeed, BPD has been called a

problem of mentalization by clinical, psychodynamic researchers in which the individual

does not develop a hearty enough reflective function that can withstand these inner

attacks (Fonagy & Bateman, 2005). This experience of bombardment from within

explains why the borderline condition is situated in a power complex with the
unconscious which the person feels is constantly attacking him. Corbett notes that "the

borderline personality ... is particularly prone to fragmentation in the face of the

numinosum" (1996, p. 139). Further noting that the archetype announces itself via its

affective intensity, Corbett states, as do others, that it is the state of cohesion of the self

which determines the effects of an intrusion of the collective unconscious. "If the self
structures are fragile, as in the case of borderline personalities," the result is overwhelm

and fragmentation (p. 115).

Freud's reference to the "oceanic" experience was to the early fusion states

between infant and mother:

The borderline person suffers from an absence of the nurture and support of
this 'Ocean.' But he or she has often known a mystical realm, wherein the
Ocean is not the personal mother but the numinosum. In the borderline
person especially, the numinosum combines with the mundane. (Schwartz-
Salant, 1989, p. 12)

Even though the negative affects of the unconscious tend to dominate the experience of

the borderline person, they are also privy to the mystical, sublime manifestations of the

collective unconscious as well, perhaps even more so than those with a well girded,
cohesive ego, because a cohesive self mediates and inhibits positive as well as negative
affects of the unknown, "not-me" aspects of the psyche; that is, the ego tends to find all

emotional prompts outside of its boundaries frightening. As Schwartz-Salant notes, the

"archetypal energy storms that so afflict borderline individuals and through them, others,

have traditionally been represented by myth and religion as the negative side of God" (p.
21). The borderline condition is also accessible to the positive side of the divine, but
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being that the unconscious reflects the face we show it, the borderline is locked in a

negative appraisal of self and the collective unconscious. Schwartz-Salant believes that

borderline individuals are terrified of engaging the positive form of the numinosum

because of a fear that they will be eclipsed by this force, just as they fight against being

eclipsed by the negative manifestations. "Futhermore, there is a tenacious belief that if

the positive numinosum were consciously owned for one's individual needs,

appropriation would be at the cost of taking the numinosum away from another person"

(p. 34). For borderline people, the key fact is a weak ego structure rendering them unable
to mediate the overwhelming energy of the collective unconscious whether in positive or

negative form, and, as Schwartz-Salant refers to above, unable to separate from

significant others.
In the separation-rapprochement phase—the same practicing period discussed

previously in which there are repetitive reunion transactions between infant and mother at
10-18 months—Schwartz-Salant sees the gradual incarnation of the numinosum or self

archetype through the weaving of archetypal energy into personal internal structures.

Corbett also links this gradual incarnation of transpersonal levels of the psyche with
embodying soul by making the impersonal personal (1996, p. 115). For the borderline
person, this incarnation failed, splitting the individual into secular and sacred parts, with
the secular aspect of self being dead or "as-if," false and not real, and the sacred parts
remaining outside of one's being, external and overpowering. Yet, the sacred element is

the life-giving force as well and in this respect necessary. Schwartz-Salant asks, "Isn't a

therapist who links a borderline patient's failure to negotiate rapprochement issues to

incarnation of the numinosum into space-time existence aligning with the patient's

delusional and primary process thinking?" (1989, p. 90) Yes, and in this sense, the

developmental, traumatic, personal aspects of the rapprochement failure need to be

worked through first in order to create a world-bound, cohesive ego; otherwise, the

charged presence of the archetypal psyche continues to inflate and eclipse the ego,
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causing it to rely on its primitive defenses. In Jungian terms it is true that we need to

integrate unconscious wounds in order to "develop the ego-strength to actively relate to

the numinosum .... Without this knowledge of our limitations, and hence, an awareness

of our humanity, contact with the numinosum leads to an inflated state" (Schwartz-Salant,

1989, p. 93). This is the condition of the borderline individual who exists in an often
dark, eclipsing inflation with the collective unconscious because the stage in which one

obtains a "healthy" sense of limitations, or shame, failed to mediate the affective

experiences.
Psychological treatment for BPD varies according to modality. As discussed, a

Jungian approach identifies archetypal affect and images and attempts integration of

these numinous experiences through containment in the being or mind of the analyst until
the analysand can contain her own experience consciously (Dougherty & West, 2007;

Knox, 2003; Schwartz-Salant, 1989). A neuroscience perspective is not essentially much

different except for the fact that it does not identify archetypes as archetypes; rather, a

neuroscientific approach locates the symptoms and manifestations of an inability to

contain overwhelming emotions in an imbalanced relationship between the right

hemisphere and limbic system with the prefrontal cortex (Cozolino, 2006; Fonagy &
Bateman, 2005; Schore, 1994). It would be inaccurate to label the understanding of

symptoms in correlations with brain functions as reductive; rather, this is a

neuroscientific method of egoistic de-identification with symptoms, a primary method in

analytical psychology, even if effected in de-identification from collective as opposed to

personal contents.
However, both perspectives lead to similar therapeutic dynamics involving the

necessity of developing a strong enough ego or self structure that can contain intense

affects in consciousness, modeled in and performed by the psychotherapist until the

borderline patient can contain his or her own experience. It should be noted that

borderline persons in particular tend to have an abundance of archetypal material, and

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until a certain stability of self is developed, analytical modalities that focus primarily on
the exploration of archetypal contents may not be the most effective approach (Corbett,

1996). I believe this is why in studies of efficacious treatment with BPD, which analytical

psychology does not participate in, dialectical and cognitive approaches are considered

the most effective modalities in treating BPD (Kemberg, 2009; Lieb, et al., 2004).

In the borderline personality, we see a dominance of the limbic systems of the

brain coupled or created by a weak reflective function in the orbital prefrontal cortex. A

failure of the developmental task of neurobiological

integration between limbic and cognitive functions is incomplete, resulting

in so-called dissociative personality disorder or, in the extreme case,
'double' or 'multiple personality', in which the symbiotic unity of a
person's rational-cognitive and affective-emotional levels fails to take
place. Emotional elements force their way through into the foreground and
suppress the reflective-cognitive abilities, thereby making it impossible to
find an internal expression (the ability of verbalization) for feelings and
thoughts. Such patients are caught up in stereotyped, uncontrollably
recurring mental images or, in extreme cases, in delusions (Fujiwara &
Markowitsch, 2003). (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 89)

In a less intense experience, one that lends itself to nonverbal expression but does not

overwhelm ego-consciousness all together, we might expect to find mythological, artistic,

and imaginative expression of emotions. Yet this takes a strong enough container to

mediate the oceanic feeling produced by the dominant limbic brain. In analysis, the

borderline patient is possessed by the archetypal psyche, locked in a power battle with the

collective unconscious, which announces itself through numinous affect. Symbolically

and neurobiologically, BPD represents an arrested moment, eternal and ancient, of the

emergence of self from its primordial ground.

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Chapter 5
The Other Within

One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and
for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all
draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all
call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me'
respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of
interest which each human mindfeels in those parts of creation which it can call
me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact.
(James, 1942, p. 163)
In the previous chapter, we correlated the numinous and affective intensity of the

collective unconscious with the limbic system. Neuroanatomically, this involved an

examination of the relationship between cortical (prefrontal cortex) and subcortical

(limbic) systems of the brain, as well as between anterior regions (orbitofrontal, behind

the forehead and eyes) and the medial midbrain (deep within at the center). But the

collective unconscious also imparts a felt sense of otherness within; this has been

analyzed by various concepts and mythologies in Jungian literature and the examples to
choose from are almost endless. Otherness has been described through Jung's
personality No. 2, the shadow, the alter ego, dissociated traits and qualities of the ego,
and also through the image of daimon, genius, or particular archetypes. Elie Humbert

explains that Jung's psychology does not put manifestations of the unconscious into

categories of a psychic apparatus, referring to Freud's framework, but rather his

distinction is to describe them as "images of the 'other'" (1988, p. 47). Jung's

psychology is personal. Psychic otherness is also found in Hillman's polytheistic,

personifying psyche.

Some have considered Jung's most important discovery to be the

psychological complex, others the archetype, but perhaps his main
contribution lies not so much in these ideas as in his radical, personified
formulation of them.... Whereas philosophers had conceived such forces
as mental events, Jung described them as persons. (Hillman, 1975, p. 20)

Jungian conceptual structural components of the personality—ego, self,

anima/animus, shadow, etc.—"are always imagined to be partial personalities" (Hillman,

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1975, p. 22). As Jung developed his theory of complexes, he discovered that their
"autonomy and intentionality derives from deeper figures of far wider significance" (p.

22): the archetypes. Of the archetypes, Jung says, "It is not we who personify them; they

have a personal nature from the very beginning" (quoted in Hillman, 1975, p. 22). All of

these examples involve a sense of an otherness within that is yet outside the boundaries

of the ego and possessing its own volition.

In this section we turn to neuroscientific discoveries in hemispheric differences

and distinctions between explicit and implicit consciousness, linking them with a felt

sense of an internal other that is not-me. Though I make distinctions within Jungian
theory between the collective unconscious and archetypal psyche, unconscious structures,

and a sense of internal Otherness, these concepts overlap phenomenologically and

theoretically. In the same manner, neuroscientific terms of explicit and implicit

consciousness, nonconsciousness, and the nature of the hemispheres conceptually overlap
as well.

Core Consciousness
In general, scholars of cognitive neuroscience as well as other fields agree with

depth psychologists that the vast majority of mental functioning takes place
unconsciously. "Bargh and Chartrand (1999) concluded that 95% of our actions are

unconsciously determined" (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 84). Consciousness, or free will,

then, accounts for 5% of our behavior. Implicit consciousness or nonconsciousness

makes up this 95%, its content and dynamics.

There are two ways to understand implicit consciousness: through Antonio

Damasio's levels of consciousness and through more general distinctions and workings

of implicit and explicit consciousness. First, neuroscientist Damasio considers

consciousness to be the aspect of mind that includes or is the knowing of the self that it

knows. The self is the feeling of what happens when it becomes aware that it is a self
having a feeling. In his work, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
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Making of Consciousness (1999), he distinguishes core consciousness from extended

consciousness—also called the autobiographical self—as well as from the proto-self

which exists in the structures of the brain before consciousness as a structural condition

and potential for consciousness to emerge. The proto-self is that part of the brain that is

constantly monitoring the internal milieu and contains the neuronal mapping of the
boundaries of the body. "Internal milieu, viscera, and musculoskeletal frame produce a

continuous representation, dynamic but of narrow range, while the world around us

changes dramatically, profoundly, and often unpredictably" (Damasio, 1999, p. 142).

Our organismic survival and existence happens along a narrow spectrum; not very much
change can be tolerated in biological basic functions, unlike our emotional and

psychological capacities.
Core consciousness and emotion go hand-in-hand; when one disappears so does

the other; when one exists the other exists (Damasio, 1999, p. 122). Damasio speculates
that emotion and core consciousness must occupy the same neural substrates in the brain

so that when these substrates are disrupted, both core consciousness and emotion are

disrupted. Core consciousness emerges from the somatic pressures of the body and is the
experience of the self in the here and now, in the moment, that is not extended in time by
the autobiographical self. In extended consciousness the sense of self is connected to

"the lived past and anticipated future" (p. 196). This autobiographical self "hinges on the

consistent reactivation and display of selected sets of autobiographical memories ...

those that can easily substantiate our identity, moment by moment, and our personhood"
(p. 196). Clearly, we can link Damasio's concept of the extended, autobiographical self

with the ego in depth psychology.

Core consciousness is not founded on autobiographical memory or identity.

David, a patient with profound memory loss due to herpes virus encephalitis that left

severe damage to the hippocampus (memory encoding) and temporal lobe cortices (long-

term memory storage), cannot recall any autobiographical memories or details about his
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life, has not been able to learn anything since he had encephalitis at 46 (he is now in his

60s), and can retain short-term memories for about 1 minute. Yet David has core
consciousness: he has retained general, semantic knowledge of the world, how it

operates, he can hold a normal conversation about general topics, and his emotional

resonance and response to others and his experience are normal. But he remembers no
unique details whatsoever, about himself, his family, or you, if you were to meet him. If

pressed for details, David will fabricate a story, making something up on the spot to

answer the question.

Finally, his spontaneous behavior is purposeful—he will look

appropriately for a good chair to sit in, for food and drink to consume, for
a television screen or a window from which he can watch the world. Left
to his own devices, he sustains purposeful behavior relative to the context
he is in for many minutes or hours, provided that what he is doing is
engaging .... When almost nothing comes to mind, David's sense of self
still does. (Damasio, 1999, pp. 117-118)
In medical school, Damasio received a standard answer to his questions about

how we produced the conscious mind: language did it. He did not believe this.
"Language ...," says Damasio, "is a translation of something else, a conversion from

nonlinguistic images which stand for entities, events, relationships, and inferences"
(1999, p. 107). In contrast to postmodern and deconstructionist theories that posit

consciousness from language, Damasio's work actually finds the reverse: the existence of

nonverbal images or states of conscious knowing of a self who can then know that certain

translations in language are accurate (p. 108). In Damasio's work and in neuroscience in

general, consciousness is found to be essentially emotional, with linguistic, linear,

rational thought at the conscious tip of an ocean of implicit, physiological nonconscious

ground.
Even though Schwartz-Salant (1989) makes a persuasive case for the fourth

element in Jungian psychology as the missing feminine and the body in Christian trinity

symbolism, the body itself is missing from much of Jungian theory. Nonetheless, there
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are clear parallels here between Damasio's emergence of consciousness from the

somatic-affective pressures of the body into increasingly complex levels of consciousness

and Jung's understanding of archetypes which places them at the affective-imaginal end

opposite the somatic instincts along a spectrum of consciousness (Jung, 1954/1969, p.

207). In both concepts, consciousness exists along a spectrum that moves between the

body and instincts, to the imagination and ego-consciousness.

Implicit Consciousness
LeDoux and Debiec note that the natural sciences—neuro- and cognitive

scientists—have come late to the discussion of nonconsciousness or the unconscious,

typically the province of the social sciences, and in particular, depth psychology, but are
showing a different view of the unconscious mind. "The unconscious processes viewed

as relevant to the self are diverse, and include aspects of normal perceptual, memory, and

emotional functions" (2003, p. vii). The bestial, immature, and primitive unconscious of

the Freudian Id, witnessed primarily in children and the mentally ill, while still accurate,
is a small portion of the unconscious mind that the neuroscience terms "nonconscious" or
"implicit consciousness" encompass.
Essentially, explicit consciousness is declarative, it is that aspect of consciousness

that we are aware of and that is or can be expressly stated and definite. Implicit
consciousness is then that aspect of consciousness outside of explicit awareness. The

correlation with depth psychological distinctions between conscious and unconscious are

evident. Whereas Freudian psychoanalysis has tended to understand the unconscious as

personal, repressed material, for Freud himself "the mind itself is unconscious, and

consciousness is mere perception of the mind's actual processes" (Solms & Turnbull,

2002, p. 72). This view is resonant with Jung's view of the relationship between

consciousness and unconsciousness as well, in that ego-consciousness is a slim portion of

the processes of the mind as the personal unconscious is a slim portion of the dynamics of

the unconscious as a whole. Also, as noted in the beginning of chapter 5, Jung reminds
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us that what we call the unconscious is the subjective experience in consciousness of

what is essentially unknown.

The primary distinction in explicit and implicit consciousness against

consciousness and unconsciousness in analytical psychology is that states of

consciousness and unconsciousness are related to ego states; that is, what the ego is

conscious of or not and how it relates to unconscious material. Neuroscience, on the

other hand, uses explicit and implicit consciousness as terms to denote processes in the

brain (i.e., there are explicit and implicit processes and content that can be entirely

separate from one another). An example is the semantic knowledge system which can
remain thoroughly intact although the autobiographical knowledge system is wiped out,

or learning in the procedural memory system when conscious learning is obliterated.

Analytical theory recognizes that the unconscious operates outside of the awareness or

knowledge of ego-consciousness but cannot and does not make much comment other
than what the ego is aware of at any given time. In this way, in Jungian theory,

consciousness and unconsciousness are more often solely in connection with their

contents.
Neuroscience does not use the term ego so readily; although it is sometimes used,
more often researchers employ the term self. Explicit consciousness is certainly what the

ego is aware of, but it is more than this. For example, it encompasses the processes and

content of semantic, declarative memory: that aspect of memory that includes knowledge
and information not associated with autobiographical memory (and hence, the

autobiographical self). Knowledge that broccoli is green, that we eat food with a fork,

and that George Washington was the first U.S. president are examples of semantic

memory and explicit consciousness without autobiographical reference to the ego. A self

was present for conscious focus and learning of semantic knowledge, yet it is

distinguished by the lack of the self in the memory; that is, most of us do not recall the

personal moment and circumstances when we learned that we eat food with a fork or that
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the H on the left is for Hot on a faucet. We learn semantic knowledge personally, but it is

not stored in our autobiographical memory system. Developmentally, the signs of

explicit consciousness emerge between 18 months and 4 years of age through self-

recognition, use of personal pronouns, and pretend play (Lewis, 2003, p. 114).
In a logical extension, implicit consciousness refers to those processes of the mind

that occur outside of explicit ego awareness, that are unavailable to explicit

consciousness or are not declarative in nature. "The term 'implicit' is used to refer to

processes that occur outside conscious awareness .... [It] is also applied to those
processes that occur without conscious control" (Devos & Banaji, 2003, p. 179). Some

Jungians, such as Knox (2003, 2004), correlate implicit consciousness functions with

archetypes-as-such, in that both are inaccessible to consciousness and have a dynamic

and autonomous nature not dependent on consciousness. In later chapters, I argue against

this interpretation of archetypes-in-themselves.

Implicit consciousness is correlated with the limbic system in that "emotional

states ... refer to implicit consciousness. Implicit consciousness can have goals, can
learn and profit from experience, can control functions, and can react to events, including
people" (Lewis, 2003, p. 110). In relation to the term unconscious, it is more accurate to

call implicit consciousness nonconscious rather than unconscious, as unconscious implies

a subrelationship to consciousness that nonconscious does not impart. "The unconscious,
in the narrow meaning in which the word has been etched in our culture, is only a part of

the vast amount of processes and contents that remain nonconscious" (Damasio, 1999, p.

228). In comparison, the unconscious is always understood as the subjective sense of the

ego's knowledge or relationship to certain contents or processes. I propose that the term

unconscious in its personal and collective sense always be used to denote the subjective

experience of objective implicit processes or contents of the mind. In both

neuroscientific and analytical psychology, concepts of implicit consciousness and the

objective psyche are not dependent on the ego or explicit consciousness, whereas the ego
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and explicit consciousness are dependent on an unconscious ground of structures and

implicit processes.

We tend to find incongruence uncomfortable, leading us to avoid cognitive

dissonance: the experience of holding two contradictory ideas or feelings in mind. Most

of the time, we will move to rationalize or justify one idea or feeling over the other in

order to obtain emotional comfort. In a study of consistency bias and cognitive

dissonance, researchers asked if it was necessary to have explicit memory of the past

experience that is causing dissonance with current experience in order to prompt the

response of psychological rationalizations.

This rationale assumes that the past can influence the present only through
conscious or explicit recollection of past happenings. However, more than
two decades worth of research on implicit memory (Schacter, 1987) has
demonstrated that past experiences can influence subsequent experience
and behavior despite an absence of conscious or explicit recollection.
(Schacter, Chiao, & Mitchell, 2003, p. 235)

The specific study cited involved a control group and a group of amnesiacs who
ranked art prints as to how much they liked them. Both groups were then made to choose

between two prints that they had ranked as equally desirable to keep for themselves. At a
later time the participants were asked again to rank all the prints in order of how much
they liked them, indicating which one they had chosen previously. In previous studies

with nonamnesiac subjects, in the second ranking of the same prints after being made to
choose one, the subjects consistently inflated their desire for the print they chose and

deflated their desire for the print they did not choose. In the study that included

amnesiacs, who all indicated they did not know, explicitly, which print they had chosen
previously, they demonstrated the same consistency bias of inflation and deflation as the

control subjects.

These results suggest that amnesic patients were trying to reduce the
dissonance created by choosing between the two prints even though they
lacked conscious memory for making the choice that produced dissonance
in the first place .... [Further] the results suggest that considering implicit
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forms of memory is critical for understanding the relation between

memory and self. (Schacter et al., 2003, p. 236)

In many various studies "modularity of brain function has demonstrated that areas
of the brain are quite capable of carrying out complex tasks or learning complex
problems without other areas having explicit knowledge of them (Bechara et al., 1995;

Gazzaniga, 1985; LeDoux, 1990)" (Lewis, 2003, p. 126). In one such study, Damasio

(1999) and his colleagues designed and conducted an experiment on the unconscious

level of learning in which participants were asked to hold the tip of a stylus pen to a dot
on the edge of circular plate while the plate moved in a circular motion. A machine

recorded the time intervals that the stylus was in contact with the dot. Participants
mastered this task in a few sessions and had a predictable learning curve when the

performances were plotted on a graph.

Then the research team used amnesiac patients, including David discussed earlier,

who have an inability to consciously learn or retain new information and memories. The
amnesiacs "learn it perfectly and their actual performance is in no way distinguishable
from the performance of the normal subjects" (Damasio, 1999, p. 299). The major

difference between the participants was that the amnesiac patients did not learn any

information that surrounded the performance (i.e., the people, place, apparatus, and
instructions for the experiment). To them, consciously, it was the first time they were
participating in the experiment, but their nonconscious mind was learning the task just as

an individual with functioning explicit memory retention did. Finally, the implicit

nonconscious knowledge of the learned skill in amnesiac patients was retained and able

to be employed in re-testing 2 years later (p. 299).

Studies with face-agnosic patients—individuals who cannot recognize familiar

faces—demonstrate how implicit consciousness contains personal emotional responses as

well.

When a face-agnosic patient... is shown, in random presentation, faces of

people whom she has never met as well as faces of close relatives and
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friends, and when we simultaneously record her skin conductance with a

polygraph, a dramatic dissociation takes place. To her conscious mind,
the faces are all equally unrecognizable. Friends, relatives, and the truly
unfamiliar generate the same void, and nothing comes to mind to permit
the discovery of their identity. And yet, the presentation of virtually every
face of a friend or relative generates a distinct skin-conductance response,
while unknown faces do not. None of these responses is noticed by the
patient. Moreover, the magnitude of the skin-conductance response is
higher for the closest of relatives. (Damasio, 1999, p. 300)

Of this experiment, Damasio says "the finding illustrates the power of

nonconscious processing, the fact that there can be specificity underneath consciousness"

(p. 301). Clearly, a nonconscious aspect of the mind is perceiving external reality
directly, accurately, and with personal response without the awareness or involvement of

ego-consciousness, and we can easily understand why this may express subjectively as a

sense of an internal other separate from the ego. In fact, neurobiologically, the decisions
of implicit consciousness not only can occur outside of explicit consciousness, but do not

need the involvement of explicit consciousness; yet, explicit consciousness depends on

implicit functions for its existence as the ego depends on the unconscious. In the

specialized functions of the cerebral hemispheres in general, and through

commissuratomies—"split-brain" procedures through which the corpus callosum

connecting the hemispheres is severed—in particular, we witness further a possible origin

of a sense of an internal other.

Cerebral Hemispheres
The cerebral hemispheres are almost anatomically identical, yet as "regards

mental functioning ... the two hemispheres are radically different" (Solms & Turnbull,

2002, p. 240). In general, the right hemisphere is known for superior visuo-spatial skills,

is dominant for visual understanding and also holds superior synthetic, holistic

understanding.2 In contrast, the left hemisphere has superior language and analytical

2 Discussion and analyses of hemispheric dominance and differences based on right-handedness.

8-10% of the population is left-handed; 70% of left-handers are believed to also have the same left
hemisphere/right hemisphere demarcations as right-handers. That is, their left hemisphere is dominant in
language and right hemisphere in visual-spatial functions, among others. Of the remaining 30% of left­
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skills and works to breaks things down rather than synthesize. Yet "the world of science

supports the idea that the relationship between the two cerebral hemispheres is more

appropriately viewed as two complementary halves of a whole rather than as two

individual entities or identities" (Taylor, 2006, p. 29).
The right hemisphere takes in whole moments of time, thinks in pictures, images,

and intuitions. "Information processed this way allows us to take an immediate inventory

about the space around us and our relationship to that space" (Taylor, 2006, p. 30). The

right brain is empathic, imaginative, spontaneous, and creative while the left hemisphere
"takes each of those rich and complex moments created by the right hemisphere and

strings them together in timely succession" (p. 31). While the left hemisphere houses

primary language regions and is biased towards a sense of a "conscious linguistic self,"
the right hemisphere is biased towards a "physical emotional self' (Cozolino, 2006, p.

25).
The hemispheres have differing emotional natures as well: it is believed that

positive, approach-based emotion is processed in the left prefrontal cortex, whereas the
right hemisphere, more richly connected to the subcortical limbic systems, is dominant in

appraisal and negative emotions.

Right brain functions are similar to Freud's notion of the unconscious ....
Perhaps most significantly, the right brain responds to negative emotional
stimuli prior to conscious awareness. Thus unconscious emotional
processing based on past experiences invisibly guides our moment-to-
moment thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Kimura et al., 2004).
(Cozolino, 2006, pp. 67-68)

Discussion of the contrasts in hemispheric characteristics leads one to speculate

that Jung's childhood sense of personality No. 2 was generated from the right

hemisphere.

handers, half are thought to have reversed hemispheric functions, making them dominated by the language
hemisphere, same as right-handers, and the remainder have language functions dispersed equally in the two
hemispheres. This would make the majority of left-handers, 70%, "right brain dominant" (i.e., the non-
language hemisphere is dominant), an interesting topic outside of the domain of this research.
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Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons.
One was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less
intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent, and clean than many other
boys. The other was grown up—old, in fact—skeptical, mistrustful,
remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the
moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to
dreams, and to whatever 'God' worked directly in him. (Jung, 1961, p. 42)
At least one other author has speculated along these lines of right hemisphere dominance
in Jung. In Anatomy of Genius (1986), Jan Ehrenwald links geniuses from history—

Freud and Jung among Beethoven, Da Vinci and others—with hemispheric dominance in

their personalities, talents, and styles. In Jung's confrontation with the unconscious,
Ehrenwald sees a shift to right brain dominance in his thinking and work, "an inspired

prophet and dispenser of a beguiling personal myth in an increasingly demythologized

technological age" (p. 100).

The left hemisphere generates distinctions, boundaries, and, by psychologically
minded scientists, is considered the home of the ego. "One of the jobs of our left

hemisphere language centers is to define our selfby saying 'I am'" (Taylor, 2006, p. 32).

Therefore, Taylor understands the left hemisphere as the "home of our ego center" that
"revels in our individuality, honors our uniqueness, and strives for independence" (pp.
32-33). Metaphoric and visionary perception is generated in the right brain; hence
Ehrenwald's description of Jung as a prophet. "Without the right hemisphere's ability to
evaluate communication in the context of the bigger picture, the left hemisphere tends to

interpret everything literally" (Taylor, 2006, p. 34).

However, we need to make a careful and subtle distinction here, which is that

ego-consciousness cannot be completely and simply relegated to the left hemisphere and

the unconscious to the right hemisphere. This left hemisphere bias of language tends to

make it easy to equate it with the ego. The primary language centers are housed in the

left hemisphere, but not all aspects of ego-consciousness are captured or processed in

language. This is demonstrated in cases in which damage to the left hemisphere does not
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equal an inhibition of ego-consciousness—it manifests in an inhibition or diminishment

of the languaged aspects of ego-consciousness which can be considered a core aspect of

ego-consciousness but not its totality. As an example, Solms and Turnbull (2002)

describe a patient, a young man in his 20s who suffered a stroke which affected Broca's

area, a region in the left hemisphere's frontal lobe which is primary in communicative,

intentional production of speech. He was reduced to saying a very few words. This

patient was offered psychotherapy which he eagerly took part in, and, through much
effort and courage was able to express, share, and consciously "digest" his profound

losses and eventually construct a new, workable life for himself (p. 258). This patient had

sustained considerable damage to the left hemisphere but did not lose the consciousness

and executive functions of ego-consciousness.

As another example of the bilaterality of ego-consciousness, some patients sustain

brain damage that manifests phenomenologically as though the restraints of ego-

consciousness are weakened, allowing the irrational, chaotic unconscious to flood

consciousness. "These patients' beliefs are riddled with contradictions, their perception
of external reality is overwhelmed by their wishful fantasies, they appear to have no
sense of time, and their thinking is grossly distorted by primary-process transformations"
(Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 260). Yet these patients sustain bilateral lesions to the

ventromesial (lower orbitofrontal) area of the prefrontal lobes. Specifically, damage to

this area produces disorders of the regulatory function of language, our "inner speech"

that subordinates our actions to reflective thinking and decisions (p. 260). In these

patients, the ego-consciousness function of reflective inhibition is damaged.

In simplistic terms, the right hemisphere is often cited as being the seat of the

unconscious and of emotional processing. It is true that the right hemisphere is more

connected to the subcortical and limbic systems of the brain and processes the emotional

content of circumstance and language, for example. However, research indicates that the

left hemisphere plays a predominant role in approach-oriented, positive emotions,

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whereas the right hemisphere is dominant in emotional appraisal and negative emotions.

Considering the nature of the limbic system, discussed earlier, this connection with
negative emotions in the right hemisphere makes sense. In general, the majority of

patients who suffer damage to the left hemisphere experience heightened catastrophic or

depressed emotions, whereas the majority of patients who experience damage to the right

hemisphere experience blunted affect. "Overall, there appears to be a good case for

believing that the right hemisphere is more involved in both the processing or perception
of emotional information than is the left" (Deutsch & Springer, 1998, p. 233). However,

researchers maintain a critical attitude to a clear demarcation of emotional processing to

the right hemisphere as they do towards assigning language functions to the left
hemisphere; each hemisphere is functionally specialized, but each plays a necessary role

in all functions as well.

Our sense of a self involves far more than that what can be perceived and
expressed through language, as is demonstrated beautifully in Taylor's (2006) account of
suffering a massive stroke in her left hemisphere and also in Paris' (2007) rich account of

suffering left hemisphere damage. Both women experienced a definite, rich, complex

sense of self, though they lost their left hemisphere language skills.
"Split-brain research has dramatically confirmed that, in most persons, control of
speech is localized to the left hemisphere" (Deutsch & Springer, 1998, p. 42). However,

the right hemisphere is involved with certain aspects of speech, such as prosody and

singing. In patients with damage to the speech or comprehension functions of the left

hemisphere, they can sing songs known to them clearly and without hesitation. Also, the
right hemisphere is involved with nonliteral aspects of language such as humor and

metaphor. Without the metaphorical perception and interpretations of the right

hemisphere, the left hemisphere language centers will interpret everything literally

(Sidtis, 2006; Taylor, 2006).

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The capacity for language brings a prominent, and humorous, characteristic of the
left hemisphere: the tendency towards appalling confabulations and an

ability to weave stories. This story-teller... is specifically designed to

make sense of the world outside of us, based upon minimal amounts of
information .... Most impressively, our left brain is brilliant in its ability
to make stuff up, and fill in the blanks when there are gaps in its factual
data. (Taylor, 2006, p. 142)

A neuropsychological disorder called anosognosia hemiplegia results from

damage to the right parietal cortex, the area that maintains a physical representation of

the left side of the body. Individuals with this disorder do not recognize the left side of

their body as their own and are unable to direct it in action. When asked specifically to

do certain things with their left arm, such as point at something, they cannot, but will

come up with an explanation when asked why. One patient explained "because I didn't

want to" and then identifies her left hand as really belonging to her son. Another patient

claimed that her left hand was two inches from the doctor's nose, which he had requested

she point to, though it actually lay paralyzed on the bed beside her body. The brain

damage leaves the individual unable to process sensory data for this part of her body,

causing it literally not to exist, "and as a result she engages in elaborate confabulations to

explain its presence" (Turk, Heatherton, Macrae, Kelley, & Gazzaniga, 2003, p. 71). It is

not only neuroscientists and analysts who have collected many examples of the

confabulations of ego-consciousness; surely we each have our secret stash of such

embarrassing epiphanies.

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga calls the left hemisphere "the interpreter"

(Turk et al., 2003, p. 70) and Steven Pinker says, "The conscious mind—the self or

soul—is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief' (2002, p. 43). Pinker notes further
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that among Freud's many insights into the nature of the ego is "the discovery that often

our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our

actions" (p. 43). Pinker claims that the decisive blow to the ego came through cognitive

neuroscience's demonstration of the ego's relativity through research in cases where the

corpus callosum that connects the brain's hemisphere was severed. Commissuratomies,

as these split-brain surgeries are called, also give the most dramatic examples of the

presence of the other within.

Split-brain surgery came about in the attempt to free individuals afflicted with

severe epilepsy whose condition could not be addressed in any other way. In this

procedure the thick bundle of nerve fibers that connects the cerebral hemispheres in the

anterior of the brain is severed. The bilateral structures of the limbic system, however,

such as the amygdala and hippocampus, which sit in the deep, medial midbrain, remain

untouched.

Split-brain research has identified different cognitive processing styles for

the two cerebral hemispheres. The right hemisphere appears to process
what it receives and no more, while the left hemisphere appears to make
elaborations, associations and ... attempts to assign a coherent
explanation to events or behavior, even when in reality none is present.
(Turk et al., 2003, p. 70)
N. G., a commissurotomy patient of Gazzaniga, in an experiment to determine the

processing of information occurring outside of ego-consciousness, sat in a chair facing a

screen. Fixating on a black dot on the screen in front of her, images were flashed (one to

two tenths of a second) to the right of the dot and to the left of the dot. The left eye sees

images to the left of the dot and is connected to the right hemisphere; the right eye to the

right of the dot and to the left hemisphere. N. G. could say what she saw with the right

eye because the left hemisphere could translate it into language, but because she could

not articulate verbally what her left eye/right hemisphere saw, her left hemisphere, when
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responding to the question of what she saw, replied, "Nothing." It was clear that she in

fact did register and understand the images with the right hemisphere, but because it
could not be verbalized in language, it remained nonconscious to the left hemisphere.

For example, after a picture of a nude woman was flashed to the left eye/right

hemisphere, N. G. giggled and blushed but could not say why except that it was "some

machine" the doctors had. "It is very common for the verbal left hemisphere to try to
make sense of what has occurred in testing situations where information is presented to
the right hemisphere. As a result, the left brain sometimes comes out with erroneous and

often elaborate rationalizations based on partial clues" (Deutsch & Springer, 1998, p. 39).

It is provocative, and perhaps embarrassing, to consider how often we interpret our world

based on partial clues and inferences, by making rational what is, in reality, incomplete.
Precisely this tendency and incompleteness of ego-consciousness is what analytical
psychology is designed to address.

In another experiment with N. G., sitting in front of a screen and focusing on a dot
in the middle, an image of a cup is flashed to her right eye/left hemisphere. When asked

what she saw she replied, "Cup." Next an image of a spoon is flashed to her left eye/right
hemisphere and N. G. claims she saw nothing. But when then asked to reach under the
screen in front of her with her left hand and find by touch only among various objects one

similar to what was just flashed (but she didn't see), N. G. picks out a spoon (Deutsch &

Springer, 1998, p. 36). Experiments such as these with N. G. have been repeated and are

common results with split-brain patients. An aspect of mind that perceives and interprets

reality and can respond to it accurately is clearly indicated and clearly outside of the

domains of ego-consciousness. This refers to a nature of the unconscious captured in

Jungian theories in particular, as opposed to the Freudian image of the unconscious as

repressed material, able to act but blind in its ignorance. Whereas the unconscious is

certainly represented by blind, repressed material, these split-brain experiments

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demonstrate a present, responsive intelligence, more akin to Jung's concept of the

unconscious as an autonomous Other.

Neuroscientists and psychologists alike know that the vast majority of processes

and content of the mind are unconscious and that the verbal self of the left hemisphere is

driven to make sense only out of the data it perceives, including its own behaviors and

feelings, which may very well be unconsciously motivated. For example, Gazzaniga and

LeDoux found repeatedly in a split-brain patient, P. S., a forced consistency or

rationalization from the left hemisphere of unconsciously motivated events. P.S. was

presented with visual images, again focusing on a dot in the center of a screen, to each

hemisphere: a chicken claw to the left and a snow scene to the right. P. S. claimed to
have seen the chicken claw but not the snow scene image. He was then asked to choose

among several pictures in front of him one that best related to what he saw on the screen.
P. S. chose a picture of a shovel and a chicken. When asked why he explained he

saw a picture of a chicken claw and one needs a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.

Gazzaniga and LeDoux interpreted these results, repeated in trial after trial, that "the
major task of the 'verbal self is to construct a reality based on actual behavior....

Verbal mechanisms are not always privy to the origin of our actions and can attribute
cause to actions not actually accessible to them" (Deutsch & Springer, 1998, pp. 338-
339). V. S. Ramachandran is more blunt: "Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an

elaborate post-hoc rationalization of things you really do for other reasons" (2004, p. 1).

He is more cynical of consciousness than is really called for. We fool ourselves, yes, but

the verbal, rational left hemisphere does much more than rationalize; we wouldn't

consider Bach's violin sonatas, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, or whispered

conversations in the middle of the night with a lover, elaborate post-hoc rationalizations

of things we do for other reasons.

More telling still of a presence of an internal other is a phenomenon known as
acute disconnection syndrome, which sometimes occurs after a commissurotomy in
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which patients experience competitive, conflicting behaviors between their right and left

hands. Typically this syndrome lasts only a few weeks to a few months, though there are

some well-known cases that last longer and are more dramatic, such as the right-handed

man whose left hand reached out and choked his wife while his right hand pulled it off of

her. Or the woman whose right hand would reach for an article of clothing in her closet
while her left hand grabbed something completely different and wouldn't let go of the

garment; she had to call in her daughter to help her pry the left hand loose. "Cases such

as these support the concept that the cerebral commissures transmit information that is

inhibitory in nature," allowing one hemisphere to mediate or stop the activities of the
other. Researchers speculate that this inhibitory function is "quickly masked by

compensatory mechanisms in most split-brain patients" (Deutsch & Springer, 1998, p.

40). The question comes up, who is inhibiting whom? The data from acute
disconnection syndrome indicate that the hemispheres not only house differing cognitive
styles but also different tastes, feelings, and desires towards things and people in the
world.

Conclusions
The hemispheric differences boil down to the dependence of ego-consciousness on

language or linguistic processing. For this reason, the functions performed

predominantly by the right hemisphere, outside of language, are experienced as

unconscious or nonconscious. Theorists argue over the linguistic necessity of

consciousness; it seems to me from research of split-brain patients, left hemisphere

damage, and the experiences of Paris (2007) and Taylor (2006) who both had left

hemisphere damage, consciousness and experiences of the self from a dominant right

hemisphere are intact, but what is linguistically dependent is ego-consciousness: the

sense of "I" that we refer to every day in typical thought, speech, and action, which is, as

it turns out, a small portion of consciousness and the self.

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So, is there more than one self to a brain? Some scientists conclude that there are

different selves represented by each hemisphere in the brain; others conclude as certainly

there are not. It is a controversial topic, to say the least. It seems to me to be a matter of

self and identity. There is not more than one self (in the normal personality or brain) but

there is definitely more than one identity, or, looked at another way, many levels of

identity. A self is a whole and containing concept and experience; an identity is a

particular quality of experience of the self in a given context, at a given age, with certain

perspectives—sensual, emotional, linguistic—among them. The problem is that we each,

in our daily lives, tend to think our identity is our self, as Jung noticed in our

identification with the persona. This is confounded by the fact that left hemisphere ego-

consciousness feels compelled to rationally create cohesion, order, and sense at the cost

of veracity and reality. Where neuroscientists see that the verbal left hemisphere will

confabulate wildly to maintain its illusion of control and consistency, Jung saw that the

ego engages in self-deception to maintain control and consistency in response to internal

pressures.

A review of the characteristics, functions, and cognitive styles of the hemispheres

certainly relates to the understanding of the relationship between conscious and

unconscious in analytical psychology. The depth psychological unconscious is

emotional, primordial, and ancient, possessing an irrational intelligence; in the right

hemisphere there is a predominance of emotional processing, especially from the

primitive limbic system, metaphorical and nonsensical sensibilities, music and

abstraction, image, and the appraisal of factors that lie just below our consciousness but
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that we are dependent on for perceiving an embodied world, such as the valence of voice

and interpreting body language.

But there is also a connection between the concepts and felt experiences of a

collective unconscious and an internal other in the right hemisphere and implicit

consciousness. Neurobiologically, there are regions and processes of the brain that in

fact, if the ego is understood as a specific pattern of neuronal firing in the brain that is

constructed via personal experience after birth and that comes into consciousness through

language, then there is literally an Other within, neuronally mapped within the same

brain, with relationships to the egoistic neuronal map but existing autonomously outside

the ego as well.

In the third perspective of the collective unconscious—imagination—manifests in

mythopoetic and nonpersonal, though not impersonal, form due to its correlations with

the limbic, ancient, "not-me" regions of the brain. I have argued in this first section that

the subjective phenomena of the collective unconscious correlates with the limbic system,

right hemispheric, implicit consciousness aspects of the brain. These regions and

processes are outside of ego-consciousness, they exist and function before ego exists; in

fact, they are the ground of instinctual affect and archetypal symbolism that emerges into

the psyche. This relegates to them a personal felt sense of transcendence, of otherness, of

ancientness, and autonomy.

These areas and processes of the brain are experienced by the ego as "not-me"

because truly, though the ego shares the same brain and body with the limbic system,

right hemisphere, and implicit processes, they exist and operate outside of the boundaries

of ego-consciousness. The limbic and implicit aspects of the brain evolved over millions
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of years, whereas the brain of ego-consciousness evolved over the last few hundred

thousand years. In a symbolic representation of this fact, the limbic and implicit systems

of the brain "come with us" when we are born; they are intact and functioning in each

infant just as they functioned in our ancestors. Through the development of the frontal

lobes, the individual that knows and names the collective unconscious is born.
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Section II: Fate

Fate reaches us through others in two primary ways: our ancestral legacy and the

conditioning influences of our childhood and culture. Phenomenologically, in neither of

these circumstances do we have any choice; it is what you get, what you are born in to.
We do not choose the flaws, strengths, and characteristic weaknesses of our ancestral

line. Nor do we choose the family dynamics we are born in to, the level of consciousness

of the significant others in our early lives, nor the cultural-historical epoch we become an

individual within. All of these aspects of identity are brought about by others—personal,
collective, and anonymous. This is a statement of phenomenological, subjective

experience and is not meant as a statement of fact. Even within a paradigm of

reincarnation that believes we, or an a priori soul, chooses our parents and circumstances

of fate, the immediate, personal, and phenomenological experience of fate is that we are
confronted with events that have an impact on us but which we did not consciously

choose. This is reflected in the Christian serenity prayer to be granted the ability to
change what one can, accept what one cannot change, and the wisdom to know the
difference. Fate, as understood here and phenomenologically referenced, is represented

in the request for wisdom to accept what one cannot change.

Referring to a famous image in Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein, Palmer notes

that a hammer that is simply present is an object that can be weighed, catalogued, and
compared with other objects; but this is not knowing or understanding the object. It is

not until one comes upon a broken hammer that we at once grasp what a hammer is

(1969, p. 133). A depth psychological understanding of this metaphor is that it is through

our wounds—where we are "broken"—that we separate from others and the emergent

consciousness breaks through our unconscious identifications. Our psychological

wounds are the space where we become conscious of ourselves, where we can then

reflect and come to know ourselves as a separate being or person. Identity has this same

relationship to the fate and conditioning received via others: it is not until we are marked
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and wounded that our peculiar shape and potentials emerge through the horizon of our

limits. That is, it is only through the limits and falsehoods imposed by what Hollis

(2001) refers to as the provisional or acquired self, that we find the way to become who

we are.
Another aspect of identity brought about by others is content. By content, I mean

the literal content of our knowledge, our minds, our imagination, and our identities.

Content encompasses images and facts, but also dynamics, interpretations, truths and

falsehoods, beliefs and values. Not all of this content, of course, is determined by others,
but much of it is. Which part others and which part psyche? The chapters in this section

are written with this question as impulse. First, we look at the role of temperament in

neurobiological profiles as the first representation of our personality in our typological

characteristics. Our neurobiological profile—literally, how our individual brain is

structured functionally to perceive the world—determines our instinctual, automatic

sensitivities and lack thereof towards the world. This aspect of identity is captured in
William James's aphorism: "Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character.

Sow a character, reap a destiny" (1942, p. 82).

Most often how we think of others shaping personality is through childhood
experiences, especially our parents. Developmental psychology research is heavily

studied and the correlations between genetics, rearing environment, early experiences,

and resulting personality have been so validated as to be assumed. In attempting to find

the edges of conditioning, and from which source, we will look at a range of ingredients
from genetics, rearing environment, brain development, and culture through the lens of
an influential and rather radical text that asserts that the assumption of the parents

providing the nurture aspect of the nature-nurture debate is bunk. The benefit of a radical

idea is that it has clear boundaries that can be used as a scalpel, both for and against the

originating theory, in drawing distinctions between realms of influence.

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The idea of the self-made individual is a common image in contemporary

American culture that lends to the myth that you can be anyone you want to be. It's clear

this is not true, but there is wiggle room in consciousness for self-creation. Which

attributes are learned, which are inherited? How malleable are our patterned ways of
being? These are the questions this second section intends to explore.
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Chapter 6
Temperament and Typology
Temperament

In 1929, Jung speculated that there might eventually be a bridge found between

psychology and physiology - their definite relationship established - via typology

(1929/1969, p. 107). Seventy-five years later, in 2004, reporting on the findings from a

large, longitudinal study on temperament in children that involved establishing biological

correlates, researchers Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman referred to Jung's work on
typology, stating that his insights into introversion and extroversion "apply with uncanny

accuracy" to their research findings (2004, p. 218).

Jung discussed the necessity of proceeding from the mind to the body in
methodological attempts to understand the psyche.

It is necessary that research should follow this direction until certain

elementary psychic facts are established with sufficient certainty. But once
having established these facts, we can reverse the procedure. We can then
put the question: What are the bodily correlatives of a given psychic
condition? (Jung, 1933, p. 75)

He proceeded on the certainty of his empirical observations of psychic conditions;

intuitive genius aided him here because the physical, scientific methods did not catch up
with certain psychic facts until time tipped over the 21st century. Kagan and Snidman

found the same relationships in their research into the neurobiological correlates of

temperament as Jung found in his theory of types. Specifically, Kagan and Snidman's
research asked how the amygdalar threshold of excitability was correlated with
temperament.

Neuroscientific methods have caught up with Jung's foresight.

For much of the last century, personality psychology has been concerned
more with describing personality than with explaining it—that is, with
how people differ from each other rather than with why they differ from
each other. One reason for this emphasis on description rather than
explanation was the immaturity of human neuroscience. (De Young &
Gary, 2009, p. 323)
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Neuroscientific research into temperament and personality inquires into the

functions of the limbic or visceral brain, the role of chemical neurotransmitters such as

serotonin, Cortisol, or dopamine, and the physiological responses of the skin, heart rate,
and blood flow to the brain, but what they are all measuring is essentially the innate level

and pattern of arousal in the brain. Biologically, temperament is a phenomenon of the

central nervous system (CNS) which stems from the limbic brain. The level of arousal of

the CNS, or stated another way, the height of the threshold for stimulation, determines

how we react cognitively, both consciously and unconsciously, to the constant

stimulation received by our senses. Our most basic orientation to the world is captured in
whether we tend to first approach or avoid novelty. Jung called these hard-wired

strategies extraversion and introversion, respectively. Recall from the preceding chapters
that basic emotions—again, in distinction to feelings—are driven by ancient limbic

structures and neurochemicals. We inherit a neurobiological capacity to regulate

stimulation. The arousal thresholds, not the potential or learned response, of these

somatic-affective functions are genetically determined. Neuroscientific research in

temperament and personality seeks to establish the correlation between character traits
and affective arousal functions of the brain.
The general and consistent distinction between temperament and personality is the

line between biology and environment: "temperament is a basic property of the nervous

system of both animals and humans, whereas personality is a product of external social

conditions and is an essentially human phenomenon" (Vernon, 1994, p. 240).

Temperament arises from the regulation of arousal and emotion reliably producing

characteristic and automatic responses to experience, whereas personality is the

constructed, storied level of identity that emerges through our relationships with others,

ourselves, and the world. In enough studies over time to be generally accepted in the

scientific community as reliable and accurate, the percentage of heritability for both

temperament and personality traits is about 50%. Obviously, temperament and

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personality have an intimate relationship; they are often used synonymously. "One

possible interpretation of these findings is personality variables are so influenced by and

reflective of temperamental characteristics that much of the heritability observed in adult

personality is temperament based" (Vernon, 1994, p. 239). Temperament, being a

biological function of the nervous system and arousal regulation, would appear to be the

less malleable to environmental influences; personality is considered more malleable due

to being a hybrid of genetic potential and environmental conditioning. In light of this

understanding of the genetic origins of temperament, we can understand temperament as
the underlying, neurobiological structure of personality and conditioning as those
environmental influences that shape biological potentials via attitudes, values, and

interpretations into reliable and characteristic expressions and patterns of behavior. In

this sense, personality traits refer to temperament; that is, the traits underlying personality
are the result of neurobiological temperamental structures. The term personality always

includes the traits of temperament. We need to keep in mind that traits of temperament
and personality are thoroughly enmeshed in experience and application and therefore the

terms are often used interchangeably.

In general, researchers agree that there are three to nine traits of temperament—a
growing consensus settles on five—and that traits remain relatively stable throughout

one's life time. The most accepted, applied, and tested model of personality traits is

called the Big Five or the Five-Factor Model (FFM). This FFM of personality traits is

based on reducing patterns of self-description in nonclinical (normal) populations to the

underlying traits. The five overarching constructs are (1) Neuroticism or the tendency
towards experiencing negative affect; (2) Extraversion or the tendency to experience

positive affect; (3) Conscientiousness; (4) Agreeableness; and (5) Openness to experience

(Heim & Weston, 2005, p. 22). Neuroticism refers to a temperamental trait, not a rigid

psychic defense structure as used in clinical psychology and psychoanalysis.

Neuroticism refers to an innate heightened sensitivity to limbic arousal, translating into
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subjective affective states of anxiety, depression, and negativity. Extraversion is not only

the tendency to experience positive emotion but is also described as assertive sociability.

Agreeableness is characterized as warmth and kindness, Openness as imaginative and

curious, and Conscientiousness demonstrates reliability and honesty. Other trait models

include Psychoticism, notably Eysneck's, which refers to traits of impulsiveness and

aggression; clearly, this term, like Neuroticism, is distinct as a trait from the clinical

description of psychosis.
The FFM is one of the most influential and applied models in psychology.

Longitudinal research has consistently demonstrated traits as stable and enduring

dispositions in personality. The translation of the FFM into other countries has produced

the pithy interpretation: "personality is much the same everywhere" (McCrae, 2009, p.

151). We must keep in mind that when McCrae says the FFM structure is universal, this
does not mean other cultures have a majority of personalities just like Americans, but that

the underlying categories of traits are reliably measured and present. "Marsella (2000)
proposed that cultural factors influence patterns in which such traits are displayed,
situations in which they tend to be elicited, their value in behavioral description,

interpersonal responses to them, and meanings attributed to them" (Draguns, 2009, p.

563). Each culture assigns various values, weights, and influences to different
personality traits and styles at different points in history.
However, what the FFM demonstrates is that there are biological underpinnings to

personality that are present universally, even if they are valued, conditioned, and

expressed differently across cultures. For example, though there is considerable overlap
between traits, the FFM does reliably reflect small but consistent gender differences

between men and women universally.

Women score higher in N [neuroticism] and A [agreeableness] than men. At the

level of specific facets, there are sometimes differences within domain. Thus, both
Warmth and Assertiveness are facets of E [extraversion], but women are typically
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wanner and men more assertive. Again, women are more open to aesthetic
experiences, whereas men are more open to ideas. (McCrae, 2009, p. 151)

In addition, there is a universal trend of decline in Neuroticism, Extraversion, and

Openness as we age, along with a corresponding increase in Agreeableness and

Conscientiousness (Dreary, 2009, p. 104). The universality of the structure of the FFM

of personality has created a revolution in personality psychology since the second half of
the 20th century. The theory is that because the FFM is rooted in biology, in

temperamental traits tied into neurobiological profiles and genetic dispositions,

"variations on the same trait-related genes are found in Homo sapiens worldwide"
(McCrae, 2009, p. 151). Again, this does not eclipse the real shaping influence of

experience and culture; it simply gives a clearer delineation between biology and
personality. As psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg has said, "We still have to clarify how

neurobiological disposition and structures relate to psychological development and its

derived structures" (2009, p. 506). The lens of the FFM brings us a little closer to this
goal.

There are many ways to study traits and temperament: some research focuses on

one or two traits, and some focus on a model that includes all of them. Two well-
researched traits are Extraversion and Neuroticism; these traits overlap with Jung's terms
of Extraverted and Introverted attitudes. Correlations will be picked up in later

discussions. Researchers differ in their theories of which biological processes or systems

traits emerge from. For Eyseneck, the biological determinants of introversion and

extroversion are thought to stem from the reticular activating system (RAS) in the brain
stem that controls the arousal level of the central nervous system (CNS); for others, such
as Kagan and Snidman's research discussed below, the focus is on the amygdala in the
limbic brain. Eyseneck's research has relied on the

brain's ascending reticular activating system, associating Extraversion with the

reticulo-cortical circuit and Neuroticism with the reticulo-limibic circuit. Eyseneck
hypothesized that extraverts have a higher threshold for cortical arousal than
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introverts ... [and] that neurotics are more easily aroused by emotion-inducing
stimuli than are emotionally stable people. (DeYoung & Gary, 2009, p. 326)

In other words, Extraverts need a higher level of stimulation in their limbic system but

are easily aroused cortically; the limbic system, as mentioned above, is associated with

negative affect and the cortical layer of the brain is associated more with positive affect,
especially the left orbital prefrontal cortex. In comparison, Eyseneck associates

Neuroticism with a limbic system that is easily aroused and a cortical circuit that requires

more stimulation for arousal.

Eyseneck theorized that introverts are found to have a higher arousal level of the
CNS, thereby producing their characteristic desire for solitude and low-stimulus
environments and activities, as well as a tendency to avoid novel situations. In

extraverts, on the other hand, one finds the opposite in behavior that seeks external

stimulus and novelty. Further, introverts tend to have a more pessimistic attitude and
extroverts a more optimistic attitude, again linking the sensitivities of each brain circuit—

limbic or cortical—with the dominant trait and subjective attitude—

Neuroticism/Introversion and Extraversion. But it is not so simple or straightforward as

cortical or amygdalar arousal; some researchers focus on the level of crucial

neurotransmitters in the brain, as discussed briefly in chapter 5.

The role of dopamine in exploratory behavior and cognitive flexibility is

well-established .... A growing body of evidence indicates that
Extraversion is partly a function of dopaminergic activity (Depue and
Collins 1999; Wacker, Charanon and Stemmler 2006; Wacker and
Stemmler 2006) (DeYoung & Gary, 2009, p. 330).

Traits of intelligence, extraversion/introversion, neuroticism (anxiety and negative

emotionality), and psychoticism (impulsivity; aggression) are reliably found to have

biological origins, though, again, there is differing focus on the various systems and

processes in the brain that produce them, such as brain functions or chemical
neurotransmitters. Indeed, most likely more than one system, function, or process is

involved.
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In The Long Shadow of Temperament (2004), developmental psychologists

Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman present the methods and results of an 11-year
research study of two primary temperamental traits—introversion and extraversion—in

an original cohort of 500 infants followed from 4 months old to 11 years old. First,

Kagan and Snidman acknowledge that "different life histories create different

personalities in children born with the same temperament. But one's temperament
imposes a restraint on the possible outcomes" (p. 3). But although "no temperamental

bias determines a particular personality type," and it is true that by adolescence we are

able to marshal our will to present a persona to the world, "we have learned that some
features of these biases stubbornly resist extinction and continue to affect a person's

private mood" (p. 2). Also note that this study singled out only two temperamental traits,

introversion and extraversion, from among many. The following analysis and
comparison of this work with Jung's theories of introverts and extraverts does not assume
that these traits make up the majority of the personality; rather, it is meant to demonstrate

the connection between temperament and personality, between physiology and typology,

and the relationship between the subjective felt sense of self and world and an innate

neurobiological profile.

Most scientists define temperament as a biological bias for particular

feelings and actions that first appear during infancy or early childhood and
are sculpted by environments into a large, but still limited, number of
personality traits .... We believe that most temperamental biases are due
to heritable variation in neurochemistry or anatomy, although some could
be the result of prenatal events that are not strictly genetic. (Kagan &
Snidman, 2004, p. 40)

Prenatal events that are not strictly genetic refer to unique experiences of the

pregnant mother that makes a significant change in her biology, such as the fact that a

female embryo developing next to a male embryo will share in the masculinizing effect

of his testosterone which will have an effect on her level of activity and aggression

compared with other girls (p. 40).

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The amygdala, as discussed in chapter 5, modulates fear, though Kagan and

Snidman make a powerful argument that the amygdala also primarily modulates reaction

to novelty. It is our reaction to the unfamiliar that is then translated into surprise or fear,

depending on the assessment of the unexpected event. The amygdala receives direct

neuronal wiring from sensory modalities, such as the thalamus, allowing immediate

response that bypasses conscious cognitive processing.

It is the only brain structure that detects change in both the outside
environment and the body, and in addition, can instruct the body to flee,
freeze, or fight. Every sensory modality sends information to one or more
areas of the amygdala, and each area, in turn, sends projections to sites in
the brain and body that mediate emotions and actions, including the
cerebral cortex, brain stem, and autonomic nervous system. (Kagan &
Snidman, 2004, p. 10)

Kagan and Snidman's hypothesis is that the amygdala is the primary brain
structure that determines the affective reactivity of an infant, producing characteristic
responses of what they refer to as a high-reactive or low-reactive infant. "Human beings
... are exquisitely sensitive to changes in facial expression, voice, and posture that
signify anger, empathy, fear, seduction, delight, or disapproval from another person"

(2004, p. 11). This sensitivity, mediated in part by the amygdala (and also the right
hemisphere), represents an innate index of temperamental bias. An individual with
heightened amygdalar sensitivity would be predicted to be a high-reactive individual,
expressing behaviorally as introverted, shy, anxious, and timid. The complement is a

low-reactive individual who does not experience the internal movements of threat or

danger so readily from the environment and therefore is more likely to exhibit an
extraverted attitude of being outgoing, exploratory, and rather fearless. The longitudinal

study incorporated physiological testing of biological markers for amygdalar activation—

such as heart rate, brain scans, and sympathetic nervous system activation—as well as

qualitative, descriptive assessments from the child when appropriate, the parent (usually
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the mother), and when possible, from teachers. In addition, research diagnostics included

direct observations of behavior made in the lab by trained observers who were not known

to the participating children.

The researchers first made assessments of 4-month-old infants, categorizing them

as either low-reactive or high-reactive to unfamiliar events in their environment.

Amygdalar excitation sends messages to the motor centers of the body, and in infants this
is expressed as a thrashing of limbs, arching of the back, and crying. Thus, a central

hypothesis of Kagan and Snidman's research was that an infant born with a

neurochemical profile that rendered the amygdala highly reactive would respond to
unfamiliar stimuli with a vigorous motor and emotional display, whereas a low-reactive

infant would have a minimal display. After categorizing 4-month-old infants as high-,
low-, or mixed-reactive, the research followed up with further testing of amygdalar

sensitivity and temperamental bias at approximately 2, 4, 7, and 11 years old. The data

reported at various ages reflects the general themes of the research (1) most individuals
are a mixture of traits, with about a fifth to a quarter exhibiting more extreme

temperamental biases, (2) between infancy and preadolescence, a fifth to a third of

children retained their characteristic profiles categorized in infancy, and (3) a majority of
those classified at the extremes of high- and low-reactive developed profiles at 11 years

old inconsistent with infant categorization. In an original cohort of 500 4-month-old

infants, a fifth (20%) were classified as high-reactive and a quarter (25%) as low-

reactive; the remainder of the infants, a little more than half, were a mixture of traits with
a small group termed aroused, showing high motor arousal not accompanied by crying.

In follow-up lab visits of 300 of the original infants at 14 or 21 months old (or both), one

third displayed a high level of fear to the tests exposing them to unfamiliar stimulus, one

third displayed a notably low level of fear, and the other third had intermediate scores.

The infants who had been evaluated as high-reactive at 4 months old had the most fear,
while those who were low-reactive had the least fear. These results linked innate
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temperamental bias detected at 4 months old with behavioral bias in the second year
(Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 15).

In their fourth year, 193 children returned to the lab where an unknown female

examiner interviewed them and then several weeks later they returned for a play session
with other unknown children their age. Twice as many children designated as low-

reactive in the previous tests were more spontaneous and sociable with both the examiner

and the unfamiliar children than those who were high-reactive. Almost half of the
children who were high-reactive infants continued to display behavior congruent to this

assessment by being notably shy, quiet, and timid, whereas only 10% of those children

who had been low-reactive infants acted in a timid or shy manner (Kagan & Snidman,
2004, p. 15).

A total of 18 percent of the high-reactives were consistently inhibited at all

four ages—14 and 21 months and 4.5 and 7.5 years—but not one high-
reactive infant was consistently uninhibited across all four evaluations.
Moreover, the high-reactives with anxious symptoms, compared with the
non-anxious high-reactives, showed higher diastolic blood pressure and
greater cooling of the temperature of the fingertips as they listened to a
long series of numbers they had to remember. These latter two
measurements imply a more reactive sympathetic nervous system in the
presence of a cognitive challenge, (p. 17)
The last assessment took place between 10 and 12 years old. Of the 237 children

who returned for this evaluation, 30% had been high-reactive infants and 39% had been

low-reactive. This cohort underwent an extensive assessment of biological variables—

EEG power, brain stem auditory-evoked potential, sympathetic reactivity in the

cardiovascular system and others—selected because these biological markers are

potentially under the direct or indirect influence of the amygdala. The majority of the

research, its findings and interpretations, was taken from the evaluations of the 11-year-

olds. In essence, the researchers were asking to what degree behavior (high/low reactive)
was yoked to past and present biology (amygdalar reactivity).
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The high-reactives showed greater activation in the right hemisphere as compared

to the left, higher Cortisol arousal (hormone released under stress), and greater

sympathetic tone in the cardiovascular system. The researchers observed that high-

reactive children were more likely to be of slender build with a narrow face and blue
eyes; low-reactive children were more likely to be taller, heavier, and brown-eyed. A

likely reason for this is that the genes that contribute to the threshold of amygdalar

reactivity influence many traits, including body size and eye color (Kagan & Snidman,

2004, p. 21). Kagan and Snidman noted an interesting intuitive reflection of this
observation in Disney's artists: more of the heroes and heroines are sensitive, light-

haired, and blue eyed, where the typical aggressive villain more likely has dark-eyes.
By age 11, 20% of high-reactive infants and just over 30% of low-reactives

preserved their expected behavioral and biological features; that is, high-reactives tended

to be shy, intimidated by the unfamiliar, and disliked interacting with large groups,
whereas low-reactives tended to be outgoing, attracted to novelty, and enjoyed large

groups. Yet less than 5% of each group displayed characteristics of the complementary
type; most of the remaining had constrained characteristics. That is, high-reactives who
were not in the 20% of preserving expected behaviors did not act like low-reactives (less

than 5% did) but rather had a mixture of modified high- and low-reactive traits (Kagan &

Snidman, 2004, p. 190). Why would a majority of those classified as high- or low-

reactive in infancy not develop a behavioral profile at 11 years old congruent with an
earlier assessment atinfancy? This consequence is believed to be the affect of

conditioning. "The biology of the high-reactives had not prevented them from learning

ways to cope with strangers and new challenges, but it did prevent them from displaying

the relaxed spontaneity ... characteristic of many low-reactive children" (p. 23). Kagan

and Snidman continue with this assessment of external behavior modified by

conditioning contrasted with the internal experience of the individual:

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The more important fact is that very few high-reactives became exuberant,
sociable, minimally aroused preadolescents, and very few low-reactives
became fearful, quiet introverts with high levels of biological arousal....
Most children who did not conform to expectation were neither extremely
shy nor extremely exuberant, and few possessed more than one sign of
amygdalar excitability. The power of each infant temperamental bias lay
in its ability to prevent the development of a contrasting profile, (p. 23)
The results of the research showed that it is easier to predict what an infant with a

definite temperamental bias of high-reactivity will not become at age 11—spontaneous,

ebullient, fearless—than what he or she will become—extremely fearful and shy. "An
infant's temperament, therefore, constrains the acquisition of certain profiles more
effectively than it determines the development of a particular personality" (Kagan &

Snidman, p. 24). There a several reasons for this including environmental conditioning
and the relationship of biology to psychology and behavior. At 11 years old there was

not a consistently high correlation between biological markers and behavior; for example,
"high- and low-reactives who were described by their mothers as highly sociable ...

differed in their biological profiles" (p. 205). The data from Kagan and Snidman's

research as well as others reflect a relative independence of biological and behavioral

variables; "these data imply that some brain states may have minimal influence on the
quality of a person's consciousness, intentions, or behavior, just as some alleles have no

implications for either phenotypic features or adaptation (Tang et al., 2001)" (p. 206). So
although we can clearly trace correlations between neurobiology and temperament and
typology, as I will do further below, we must remember that biology and psychology,

though intimately related, each retain a relative independence. "A biological state

represents only a potentiality for a psychological property" (p. 206). For now we will

explore the connections between the objective level of biology expressed in temperament

and the subjective manifestations of typology in Jung's theories on introversion and

extraversion.
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Typology

When noting the relevance of Jung's attitude types to their research on

temperament, Kagan and Snidman acknowledge that "each adolescent's dominant feeling

tone, not the degree of shyness or sociability in his outward persona, is the seminal

property that differentiates these temperamental groups" (p. 218). Dominant feeling tone

is precisely what Jung's typological classifications capture; it is the underlying structure

and energy to external persona, the area that Jung's own intuitive nature read with ease

and accuracy. Kagan and Snidman note that "the developmental journey that leads to a

relaxed or a tense feeling tone requires a more substantial contribution from temperament

than does a sociable or shy posture with others" (p. 218). It is this link between feeling

tone, or typology, and temperament that is explored here.

Jung notes that the distribution of introversion and extraversion, as general attitude

types, is widespread throughout gender, classes, cultures, and time periods; philosophers

from the Greeks to the 1 ^-century aesthetic philosophy to modern-day psychology have

detailed the distinctions between the various yet repetitive occurring of types in human

nature. Therefore, Jung concludes, the distinction in attitude types could not come about

through conscious and deliberate choice: "As a general psychological phenomenon,

therefore, the type antithesis must have some kind of biological foundation"

(1921/1971b, p. 331). At root, the relation between subject (self) and object (other) is

one of adaptation; biologically, an innate predisposing somatic sensitivity to the world

determines our style of adaptation. What Jung and Kagan and Snidman describe are

these subjective adaptations to the world that emerge from the meeting of a general

somatic profile and unique conditioning experiences. Jung, like Kagan and Snidman,
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finds that the reliable thread is found in temperament. "Although nothing would induce

me to underrate the incalculable importance of parental influence, this familiar

experience compels me to conclude that the decisive factor must be looked for in the

disposition of the child" (Jung, 1921/1971b, p. 332).

Jung calls introversion and extraversion "attitude types," as these are

characteristics

distinguished by their attitude to the object. The introvert's attitude is an

abstracting one; at bottom he is always intent on withdrawing libido from
the object, as though he had to prevent the object from gaining power over
him. The extravert, on the contrary, has a positive relation to the object.
He affirms its importance to such an extent that his subjective attitude is
constantly related to and oriented by the object. (192171971b, p. 330)

Psychologist and philosopher William James names these types as rational or

tender-minded and empirical or tough-minded. The tender-minded, representing the
introvert, are individuals of "principles and systems; they aspire to dominate experience

and to transcend it by abstract reasoning, by their logical deductions and purely rational
concepts" (Jung, 1913/1971, p. 502). In contrast, the extravert, oriented by the external

object, is logically represented in James's tough-minded empiricist who follows the facts
above opinion, for whom "only tangible phenomena in the outside world" count and
"thought is merely a reaction to external experience" (p. 503). Even further in James's

types do we find the level of affective sensitivity of Kagan and Snidman's high- and low-
reactives in the image of the thin-skinned, tender-minded high-reactive who is motivated

by intense feelings and concern over others' or their consciences' evaluation of them, and

the thick-skinned, tough-minded low-reactive who is relatively unconcerned with the

opinions of others and tend not to feel personal transgressions so acutely.

Jung also analyzes Worringer's types of modern art from the classic Abstraction

and Empathy (1920) in light of introversion and extraversion. In abstraction is the desire

to find haven in a self-made form from an overpowering and dissonant reality; in art
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created from the empathic attitude we find harmonious works into which we can project

our internal affective states, finding there alignment with the art object. The introverted

attitude, represented in abstraction, finding the world threatening, attempts to devalue the

object, to leech it of its power over him and therefore be dominant and secure. In
contrast, the extraverted attitude, represented in empathic art, finding no threat from the

external world but rather a universe of dead objects, seeks to animate them through the
projection of her libido. This projection of her own libido into the object produces

empathy, a harmonious relationship between viewer/artist and object/world.

What we see in Jung's theory is the subjective manifestation and attitudes of

certain biological profiles; note that both Kagan and Snidman and Jung concentrate their
descriptions on those individuals who are lop-sided in their profile, which amplifies the

mental, emotional, and behavioral correlates. Focus on profiles in the margins offers a
clearer peering into the inner workings of the brain-mind and psyche. "We call a mode

of behavior extraverted only when the mechanism of extraversion predominates" (Jung,

1921/1971b, p. 340). We should remember that a majority of us have a nature coiled

somewhere in-between the pure or even strong introvert-inhibited and extravert-
uninhibited.

Kagan and Snidman's inhibited, high-reactive type correlates with Jung's

introverted type. Again, the inhibited high-reactive is characterized biologically by a low

excitability threshold in the amygdala which translates into more intense and consistent

subjective feelings of anxiety, fear, shame, and guilt. Recall that a high-reactive is

characterized by the trait of shyness and high-reaction to the unfamiliar in Kagan and

Snidman's lab experiments, causing him to be more vigilant in his reading of the

environment for danger or unfamiliarity and in this sense is more likely to be exquisitely

sensitive to tone of voice, facial cues, actions, for instance. Consider Jung's observation

that "one of the earliest signs of introversion in a child is a reflective, thoughtful manner,

marked shyness and even fear of unknown objects .... Everything unknown is regarded
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with mistrust; outside influences are usually met with violent resistance" (1923/1971, p.
517). It is easy to understand why Kagan and Snidman consider Jung's work on

introverts and extraverts, made almost a century ago, to reveal uncanny insight into the
research on the biological structures of temperament.

A high-reactive child is also more vigilant in reading and analyzing her own inner
environment because she has to; the high-reactive preadolescents and adolescents
reported more anxiety about others' perceived judgments of them and a heightened,

painful sensitivity to transgressions of their own standards. For high-reactives, there is a

sense of being bombarded with thoughts and feelings, that the world provokes much

emotion in her and therefore an internal focus that understands, organizes, and interprets
these constant messages is a way of coping or managing her internal state. A low-

reactive does not need to develop an inner vigilance because he is not compelled to do so;

his inner world is rather quiet compared to the high-reactive. It is present, but on a
consistently lower volume.

Jung's assessment of the introvert as attempting to devalue the object world and
elevate the primacy or superiority of one's subjectivity dovetails with the above
description of the inner world of a high-reactive. Jung describes the introvert having a
relationship to the object (the external world) that seeks to devalue it by draining it of its
libido. This leeching of the object's energy is performed because the world holds an

overwhelming power for the introvert in its ability to constantly elicit strong somatic and
affective states that the individual then has to respond to and attempt to mediate or calm.

For the introvert, the world is highly charged and alive and one feels in constant battle for
equilibrium; a solution is to withdraw from the world and to interact only under certain
circumstances. A high concern and focus with inner states cause an introvert to be much

more concerned with her own subjectivity than with the circumstances of the world or

others external to her. In this way, an introvert's subjectivity—what he thinks and feels

about things—takes a priority and superiority over facts or another's subjectivity. After
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all, the primary and immediate route an introvert has to find peace is to manage and

control inner space, since it is so easily stirred.

The extraverted attitude, oriented by the external object rather than subjective

states, shows an early sign of

quick adaptation to the environment, and the extraordinary attention he

gives to objects and especially to the effect he has on them. Fear of
objects is minimal; he lives and moves among them with confidence ....
He likes to carry his enterprises to the extreme and exposes himself to
risks. Everything unknown is alluring. (Jung, 1923/1971, p. 516)

Consider the descriptions of low-reactives as playing easily with unfamiliar

children or smiling within the first few minutes of entering a room alone with an

unfamiliar adult. The low-reactive could be described as finding the "unknown alluring"
because it does not disrupt his inner life; he does not experience dissonance between self

and world but rather seeks alignment, an experience of pleasure and harmony. For the
extravert, "objective happenings have an almost inexhaustible fascination for him, so that
ordinarily he never looks for anything else" (Jung, 1921/197lb, p. 334). It's not that the
extravert's objective world is that fascinating compared to his inner world, but that the

objective world is the inner world. Recalling the analogy in Worringer's types of art, the

extravert is associated with empathic art because he projects his subjective experience
into the art object and experiences his subjectivity there. So again, it's not that an

extravert does not have an inner world but that he or she realizes the inner world through

the external world, in contrast to the introvert who moves to keep the external world from

exerting too much influence or dominance on subjective experience. A highly

extraverted nature finds, through projection, her inner world in external objects and
events, thus Worringer's interpretation that the empathic artist-extravert lives in a world

of dead objects, whereas the abstract artist-introvert is perpetually pursued by an all too

alive object world.

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Projection brings alignment between inner and outer in the extravert, allowing

him to adapt with ease to the environment, something introverts and high-reactives find
much more difficult because inner turbulence puts them at odds with the outer world.

The extravert finds an ease of communication between his inner world and outer world in

that the outer world is not threatening—it does not elicit the amygdalar-limbic system—

and therefore we can presume that objects are for the most part pleasing or neutral in
comparison for a predominant experience of the threatening power of objects in the

introvert. This affinity between the internal state and objective circumstances allows the

extravert to adapt to external circumstances. Whereas an introverted temperament,

finding a general dissonance between inner and outer worlds, does not feel an easy fit

between who she is and the circumstances she finds herself in and therefore easy
adaptation eludes her. In Jung's assessment, this leads the introvert to raise subjective

experience above circumstance and appear maverick, self-centered and egotistical,

irrational, or a combination of these judgments. This dissonance between inner and outer
causes the introvert to attempt to orient the object world to the subjective world. The

extravert, on the other hand, tends to elevate circumstance and objects, thereby appearing

gregarious, exploratory, superficial, or slavish in the attempt to adapt to external

circumstances.
In Jungian theory the unconscious is autonomous, possessing its own attitude and

volition, and compensatory in these functions to the conscious attitude. A compensating

attitude in the unconscious of an extravert, therefore, would have a decidedly introverted

nature. What does this mean? It points to an unconscious focus on the subjective factor

as a complement to the conscious focus on the object; that is, an unrecognized self-

centeredness in the extravert's attitude, whereas the unrecognized attitude in the

consciously subjective introvert is the tendency to take internal states as objects. Jung's

writing on the unconscious attitude is sometimes not as clear as his explication of the

conscious attitude. For example, he focuses on the infantile and primitive manifestations
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of the extravert's unconscious, but this general claim could be made on anyone's

unconscious material as the unconscious is, in part, that which has not been integrated,

developed, and thus matured through conscious reflection and application. Thus, we all

have infantile and primitive unconscious attitudes, qualities, and content, whether we are
predominantly extroverted, introverted, or somewhere in between.

Jung does refer to qualities of a strong extravert's unconscious attitude that are

more revealing, especially in light of the biological foundation of attitude types found in
Kagan and Snidman's hypotheses. The egocentric nature of the extravert's unconscious

attitude, Jung writes, "goes far beyond mere childish selfishness; it verges on the ruthless

and the brutal" (1921/1971b, p. 339). In Kagan and Snidman's research, boys in the
extreme end of the low-reactive spectrum from deprived backgrounds who did not

effectively sublimate or socialize aggressive urges had a higher tendency towards

criminality. Further, the researchers note that studies of criminals revealed low-reactive

biological profiles and attitudes with a low concern for the opinions and judgments of
others (2004, p. 223). Therefore, the ruthlessness and brutality observed by Jung in the

unconscious of lop-sided extraverted types may be an accurate subjective description of

their motivations. That is, an extreme extravert, as an extreme low-reactive, more than
others will tend not to register as important others' opinions and feelings because they do

not experience these responses as fearful, producing anxiety or personal threat.

Conditioned in an environment that does not shape his attention towards learning to care
for and consider the feelings and concerns of others, a low-reactive extravert could easily
develop along the path of least resistance where there is a marked lack of concern for

other's feelings culminating in a brutal or ruthless self-centeredness.

Jung considers the introvert oriented by inner psychic structures, but this is not the

ego per se. Rather, he asserts that the introvert, in his focus on his inner state, is

identified with innate psychic structures beyond the ego. More specifically, Jung
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believes the introvert tends to identify with the promptings, impulses, and movements of

the collective unconscious.

But it is a characteristic peculiarity of the introvert... to confuse his ego

with the self, and to exalt it as the subject of the psychic process, thus
bringing about the aforementioned subjectivization of consciousness
which alienates him from the object. The psychic structure is ... what I
call the 'collective unconscious. (1921/1971b, p. 376)
This observation finds a synonym in the correlation in section one of this
dissertation of the collective unconscious with the limbic system of the brain of which the

amygdala is a primary structure. The biological underpinning of high-reactive's

inhibition centered in the excitability threshold of the amygdala and its projection sites.
In biological terms, the introvert has a highly reactive limbic system and as a result feels

intensely, and we can presume more often, the subjective feelings of anxiety, fear, shame,
and guilt which the introvert links with objects—circumstances and other people—in

their outer world. That is, the high-reactive is overly focused on her subjective state
because it keeps her in a state of alert, if not threat. This vigilance is also indicative of an

identification with her internal states as objective statements about her worth. Jung's

observation that a key feature of the introverted nature is to identify the ego with the
collective unconscious is expressed in Kagan and Snidman's work as a high reactive
identifying with the somatic ripples of the limbic system in feeling and thought and

attributing these internal states to external judgments or conditions (e.g., what others are

thinking and feeling towards one), that a threatening presence is hidden in the external

world rather than a subjectively generated experience. Referring back to the empathic-

extravert projecting subjective states into the object world and experiencing one's

subjectivity in the world, the abstract-introvert is also seen here to project one's

subjective state into the world and experience it there; the primary difference appears to

be the valence of the emotion: for the extravert it is positive and for the introvert,

negative.
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This identification with subjective states, or ego with the collective unconscious,

leads to an over-valuation of one's internal world; the subjective element takes on a

superiority because it is the loudest and most threatening to one's sense of peace and
stability. But it also leads to the unconscious compensation in introverts of objectifying

their subjective world. In Jungian parlance, the ego is inflated with the transcendent

material of the collective psyche, and "the inflexibility of his subjective judgment, setting

itself above all objective data, is sufficient in itself to create the impression of marked

egocentricity" (1921/1971b, p. 377).

Jung correlated specific psychopathologies with extraversion and introversion.

Hysteria is the pathology he links with an extraverted attitude. "The hallmark of classic
hysteria is an exaggerated rapport with persons in the immediate environment and an
adjustment to surrounding conditions that amounts to imitation" (Jung, 1921/197lb, p.

336). For the introvert, "should he become neurotic, it is the sign of an almost complete

identity of the ego with the self' (p. 336) and hence, schizophrenia is the mental illness
Jung named as representative of the introvert, revealing an enmeshment of ego and
collective unconscious. In their symptoms, Jung finds correlations with the attitude
types: the hysteric's fantasies are always tied to the subjective history of the individual,
whereas in the schizophrenic the typical fantasies of a collective and mythological nature

remain disconnected from the history of the patient. The hysteric's subjective

unconsciousness is a compensation for the extravert's over-valuation of the object; the

schizophrenic's objective unconscious content compensates for the subjective orientation

of the introvert. Finally, the centrifugal movement of the libido in hysteria correlates

with the extravert's outward focus. Likewise, the centripetal movement in schizophrenia

mirrors the inward focus characterizing the introvert.

I call regressive extraversion the phenomenon which Freud calls

transference, when the hysteric projects upon the object his own illusions
and subjective valuations. In the same way, I call regressive introversion
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the opposite phenomenon which we find in schizophrenia, when these

fantastic ideas refer to the subject himself. (Jung, 1913/1971, p. 500)

In summary, the introvert/high-reactive is temperamentally driven to over­

emphasize the power of the objective world consciously, which elevates the importance

of his subjective states. In contrast, the extravert/low-reactive is biologically driven to

over-emphasize the life-giving power of her inner world consciously but compensates
unconsciously by being slavishly possessed by their objects. The extravert has a style that

assimilates subject to object, whereas the introvert has a style that assimilates object to

subject. Stated differently, the extravert adapts to the external world, whereas the
introvert attempts to make the external world adapt to his subjective reality. As discussed

previously, the introvert's strategy is less successful from an inner dissonance

perspective, as reflected in the experience of high-reactives who learned to adapt

behaviorally to the world, appearing congruent when still experiencing an elevated, more
intense subjectivity.
The extravert does not know herself as an individual as clearly as the introvert

does; indeed, the introvert deals with the loneliness of being separate more than the
extravert because the incongruence between inner and outer makes him aware of himself
as separate more than the extravert's experience of alignment and connection with the
outer world allows. An introvert's nature leads her to follow her own promptings more

than outer demands, whereas an extravert's nature prompts him to follow the openings

and opportunities in the world more than open the doorways presented subjectively. Yet,
an extravert, having less internal chaos or traffic, may unconsciously fear feeling dead or

empty inside if he stops chasing objects and sits within his own subjective experience.

This focus on resonance with the object leads to an orientation by the object world which,

in pathological unconscious compensation, causes the outwardly gregarious extravert to

be cold and self-centered, unable to consider others' feelings or needs. In contrast, the

introvert fears the power of the world because she experiences so much dissonance and
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chaos in response to objects; they elicit so much from her, without her choice or will, that

she experiences the world as too alive in comparison with the dead world of the extravert.
In pathological unconscious compensation, conscious orientation to the subjective world

leads the introvert to be dominated by an inner objective world.

In Jung's work we find rich descriptions of the subjective experience of

neurobiological profiles of temperament. I believe we can consider Jung's observations

to be the first lifting off of psyche from physiology. The attitude types develop
organically from their physiology into characteristic ways of being in and responding to

the world. Yet, Kagan and Snidman's studies found just as readily the influence of
experience and conditioning on nature; only a quarter of those categorized as high- or
low-reactive infants maintained a character profile in pre-adolescence consistent with

earlier temperament assessments. Clearly, the world had intervened, an aspect of

personality development Jung's theories lack. In the next chapter, we will consider the

influence of the intervening world through the impact of conditioning.

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Chapter 7
A Confluence of Events
The previous chapter demonstrated two points: from a dual-aspect monism

perspective, temperament and typology are two sides of a single coin, and that

temperament is the basic, driving force in shaping personality. Considering the influence

of neurobiology, where does this locate us in the nature-nurture debate?

Research into the nurture sector has primarily focused on parent-child interactions
and conditioning relationships, called the rearing environment. A major criticism of this

developmental research, and a valid one, is that it has not incorporated the fact of genetic

heritability in traits and personality. Genetic research has reliably validated that between
40 and 80% of temperament and personality traits are inherited, depending on the specific
trait, and the conclusion that generally 50% of personality attributes are inherited is

uncontroversial.
Biological evidence of the structures girding personality is not enough to tell us

about the correlating behavior without context and individual history. Kagan and
Snidman note that an impediment to understanding research results of temperament is an

assumption that behavior is reduced to the biology; it is not, and cannot be actually, any
more than a wave crashing on a beach can be reduced to the billions of water molecules
that it's made of (2004, p. 49). However, each aspect of the wave is real and necessary to

truly understand an ocean wave. In the same manner, in order to truly understand the role
of temperament we must consider both its ground—biology—and the context through

which it is realized. As physicist Niels Bohr said, "scientists can never know a

phenomenon as it exists in nature; all they can ever know is what they can measure"

(Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 49). Science that relies solely on physical measurements

may never know a phenomenon as it exists in nature, but we can. As individuals, we

know the living experience of being a self with an identity. But being that this work is

focusing on where the measurements of neuroscience correlate with the theories of

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analytical psychology, we must consciously accept the limitations as well as the

revelations of scientific methods. What our measurements tell us are that matters of
personality, identity, and pathology or mental health are a confluence of events.

Biological Predisposition
Research into temperament and the FFM demonstrates the shaping influence of

neurobiology on personality. There is a general consensus that in the FFM the

personality dimension of Neuroticism is associated with personality disorders and major
depression, that Extraversion predisposes people to be happier, that Openness predicts a

tendency towards social and political liberalism, that the risk factor for substance abuse

increases as scores on Agreeableness decrease, and that Conscientiousness is associated

with positive ratings on job performances (McCrae, 2009, p. 152). Critiques of the FFM
are that differences in personality types represent different psychological processes rather

than traits, that traits describe but do not explain behavior, and that the FFM, though

accurate in its domain, does not explain personality fully. Of course, the FFM does not
explain personality fully, no one methodology or measurement does. In response to the

first critique, if we approach a whole person in personality theory, then we must see that
biological and psychological processes are connected at some level. Although it is true

that at some point, and the location of this point can be argued, an individual's
psychology separates from its physiological ground, possessing a relative autonomy, the

fact remains that biology and psychology are intimately connected. A dual-aspect monist

perspective would hold that each manifestation is a different aspect of the same

phenomena.
In response to the third critique that temperament describes but does not explain

behavior, the FFM demonstrates a validated relationship between genetic and

neurobiological profiles and psychological traits; these factors are then shaped via

experience into the more complicated, contingent, and unique personality of the
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individual. Longitudinal research on childhood temperament demonstrates this

relationship, and the "findings suggest that early temperamental predispositions form a

core or nucleus around which the later developing personality is built" (Rothbart, Sheese,

& Conradt, 2009, p. 181). While keeping an eye on not confounding correlation with

causation, the analysis goes forward understanding temperament as more than a

description, but as a generating nodal point for personality traits and patterns.

Although a large body of research evidence correlates childhood adversity as risk

factors for personality disorders, there is not a direct causal link.

It has been consistently shown that the impact of childhood adversities is

different in clinical and community samples. Community surveys of the
effects of childhood sexual abuse (Browne and Finkelhor 1986; Rind and
Tromofovitch 1997), as well as of physical abuse (Malinovsky-Rummell
and Hansen 1993), have found that only a minority of children exposed to
abuse and trauma suffer measurable sequelae. (Paris, 2005, p. 123)
Clearly one explanation is that abuse or adversity is a necessary but not sufficient

condition for personality disorders to develop. It makes sense that over millions of years
of evolution in which the conditions for survival were consistently harsh, most human

beings are born with a resilient and hearty psyche. This is not, of course, to dismiss the
moral issue of abuse or adversity and our worthy attempts to address it. Nor does it
dismiss the fact that the more sensitive souls among us have special and valuable

contributions to make from their experiences.

Outcomes of trauma research demonstrate that our genetic predisposition

establishes a biological ground from which we respond to adversity. For example,

during the winter of 1984, a sniper fired at a group of children on the

playground of a Los Angeles elementary school, killing one child and
injuring 13. One month later, when clinicians interviewed the children to
determine who was experiencing extreme levels of anxiety, 38 percent were
judged to be anxious, while 39 percent seemed free of unusual levels of
tension or fear. The children who were judged to be anxious had shown an
inhibited style prior to the school violence (Pynoos et al., 1987). (Kagan &
Snidman, 2004, p. 46)
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And finally, 15 months before Hurricane Andrew hit south Florida in 1992, a group of

elementary students had been assessed for the presence of anxiety. Seven months after
the hurricane, 11% of these children had elevated distress and all of them had been

categorized as anxious in the study before the hurricane (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 46).
A research study of posttraumatic stress disorder tested adults who were exposed

to several hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004 for those "born with the short allele in

the promoter region of the gene that affects the concentration of serotonin in the synapse"
(Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 151). The allele leaves individuals with a higher genetic

vulnerability to stress. "However, only those with this allele who also had been deprived

of social support developed posttraumatic stress disorder. Adults possessing exactly the
same allele who enjoyed social support did not develop these symptoms" (p. 151). The

inheritance of personality traits is a multivariant phenomenon. Several conditions—

neurobiological vulnerability, developmental failures, abuse, psychosocial and cultural
factors—are necessary but not sufficient in and of themselves. Also, the presence of
alleviating and modulating factors needs to be accounted for as well.
However, there are limits to the influence of genes and our scientific knowledge

of them. The most popular method makes an erroneous assumption that genetic and
environmental forces are additive—that is, that they add to the profile or dynamics rather
than influence, integrate, and build upon one another in complex ways. Another

methodological assumption is that interactions between genes themselves and between

genes and the environment are small and can be reliably separated. These assumptions

lead geneticists to assume that the variation in a gene and its relevant trait or phenotype is

linear and direct. "Most biological or behavioral pheonotypes are not a function of
additive factors but products of nonlinear interactions among genes and between genetic

propensities and experiences" (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 229).

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Behavioral genetics attempts to establish the ties between genetic material and

personality traits and behavior. There are two methodologies in behavioral genetics:
studies of molecular genetics and twin and adoption studies.

Molecular genetics is represented in the type of research stated above regarding

specific alleles and individual responses to trauma or adversity, such as the combination

of a certain allele, the Florida hurricane, and support networks in individual lives.
Molecular genetics relies on the assumption that the biological underpinnings of
personality traits are linked to a number of genes which influence the variation in
neurobiology. This area of research finds links between neurotransmitters and behavior,

such as dopamine for approach behaviors (extraversion) and serotonin and noradrenaline

for avoidance behaviors (neuroticism). The difficulty confronting molecular genetics

research is in the polymorphism of genetic material and the necessity for studies of
considerably large populations that can reveal the subtle and small influences being

measured. Polymorphic refers to the ability of some genotypes to express in a number of

phenotypes; for example, the dopamine D4 receptor, just one receptor for dopamine, is
highly polymorphic. And the effects of single genes, such as D4, are difficult to isolate

among the many gene x gene effects occurring in any phenotypic expression. "A
reasonable conclusion after ten years of personality genetics research is that main effects
of single genetic variants are likely to be of small magnitude, and unlikely to account for
more than 1 per cent of phenotypic variance (and possibly much less)" (Munafo, 2009, p.

295). Where there is a definite contribution of molecular genetics to traits and behaviors,

it is not as well established or as influential as other contributions to personality.

Twin and adoption studies consistently indicate that 50% of personality traits

have genetic contributions; yet the fact that this also demonstrates that 50% of personality

traits are shaped by the environment is not discussed or incorporated into the findings of

researchers who have a genetic bias. For example, a personality trait with a traditionally

high heritability quotient is intelligence. In an analysis of developmental studies of

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twins, "the heritability of IQ varied ... as a function of socioeconomic status (SES).

Thus, among twins living in impoverished environments, a substantial portion of the

variance was accounted for by environmental factors, with relatively little variance

accounted for by genetics; in contrast, this effect was nearly completely reversed among

twins living in affluent families" (Nelson, de Haan, & Thomas, 2006, p. 31). Translation

of this data does not mean that SES creates a dumb or smart individual. Environment
does not create but modifies genetic potential, as genetic potential constrains the number
of possible developmental responses to any given environment. Therefore, an

impoverished environment can hinder natural intellectual potential, whereas a rich

environment allows for a more full expression of genetic potential.
Studies of twins and adopted children rely on "shared environment" distinctions

in theorizing the influence of the environment in the remaining 50% of traits. Shared
environment are those aspects of the environment that each sibling experienced, whereas
nonshared environment are those aspects unique to an individual child. It is hypothesized

that individual differences in personality must be due to nonshared environment.

However, because this argument does not consider the influence of neurobiological
profiles of temperament, it makes an erroneous assumption about shared and nonshared
environment. Essentially, the assumption that shared environments—having the same

parents and rearing environment—produce similar or the same traits in different children

is simply wrong. Studies in temperament demonstrate over and again that each child will
respond to the same stimulus with great differences which then go on to develop

considerable personality differences.

It is accepted that genetic influences on personality will be polygenic (i.e.,

comprise effects of multiple genes, each of small effect, as well as
numerous gene x gene interactions) and will be modified by
environmental effects (i.e., gene x environment interactions). It is
therefore perhaps not surprising that the evidence to date has not strongly
implicated any single genetic variation in the etiology of human
personality. (Munafo, 2009, p. 296)
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When temperament is considered in the analysis of shared or nonshared environments,

we must allow that sometimes shared environments can become nonshared.

Studies on gene x environment interactions demonstrate what every parent of

multiple children knows: the significance of individual response to shared environmental

conditions. The shared environment argument is not really "shared" by siblings who

perceive, receive, and respond to circumstance and stimuli with different genetic and
neurobiological predispositions. "The evidence supports the central premise of gene x

environment interactions, which is that individuals of differing genotypes may respond

differently to specific environmental influences" (Munafd, 2009, p. 297). Theorists such

as Rowe and Harris (discussed below) assign the rearing environment negligible

influence in shaping personality because the same parents can raise vastly different

children. This does not prove, however, that the parental conditioning had no effect on
personality; it means it is more difficult and complicated than they are thinking. The

influence the parents have on each child differs with the child; and this does not include

the reality that parenting styles often differ with different temperaments.
Temperament and Parental Conditioning

Parental conditioning is powerful and complex. Although parental response to

innate temperamental profiles is only one ingredient, it is a significant one. For example,

in Kagan and Snidman's research they found that "the mothers of high-reactives who, out

of equally loving concern, were reluctant to cause them distress and protected them from

new experiences had the most fearful 2-year-olds" (2004, p. 24). On the other hand, the

small number of parents who interpreted a high-reactive child's distress as an act of

willfulness, and responded with angry punishment, tended to have the most detrimental

effect, producing children who became severely irritable and withdrawn (p. 30). Finally,

some families of high-reactives held the belief

that they must prepare their children for a competitive society in which
retreat from challenge is maladaptive .... Children reared this way are less
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likely to be avoidant when it is time to begin first grade. Such children

often display a high energy level, talk too much, and ask too many
questions. (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 29)

Could it be that these high-energy traits of talking too much and asking too many

questions are a manifestation of an innate tendency towards fearfulness channeled into

assertively conditioned behaviors? It is easy to imagine that a naturally shy child

conditioned to be more assertive may ask a lot of questions out of anxiety and the desire

to know what is going on in order to feel more secure. Further, tendencies towards

shyness can be combined with innate predispositions towards traits that hide shyness,
such as impulsivity or aggression, which would make fearful responses of the child go
unrecognized as such by others and even the child himself.

As children age, it is more and more difficult to determine an individual's inner

state by outer behaviors. An example from Kagan and Snidman's research was the
interview at home of two 15-year-old girls who had been high-reactive infants. Both

were relaxed and showed minimal defensiveness externally, yet both described inner

states of anxiousness in crowds, in anticipating the negative evaluations of their peers,

and being exceptionally uneasy when they violated a personal standard (2004, p. 218).
Therefore, the researchers make a distinction between feeling tone of a personality and

the outward manifestations of behavior which tend to become dissociated, more for some
people than others, as we grow up.

Temperament makes a more substantial contribution to feeling tone than

to the public personality during adolescence and adulthood....The
developmental journey that leads to a relaxed or a tense feeling tone
requires a more substantial contribution from temperament than does a
sociable or shy posture with others, (p. 218)

This is where Jung's description of introverted and extroverted attitudes "apply

with uncanny accuracy to a proportion of our high- and low-reactive adolescents (Jung,

1961)" (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 218). Jung's attitude types are descriptions of the

subjective feeling tone of individual nature.

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"Fearful children who are harshly disciplined often experience an arousal level

that far exceeds the optimal level. Such a high level of anxiety does not allow the child

to process the parents' message effectively (Koschanska 1993, 1995)" (Jensen-Campbell,

Knack, & Rex-Lear, 2009, p. 508). It is easy to imagine that some parents may

misinterpret this temperamental disposition and treat the child as stupid or

inappropriately willful; it is easy to imagine further that the child would incorporate this
interpretation into self definitions. On the other hand, fearless children do not become

aroused through gentle discipline, yet studies have shown that a typical response to
harsher discipline is anger. "Indeed, fearful children respond best to gentle discipline

while fearless children respond best to alternate parenting methods that capitalize on a

positive parent-child relationship (Kochanska, Aksan and Joy 2007)" (Jensen-Campbell

et al., 2009, p. 508). Considering that many parents attempt, out of principles of fairness,

to treat all of their children the same (i.e., the same disciplinary methods and
consequences), we can surmise that siblings sharing 50% of their genetics with each other
and receiving similar treatment from the same parents respond to this shared environment

with great variance.

The Other Environment: Social Adaptation
Judith Rich Harris represents the other major criticism of developmental-parental

paradigm research on personality. In The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out
the Way They Do (2009), Harris attacks the major tenet of accepted developmental theory

in Western culture: the nurture assumption that parents shape their children's
personalities. As with other critics, she cites the lack of incorporation of biological

factors and their significance in determining personality, but she does something

relatively unusual: she separates the nurture sector into rearing environment and the

socialization environment of culture through peer groups. Incorporating into her

argument socialization theories from other theorists, Harris presents a cohesive argument
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not only for the power of peer group identification but also against developmental

research as it has been designed and practiced in the last four decades.

Harris's hypothesis is that personality is shaped primarily by two forces: biology

and culture. By culture, Harris refers specifically to adapting to society through our peer

groups. It is this process of adaptation that hones and molds our personalities, she argues,

not the almighty influence of the parents. Her argument is persuasive, if anecdotal, and

consists of these main points: (1) developmental research does not incorporate the facts

of genetics; (2) developmental research confuses correlation with causation; and (3) the

influence the rearing environment does have on children is to construct the patterns of

their personal relationships within their families. Modern families have become islands,
no longer connected to the larger community. Parents do not transmit cultural norms, and
who one is in one's family remains in that context—with annoying reliability popping out
at Thanksgiving—remaining separate from who one is in and for the world.

People, regardless of their age, do behave differently in the presence of their

parents. A mistake made by psychologists of every stripe is to assume that
the way people behave with their parents is somehow more meaningful,
more important, more lasting than the way they behave in other contexts. It
is not. (Harris, 2009, p. 307)
This is a simple and yet profoundly original insight that pulls a primary assumption of

psychotherapy out from underneath itself. From here, Harris argues that who we are, our
personality and identity, is the result of our adaptation to the larger culture and our niche
within it, which is distinct from who we are in our family and is not necessarily carried

over into who we are in the larger world.

For this, Harris relies on an application of the theory of brain modularity specific

to her anecdotes. Experiments support a model of the mind as innately structured and

strongly modular at lower levels of cognitive function, while more weakly modular at

higher levels of cognitive function (Maloney, 2003, p. 105). This means that at basic,

implicit, or unconscious levels, the brain is heavily structured towards specific and
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certain functions. For example, in earlier chapters, implicit consciousness was discussed

as both operating autonomously from explicit consciousness and being predictable in its

outcomes; this is modular. The processes of explicit consciousness, or higher cognition,

rely on implicit consciousness as a base and at this level, cognitive functions are less

modular or less structured towards specific outcomes. Specific examples would be

procedural learning at a modular level of function and symbolic thinking, which is less

modular. As the mind becomes more conscious, creative, and complex through
experience, learning, and reflection, it becomes less modular and more emergent.

Emergence is less predictable than modular. In later arguments, Harris proposes that

personality has two components, public and private, and that these aspects are an
expression of the modularity of the brain. Her theory involves an idiosyncratic definition

of modular as separate functions of the brain—that private aspects of personality are not
only minimal but do not spill over into public aspects—rather than being more or less

predictable in the outcome of its functions. Research supports an understanding of the

brain as having distinct regions and functions but more along the line of
explicit/conscious and implicit/unconscious, not a split personality such as Harris offers.
The function of the ground of biology via temperament in shaping personality has

been argued above, and I agree with Harris's criticism that developmental research does
not incorporate this reality. She also notes that temperament biases parental response to

each child. However, Harris employs the same confusion behavioral geneticists do:

specifically, that because the same parents turn out different kids, parents don't shape

personality. Why would an individual with a unique genetic blueprint, a temperament

distinct from siblings, respond to parental conditioning the same as his siblings and
develop a similar personality? Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux comments on the genetic

bias that asserts the insignificance of parental influence found in twin studies, mentioned

above:
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We hear a lot these days about how identical twins, reared apart by separate
adoptive parents, can have similar habits and traits. We hear less about the
many ways they differ. The main outcome of Judith Rich Harris's
controversial 1998 book, The Nurture Assumption, in which she proposed
that parents hardly matter, was probably the emergence of clearer ideas
about just how important, and under what circumstances, parents do matter.
(LeDoux, 2002, p. 5)
The fact that siblings raised in the same environment by the same parents turn out with

very different personalities does not prove that parents don't have a shaping influence on

their children's personalities. In the same vein, twins reared apart who maintain many
similarities also do not prove the insignificance of parental conditioning.
In the perspective of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Harris

pinpoints the unconscious assumption of the development perspective that children are

shaped by their rearing environment as a driving force for the subject matter and design
of the research studies. "A resistance to acknowledging the seminal truth that no

conclusion is independent of its source of evidence is one of the most serious problems

facing the social sciences. Natural scientists are less resistant to this restriction" (Kagan,
2009, p. 132). We tend to find what we are looking for, whether it is the influence of
parents or a self archetype, when we use its de facto existence as the ground of our

inquiry. Harris demonstrates that developmental researchers find parental influence and
conditioning because they look for it. This charge is accurate, but unfortunately, it is

accurate for all researchers and theorists, including Harris's, and therefore makes for a
weak charge against another's theory when it is not applied to one's own as well.

The confusion of correlation with causation was mentioned in a broader context

earlier in regards to the fears of reduction from humanists and depth psychologists when

looking at the biological ground or origins of the self. To correlate our behaviors and

personality with brain systems and functions does not reduce our psychic reality to our

physiology; rather, the correlation points out the relationship between matter and mind.
Harris argues that researchers see correlations between experiences with parents or in the
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home and behavior and erroneously assign causation to the experiences in the home.

Statistically, "everything is related to everything else," Harris claims (2009, p. 302) and a
case can be made for her assertion. Unregulated high blood pressure and high cholesterol

are implicated in developing vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease later in life, but

this does not mean that high blood pressure and cholesterol cause dementia—they do
not—but that because they are correlated they tend to express together more often than

not. They are related; there is a significant association, but this association is not
causation. What causes Alzheimer's disease are amyloid placque and neurofibrilliary

tangles in the brain. In the same way, Harris argues:

Teachers and parents have higher expectations for kids who have done
well in the past; these kids are likely to do well in the future. Kids who do
well in school are less likely to smoke and less likely to break laws. Kids
who receive lots of hugs tend to have nicer dispositions than kids who
receive lots of spankings, (p. 302)

Although Harris does not indicate who is giving these influential hugs and
spankings—probably the parents more than the peers—her point that perhaps the nicer

disposition causes one to get more hugs than spankings, or that the ability and motivation

for a good performance preceded the higher expectations, is well taken. Developmental
research must address methodological problems, such as the correlation-causation
confusion and the use of subjective self-assessments as objective data, an issue raised and
addressed in Kagan and Snidman's longitudinal temperament study.

Harris is not careful with language and has a confusing collapse of the terms

personality and socialization. She writes that "the central question of this book is: How

do children get socialized—how do they learn to behave like normal, acceptable

members of their society?" (2009, p. 157). The loaded terms normal and acceptable need
to be de-charged through specific, contextual definitions. Fitting into the larger social

structure is not necessarily a sign of a successful personality, an authentic personality, or

normality. It is not even a deeper sense of self, as indicated when Harris says:
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We learn how to disguise our differentness; socialization makes us less

strange. But the disguise tends to wear thin later in life. I see
socialization as a sort of hourglass: you start out with a bunch of disparate
individuals and as they are squeezed together the pressure of the group
makes them more alike. Then in adulthood the pressure gradually lets up
and individual differences reassert themselves. People get more peculiar
as they grow older because they stop bothering to disguise their
differentness. The penalties for being different are not so severe. (2009, p.
337)

Considering personality the disguise over our differentness that is eventually

dropped in later life is a superficial understanding of personality. This definition is more

akin to Jung's concept of the persona as the face one shows the world; it is the public self

that adapts to the conditions of the world and learns to survive and hopefully thrive in
that world. But it is not who one "really" is, a deeper, genuine identity. It is a mask, as
Harris says, a disguise. To ask the question: "how do children get socialized?" is quite

different than to ask "how do children's personality come into being?" Although there is

overlap between these constructs—socialization processes certainly have an impact on

personality and vice versa—successfully adapting to the social environment does not
capture all or even a significant portion of personality. Personality is a complex construct
containing private and public aspects as well as developmental and stress-related aspects;

personality is heritable and consists of temperamental traits, of memory and story,

fantasies and self-images, personal interpretations, socialization desires and realities, and

more. Harris needs to define more clearly what she means by "how children turn out."
Harris provides the field with rich insights into the role of peer groups and social

adaptation in shaping personality; it is a perspective few have honed and developed, and

her leads deserved to be followed with solid research. The main weakness stems from
her extremes when she argues that parental influence on identity is so negligible that the

parents in any given community could be switched around and it wouldn't affect how the

children turn out at all. So what does it matter, then, to point out that different innate

traits in children bring out different attitudes and behaviors on the part of the parents, one
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of the main arguments in the text, if their role is negligible in the first place? Harris made

the point because it actually does matter: parental style and response are important

conditioning factors of individual identity, alongside cultural, biological, and peer group

dynamics. The research cited above on the effects of parental relationships and

conditioning on the personality outcomes in their children is just a small portion; there is
a growing body of developmental work, such as Kagan and Snidman's, that addresses the
lack of incorporation of the biological ground of temperament.

Kagan and Snidman's work supports Harris's claims of the influence of

socioeconomic status on how children turn out (not necessarily in terms of strict
personality traits but in a larger sense of how well adjusted they are in society). In
studies of aggression, boys, and criminality, a relationship has been demonstrated

between an extremely uninhibited temperament, low socioeconomic status in childhood,

and parents who did not socialize the aggressive behaviors. An uninhibited temperament
manifests as low levels of fear of others' evaluation or judgment, low fear of punishment,
and low guilt response in violating personal or social ethical standards. "But low-reactive

boys living in nurturant families, free of psychopathology, that effectively socialize

aggression do not have higher rates of delinquency. Indeed, these boys are likely to be

popular with their peers" (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 223).

Temperament also affects peer relations. Extraversion, Agreeableness, and

Conscientiousness are all correlated with social competence and smoother interpersonal

relationships. As might be expected, Neuroticism is associated with poorer social

relations and victimization. "Because neurotic children are more likely to experience

negative emotions, they are angrier during peer conflict, are less forgiving of others, and

are more likely to blame others, which increases the likelihood of being victimized by

peers (Bollmer, Harris and Milich 2006)" (Jensen-Campbell et al., 2009, p. 509).
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Harris's argument that one's friends make a powerful difference in successful

socialization is also supported by research.

Neurotic children who have an emotionally stable best friend do not differ
from a low neurotic child on skills such as initiating relationships,
resolving conflict and self-disclosing .... [whereas] a neurotic child with
a neurotic best friend has the lowest levels of interpersonal functioning
(Knack, Rex-Lear, Bryant, Gomez and Jensen-Campbell 2007). (Jensen-
Campbell et al., 2009, p. 509)
Harris' theory of personality and socialization considers the significant portion of

personality shaped by socialization more than personal familial relationships. Actually,

however, research into culture and personality has demonstrated the opposite. "Although

there appear to be personality-relationship transactions, Asendorpf and Van Aken (2003)

found that surface characteristics (e.g., loneliness, self-concept) are more likely to be
influenced by social relations than are more core personality characteristics (e.g.,

Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness)" (Jensen-Campbell et al., 2009, p. 512).

Both environments—rearing and social groups—shape our personality. I think this is a

distinction between private and public selves rather than a power struggle between

parents and culture; this distinction will be discussed more fully later.
Parents and Culture

One reason that parents are not as influential in shaping their children as
developmental researchers would have us believe, says Harris, is that parents do not

transmit culture, and culture is the true shaping force of who we become. As an example,

Harris sees a cultural assumption in a cultural practice, or the confusion of correlation

with causation, that putting children in their own bed to sleep—a distinctly Western
custom—makes children independent: a trait we prize. "They are put to bed by

themselves because we believe children should be independent. Child-rearing practices

are the product of a culture, not necessarily the baton with which the culture is passed on

from one generation to the next" (2009, p. 76). Although it is clear that child-rearing

practices are a product of culture, the latter conclusion is not clear. Our beliefs about the
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type of adults our children should be drive our customs, but they are also driven by

cultural customs. That is, Westerners believe children should be independent because

our culture prizes this, and as a result, these beliefs drive cultural customs. It is also

entirely possible that child-rearing practices are a product of culture and that child-

rearing practices are a conduit of culture from one generation to the next; her insights

provide no evidence that parents are not conduits of culture. Harris makes persuasive

arguments that adaptation to society is an influential factor in shaping personality, and

she brings up salient criticisms of developmental research, but these do not, in

themselves, prove her alternate contention that parental conditioning is negligible.

Harris's theory is that culture is transmitted through peer groups, and she makes a good

case for this. But she mistakes a good argument for the power of peers to double as a
good argument that early conditioning factors through primary relationship with parents

and siblings are inconsequential. A persuasive insight does not on its own disprove the

opposite argument.
Besides, cross-cultural developmental research brings into question the opinion
that parents are not conduits of cultural norms. Researcher Naomi Quinn (2003)

performed cross-cultural studies of a model that hypothesized that child-rearing practices

are designed to produce adults who will be productive in the larger culture. Her cohort

included Americans, Chinese, Germans, Gusii (Kenya), Ifaluk (Micronesia), and Inuit

(Baffin Island). From the study, a cross-cultural model of child-rearing with three

constant features emerged. The three features were (1) ensuring the constancy of the
child's experience around important lessons, (2) making these lessons emotionally
arousing, and, (3) attaching these lessons to evaluations of the child's behavior and to the

child herself as good or bad. "Child rearing depends upon constancy, emotional arousal,

and evaluation because these three features of experience are especially effective in

imparting to children what their rearers desire to convey to them, and in making these

lessons durable ones" (2003, p. 147). Of course, it is stating the obvious to point out that
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these specifically parental concerns of conditioning are culturally informed and that the

emotionally important lessons parents inculcate into their children are cultural values.

But because Harris makes assertions that refute common sense, which is both her gift and
her weakness, the obvious needs to be stated at times.

Quinn found that much of the constancy of communication is in unconscious or

implicit communication through looks, gestures, tone of voice, and body language, that

are "highly habituated ... [and] shape what the child experiences—and, equally

importantly, what the child does not experience—with enormous regularity" (2003, p.

148). The more constant the experiences, the stronger and more memorable are the
synaptic patterns that result. This is made even stronger by the coupling of emotional

arousal with constancy. "Hormones released during emotional arousal actually

strengthen synaptic connections, and emotional arousal organizes and coordinates brain
activity, crowding all but the emotionally relevant experience out of consciousness
(LeDoux, 2002: 200-234)" (p. 148). Approval and disapproval by one's caretakers is

especially emotionally arousing because of the importance of these relationships for the

care and survival of the child. Understanding what is good and will secure love as an
adult and what is bad and will not secure love, is an intensely important and affective

lesson for the young child. Emotionally driven synaptic patterns established early are

more likely to be unambiguous because they are not contradicted by other experiences.
This, coupled with the emotional arousal of security and survival issues, makes lessons

learned in infancy particularly strong.

The Gusii of Kenya prize calm, obedient adults who are submissive to the strict

hierarchical social structures and induce fear and shame in childhood to produce these
adults. One of the child-rearing methods observed by the researchers was the consistent

avoidance of eye contact a mother had with her infant in general, and in particular, with

her toddler and young child as they expressed narcissistic or attention-getting behavior.

This aversion of recognition produced adults who had a sense of smallness or humility
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and who were inhibited in expressing individualistic opinions or needs (Quinn, 2003, p.

168). A child in this culture who is born with a neurobiological profile of being outgoing,

extraverted, and rambunctious would be judged rather harshly on a personal level by the

parents, the community, and the culture at large. On the other hand, as America prizes

assertive, independent, and extraverted adults who take full advantage of the

opportunistic, entrepreneurial, and consumer-driven culture, a child who is markedly

introverted, timid, and fear driven will be judged harshly as well. Yet clearly, for the
Gusii this misfit of American culture would be prized. One can easily imagine both of

these children growing up with a core identity of being a misfit and even possibly an

unconscious interpretation that something is essentially wrong with them.

Developmental research involving language and memory as they are transmitted

through conversation from parent to child also confirms the role of parent as mediator of
cultural values. At the age of 3 to VA , children are able to tell more or less coherent

stories with assistance. Researchers have found correlations between stylistic differences

in memory talk of mothers and the details of the stories their children tell. A distinction
is made between elaborative mothers and repetitive mothers. Elaborative mothers focus

more on narratives and emotional content of memories and invite their children to

contribute their own memories to the narrative. Repetitive mothers focus more on asking
their children questions to elicit details of an event but do not contribute details or their
own interpretations of the event; repetitive mothers place emphasis on who and what,
whereas elaborative mothers place emphasis on how and why (Markowitsch & Welzer,

2005/2010, pp. 172-173).

Children of elaborative mothers had more autobiographical memories when tested

at 3 years old than children of repetitive mothers. Also, in general girls had more

autobiographical recall than boys; researchers surmise that, in part, this is because

mothers tend to engage in more emotionally focused memory talk with their daughters

than they do with their sons. "In talks about emotional events with their daughters,
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mothers put particular emphasis on having an elaborative style, far more so than with

their sons, and this was especially the case when the talks were about sad events (Fivush

et al., 2000)" (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 174).3

The influence of parental focus on the memories and stories of their children is

important when considering the cultural element to personality and whether parents are

conduits of culture. How else but through conditioning of what to pay attention to do we

learn what is valuable? And as this research demonstrates, subtle but powerful cultural
values are transmitted, as seen in the gender bias of emotionally descriptive language and

in the memories of daughters as compared to those of sons.

Genetic endowment and conditioning are impossibly enmeshed in shaping

personality; so are familial rearing environment and cultural influences. These cultural

selves are deeply ingrained yet implicit, outside of conscious self-reflection. We need to

recognize that our home environments are profoundly culturally shaped; there is not a

clear line between rearing environment and culture.

In further disagreement with Harris's perspective are other culture-personality
researchers, in particular, authors who analyze the methods and results of decades of
cross-cultural research in personality psychology. These authors

concluded that the pioneers of culture and personality investigation had

substantially overestimated the impact of culture upon personality ....
Moreover, attention should be paid to the interaction between the person
and his or her environment and situational influences, hitherto neglected
or underestimated, should be accorded their due importance. (Draguns,
2009, p. 568)

No matter the perspective taken in personality research, theorists must include

factors and perspectives outside of their own theories, as they discuss the confluence of

events that make up personality. What is glaringly lacking in Harris's theory as well as

in the social-cultural theorists discussed here is the role of the unconscious. Depth

3 Could this be a priming precursor as to why more adult women than men experience depression

in our culture?
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psychology is based on the significance of the unconscious, and neuroscience is also

coming to value this component in personality development, as LeDoux understands:

"An understanding of the mystery of personality crucially depends on figuring out the
unconscious functions of the brain" (2002, p. 11).

Public and Private Selves

A most important delineation in Harris's theory is the distinction between the

public self and the private self, though she dismisses the private self and spends her time

on the public self, contrary to the focus of developmental researchers. Yet, this boundary
is at the heart of Harris's work; who one is in her family is a limited, less influential

identity than who she is socialized to be. I agree that there are two selves constructed for
each of us along these lines, but it is a matter of opinion as to which one is "more" who

we really are. It seems to me that this is different for each of us and a part of our unique
story. However, what I want to build on here is that Harris's distinction between the

public and private personality is a concept worthy of further inquiry in developmental

research and depth psychological theory, and that it is dealt with in both Kagan and

Snidman's research on temperament and Jung's theories of persona and types.

"The public personality is the one that a child adopts when he or she is not at
home. It is the one that will develop into the adult personality" (Harris, 2009, p. 165).

Building on Turner's (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) theories on

group socialization, Harris draws a circle around "groupness," a salient identification that
children move through effortlessly as their social context changes. Through assimilation

into their peer groups' norms, children's personalities are honed to amplify what will

bring belonging; on the other hand, a sense of differentness is also carved through these

interactions. "Some of the characteristics they have when they enter middle childhood

get exaggerated, rather than toned down, as a result of their experiences in the peer

group" (Harris, 2009, p. 165). This statement is accurate—the problem is that it also

describes what happens as the private self is constructed within the family context. A
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major gap in Harris' theory is that she does not adequately explain why the sense of self

constructed in our personal relationships is less salient or influential than our social self.

Kagan and Snidman's work clearly demarcates the private and public self,

without necessarily using these terms, when they describes the process of adaptation that
high-reactives/introverts go through in learning to be more extraverted, yet, interviews
reveal that their subjective internal world—their private self—exists in sharp relief to

their adapted, public selves. A successfully adapted high-reactive child has the behavior

of an extravert but the inner world of an introvert, of their original temperament and
nature. We would assume that a low-reactive feels low dissonance between private and

public selves where a high-reactive is highly sensitive to the dissonance, and the rest of
us, the majority, feel a mixture of alignment and dissonance, most likely associated with

our social context at any given time.

Jung, in polar opposition to Harris' priorities, was far more interested in the

subjective inner self; he was as dismissive of our public selves, both family roles and

social personas, as Harris is of the private personality. He used the term "persona" for
the face of our social adaptation because it refers to the mask worn by Greek actors. This

term confers with Harris' use of "disguise" for the public personality. A weakness in
explicating her theory is that she does not adequately demonstrate that the public

personality is "the one that will develop into the adult personality" (Harris, 2009, p. 165).

Jung's theory of the persona seems to be more realistic and sober understanding of the

boundary between private and public. The persona is the part of the ego—the outer

wrapping—specifically involved with social adaptation, again, in agreement with Harris'

sense of the public personality. And while the persona in adult life is the face we

publically show and it is true that some adults erroneously confound persona with their

entire identity, the persona remains directly related to the inner, private, subjective self.

In fact, it cannot be understood separate from the internal, unconscious dynamics and

personal history of the individual. Being that the persona is an adaptive function of the
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ego, and the ego is in part unconscious and emerges from the greater collective

unconscious, the persona is structurally intimately involved with the whole self. Further,

an adult who is primarily identified with the persona or public personality is not healthy;

in Jungian terms this person would be lop-sided in development and likely neurotic or at

least rigidly defended. Harris does not include in her quite lengthy text on identity a

relevant discussion of pathology, particularly in connection with generalizing statements

such as that the public personality develops into the adult personality.
Jung was interested in the intersection of these two selves, as am I. In stating that
he believed the arbiter of type to be biological disposition—temperament—over the

effects of parental conditioning, Jung notes that this is the normal case. The typical

person is a combination of introverted and extraverted attitudes and not at an extreme;

Kagan and Snidman's original cohort reflected this in the distribution of a fifth of the
original group of infants who were categorized as high-reactive and another quarter low-
reactive. A full 50% fell into a mixed group of types. In abnormal circumstances,
however, Jung notes, an attitude can be forced on the child that is not aligned with his or
her neurobiological temperament. "As a rule, whenever such a falsification of type takes

place as a result of parental influence, the individual becomes neurotic later, and can be

cured only by developing the attitude consonant with his nature" (1921/1971b, p. 332).
Pathology in the personality is a hallmark of an uneasy and maladaptive relationship

between the private and public selves. Inquiry into personality disorders and pathology is

missing in Harris' research.

The extravert finds an ease of communication between his inner world and outer

world in that the outer world is not threatening and we can presume he finds objects

primarily pleasing or neutral in comparison of a predominant experience of the

threatening power of objects in the introvert. This affinity between who one is internally

and the objective circumstances she finds herself in allows the extravert to adapt to

external circumstances with more ease. Is the extraverted nature a type that would be the
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most adaptable in any culture? Or is the extravert a cultural artifact of American and

Western cultures that prize an assertive, sociable nature? In other words, would

introverts find more affinity between their internal states and external conditions in a

culture that valued introversion over extraversion? From a neurobiological perspective,

the high-reactive/introverted nature would be more uncomfortable physiologically in any

environment, but some cultures would surely be a better fit in that there would be an

overt value of introverted/high-reactive behavior. The high-reactive may be somatically

more aroused but would feel that this leads naturally to behavior that is valued. For the

introvert in America, the internal state would tend not to match the peer environment one
needs to adapt to, and this perpetual emotional mismatch creates a painful dissonance
between private and public selves.
If we consider manifestations of pathology, and in particular the state of the

borderline individual, there is an obvious match between Kagan and Snidman's high-

reactive and Jung's introverted type. A crippling self-consciousness is a typical

experience in BPD, and to manage it, the borderline person develops a false self/persona

to adapt to significant others and social circumstances, leaving a haunting sense of a true

self that is protected through its hiding but also unbearably vulnerable, ineffective, and
incompetent. Marsha Linehan, the creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which
has proven to be highly effective with BPD, among other mental illnesses, developed it
from her insight that the borderline is treated as competent but feels consistently

dissonant with this external observation. Linehan calls this an invalidating environment

where the borderline person feels others do not grasp how vulnerable and unable she truly

is and how much support she truly needs (Lieb et al., 2004). The over-adaptation that the

borderline develops to try to secure emotional grounding leeches him of a sense of a

stable, cohesive, authentic self and is the technique of his opposite attitude, the extravert,

taken to an overcompensating extreme. Recall Jung's words "that a reversal of type often

proves exceedingly harmful to the physiological well-being of the organism, usually

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causing acute exhaustion" (1921/1971b, p. 333) at the least and a mental breakdown or

illness at the worst. Excellent future research and theory development would be to bring

the knowledge of neurobiological profiles of temperament together with the construction

of private selves in depth psychology and public selves in socialization theory.

Harris separates the two major strands of experiential conditioning: rearing

environment and society. However, her thorough dismissal of the former is not

supported by evidence or logic. Moreover, she does not recognize that her argument for

socialization shaping personality, although relevant and strong, has many of the same

arguments and issues as developmental research. That is, sometimes she simply carries
the same argument out of the home and into the schoolyard and argues that these
dynamic processes can only take place in one realm, not both. For example, after

asserting that wounds of status in one's peer group lead to permanent effects on

personality, Harris states, "It is not easy to prove, however, that adults' insecurities (or

other psychological problems) date from experiences in their childhood peer groups.
Inevitably there are cause-or-effect uncertainties" (2009, p. 167). Well, yes, and these are
the same uncertainties that rearing environment theories face, as Harris herself effectively
pointed out.

It is necessary to separate the various elements that come together to create our

individuality, yet we cannot theorize on the whole—the self—from the evidence of

partial views; no matter how accurate the evidence is in its realm, its realm is limited. In
spite of my criticisms of Harris' argument, I agree with her essential gist: the influence of

parents on the personality of their children receives a distorting focus in Western, and

particularly American, research and culture. It is evident that a rearing environment has

the capacity to significantly impair or support children—and I do think that there is a

distinction between private and public selves and their primary shaping influences—but
our early environment and relationships are just part of a confluence of factors and events
that shape us. Beyond the pastiche of shaping influences, the final arbiter is our capacity
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for conscious reflection and choice. Our neurobiology perhaps cannot be altered by the

quality of our consciousness, but our conditioning from parents, culture, and

circumstance certainly can. We may not be able to alter the biological sensitivity of our
amygdala no matter how much healing we attain, but we can change our attitude and

relationship to these aspects of ourselves. This transformation in conscious attitude and

relationship to the unconscious is at the heart of analytical psychology.

Conclusion
In spite of the evidence that rearing environment is an influential factor in shaping
personality, it is one among many significant factors, and one that is over-emphasized in
developmental psychology. The money, effort, attention, publishing, and validated

results are convincing in persuading us that parents have a direct and lasting effect on the
organization of their children's emerging mind as well as their future ability to give and
receive love; however, the lack of equal research and attention given to other

developmental factors cause theories about parental conditioning to be distorted in their

significance. Although parents are certainly shown to be influential, they are not always

so. Many studies demonstrate that most children are born along a spectrum of resilience
that allows them to emerge relatively unscathed (none of us is without scars) from a
dysfunctional or adverse beginning. A methodological problem is that most research uses

retrospective methodologies in which the adult in the present is asked to report on past
conditions. Recall bias, the tendency for "individuals with current symptoms to

remember more adversities in the past" (Paris, 2005, p. 123), distorts and colors this

reporting. More longitudinal studies are needed to address recall bias. Another
methodological goal is the need to control for temperament factors genetically so that the

effects of heritability and parenting can be understood separately.

As discussed in the beginning of this chapter, not all people who experience

trauma develop PTSD and not all abused children develop mental health issues. The

focus on the role of parenting skews the data, causing it to appear bigger than it really is
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in psychic development. Hillman addressed this 15 years ago in The Soul's Code (1996)

when he drew a circle around what he called "the parental fallacy." I believe this still

exists today and that part of the value in Harris' contribution was to point this out while
elucidating the power of socialization. Why would we still cling to this myth of the

absolute primacy of the parents? Is it a desire to latch onto the aspect of development

that we feel we have some control over, and therefore, someone to blame? Is our

thinking following the cultural evolution of the isolated family; that is, do we see that the

parent-child relationship becomes more and more primary in our social structure and
assume it is primary in the development of psychological structure as well? Measuring

the relationships between parents and child is relatively easy, and it will give more

definite results than measuring slow-moving, diffuse cultural paradigms; we want

answers, even if they're short-term. Furthermore, a focus on social realities quickly

becomes political—economic status, for example, tends to play a large role—and these

realities cannot be easily responded to by individuals. Depth psychological and

psychodynamic developmental theories in particular are threatened by a release of focus

on the parents in the turn to culture, for these theories are particularly invested in the
internal, unconscious structures of self constructed in the early years of children's
primary relationships with caregivers. The internal and subjective focus of depth
psychology needs to be balanced with the objective perspectives of biology and external

forces of culture.
It seems to me that temperament is the driving force that meets, receives, and is

shaped through experience, but many factors are woven into our story of ourselves. I

offer two dynamic shaping experiences: repetitive and wounding. Wounding experiences

make us aware of ourselves in a painful way; their shaping experiences are especially

powerful because they separate us out from others, as an individual, alone. It seems that

people have significant wounding experiences that shape their identity from different

areas: some in their bodies, such as disabilities, illness, or chronic health problems; some
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in their parental or sibling relationships, to which those with personality disorders seem

especially sensitive; some in their peers groups or social belonging, such as Harris; and

some in their cultural-historical milieu, such as African Americans or homosexuals in

American culture. Having difficult parents or being gay in America does not guarantee

that it is a wound; it depends on how the particular factors combine to shape that

individual.
In Harris's example from her own youth, she was rambunctious, outgoing, loud,

made friends easily, until suddenly in a new school between 9 and 12 years of age, she

became an outcast of her peers. This changed her into an insecure and inhibited girl.
Apparently her peers did not agree with the positive perspective she presents of her

qualities. A psychological reading might see that Harris needed to confront her negative

personality tendencies that her parents, apparently, did not effectively socialize. (This

reminds me of the comment, above, that fearless children are not as emotionally aroused

by discipline as fearful children. Harris certainly appears to be fearless in what others

may think of her). This confrontation and rejection are simply part of maturing and

growing up, but on a wounding level they contribute to how we develop an identity,
through our recognition of ourselves in comparison and relationship to others. These

events can leave emotional and psychic wounds.

It did in Harris's case, and she says it changed her; she became quieter, more

restrained, more studious. What her home life did not accomplish her peer groups did:

maturation, thinking of others, balancing the brash leader with the thoughtful intellectual.

It is no surprise that when she moved to a new school in junior high and found herself

well-liked again, she attributed this in part to the changes resulting from her experience

of rejection, and this was not an entirely negative thing. This self-defining wounding

experience didn't happen for Harris at home but with her peer group; hence her theory

that it "really" is the peer group that conditions us. This is the value of a depth

psychological perspective that places content in an underlying dynamic context of

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psychic wounds: we are oriented by our significant psychic wounds that are inextricably

caught up in the details of our experiences but cannot be defined by or wholly attributed
to this content. When our theories elevate one class of experiences over another—as

Harris does with socialization experiences and developmental researchers with private

rearing environment—we erroneously find causation in a correlation.

Repetitive experience and conditioning are silent and harder to see for what they
are; they feel simply as how one is who one is, and this may be an accurate statement in

that there is not something to heal and resolve, as with wounds, but to see and choose.

This may be best expressed through Jung's typology functions. We rely on our dominant

ftmctions because they are a part of how we naturally work; it is what we automatically
bring to all of our experiences. When we see this about ourselves, we realize that we can

choose other functions, other ways of seeing, being, acting, and we can also choose our

dominant functions consciously, which changes the experience of them.

Consideration of the physiological base of character and behavior is important,

yet environmental influences reliably shape the other 50% of measurable personality
characteristics. If we understand conditioning as those external, environmental forces

that shape the expression of our genetic potential as we adapt in response to experience,

then conditioning doesn't "create" an introvert, for example, but molds the manifesting
personality traits associated with it. This may result in an individual afraid of the world,
insecure or shy to the extreme, who finds it difficult to move into society, or, an introvert

who values her solitude and learns to arrange her life so as to exploit the riches of her
nature. It may be fair to say that most people move through life in the middle of the road,

that is, with a biological disposition and conditioning experiences that inflict wounds but

without tipping towards the extremes.

The cultural paradigm at any given time of how the self comes to be and its

malleability, as well as the desirable qualities of individuals within the culture, have a
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powerful influence not only on how individuals may evaluate themselves and others, but

it also determines the questions researchers are more likely to ask. For example:

18th century England, on the cusp of great economic and military power and
eager to announce its intellectual separateness from Catholic France and
Spain, celebrated the power of the human mind to accomplish whatever it
desired without metaphysical restrictions. (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 35)
Therefore, philosophies and evidence that pointed towards the malleability of human

nature—such as John Locke's position that we each are born a blank slate—were prized
and esteemed above perspectives that awarded influence to biological disposition. Yet by

the time Darwin's ideas burst on to Western culture, with the state of competition in

industrialized nations, a great number of poor in the inner cities, and slavery in the
American South, it was more rational to see human nature as biologically determined in

which the strong survive or conquer. The cultural cycle of finding society or biology the
more influential in shaping human nature—the nature versus nurture debate—has

oscillated accordingly throughout the 20th and now the 21st century.
Or consider a matter as simple and common as anxiety today. Even an affective-

somatic human constant such as anxiety can go through vastly different cultural

interpretations and therefore responses to it.

The ancient Greeks, as well as Europeans during the Middle Ages, did not
regard anxiety as a mental illness because worry over Zeus's actions,
God's wrath, or social criticism for violating community mores were
utilitarian emotions that guaranteed civility and obedience to local rules.
Anxiety was an aid to adaptation rather than an alien emotion to be
exorcised. Further, most individuals in premodern times lived with
extended families who provided social support when they became worried.
Single adults with few friends living alone in apartments in large cities
represent a historically unique social condition that makes chronic anxiety
a more likely phenomenon. (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 98)
Currently, it is becoming more common for researchers to at least give a nod to

the complexity of perspectives that make up the potential of what can be known of

human beings, consciousness, identity, and development, but it is still uncommon in

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actual practice for researchers to incorporate findings from other fields. However, I

believe it is time for an interdisciplinary approach to the discourse of the self and identity
to be further developed and defined. An interdisciplinary perspective must accept the

great complexity of various relevant fields and acknowledge the inherent vulnerability of

the fact that as we rely on various fields to develop our theories, changes in just one field

can and will influence the entire theory. The truth is that extreme perspectives—such as

Rorty or Foucault's insistence that the self is only a culturally constructed fiction,

geneticist David Rowe's argument that genetic potential is deterministic, or theorist

Judith Rich Harris' arguments that biology and culture are the determining factors

rendering parental conditioning obsolete—can be so partial and myopic as to be untrue.

Harris is accurate and insightful, even original, about the influence of peer groups

because she experienced a powerful shaping influence through a wound with her peer
group. Her mistake was to then see her own wound in everyone. Like a person under the

influence of major depression who squeezes all past, present, and future happenings into
the gray shape of his or her depression, Harris sees all people as wounded through the
same dynamics that she herself was wounded through. She is in impressive company for

this cognitive and theoretical bias. The psychologies of both Freud and Jung can be
understood in this light. It has been said that psychoanalysis is a psychology of
repression and neuroticism—traits and states found in Freud—and that analytical

psychology is one of projection and psychosis—attributes and experiences Jung was

prone to and struggled with himself.

But it is not only Harris, Jung, and Freud who do this: they happen to dare to put

their ideas in writing where we can see their cognitive flaws more easily than our own.

The tricks of our minds and our unconsciousness is one of several reasons for an

interdisciplinary approach to understanding the self and identity. If our desire is to

attempt to grasp and know the truth of the self as much as possible, we need to begin

from an acceptance of the truth that the self—as well as many other psychological
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phenomena—is highly complex, complicated, and on a deeper level, unknowable in its

entirety or wholeness. Researchers and theorists in the field of personality psychology

and structures of the self are recognizing and embracing this complexity.

One way to embrace complexity is to frame psychological phenomena in a

systems perspective. General systems theory (Sameroff 1995) takes into
account the biological roots of behavior without reducing psychology to
neurochemistry. Mental processes have emergent properties that cannot
be explained at other levels of analysis. (Paris, 2005, p. 119)
The self is not captured exclusively in the brain's synaptic patterns, in

predominant neurotransmitters, in the relationship of limbic to cortical functions, in

genetic potential, rearing environment, culture, history, evolution, language, story or

myth. It is all of these. It is none of these. The self is that which emerges from all of
these factors. It is born from them but not of them, as the child is born of her parents but

is not her parents, born in the world but not of the world.
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Section III: Imagination

The work turns here on an aesthetic hinge into psyche. This is not a fork in the

road; it is a qualitative shift. Now that we have circumscribed the brain and molding of

personality through others, we inquire into how imagination is woven into identity. More
accurately, since identity is the aesthetic aspect of the self, we inquire into how

imagination weaves identity. In order to understand the self aesthetically, we must first

understand aesthetics as a discourse of subjectivity and depth psychology as an aesthetic

discourse.
Scholar Terry Eagleton describes aesthetics as "a discourse of the body" (1990, p.
3). Etymologically, aesthetics is derived from the Greek aisthetikos, "things perceptible
by the senses" (p. 3) and also "a showing forth or display''' (Slattery, 2010, p. 468). The

aesthetic moves us emotionally; a sensual, subjective, and particular expression.

"Aesthetics attends to that which is not reducible to scientific cognition and is yet

undeniably a part of our world" (Bowie, 2003, p. 25). The imagination is not imaginary;
it is a nonliteral reality beyond the senses yet born of the senses.

The subject is a kind of aesthetic object that straddles worlds—in depth

psychology the conscious and unconscious—of the interior and exterior. Art critic

Donald Kuspit suggests, "The artist keeps one foot in the everyday through his subject

matter... but transcends it by recreating it in aesthetic terms" (2004, p. 9). In this

section, we will come to an understanding of archetype and identity as an aesthetic re­

creation of primary experience. In short, as Kuspit explains, "aesthetic experience leads

to the realization that social identity is not ingrained—not destiny—nor the be-all and

end-all of existence ... it involves insight into the needs of what Winnicott calls the

incommunicado core of the self' (p. 13).

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Analytical psychology is a discourse of image, fantasy, and aesthetics. Jung's

work is primarily with the same medium that artists are concerned with, psyche: the

imaginative, creative unconscious. Consider as just one example among many, the

comparison between Jung's description of the psyche and art critic Rudolf Arnheim's

reference to the source of artistic inspiration. Jung writes that psyche is "the mother of

all possibilities, where, like all psychological opposites, the inner and outer worlds are

joined together in living union" (1921/1970, p. 52). Arnheim explains and cautions us

that "creative thinking below the level of awareness preserves the primordial unity of

thought and image, without which art is impossible. Our civilization promotes a

separation of abstract ideas from what the senses perceive, which is fatal for the artist" (p.

288).

Jung personified unconscious structures and dynamics into persons,

subpersonalities, demons, and gods, with their own volitions and messages. Along the

same vein, scholar, mythologist, and poet Dennis Slattery considers the psyche

"fundamentally mythic and metaphoric and that psychic energy is composed primarily

along these, among other, contours" (2010, p. 444). Although the roots of the psyche and

identity are in the body, the fruits are clearly of the imagination.
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Chapter 8
Imagine the Archetype

Jung's theory of archetypes was one of the most debated areas of his work while he
was alive, particularly among non-Jungians, and this continues in Jungian discourse

today, as the following discussion of the current debate on archetypes from various

scholars demonstrates. In particular, Jung received consistent criticism that he asserted

that archetypal images were inherited (Jung, 1948/1969b, p. 133). Throughout his life,

Jung consistently lamented that his critics did not understand archetype theory:

The concept of the archetype has given rise to the greatest

misunderstandings and—if one may judge by the adverse criticisms—
must be presumed to be very difficult to comprehend .... My critics,
with but few exceptions, usually do not take the trouble to read over what
I have to say on the subject, but impute to me, among other things, the
opinion that the archetype is an inherited representation. Prejudices seem
to be more convenient than seeking the truth. (Jung, 1959, p. x)

It may be that Jung's critics were responding to a statement such as this, written in

1943: "I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images come from. It
seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuring them to be deposits of the
constantly repeated experiences of humanity" (Jung, 1943/1953b, p. 68). Jung used the

word deposit repeatedly in his work to describe how archetypes are created. This word is
ambiguous and provocative when left unexplained, which it was, possibly referring to a

literal deposit of images or abstract renderings of evolved brain structures. "But because

of the wide-ranging application of the term 'archetype' in Jung's writings, it is no wonder

that confusion about its meaning has been one of the results" (Saunders & Skar, 2001, p.

312). In spite of years of claiming that his critics did not understand archetype theory,
Jung consistently contributed to the misunderstanding with his own contradictory

language.
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He indicated a transcendent origin of archetypes as

located beyond the psychic sphere, analogous to the position of

physiological instinct, which... forms the bridge to matter in general. In
archetypal conceptions and instinctual perceptions, spirit and matter
confront one another on the psychic plane. The ultimate nature of both is
transcendental, that is, irrepresentable. (Jung, 1954/1969, p. 216)

The distinction made here is between the archetype-as-such, indicated in the

transcendent position of spirit, and the archetypal image, referred to as the archetypal

conception in the psyche, and the realm of matter represented in instinct. The archetypal

image is found in the psyche, but the unknowable archetype structure and the instinct are

"transcendental" and "irrepresentable." Jung often described the archetype as the

imagistic representation of the instinct, but he did not see the archetype as emerging from

the instinct and appearing in the imagination, but rather meeting the instinct from

opposite ends of the spectrum of the psyche.

Instincts and archetypes originate in the body and are transcendent to ego-

consciousness but not the organism and certainly not to time and space. Instincts are

transcendent to the psyche or imagination, whereas archetypes are transcendent to ego-

consciousness but not the psyche. If in Jung's statement the definition of transcendental

refers to beyond consciousness or direct apprehension, then we are more in agreement, as

this refers to an unconscious origin. However, my argument places the human mind and

imagination as emergent from matter, which Jung is not indicating in the quote above but

does so when he writes that the archetype "represents or personifies certain instinctive

data of the dark, primitive psyche, the real but invisible roots of consciousness" (Jung,

1951/1959, p. 160).
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Further, instincts are not irrepresentable. An instinct, unlike an archetype, is

represented fully if the pattern of behavior it compels is allowed to unfold, such as

satiating hunger, copulation, building a nest, or the instinctual pattern of behavior in the

infamous leaf-cutting ant. An archetype is represented by a symbol which does not and

cannot express it fully. The archetype represents potential forms that emerge from the

intuitive-affective and subjective gestalt or theme of the complex. Many symbols can

represent the archetype but none completely.

Mogenson (1999) asserts that analytical psychology is its own field, and this still

needs wider recognition as such; in this sense, he sees the debate over archetype theory as

leeching the integrity of analytical psychology in its own right. I agree in principle but

contend that wider recognition of our field will come through analytical psychology

intentionally finding, recognizing, and affirming its relations to the matrix of

psychological discourse while retaining its distinct identity by being clear of its

contributions. In order to find its place within the rich web of knowledge, analytical

psychology must get past its fear of reduction while admitting its relativity. Archetype

theory is, after all, a theory; conceptually, archetypes are not necessary to understand the

mind in general. Many theories of consciousness do not incorporate archetypes just as

archetype theory excludes concepts from other fields. However, this does not mean that

archetypes are not relevant and significant in bringing insight to our understanding of the

mind, self, and in particular, the subjective inner world of individuals. We need to

demonstrate the interdisciplinary relevance of archetypes specifically and analytical

psychology generally. Others support this position, such as Saunders and Skar, a

mathematician and analyst, respectively, in England.

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While Jungians can find analogies for the theory of archetypes in other
fields, these fields have shown little interest in adopting the Jungian
terminology in return. Reasons for this might include the fact that the
theory of archetypes (like so much else in Jungian theory) has not been
consistently and clearly defined by Jung or his followers, and therefore has
not succeeded in attracting the interest of those in other contexts who
could lend new dimensions to our understanding of the efficacy of the
concept. (Saunders & Skar, 2001, p. 306)

Jungians have not persuaded other disciplines that terms such as archetype,

complex, and processes of individuation are necessary or relevant to their understanding

of the mind and self. My position here is to argue for a clear demarcation of the nature
and function of archetypes, mainly, that archetypes are of the subjective psyche or

imagination, and have a distinct nature and function.

Critics outside of depth psychology have dismissed Jung's, and Freud's, ideas as

irrelevant for relying on Lamarckism, the belief in the late 19th century that acquired
characteristics were inherited and that evolution was moving progressively towards
higher goals or states. In the Jungian view, the psychic evolution of the individual is

teleological. Pietikainen contends Jung is Lamarckian based on his perspective that

"there is a natural tendency for each species to progress towards a higher form" (2003, p.
197). He also cites Jung's Lamarckism in his position that we inherit the primordial
images themselves from our ancestors, but, as discussed above and as many critics have
noted, Jung's writing on this point was contradictory so that either point—inherited
images or dispositions—could be argued as to what he really meant. The more accurate

critique, then, is that Jung was not rigorous and consistent in his language when
discussing our archetypal inheritance; however, Jung's theory of individuation is
certainly teleological. Individuation is not germaine to this discussion, yet I want to note

that scientific knowledge does not invalidate the concept of individuation.

Another criticism from Pietikainen is Jung's separation of psychic evolution from

physical evolution, which refers to turn of the 20th century neo-vitalism, a theory that was

advocated by only a few biologists. A primary confusion of this thinking, he claims, was
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a split between the biological and the spiritual, and hence, that there were different

natural laws for each. Pietikainen connects this with what he calls "Jung's

spiritualization of the mind" (2003, p. 197) through the theory of archetypes. Although

Jung tried to distance himself intellectually from neo-vitalism, "like neo-vitalists, Jung

firmly believed in the existence of [a] 'vital entity' that animates the organism and

possesses 'some degree of autonomy with respect to the body it animates' (Becker, 1967,
p. 254). These almost autonomous vital entities are those famous 'archetypes'" (p. 200).

In Pinker's (2002) terms, this puts Jung in the category of those who advocate the

perspective of the Ghost in the Machine, a hang-over from the Descartian mind-body

split. The clear trajectory of neuroscientific knowledge and psychological theory,

including within analytical theory, is the acknowledgement of the enmeshment of matter
and psyche, of body and mind, and in particular, the emergence of consciousness from

the brain. Again, Jung wrote in a confusing manner about this point, as we might expect

from anyone with such a long and deep intellectual career, and as we get from applying

contemporary knowledge to prior theories. However, it remains that one can pluck from
his canon quotes, viewpoints, and even entire essays to support either perspective. Jung
at times clearly acknowledged the intimate relationship between psyche and matter, to the

point that they are the same phenomenon in different expressions, and yet he wrote much

of his work from a Descartian perspective of an autonomous, animating psyche with its

own laws. In light of contemporary knowledge of the brain and mind, we need to let go
of these elements of Jungian theory that define archetypes as autonomous, animating

agents originating outside the realm of consciousness.

Pietikainen also charges that "Jungians rely on an argument from analogy" (2003,

p. 209). Analogy is important when explaining and discussing the psyche or any areas of

human life that challenge and defy the linear deductions of science. It is personally

persuasive, metaphorically intimating intuitive details lost to logic; analogy enriches and

deepens the understanding of a given phenomena. Yet to use analogy as argument can be
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a problem. Analysts and psychotherapists in general are criticized from the scientific
perspective for relying on anecdotal knowledge to guide them in their work. Jungians,

among other humanities oriented thinkers, do tend to use anecdotal and analogical

explanations; if we rely on these solely for the basis of our argument, it is a weak

foundation. However, if we explain the human imagination without employing

analogies, similes, and metaphors, it is as dry as the methods section of a science

experiment and does not accurately capture the full nature of the psyche. Still,
Pietikainen's criticism is valid: to rely on analogy as argument when correlating Jungian
theory with biological evolution, or any other hard science, does not establish fact. As

Kagan and Snidman note, "anyone with a modest knowledge of the natural world and

minimal inferential skill can find examples in nature that support almost any ethical
message desired" (2004, p. 242). My goal here is to incorporate established

neuroscientific knowledge of the brain with Jungian theory to determine how analytical
discourse is updated and viewed from validated research; it is not intended to be the final

word on how consciousness works or to state that those elements of analytical

psychology that do not resonate with scientific methods are invalid aspects of human

experience.
There are, however, more powerful critiques of archetype theory than a
philosophical perspective such as Pietikainen's provides, due to great divisions within
Jung's work itself. Consider the following descriptions of archetypes which place them

both squarely in the human imagination as a manifestation of the brain structure and

outside of the human body all together. "The archetypes are as it were the hidden
foundations of the conscious mind .... They are inherited with the brain structure—

indeed, they are its psychic aspect" (Jung, 1931/1970, p. 31). Here primordial images are

the imaginative manifestations of the brain. Likewise, "The primordial image might

suitably be described as the instinct's perception of itself'' (Jung, 194871969b, p. 136;

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italics in original). A correspondence between archetypes, instincts, and brain structure

roots archetypes within the domain of the body.

In comparison, in Jung's discussion of the yucca moth's uncanny ability to know

the exact time to break out of its cocoon, he states that along with instinct one could posit

a kind of intuition occurring in the yucca moth, "namely the archetypes of perception and

apprehension" (Jung, 1948/1969b, p. 133). In this statement, archetypes of perception

and apprehension are now clearly located in the nonhuman physical world of the yucca
moth. This perspective of archetypes as external to the individual psyche is captured in

Anthony Stevens' interpretation of Jungian theory. "Jung proposed that archetypal

structures were not only fundamental to the existence and survival of all living organisms
but that they were continuous with structures controlling the behaviour of inorganic

matter as well" (Stevens, 1995, p. 354). In light of this, we need to consider Jung's

statement that "an image can be considered archetypal when it can be shown to exist in
the records of human history, in identical form and with the same meaning" (1954/1967,
p. 273). The image of the yucca moth and the leaf-cutting ant are not a part of the

records of human history and culture, yet both are considered archetypal by Jung and
Jungians (Hogenson, 2001; Jung, 1948/1969b).

Not only are there contradictory statements of heritability of images and location,

but also the quality and type of archetypes. Jung claimed that "there are as many

archetypes as there are typical situations in life" (1936/1959, p. 48). Structures of

perception and apprehension, as quoted above in regard to the yucca moth, are quite

distinct from the images and patterns that capture typical life situations. The former are

contentless cognitive structures, the latter subjective, metaphorically filled images.

Instincts are limited in number as they represent universal, biological drives. Archetypes

as images of instincts would be correspondingly limited, whereas archetypes as images of

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typical life situations would be much more numerous. A key part of the confusion over

just what Jung meant by archetype was that the same term applies to both the archetype-

as-such, considered a nonrepresentable and noncomprehensible level of noumena, and the

archetypal image, considered the symbolic, dynamic phenomenon.

I do not think that Jung was sure of what archetypes were, once and for all, but he

was sure of what he did not mean: archetypal images are not inherited. At times Jung

saw that the phenomena of the collective unconscious and archetypes were intimately and

directly related to instinct and brain structure; at others he saw seductive possibilities that

archetype may originate in the nonhuman physical world. Analyst Jean Knox (2003)

provides a more succinct dismantling of a single paragraph of Jung's, demonstrating four

different concepts of archetypes presented in the one piece. The paragraph she

deconstructs is below:

Archetypes are by definition factors and motifs that arrange the psychic
elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a
way that they can be recognized only by the effects they produce. They
exist pre-consciously, and presumably they form the structural dominants
of the psyche in general. As a priori conditioning factors they represent a
special psychological instance of the biological 'pattern of behaviour'
[which gives all things their specific qualities]. Just as the manifestations
of this biological ground plan may change in the course of development,
so also can those of the archetype. Empirically considered, however, the
archetype did not ever come into existence as a phenomenon of organic
life, but entered into the picture with life itself. (Jung, 1948/196%, p. 149)

The four models she delineates from this paragraph are as follows:

• biological entities in the form of information which is hard-wired in the genes,

providing a set of instructions to the mind as well as to the body
• organizing mental frameworks of an abstract nature, a set of rules or
instructions but with no symbolic or representational content, so that they are
never directly experienced
• core meanings which do contain representational content and which therefore
provide a central symbolic significance to our experience
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• metaphysical entities which are eternal and are therefore independent of the
body. (Knox, 2003, p. 24)

In Jung's paragraph, Knox relates the first sentence with archetypes as organizing

mental frameworks of the second definition, whereas the next statement suggests the core

symbolic meanings of the third. Seeing archetypes next as "a priori conditioning factors"

places them in the first category of biological entities, yet the last statement places them

in the fourth definition as manifestations of eternal life (Knox, 2003, p. 27). Knox
claims, as have others, that the lack of precision in the theory of archetypes has kept

Jung's work from having validity in academic psychology and has provided confusion

among biologists, neuroscientists, and others (p. 25). Her intention is to ground and
clarify archetype theory in light of the latest empirical findings in cognitive psychology

and research on genetic expression. In this task, Knox finds that the first and last

definition of archetypes above are not tenable in light of the latest knowledge of the
genes, innateness, emergence, and the developing mind. That is, archetypes are not hard­

wired biological entities, as argued by Stevens (1995), nor are they metaphysical realities
independent of the body, as argued by Conforti (1999), both discussed below. She makes

a distinction between archetypes-as-such—abstract, organizing mental frameworks,

articulated in the second definition—and their images—core meanings with

representational content, articulated in the third paragraph—correlating the archetype-as-

such with cognitive image schemas and internal working models (IWMs) from cognitive

psychology. With a single yet significant exception, which will be discussed later, I

agree with Knox's position. First, however, let me claim my position briefly and then

extrapolate and ground it through a critique of a handful of representative theorists in the

debate on archetype theory as we attempt to update our understanding of archetypes by

incorporating the latest knowledge in biology, evolution, genes, and the developing brain.
Many erudite, cogent, and persuasive theories on the nature of archetypes have

been articulated over the last 15 years or so within Jungian discourse. Many of the
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arguments involve critiquing a peer's understanding of a hard science, such as genetics or

evolution. For the most part, I do not argue with the soundness of the interpretations or
knowledge offered in any of the debates; that is, my primary argument does not take issue

with whether a theorist understands the branch of knowledge he is using to develop

archetype theory. The essence of my view was stated above by Saunders and Skar (2001)

that Jungians have not initiated dialogues nor enjoyed influence in the fields we

incorporate into analytical theories because we have not been clear and consistent about
the terms and territory of depth psychology. All of the theorists discussed here to fail to

make a simple yet essential distinction: archetypes are constructs of the imagination. A

part of this failure includes seeing the world imaginatively—a proclivity of depth

psychologists—and in this imaginative sight, projecting archetypes as literal forms of

matter. Imagination is a realm of consciousness with its own integrity. Imagination as a

reality of consciousness has not received the research attention of other areas of the brain-
mind for obvious reasons: it is by nature subjective and irrational. By not recognizing

that archetypes are within the realm of the imagination, the theorists collapse the form of
the archetype with a priori processes that bring them about.

Let me give an example from Jung's work. Archetypes, Jung says:

not only occur in highly emotional conditions but also very often seem to be
their cause. It would be a mistake to regard them as inherited ideas, as they
are merely conditions for the forming of representations in general, just as
the instincts are the dynamic conditions for various modes of behavior.
(Jung, 1957/1972, p. 255)

Jung confuses the order of psychic manifestation here: archetypes do not cause highly

emotional conditions; they are the imagistic gestalt representing strong affects that first

emerge into the conscious ego mind from collective, non-ego levels of the mind. The

emotional conditions occur first and the archetypes order, channel, and symbolically

mediate the expression of them. As noted by Saunders and Skar, "In effect, Jung was
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conflating form with the process which brings it into being" (2001, p. 313). Not only

Jung but many Jungian theorists make this error of conflating archetypal form with

processes in nature and the body that bring them about. It appears that the imagination,

synonymous with the psyche—both being the subjective, creative, imagistic aspect of

consciousness—represents and organizes psycho-instinctual affects archetypally. A

theory and understanding of archetypes—their form, process, and nature—is fundamental

and necessary in order to understand the imagination. However, archetype theory is not

necessary to understand other areas of consciousness such as neurobiology, cognitive

psychology, or evolutionary psychology. When Jungian theorists argue that archetypes

originate outside of the psyche—in genes, the brain, physical matter—they are conflating

archetypal form with the processes that precede them and are distinct from them. I

propose the following five qualities and realities of archetypes:

1. Archetypes are of the imagination, or, the subjective psyche, which exists

along a continuum of existence.

2. Archetypes are emergent in experience with roots in the brain and body.

Although they can be correlated with various structures and functions along

the spectrum, archetypes, as well as the psyche, retain a unique function and

nature distinct from other forms they are consonant with.

3. Archetypes always express subjectively and personally; they are distinctly

human.

4. Archetypes are numinous because they emerge from outside of the boundaries

of ego-consciousness as an Other or not-me force.

5. Archetypes are dynamic and transformative of the self.

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From this position, I will review a select number of theorists who represent the
primary perspectives in the debate on archetype theory. But first, I want to address a

valid objection of my critique: that a body of work as voluminous as Jung's, spanning

decades of thinking, is bound to contain contradictions. This is true, of course, but it may

be more accurate to say that Jung was dealing with a paradox: the psyche. Referring
back to the methodological perspective of dual-aspect monism, psyche and the brain are
manifestations of the same phenomenon. This is a paradox, and working closely with

either manifestation, as Jung and neuroscientists do, is to work with both phenomena at

once. Yet neither side has historically recognized the phenomenon on the other side, and
the resulting contradictions compel a need to be careful with language and claims.
Clearly, neither Jung nor neuroscientists are consistently careful with their language or
claims, in part because it leads to stilted, over-determined theories, and in part because
each field tends to ignore or dismiss the other side. My driving argument in this chapter
is that in our discomfort with and unconsciousness of the psyche-brain paradox, we make

literalizing moves: neuroscience attempts to reduce psyche to matter, whereas analytical

psychology attempts to turn all matter into psyche. This dissertation desires to dance in

the dialogue in-between.

A Continuum of Existence
The debate on archetype theory circles a core dichotomy of archetypes as innate or

emergent phenomena. The innate perspective considers archetypes-as-such as inherited,

contentless structures, as did Jung in his references to them as inherited predispositions.

A branch of this perspective tends to locate archetypes in the nonhuman physical world

first, such as morphological fields in biology, parallels in quantum physics (Conforti,

1999), or evolution and genes (Stevens, 1995; Maloney, 2003). The debate can also be

framed with two questions: where are archetypes and what are archetypes? Innateism

argues that archetypes are located in either the laws of the natural world or in genetic and

biological structures through evolution. The contrary view of emergence locates

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archetypes within the individual experience: the archetypes emerge with the mind as the

brain responds to experience.

Michael Conforti represents theories from a radical innateism that sees archetypes

as originary forms outside of matter, time, and space. Conforti's reading of Jung is that

"the archetype ... is a preexistent, non-personally acquired informational field in the

collective unconscious" (1999, p. 1). As explained below, the archetypal informational

field is first, guiding physical manifestation.

Jung described an instinct as the physical manifestation of an archetypal

process, having found form in matter. For instance, the sexual drive is a
temporal, physicalized representation of the archetype of union, or
coniunctio, and related to it are a series of specific symbols, images, and
behaviors that are also expressed physically and temporally. (Conforti,
1999, p. 2)
Although Conforti does not state explicitly where the collective unconscious is, this
statement clearly posits the collective unconscious outside of the individual brain and
body. Further, the hypothesis is neo-Platonic, where ideal, advanced, and more complex

concepts are the invisible origins of simpler, more rudimentary physical manifestations.

Conforti rests on concepts of consilience, put forward by Edward O. Wilson, that calls for

an interdisciplinary attitude towards mind and matter that sees all manifestations from an

original unity. Although I also call for interdisciplinary methods of thinking and
theorizing, and support the idea of an original wholeness of all matter, I stop at the
conflation of forms that exist on different levels of existence. It is true that all forms are

part of a unity, yet material and psychic planes of existence possess unique properties and

functions that distinguish and separate them. It is these distinctions that, when lost,

mystify rather than clarify matters.

Conforti's principal thesis is based on biological morphogenetic fields put forward

by Rupert Sheldrake. "According to Sheldrake, memory is stored in what he terms

'morphic fields'" (1999, p. 3). Whereas classical biologists see that DNA and the
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unfolding of genetic coding leads to morphogenetic development, Sheldrake, like

Conforti and Plato, locates learned information in "non-spatio-temporal fields" (p. 4) that
guide and direct the physical unfolding of form in matter. Sheldrake's idea can be

criticized as a contemporary form of Larmarckism, a long discredited evolutionary theory

from the ton of the 20th century that posited that acquired characteristics are inherited.

Sheldrake accounts for the transmission of new information by suggesting

that each time a new task for survival is learned, it is added to the
cumulative store of material contained in the morphic field. What was
initially a novel experience quickly becomes assimilated in to the morphic
field as memory and habit, thus becoming available to all members of the
species. (Conforti, 1999, p. 4)

Unlike classic Lamarckism, Sheldrake's theory places acquired knowledge in the

morphogenetic field rather than the genome. Thus, for Conforti, the collective

unconscious is the original morphogenetic field. The phenomenon of how human

consciousness influences evolution, called the Baldwin Effect, is relevant here. The

Baldwin Effect sees that each generation develops not from zero knowledge but from a
foundation of acquired knowledge from their ancestors. The difference between this and
morphogenetic fields is that the Baldwin Effect sees culture as the cocoon of acquired

knowledge human beings develop within, not an invisible energy field (Hogenson, 2001).
Conforti finds, as do others, a relevant connection between mathematical principles
underlying matter, morphogenetic fields, and archetypes. "For Jung, Hillman, Plato, and

in my own ideas about the a priori nature of patterns, there appears to be agreement that

matter emerges in response to and in accordance with a preformed image, or field" (1999,

p. 15). I do not argue that matter does not display an exquisite order; I do not argue that

there are not relevant and meaningful connections between laws of physics, biology, and

the imagination. I argue that archetypes are emergent phenomena in which the archetypal

image is first manifest in the imagination; stated simply, mathematical principles and a

priori forms are not archetypes.

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An application of this perspective to Jung's work is his analysis of the discovery of

the law of conservation of energy—the first law of thermodynamics—that erupted

through the life and work of Julius Robert von Mayer in 1841. Jung calls Mayer's

discovery "one of the greatest thoughts which the nineteenth century brought to birth,"
(1943/1953b, p. 66) from a physician who was not a physicist, but one who was seized by
the numinosity of his inquiry. Upon questioning how this universal idea arose in Mayer's

life, Jung concludes that the answer "can only be this: the idea of energy and its

conservation must be a primordial image that was dormant in the collective unconscious"
(p. 67). Yet the law of conservation of energy has never been dormant; it is and has been

an active principle in the physical world always, whether human consciousness

understood it or not. Jung usurps the entire cosmos into the human psyche in this move
as though the natural laws of the entire physical world emerge from the collective

unconscious.
What emerges from the collective unconscious is our embodied intuition of the

whole. Just as the sun was always the center of our solar system regardless of
Copernicus, the law of conservation of energy as the phenomena always existed, before it
received a name and regardless of human understanding. Jung's work also demonstrates

a lack of integration of the cultural context that creates the horizon of knowledge at any
given time. The idea of the conservation of energy could not have been understood

without certain precedents in knowledge and history. When Jung describes primordial
images lying dormant in the collective unconscious, he describes a deeply subjective and
embodied experience of the world: that the discovery of reality in the human imagination

is the literal birth of the cosmos. This is certainly what it feels like, but this uniquely

human experience should not be used as the basis of understanding objective reality. It is

akin to the infant who is delighted with the game peek-a-boo because he believes that you

literally disappear and reappear upon his sight of you. That's the experience, but it is not

the reality.
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Robert Mayer was archetypally moved by the idea of the law of conservation of

energy; it possessed him. The archetype that compelled him, however, was activated in

his imagination by the physical reality. I can imagine the archetype of the scientist,

perhaps of Galileo peering through his telescope or Newton seeing the secrets of the

world in an apple, had lain dormant in his own unconscious until the very dynamic and

active law of energy provoked it from its slumber, seized his mind, and directed his
inquiry. We will never know the primordial image that moved Mayer, but we do know

this: it was intensely personal and numinous.

Archetypes are not nouns waiting to be discovered in the world; we have posited a

term to understand the quality of certain human experiences and the structure of human

consciousness. Archetypes are a psychic reality in concord with the structure of the
world.

Because brain structure and function reflect regularities of our physical

world (Sheppard 1994) the a priori features of our psyche in effect
anticipate the world around us. This insight gives weight to the
controversial possibility that the features of the environment, through
Darwinian processes, probabilistically shape our emergent mental
processes. (Maloney, 2003, p. 109)

Our archetypal brains are carved by an archetypally organized world. We are

stunned to find the exquisite organization of the world, ranging from universal forms
without content to more particular and defined structures. But we should not conflate

these structures with archetypes of the imagination.

Archetypal images are bridges that link subjective and objective reality. "By

amalgamating inner and outer, images intimate to us something about how we experience

whatever it is that has become the content of experience" (Mogenson, 1999, p. 127). In

the neo-Platonic tradition, psyche is the realm in-between matter and spirit, or, in the

current debate of archetypal theory, between biology and philosophy (p. 126). I also

situate the archetypes and psyche this way: imagination is the mediating realm between
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the body and the mind. Psyche "is a realm of imaginal or subtle bodies ... a world of

inner representations, we say, a world of imagos which combine features of external

objects with subjective factors" (p. 127). As stated in my first position, archetypes are of

the imagination, and both psyche and its archetypes exist along a spectrum of existence

from atomic structures to physical matter to consciousness. Although the processes,

forms and structures that appear along this spectrum are intimately related, and one could
make an argument that they are the same phenomena in different manifestations,
nonetheless, correlation is not equation in this instance. In our embodied experience all

levels of reality act together, as a unified whole, but each form can be isolated to a degree
and understood as having relative autonomy and integrity. Laws of physical matter,

atomic structures, or the nature of genetic coding and expression are distinct from

archetypes, which are themselves distinct in their imaginative, numinous, personally

human nature.

Archetypes are Emergent

Anthony Stevens represents another argument for the innateness of archetypes in

the natural world. His basic position finds archetype theory validated in the continuity of

archetypal structures and dynamics through the evolutionary, inorganic, organic,

neurobiological, sociological, mental, and psychic stratums of our world. Basically,

Stevens finds archetypes everywhere:

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.
Indeed, if the significance of an idea can be measured by the number of
people who later claim it as their own, then the archetypal hypothesis must
certainly be one of the most important ideas to have emerged in the present
century. (Stevens, 1995, p. 354)

This is stated as though Jung's theory of archetypes was not the re-announcing of

others' terminology and ideas, such as Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer, to name just a

few. Finding similar structures and dynamics in different fields, as Stevens does in
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linguistics and sociobiology, does not mean that all of the structures are synonymous and

that one can or should be considered the founding or original concept that all others

concepts are related to. "A similar position [to archetype theory]," Stevens argues, "has

been adopted by a new breed of evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists, who

speak of 'Darwinian algorithms' which are 'specialized learning mechanisms that

organize experience into adaptively meaningful schemas or frames' (Cosmides 1985)"
(1995, p. 358). We could just as easily designate cognitive psychology's image schemas

as the core concept that subsumes the concept of archetypes. Similar structures are found

in image schemas, neurobiological profiles, the laws of physics, mathematics, and genetic

predisposition.
Hogenson's view, popular with Knox and the central position others clarify their

thought against, involves the assertion that an archetypal image and situation emerges
from both inherited predispositions in the brain and a particular context. The instinct has

a corresponding image in the archetype, and this image must be present in order for the
instinct to be activated. Using the infamous image of the leaf-cutting ant, Hogenson

(2009) argues that all elements of the instinct—in this case, ant, leaf, cutting—must be
present in order for the inherited, compulsive, noncognitive instinct to be activated, in

order for the ant to cut the leaf and carry it to its garden. In this sense, the archetype is
embedded in soma but also linked to the external world through intuitive apprehension of

the necessary contextual elements. If these components of the image did not exist, says

Hogenson, then "the ant would, in some ontological sense, cease to exist" (2009, p. 328)

just as a man or woman, torn from his or her human environment, would cease to exist in

an ontological sense as a human being. These necessary images of the human

environment emerged with symbolic thinking in Homo sapiens roughly 200 thousand

years ago, a catalyst for language and culture.

Hogenson (2001) represents an emergent perspective of archetypes and the mind

that recognizes the ground of biology yet places archetypes decidedly in the
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developmental and environmental context. In fact, in later publications Hogenson (2009)

finds the mind itself and in particular the dynamic unconscious to be an emergent
phenomenon wholly within the space of interaction and context between individuals and

others. Maloney (2003), in a response to Hogenson's 2001 article, represents an

emergent view of archetypes, yet with more emphasis on the originating and constraining

effects of genes than Hogenson. Theoretically, Maloney is in between Stevens'

predominantly innate argument and Hogenson's contention that archetypes exist in the

interactive space between an individual and her experience. Experiments support a

model of the mind as innately structured and strongly modular at lower levels of

cognitive function while more weakly modular at higher levels of cognitive function

(Maloney, 2003, p. 105). This means that the basic implicit and unconscious levels of the
psyche is heavily structured towards specific and certain functions and as the mind
becomes more conscious, creative, and complex through experience, learning, and

reflection, it becomes less modular and more emergent.

Hogenson advocates archetypes as emergent in environmental, cultural contexts;

that, yes, there are universal structures but these are not biologically innate; they emerge

out of the meeting of biology and environment. Maloney finds archetypes contextualized
by neurobiological realities. The essential dichotomy represented by Hogenson and

Maloney is in the argument between the power of biology and the power of culture.
Jung, interestingly, situated himself in between and separately from both sides: biology

he tended to dismiss as separate from the relatively autonomous levels of psyche he was

dealing with and culture he related to as an ipso facto conditioning that could be, and

needed to be, de-identified from and re-learned in the process of individuation, thereby

dismissing its eventual influence. This led Jung's thinking to be insular, operating in a
psychic and mythological universe divorced from the influences of both biology and

culture.
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The origin of language is the exemplar employed by both thinkers in the argument

between biology and culture; specifically, is language primarily genetically based, as

argued by Steven Pinker (1994), or is it culturally acquired? Hogenson (2001) cites work

that discredits the genetic basis of language. Through Deacon, he cites the argument that

a genetic basis for anything requires that the conditions driving natural selection be stable

over a long period of time; this is not the case with language development which took

place among many varied, inconsistent conditions. But Maloney argues that "a variety of
simpler, lower level regularities could satisfactorily provide rules for language
acquisition" (2003, p. 106). In addition, although syntax and grammar may not be

heritable, the conditions of vocalizing communications and social systems of our

ancestors were stable enough through time to support the selection of genes adapting to
language acquisition and use (Maloney, 2003, p. 107).
Neuroanatomy is a relevant guide here. We do not find the language areas of the

brain—primarily Broca's area and Wernicke's area—only in the left hemispheres of

English-speaking brains or American brains or European brains, just as we do not find

the hippocampus a primary agent in encoding Polynesian or Nigerian memories.

Culture-specific language is produced by almost all brains, yet this capacity of the brain
will not emerge without the accommodating environment. The brain is species-specific

and it has evolved to be able to acquire, use, and develop language, among many other

talents, uniquely and universally human. We cannot disregard the universal structure and

capacity of the human brain when we discuss archetypal theory or innate mental

structures. Clearly, innate neurobiological anatomy plays an essential role in structuring

human cognition, its objects and images. The significant discussion is what belongs to a

priori categories versus what is emergent. Hogenson makes a relevant point in this

regard: language, as all archetypal expression, is emergent in specific contexts.

Yet the capacity for language is inherited. As an example of the genetic basis of

language potential, Maloney cites work on genetic defects that lead to language
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anomalies. These genes code for neuronal proteins that together with developmental and

environmental context promote normal speech development. Though these genes do not
code for syntax or even language per se, they are essential in the neurobiological
development and processes for language acquisition and use. Defects in these genes

disrupt an individual's potential for language acquisition. "His [Hogenson's] exploration

is limited by his focus on the use of skills, and loses its bearing because he ignores

questions regarding acquisition of these skills" (Maloney, 2003, p. 108). In other words,
by focusing on skills, Hogenson gives attention to the environmental context they
develop in and adapt to without considering that the ability to acquire skills such as
husbandry or language exists first in our biology. Maloney, while also finding archetypes

emergent, demonstrates Hogenson's lack of inclusion of the reality of biology in genetic

material and neurobiological structure. The

complex interplay [of genes and environment]... creates an emergent

regularity.... If we are committed to a deeper understanding of the
psyche, we need to leave behind sterile arguments like whether genes or
environment or emergence shape the psyche, and instead look for the
contributions of all relevant factors. (Maloney, p. 108)

I agree with Maloney's call for an interdisciplinary focus, as do the other theorists who

follow; my area of disagreement is that we cannot equate genetic predisposition, as

Stevens and Maloney do, and even neurobiological structure, discussed in the previous

chapter on temperament and typology, with archetypal structures. The modular

organization of the brain and mind leads to an archetypal order of the psyche that reflects

the structure of the matter that archetypes emerge from, but archetypes emerge from a

complex psychic system, not directly from biological structures.

Peter Saunders, a mathematician at King's College, University of London, and

Patricia Skar, an Irish Jungian analyst, offer an emergent theory of archetypes that

incorporates the phenomenon of self-organizing systems in the natural world.

Recognizing that an "ongoing concern is whether Jung's concept of the archetype and
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complex can be justified in terms of current scientific research, most notably that of

neurophysiologists and others interested in the brain and consciousness," Saunders and

Skar propose a theory of the formation of complexes as

created through self-organization within the brain/mind. Self-organization is

a process typical of large complex systems, and is generally accepted to
operate within the brain and to be important in its functioning. Examples of
self-organization in biology are related to the psychic processes that form
the complexes. It is then natural to define the archetype in terms of the
complex, and the authors propose a definition of the archetype as an
equivalence class of complexes. On this view, the archetype is an emergent
property of the activity of the brain/mind, and is, appropriately, defined at
the level at which it emerges. (2001, p. 305)
Saunders and Skar describe the Benard convection of physics as a classic example

of self-organization:

A large shallow container is filled with water and then heated evenly from
below. After a while, the water begins to move, as warmer water rises from
the bottom and cooler, denser water sinks. Eventually, and spontaneously,
this motion organizes itself into a regular pattern of cells, looking
something like a honeycomb. The pattern does not reflect either the way in
which the water was heated or the shape of the container. It is an emergent
property arising out of the dynamic ... of self-organization, the
phenomenon in which order and pattern arise spontaneously and apparently
out of nothing. There is no template, and neither are the forces applied in
such a way as to induce the pattern. It comes about through the action of the
dynamic of the system itself; it is, we may say, latent in the nature of that
sort of system. (2001, p. 315)
This describes a physical process that could be called archetypal in that the self-

organizing principle organizes matter into essential structures and forms that were

inherent and latent. However, it would be inaccurate to call the honeycombs archetypes,
as it is inaccurate to call the law of conservation of energy an archetype. The honeycomb

pattern of cells of Benard convection and the law of conservation of energy are the

essential structures of objective matter. These structures of the physical world are

counterparts of the archetypes of imagination.

The characteristic honeycomb pattern of Benard convection does not exist,

except as an abstraction, until it is realized in a tray of water or some other
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appropriate system. To be sure, a tray of water is much simpler than the

psyche and so we can write down the relevant dynamical equations and see
how the pattern arises. There is, however, still nothing that can be picked
out and identified as the archetype. There is only the system, its dynamic,
and the surrounding environment. The pattern is an emergent phenomenon.
(Saunders & Skar, 2001, p. 316)

Unique to Saunder and Skar's theory is the relationship between complexes

and archetypes. Complexes are formed through the process of self-organization

in the psyche and express in finite forms with regularity; that is, complexes are

not deviant, infinite, or random. Archetypes are the emergent phenomena of

general categories of complexes. Saunders notes that Jung discovered complexes

first and then noticed that they expressed along general categories, just as species

are ordered in genera. Yet he could not find the causative mechanism responsible

for arranging complexes into categories, just as biologists cannot find the

mechanism responsible for the exquisite order of the natural world. Jung named

this mechanism of psychic order the archetype (Saunders & Skar, 2001, p. 314).

Where Jung assumed the archetypes—images and innate predisposition—to be a

priori to complexes, Saunders and Skar propose that archetypes are categories of

complexes that do not precede the complex.

Archetypes can therefore exist as biological entities without our having to

postulate anything beyond the organizational capability that the brain is
generally agreed to possess. Nor do we have to decide when they appeared
in evolution or, indeed, whether they were always there. They came into
existence as the brain and consciousness evolved and as societies
developed. They were always there in the sense that the laws of physics and
chemistry on which they ultimately depend were always there, but they
remained latent until there were brains sufficiently complex for them to
become manifest. (Saunders & Skar, 2001, p. 314)

The problem with this view, asserts Knox, is that archetypes "lose a key distinguishing

characteristic, that of the archetype-as-such as a primitive sketch or Gestalt without

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information or representational content" (2003, p. 64). However, Saunders and Skar do

keep in mind that "we must always remember to differentiate between the archetypal

image and the archetype itself, as Jung constantly reminds us to do" (2001, p. 321), yet

radically re-imagine the classic perspective of archetypes-as-such as causative of

complexes. The problem encountered here is that we are debating an unnecessary

speculation: the archetype-as-such.

The archetype-as-such—a contentless structure girding the manifestations of the

imagination—does not exist except as a concept to explain what we assume to be there

but cannot actually locate or prove. Analytical psychology posits its existence and then
promptly finds it everywhere. Through this move, the archetype usurps concepts and

empirical observations from other branches of knowledge in order to explain itself, in

fields such as physics, neurobiology, evolution, and cognitive psychology. What is

empirically present is the psychic reality and necessity of the archetypal image and its

definite affect and prominence in the human psyche. Therefore, I propose that we do not
need to keep the distinction between archetypal image and the archetype-as-such because

we do not need the concept of an empty psychic structure designated as the archetype-as-
such. There is only the archetypal image and its nature which expresses a certain order

and structure; this order and structure are properties of the image. The archetype as a
general form is not contentless, just as the imagination that bears it is not contentless: the
psyche is teeming with affect, image, dramas, and stories.

Jacobi cites the perpetual confusion of outsiders to archetype theory as the

concept of the archetype-as-such.

The often cited comparison of the archetype with the Platonic eidos, and the
failure to distinguish between the nonperceptible 'archetype as such' and
the perceptible, 'represented' archetype have caused the archetypes to be
regarded, in a manner of speaking, as inherited 'ready made images.' This
has given rise to countless misunderstandings and unnecessary polemics.
(Jacobi, 1959, p. 51)
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The concept of the archetype-as-such is unnecessary in order to understand

archetypes and the archetypal nature of the psyche. Indeed, as Jacobi states, this
distinction has led to countless misunderstandings. One source of the consistent

misunderstanding of archetypes is a lack of vigilance with language, demonstrated by

Jacobi. She moves from stating, as does Jung, that others do not take the time to

understand the theory of archetypes thoroughly—is there an assumption here that if

others' "really understand" they would not criticize? After all, the same criticisms have
been lobbed at this concept over and over—a fair statement in itself, but then a few pages

later, when making distinctions between the personal and collective unconscious, she
states that the collective unconscious comprises "all the contents of the psychic
experience of mankind" (Jacobi, 1959, p. 60). This sounds very much like inherited
content.

The phylogenetic collective unconscious, the actual potential and structure of our
brains and bodies, allows us access to the same emotional, psychic experiences of our
ancestors, but this does not equal inherited content. As an example, Freud argued in

Totem and Taboo, according to Hogenson (2001, p. 600), that a single historical event—
the primal killing of the father—led to the Oedipus complex. This is a Lamarckian

argument that "subsequent generations have inherited the anxiety associated with the

primal killing of the father" (p. 600). I was a little stunned at first; I had not heard the

charge that Freud was a Lamarckian, although it is not unreasonable that he was applying
the popular ideas of his time to his developing theories, as we all do. My surprise was

that I understand something quite different in Freud's theory.

Namely, we did not inherit our ancestor's anxiety over a primal killing of the

father; we inherited the potential for murderous rage and this makes us anxious. The

Oedipus complex is a cultural complex and a theory to explain cultural restraint of

instinctual drives. As Jung states it, we do not inherit ideas "but rather ... the inherited
disposition to react in the same way as people have always reacted" (Jung, 1929/1969, p.
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111). Whether Freud thought literally along Lamarckian lines or not does not disqualify
the value of the Oedipus complex as a metaphor for phylogenetic and psychic

predispositions inherited through the capacities of our brain.

Jacobi further explains that archetypes should not be understood as inherited

images but as inherent possibilities (Jacobi, 1959, p. 52). This is more accurate, but the

problem then becomes that genetic, physiological structures represent inherent possibility

for many, many manifestations, not just archetypal images. The problem with the

concept archetype-as-such is that it literalizes metaphor, a calcification that transforms

symbols into signs.

We erroneously collapse the forms along the spectrum of existence when we

postulate that the causative mechanisms of archetypal structures and images are
archetypes-as-such. From this perspective, archetypes are not things, as Hillman notes,
archetypes are metaphors (1975, p. xix), and as Hogenson asserts, "the archetypes do not
exist some place, be it the genome or some transcendent realm of Platonic ideas. Rather,

the archetypes are the emergent properties of the dynamic developmental system of brain,

environment, and narrative" (2001, p. 610). The archetypal image is the representation of

the structure of reality in the imagination—the medium of human consciousness.

Archetypes are Numinous and "Not-me"

A developmental systems perspective is articulated by Merchant, who proposes that

Developmental Systems Theory (DST) provides a bridge between the polarizations of

nature/nurture or biology/culture in archetype theory. DST is characterized by the

assertions that there are multiple causes of emergent phenomena that are context sensitive

and contingent, and a phenotypic expression is not a given even when genotype and

environmental conditions are specified. Development is a life-long cycle with

bidirectional influence between function and structure lending a distributed control of

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development in which no one factor controls the outcome. Organism and environment

are one system which evolve over time so that outcomes are not imposed by genes but

emerge from genetic constraints that set limits and boundaries and unique environmental

context (2006, p. 126).

To the adult they [archetypes] will appear to be spontaneous and not as having
arisen from conscious awareness. This is because the underpinning bio-
structure has been embedded when the infant psyche was still unconscious
and developing so that archetypal imagery will be experienced as if arising
from something innate, (p. 128)

The DST perspective includes a self-organizing, emergent understanding of the

psyche and makes an important distinction between our subjectively felt experience and

objective realities of the brain and development.

Firstly, the 'other worldly' and 'numinous' aspect of archetypal experience

emphasized by the Classical and Archetypal schools is understandable
because the emergent imagery is arising from deep unconscious layers of the
psyche where the underpinning bio-structures having been forged during the
intense affectivity of early infant life. The experience will appear to be of
something spontaneous, innate and not related to conscious knowing.
(Merchant, 2006, p. 130)
I would add that the underlying limbic bio-structures of intense affect are present in the
adult as well as the infant; that is, intense affect that arises from structures of the brain

and mind outside of ego-consciousness are not only ripples from the past but are also

provoked in the present.

Merchant proposes that there need not be a distinction between collective and

personal unconscious (2006, p. 131). It is true that we always experience the world—

internally or externally—through our subjective psyche, which includes the ego and the

personal unconscious. In this way, there is not a distinction in our embodied experience

in which, as Corbett (1996) has noted, the numinous or collective experience always

seems to speak on intimate terms. But there are levels of the psyche, consciousness, the

brain and human organism outside the neural structures of the ego (remembering that the
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ego includes the personal unconscious). As discussed in previous chapters, the felt-sense

of movements in consciousness from these "species-specific" regions have a powerful

feeling of "not-me" because they are not ego. Just as we can distinguish between the
external world and the subjective medium that perceives it, we can distinguish collective

manifestations of the psyche from the personal, although both are subjective and exist
within the one whole individual organism.

Archetypes are Subjective, Distinctly Human, and Transformative

Knox argues that the concept of archetypes as innate, genetically transmitted

knowledge needs to be abandoned in light of the accumulating scientific research of

genes as catalyst rather than blueprint and that there is no genetic knowledge that girds

psychological development. Therefore, she asserts that "innate 'knowledge' of universal

themes is the product of cortical functioning, which is never genetically programmed"
(2003, p. 61). Genes operate at a subcortical level, driving the initiation of vital

processes to life, but do not make any comment or have any influence on the content that

is gathered and expressed as a result of the developmental unfolding. Knox agrees with
model 2 from her analysis above of archetypes-as-such as organizing mental frameworks

of an abstract nature, a set of rules or instructions but with no symbolic representational

content. Thus, they are never directly experienced. She argues that "image schemas are
the mental structures which underpin our experience of discernible order, both in the
physical and in the world of imagination and metaphor" (p. 63).
In making this argument, Knox relies on the models of mental development that

cognitive scientists are gradually identifying, such as Jean Mandler, who "has described

the earliest, primitive cognitive structures, image schemas, that are formed in the early

days and weeks of a baby's life" (Knox, 2003, p. 54). Cognitive scientists find that a

repetition of experiences build the basic structures of image schemas which go on to form

more complex representations through a process some researchers call "representational

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redescription," which eventually results in the conscious forms of image and language (p.

55). A distinction is made between the complex perceptual processing of image schemas

and the conceptual recognition of perceptual analysis. Perceptual processing is complex

but unconscious and without intention. An analogy used by Knox, borrowed from

Mandler (1988), is of a machine designed to sort nuts and bolts by computing the

diameter of each. "The industrial machine may throw nuts into one bin and bolts into

another... but we would not want to say that it has a concept of nuts and bolts"

(Mandler, 1988, p. 117).

Perceptual analysis is characterized by a comparison of stimuli, establishing a

primitive form of contemplation that is the basis of concept formation (Knox, 2003, p.

55). Mandler (1992) and Knox propose that these very first conceptual formations are

what cognitive scientists and psychologists call image schemas.

Image schemas are notions such as PATH, UP-DOWN, CONTAINMENT,

FORCE, PART-WHOLE, and LINK notions that are thought to be derived
from perceptual structure. For example, the image schema PATH is the
simplest conceptualization of any object following any trajectory through
space, without regard to the characteristics of the object or the details of the
trajectory itself. According to Lakoff and to Johnson, image schemas lie at
the core of people's understanding, even as adults, of a wide variety of
objects and events and of the metaphorical extensions of these concepts to
more abstract realms. They form, in effect, a set of primitive meanings.
(Mandler, 1992, p. 591)
Knox considers image schemas the archetypes-as-such. Image schemas are the

foundation of the representational archetypal experience; these archetypal representations

are "metaphorical elaborations" and "are always based on the Gestalt of the image

schema from which they are derived" (2003, p. 63). The eventual image of the archetype

forms from the accretion of representational redescription, "a process whereby the brain

constantly sorts and classifies sensory information into meaningful conceptual

categories" (p. 57). The process of representation redescription is broken up into levels:
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an implicit, procedural level; E-l (Explicit), a level not available to consciousness; E-2, a
level available to consciousness, not verbally but in a "kinaesthetic" form in the body and

the mind's sense of spatial relationships; and E-3 as knowledge that can be expressed in

language (pp. 57-58). Knox finds representational redescriptions similar to Fordham's

deintegration-reintegration model of learning in that it is also a cognitive processing of

emotional stimuli and knowledge, leading to a "gradual formation of a sense of self and

of a capacity to relate emotionally to other people" (p. 59).

Knox makes a cogent and accurate argument about the nature of image schemas

and their relationship to archetypal images. I do not argue that the cognitive processes

described above do not form essential structures of a mental apparatus; I argue that
cognitive image schemas are not archetypes-as-such because archetypes-as-such is an

unnecessary concept that conflates form and process. There are cognitive image schemas
and there are archetypes. Their difference is summed up here: "Perception involves

looking, where imagination involves telling" (Lieberman, 2003, p. 26). Making a

distinction of archetype-as-such blurs the nature of archetypes, mainly, that they are

constructs of the imagination.

In The Synaptic Self, Joseph LeDoux (2002) explains that the high-resolution
synaptic firing imprinted in the brain through repeated experiences creates neuronal

patterns that eventually emerge as the structures of consciousness. These grooves in the

mind carved from repetitive experiences are the neurobiological expression of implicit

memory that lead to mental and imaginative representation through image schemas and

archetypes. There is clearly a direct developmental relationship here. But we would not

call a certain neuronal map an image schema or an archetype any more than we should

refer to the image of a devouring mother in a dream or fantasy as a neuronal pattern.

By removing the concept of an empty archetype-as-such from our lexicon, the

distinction between image schema and archetype is clear based on the distinct nature and

function of each structure. The image schema is emergent, and as Knox further explains
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is a mental gestalt, developing out of bodily experience and forming the

basis for abstract meanings. Image schemas are the mental structures
which underpin our experience of discernible order, both in the physical
and in the world of imagination and metaphor. (2004, p. 7)

From there, Knox extrapolates: "Thus, there may be no such thing as an archetypal

mother, but, instead, there is an image schema of containment" (2003, p. 96). Keeping

image schema and archetype separate, the image schema of containment—impersonal

and abstract— is a potential form of many archetypes. The schema of containment is

represented in Mother, but also womb or cave, with a nurturing affective valence but also

devouring and annihilating. As Jung said, "there are as many archetypes as there as

typical life situations" (1936/1959, p. 48). This is not true of image schemas.
Knox claims that "the image schema enables us to see clearly that it is the dynamic

pattern of relationships of the objects of our inner world that is archetypal, rather than the
specific characteristics of any particular object in inner or outer reality" (2003, p. 69).

Yet the image schema LINK, for example, does not enable us to see the dynamic pattern
of archetypal and numinous relationships. The archetype does this, not the image

schema. The image schemas of PATH or UP-DOWN are not numinous; they are not
distinctly human nor do they transform themselves and the individual. Archetypes have

something to say to us; they are messengers. Image schemas are the bones of the mind,
archetypes the living flesh of the imagination. Archetypes are an intimate and necessary

part of our human story; image schemas and the laws of thermodynamics are not.

Archetypes are dynamic; they evolve and transform as we evolve and transform through

our conscious relationship to them. Archetypes change as they change us. If this were

true of image schemas, we would experience debilitating mental instability; UP-DOWN,

LINK, FORCE—these concepts must remain stable and unchanging. Image schemas

have a distinctly different function in consciousness than archetypes.

We all experience the general level of the mother archetype, but this does not tell us

our personal relationship with mother; the personal aspect is expressed in the archetypal
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image of a devouring mother, a nurturing mother, an absent mother, mother as rival,

mother as soothing container. The mother archetype is general and collective, yet it is

not empty; it is distinctly human and personal, unlike the schema containment. The
archetypal image exists at the boundary of the collective and personal unconscious. Jung

was closely observing the imagination with great scrutiny; we have neglected this

essential fact, and this omission causes erroneous conflations of ideas and phenomenon

while keeping us from making clear observations, analyses, and distinctions of the

phenomenon at hand: the psyche.

I suggest that the correlating structures of the brain, mind, and imagination are

analogous to but not synonymous with three basic systems of memory: procedural,
perceptual, and episodic. Biological structures, such as neurobiological profiles, are

represented in procedural memory; cognitive forms, such as image schemas, are

represented in perceptual memory; and subjective and imaginative forms, such as

archetypes, are represented in episodic memory. Procedural memory is biological and

implicit. Perceptual memory, organizing structures of the objective "non-self' world, is

implicit and without content. Episodic memory is also known as semantic or

autobiographical memory; both forms are explicit content. Autobiographical memory

always involves the self and an emotional index. Semantic memory is general

knowledge, sometimes also called the system of knowledge (Markowitsch & Welzer,
2005/2010, pp. 66-68). Like cognitive image schemas, perceptual memory involves the

recognition of patterns and characteristics, allowing it to categorize sensual stimuli and

information. This memory system appears later than procedural and priming because it is

based on experience in which "the individual has to complete a series of internal

comparisons" (p. 68).

The implicit procedural, priming, and perceptual memory systems and the explicit

episodic systems have a further distinction in encoding and storage. "Encoding takes

place through the sensory systems, but is then differentially processed depending on
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which memory system is involved" (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 72).

Procedural memory is processed by the limbic systems (e.g., basal ganglia, cerebellum,

premotor cortex); priming and perceptual memory are processed by the posterior cortex.

In all three systems, there is not a distinction between short-term or long-term memory,

and the areas of storage and recall are the same. Episodic and semantic memory, in

comparison, are first subject to short-term storage and then processed into long-term

storage, while the encoding, storage, and recall areas of the brain are different. These
differences in encoding and storage are due to procedural, priming, and perceptual being
contentless processes rather than personal episodes or specific knowledge. The short-

term and long-term distinction in episodic memory has to do with whether the

information will be consolidated and retained for future recall. In learning repetitive
physical skills or categorizing information, there does not need to be a short-term or long-

term storage distinction, because it is a structure that organizes knowledge rather than the

content itself which will be recalled. Organizing structures, such as perceptual memory,
are far fewer than the separate bits of specific episodic memories.
Episodic memory depends on conscious attention for encoding and retrieval,

whereas as perceptual memory, being implicit, forms from repeated patterns in

experience that then congeal into structures that organize episodic memory. Thus, the
perceptual category or image schema of "containment" may well be one of the bases of

many archetypes, including Mother, but the edge of definition lies with the affective,

personal, numinous nature of archetypes. Just as in our actual embodied experience these

three types of memory operate together seamlessly, so do structures and processes of the

brain and the constructs of the mind and imagination; yet, just as with the distinct

categories of memory, they are not synonymous. We can make clear distinctions in

quality and function among them.

Pietikainen's final evaluation of archetypal theory is similar to Paris' (2007)

conviction that the primary value of Jung's work is as a guiding myth. Pietikainen says
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archetypes are "important for our psycho-spiritual journey into wholeness, not for solving

particular adaptive problems that our stone-age ancestors faced in their evolutionary

environment" (2003, p. 205). Therefore, attempts to rest archetypal theory on

evolutionary, biological grounds miss the mark because archetypes have no functional

value or necessity in evolutionary theory. The non-necessity of archetypal theory to

evolutionary theory is an important insight. It is in the imagination, in our identities, and

our personal stories that archetypes have functional value and necessity. However,

Pietikainen misses the living connection between brain, mind, and psyche that makes

archetypes more than a guiding myth. Jung's work was primarily concerned with the
metaphorical, mythological, and imagistic expression of the subjective human

experience. The psyche, he discovered, expresses objective reality subjectively through

image and metaphor. The imagination is not separate from its physiological ground, nor
is it separate from the world of stimulus. The psyche is not a physical but a literal reality

that reliably reflects the inner and subjective experience of both the body and the world.

Knox has noted that "if we fail to examine the concept of archetypes in the light of
[developmental research of the brain], we run the risk that it will become an outdated

irrelevance which no one takes seriously but ourselves" (2003, p. 59). A primary reason
that archetypal theory has not been demonstrated as relevant is that Jungians are not clear
on the nature, function, and structures of the psyche as distinct from other levels or forms

of consciousness as we move into more interdisciplinary dialogues with science.

Saunders and Skar's comment from the beginning of this chapter bears repeating here:

However, while Jungians can find analogies for the theory of archetypes in
other fields, these fields have shown little interest in adopting the Jungian
terminology in return. Reasons for this might include the fact that the theory
of archetypes (like so much else in Jungian theory) has not been
consistently and clearly defined by Jung or his followers, and therefore has
not succeeded in attracting the interest of those in other contexts who could
lend new dimensions to our understanding of the efficacy of the concept.
(2001, p. 306)
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The subjective experience of archetypes as numinous does not refer to their

objective nature. There is, perhaps, no objective nature of the archetypes, for they are
always and only experienced subjectively. The ego receives stimulus from outside its

own psychic boundaries—whether "outside" is internally or externally—as bigger or

more powerful than itself, as a god, mystery, or devil. The ego tends to turn the unknown
into gods or devils, but when this tendency is consciously recognized, the analytical
process of de-identification disrobes gods and devils. The unknown—within and

without—always presents with a numinous charge, sometimes frightening, at other times

fascinating, at times both. As the unknown becomes known, the numinous charge
dissipates, but this does not reduce the unknown to the known. It is a process of
transformation of both the unknown element and the individual coming to know it;

transformation is the archetypal process.

In order to clarify and understand how psychological structures and dispositions

relate and collate with neurobiological structures, we must clarify the nature of the
psyche. Our embodied experience enmeshes imagination with the cognitive mind and the
brain, yet we can and should note the distinctions between them. In our collective search

for who we are and the nature of the self, neuroscience and depth psychology need one
another, as each represents an essential polarity of objective and subjective that in our
embodied experience is unified. As depth psychologists, we need to look at archetypal
theory empirically and methodically, and not dismiss it as mythic entertainment. Nor

should we dismiss a rigorous, sober evaluation as reductive. Knox's attitude and

perspective is correct:

This kind of scientific understanding does not have to be reductionist but

can be integrated with the narrative and interpersonal aspects of analytical
work—the scientific and the hermeneutic do not need to be seen as
contradictory, but instead the meaning-making process can itself become
the object of scientific study. (2004, p. 4)
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The images of our psyche and the stories they tell guide and compel us. Questions

as to the relationship between the imagination, the mind, and the brain are relevant to

scientific inquiry, for understanding the nature of archetypes, whether in religions, myths,
or symptoms or structures of the self, is essential to understanding the nature of the
imagination and the foundational way that we understand, clarify, and mystify our lives.

If we do not study and understand the psyche, not only in its relative autonomy but

especially in the relationship of imagination to the brain and world, we do not understand

ourselves.
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Chapter 9
Memory's Cleave

Memory unites the uncounted individual phenomena into a whole; and just
as our bodies would dissipate into countless atoms if the power of attraction
in matter did not hold them together, our consciousness would break up into
as many different splinters as there are moments, without the power of
memory. (Ewald Hering, 1870, translated and quoted in Markowitsch &
Welzer, 2005/2010, pp. 207-208)

Memory is the building block of identity; autobiographical memory provides the

foundation of our story, in which is embedded the demonstration of our character, the

history of our personality, and the dramatic themes of our lives and fate. Our memories
are the essential images that comprise the mosaic of identity; like a mosaic, when viewed

from a distance, they represent a cohesive picture. When viewed up close, we see that

the image of the whole is a collection of many separate images, in this case, memories.
Each memory is both whole unto itself and a holograph metaphorically of the whole

story. As mentioned, our embodied experience enmeshes imagination with the cognitive
mind and the brain, yet we can and should note the distinctions between them. A primary

area of distinction is how memory intertwines the brain and the imagination in the
construct of the self. Here we will explore how memory is a function of both the brain

and the imagination and in this way, the bridge from the body to the self.

Memory in the Brain

Memory is the glue of the brain and mind; neurons are literally wired to one
another through the memory of synaptic relationships. At the physiological level,

synaptic relationships are memory. In the simplest explanation, genes possess codes for
the production of proteins that shape the way neurons get wired together (LeDoux, 2002,

p. 4).
Learning, and its synaptic result, memory, play major roles in gluing a
coherent personality together as one goes through life .... Learning
allows us to transcend our genes, or, as the novelist Salman Rushdie said,
'Life teaches us who we are.' (p. 9)
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In Hebbe's Law, synapses that fire together wire together. Specifically, if a weak

stimulus is being put into a neuron at the same time a strong stimulus is being received by

the neuron, then the weak connection will be made stronger due to the influence of the

strong connection (LeDoux, 2002, p. 136). As an example, a weak stimulus would be

walking by your neighbor's house, but if this happens at the same time that your

neighbor's dog attacks and bites you, then the weak memory of the neighbor's house will

be wired with the strong emotional memory of the dog bite, causing you to associate,

consciously or unconsciously, the sidewalk and your neighbor's house with the dog bite

and thus you would be more likely to avoid it. Another example comes from

psychotherapist Louis Cozolino's work with an Iraq war veteran from Kentucky who

began exhibiting signs of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after moving to southern

California: nightmares, panic attacks, sleep disturbance, irritability, and reactiveness.

This former soldier had exhibited no signs of PTSD during or after his tour in Iraq

years before; it was only after moving to the deserts of Los Angeles that the symptoms

began without details as to their origin. That is, the symptoms were amnestic, without

memory to back them up; instead, they appeared as if from the ethers. As Cozolino got

the story of this young man's life he discovered that he had lost his leg in the deserts of

Iraq. It didn't take long for Cozolino to connect the desert as the environmental cue for

the context of the trauma that held in his body memories. "When memories are stored in

sensory and emotional networks but are dissociated from those that organize cognition,

knowledge, and perspective, we become vulnerable to intrusions of past experiences that

are triggered by environmental and internal cues" (Cozolino, 2006, p. 32). In LeDoux's

terms, above, the weak force was the desert environment that triggered the unconscious
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trauma memories. Even without the soldier's belief that his current symptoms were due

to experiences a decade earlier, as he worked therapeutically with the emotions of the

trauma, his symptoms dissipated. Here we see how implicit memory, operating on a

cellular, somatic-affective level, can be drained of its affective charge and re-learned or

re-wired synaptically in the brain.

Regions of the brain crucial to memory are the frontal lobes and areas of the

limbic system in the medial temporal lobe, which have direct synaptic connections with

one another. Sometimes referred to as the file clerk and the filing cabinet of the memory

system, the prefrontal cortex is necessary for conscious focus, attention, and retrieval—

the file clerk—whereas the hippocampus and parahippocampal area in conjunction with

the amygdala are the major actors in encoding and storage—the filing cabinet (Budson &

Price, 2005, p. 693). Sensory and perceptual data is received in consciousness—the

frontal lobes—and encoded through the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe

structures. Eventually, these memories are transferred to long-term storage in various

areas of the cortex. When we retrieve memories, the frontal lobes act as a filing clerk

motivated by a conscious intention to remember; if the hippocampus has performed its

role correctly, the memory has been properly indexed and filed, and the retrieval of the

memory takes place.

In conditions such as depression, a disorder of the filing clerk in this analogy,

memory problems are due to the lack of conscious attention as the depression soaks up

the psychic energy of the mind. Memories are either not encoded because there is not a

sufficient amount of attention, or the subjective state of the depression allows for a

narrow window of associated memories or distorts memories to fit its paradigm, causing
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distorted memory (e.g., correct detail in the wrong context or even false memories).

Depression has a tendency to generalize memory, washing images of affective or visual

vividness; specific episodes become generalized and emotionally resonant with the

cognitive state of depression. Alzheimer's disease, which first attacks the hippocampus

and medial temporal lobes, is a dysfunction of the filing cabinet. This neurodegenerative

disease essentially deletes neurons in the hippocampus, preventing encoding of memories

in the first place; there is conscious attention, but the memory is not filed, so to speak, so

there is nothing to retrieve (Budson & Price, 2005, p. 694).

The frontal lobes are also the seat of personality, demonstrating one link between

identity and memory. The prefrontal cortex exercises volition over memory retrieval;

this is called "top-down" processing which involves dynamics of inhibition, monitoring,

initiation, perseverance, and affect regulation (Daffher & Searl, 2008, pp. 249-50).

Frontotemporal dementia demonstrates the connection between personality and the

frontal lobes. This neurodegenerative disease typically starts in the left hemisphere's

frontal and temporal lobes where language, semantic memory, and Gazzaniga's "the

interpreter," what depth psychology refers to as ego-consciousness, resides.

Frontotemporal dementias typically present with changes in personality and behavior,

such as blunted affect, indifference, socially inappropriate behaviors, and poor judgment.

Presenting statements made by loved ones to the doctor is, "he is not himself." Its

victims lack insight into their situation, are emotionally labile, and often engage in

preposterous confabulations (Daffher, 2010).

In research employing functional imaging of the brain, the lateral inferior right

frontal lobe is correlated with self-recognition in images, and the medial frontal lobes are
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activated when subjects make true statements about themselves (e.g., I have a quick

temper or I am friendly), indicating the importance of the frontal lobes for personality,

which is also indicated in the correlation between frontal lobe deficits or dysfunction and

criminal or antisocial personalities (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 91).

Memory in the brain is a function of the frontal and temporal lobes—the seat of

consciousness and the limbic system. Physiologically, memory is a representation of

synaptic patterns between neurons whose strength is determined by repetition and the

emotional charge that holds them together. The more a pattern of synaptic firing is

activated, the stronger it becomes as an organizing structure of consciousness. The more

we remember our past, the more our past constructs our future memories.

In chapter 5,1 discussed distinctions between explicit and implicit forms of

consciousness; these are directly related to explicit and implicit memory. Explicit

memory is expressed in what we know, whereas "implicit memories are reflected more in

the things we do" (LeDoux, 2002, p. 116). This could also be said of explicit and

implicit consciousness: explicit consciousness is what we know we know, and implicit

consciousness is reflected in our behavior or way of being. In fact, being that memory is

the essential stuff of the brain and mind, one could say that explicit consciousness is

explicit memory and implicit consciousness is implicit memory. Generally, this is true,

except for the reality of inventive, imaginative, original thought. The ability to imagine,

to think abstractly and differently, is a function of self-reflective consciousness that has a

base in memory but is additive in nature.

Episodic memory is a neurocognitive system that allows mental time travel with

autonoetic awareness; that is, the conscious awareness of one's self in the past or future.
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This involves, but is more than, the memory of a past event, such as animals likely have;

the contextualizing element of episodic memory is the self existing as the self. Or put

another way, "Episodic memory refers to the explicit and declarative memory system

used to recall personal experiences framed in our own context" (Budson & Price, 2005, p.

692). As a reminder, semantic memory is the other type of explicit, declarative memory,

the memory system of knowledge that is not autobiographically coded.

At the heart of episodic memory in the brain are the hippocampus and the

parahippocampal, entorhinal, thalamus, fornix, and other limbic structures of the medial

temporal lobe. The hippocampus plays a primary role in providing the unique encoding

index of memories. As sensory, perceptual, and internal data converge for encoding, a

region of the hippocampus known as CA3 stamps the memory—the synaptic pattern—

with a unique index. This index is a combination of factors that make the memory

retrievable later by cues from the environment—such as emotional state or sensory or

perceptual cues. Memory indexes that overlap amalgamate into generalized memory

patterns or knowledge.

Forming memories of parking in a parking garage on consecutive days

demonstrates the indexing processing. Imagine that on day one you are feeling happy,

park on level one in the red area, half-way down the aisle on the right. When you retrieve

your car at the end of the day, you will likely easily retrieve the memory of where your

car is as well because the index—subjective mood, level, section color, and placement are

unique. If on the second day you are feeling down, park on level two in the blue section,

at the top of the left aisle. Because this has a unique index as well, you are likely to

retrieve the memory with ease. However, if on the third day, you are again feeling down,
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park on the second level in the blue section and half-way down the right aisle, it may be

more difficult to retrieve the singular memory of parking your car that day because the

memory index of the third day overlaps with the index of the second day. "When there

are completely overlapping patterns of neural activity, a separate hippocampal index

cannot form. Instead, there is a single hippocampal index that forms both days" (Budson,

2009, p. 74). If we extrapolate this simple process to the collection of everyday

memories that have overlapping features, we can begin to imagine how general patterns

of knowledge and memories are formed, and how many of our specific memories melt

into the general pattern. This generalizing process is the basis of the construction of

abstract structures, such as image schemas. I will draw on this idea that the general

emerges as an organizing principle of the particular further in development of a theory of

archetypes as emergent from particular experiences, in this case as emerging from the

congregation of melted memories.

As discussed in the last chapter, episodic and semantic memories are first subject

to short-term storage, then processed into long-term storage. The areas of the brain

utilized in encoding, storage, and recall are different. Short-term memory is encoded and

stored in the hippocampal region and transferred to long-term storage through the limbic

system. The hippocampus encodes the temporal information and the amygdala the

emotional valence in autobiographical memory, which is then stored long-term in

multiple sites in the cortex. In the transfer from short- to long-term storage, the

information is associated, compared, and linked with existing information. "The left

hemisphere is more involved in the [semantic] system of knowledge, and the right in

episodic information" (Budson, 2009, p. 74). The left hemisphere processes and houses
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explicit language, whereas the right hemisphere is where implicit, emotional aspects of

language and experience are processed and stored. Autobiographical memory evokes

both neocortical and limbic systems in its processing through the convergence of self,

language, and emotion.

Working memory, an executive function of the frontal lobes, provides the ability

to hold several pieces of information in the mind while comparing, analyzing, and

evaluating it in comparison with one other, to other stored memories, and existing

knowledge. With the development of working memory at 8 or 9 months old, infants are

able to hold an image of an object that is not physically present in their minds. This is

called object permanence and marks the realization that objects in the environment have

an existence of their own. "At this age, children stop crying out of frustration when they

cannot see a toy hidden from view, and instead start actively looking for it"

(Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 132).

Working memory allows explicit memory—semantic and episodic—to develop.

There is still considerable debate among researchers about whether the first mental

representations formed from repetitive events—such as eating or bathing—are part of the

semantic system of knowledge or autobiographical memory. There is a clear

development of explicit memory by 1 year of age but no conclusive evidence of

autobiographical memory, which is thought to generally be established around 3 years of

age with language (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 139). The phenomenon of

delayed imitation is active at this time, a form of emulation learning, in which an infant

copies behaviors to reach a goal. This form of learning is present in nonhuman primates

as well and is therefore not considered a form of episodic memory because it does not
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necessarily contain references to time, emotion, and self-identity that define episodic

memory (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 140).

Markowitsch, Welzer, and some other researchers distinguish autobiographical

memory from episodic memory even though there is no evidence of this distinction on a

biological level of different anatomy activated or patterns of activity in the brain.

However, they find a qualitative difference in the emotional valence, where episodic

memory is a more general term and neutral affect, as compared with autobiographical

memory, a more emotionally indexed form of episodic memory (Markowitsch & Welzer,

2005/2010, p. 231). Autobiographical knowledge "provides a context or setting for

episodic memories" (Conway, 2003, p. 220). As human beings have evolved into social

beings for whom survival depends on the coordination of social and individual

development and needs, autobiographical memory has developed. Markowitsch and

Welzer understand autobiographical memory in this sense as a psychosocial mediator

between the individual and the group. "Autobiographical memory is therefore not a

whole new additional memory system, but a biopsychosocial instance that represents the

relay station between the individual and the environment, between the subject and

culture" (p. 231).

It is speculated that a cognitive self—an organizing construct of the mind—

precedes and makes possible autobiographical memory, and thus, the autobiographical

self. The cognitive self is perhaps in rudimentary form at 18 months when infants can

first recognize their own image in a mirror, but truly develops by age 3. At this time

children start using personal pronouns and show evidence of episodic memories: the

ability to remember events in the past that involved them.

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When the child reaches the stage of social self-understanding, memory

takes on a new quality: persons and objects can now be understood as
constants. Semantic memory arises that contains things for the child even
when they are not physically present. With the development of cognitive
self-understanding, episodic memory starts to form. (Markowitsch &
Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 194)

However, children at this stage still lack the ability to string episodic memories along a

temporal sequence. Until there is a stable sense of continuous self through time, episodic

events lack the relevance of time—the distinguishing characteristic of autobiographical

episodes (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 159). The development of language is

decisively linked with the development of autobiographical memory and identity, of

which the cognitive self is considered a necessary precursor but not a sufficient factor.

Markowitsch and Welzer also assert that language not only translates inner experience to

the world but also provides the crucial ability of children to time travel in their

imaginations, bringing about a new autobiographical structure for the self. Research

shows that

children first develop a very general, fact-oriented memory, and only after
the third year of life do they develop conscious representational forms that
subsequently make it possible for them both to integrate the events they
have experienced into their own subjective world and to have a memory
differentiated according to time, contents and emotions. (Markowitsch &
Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 60)

In the memory talk between parents and children aged 2 to 3 years old, the

development of autobiographical memory takes place as children relive events from their

past.

The emerging ability of speech alone is not sufficient for autobiographical

memory to develop; of essential importance is also the ability to
distinguish between distinct zones of the past, present and future: between
a before, a now and a later. Autobiographical memory presupposes an
awareness of time, and for the origin of such a concept it is necessary that
memories have a reference to the individual person. (Markowitsch &
Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 170)
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The ability to recognize one's self—a cognitive self—is necessary for

autobiographical memory to develop, but it does not do so until that self is felt as existing

within a time frame (p. 170). At the age of 3 to 3 , children are able to tell more or less

coherent stories with assistance.

When children start to experience emotions in relation to another person or event,

their memories begin to encode with an emotional index: a mark of autobiographical

memory. With autobiographical memory, the child's world expands because there is now

an inherent and cohesive sense of a unique self that remains constant through the

fluctuations and introduction of new persons and experiences. This continuity brings
confidence and stability. Adulthood is shown to be continuously adaptable, as is
childhood, in relation to memory. "A constant readjustment, a recalibration within the

autobiographical subject" occurs within the adult, "whose memory then rewrites its own
life history according to the current demands placed on the person" (Markowitsch &
Welzer, 2005/2010, pp. 194-195).

From a brain perspective, then, what is autobiographical memory? "The

important prerequisite for autobiographical memories is the simultaneous confluence of
cognition and emotion" (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 106). In the brain, this

convergence of affect and mentality is the synaptic result of learning and functional

relationships between regions that correlate with the self, personality attributes, self-
reflective, autonoetic awareness, emotional valence, time, and subjective context.
Autobiographical memory is distinctly human and the building block of identity.

Memory and identity are mediating functions between inner and outer realities.

Imagination and Memory

It is not only neuroscience that tells us memory is an act of reconstruction not

restitution. "Memory and imagination have long been regarded as psychical partners, as
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mates of the mind" (Casey, 2003, p. 65). Memories are not literal recordings of

experience.

We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then
recreate or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them.
Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or
even knowledge we obtained after the experience. (Schacter, 2001, p. 9)

Memory is encoded and indexed emotionally and the retrieval, as well, is cued to

the subjective state. Recall the discussion earlier of the frontal lobe filing clerk and the
hippocampal filing cabinet. The subjective emotional state colors not only the memories
one tends to look for and retrieve but can also change the nature of memory, as in the

phenomenon of generalized memories in depression. Where encoding is primarily done

by the left prefrontal cortex—language (left) and attention (frontal)—retrieval is

processed primarily through the right prefrontal hemisphere concerned more with

emotional states (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 90).

As we know, subjective states are mercurial; not only do our moods change from

day to day or within the hours of a day, but who we are changes over time through our
experiences, leading to different analyses and interpretations of past events. This
subjective retrieval leads to reconstructions of memories that subtly change over time as

emotional interpretations and states change as we mature. Memory is a "reconstruction

of facts and experiences on the basis of the way they were stored, not as they actually
occurred. And it's a reconstruction by a brain that is different from the one that formed

the memory" (LeDoux, 2002, p. 97). Recall that memory is imprinted in synaptic

connections; when an element of the original stimulus recurs, the brain reinstates the

original synaptic-cortical pattern. "Each reinstatement changes cortical synapses a little

. . . Old memories are the result of accumulations of synaptic changes in the cortex as a

result of multiple reinstatements of the memory" (LeDoux, 2002, p. 107). Can these

synaptic shifts be the neuroanatomy of lies? "The very condition for writing history ... is
to lie. For given that the past qua past only exists now, in present consciousness, what
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other conclusion could possibly be drawn?" (Freeman, 1993, p. 85) When the events we

remember were actually happening they did not have the meaning assigned in reflection,
when tucked into a narrative. The past is always a re-fabrication, an interpretation. The

lie is that what we are interpreting is the past; what we tell about the past is about who we

are in the present.

The attributes of memory Daniel Schacter details in The Seven Sins of Memory
are transcience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and
persistence. The first three are sins of omission, but "the next four... are all sins of

commission: some form of memory is present, but it is either incorrect or unwanted"

(2001, p. 5). It is these sins of commission that demonstrate the mediation of experience
and imagination in autobiographical memory.
Misattribution. Because memories, daydreams, night dreams, and reveries all

exist in the imagination, it is common for pieces of one to drift into the realm of another.
"When we mistake a dream or a fantasy for an actual event in the past, we are committing
a classic misattribution error with the potential to change how we view ourselves and our

relationships with others (Jacob, Kelley & Dywan, 1989; Johnson, Hashtroudi &
Lindsay, 1993; Schacter, 2001)" (Schacter et al., 2003, p. 230). This is known as source

confusion; these misattributions are sometimes a binding failure: the failure of specifics

about the memory to bind to the correct time or place. Schacter explains, "Binding
failures may also contribute to memory confusions between events we actually

experience and those we only think about or imagine" (2001, p. 94). A lack of actual

memory can lead to a distorted and even false self. H.W. had an aneurysm in the frontal

lobes causing amnesia for past experiences. "More interestingly, however, H.W. filled in

the gaps in his memory by confabulating" (Schacter et al., 2003, p. 230). This

specifically points to the left hemisphere interpreter theorized by Gazzaniga.

Misattribution in memory may also be related to the "gist" nature of memory to

remember the theme and not all the details.

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Suggestibility. On October 4, 1992, a cargo plane crashed into an eleven-story

apartment building in Amsterdam, killing forty-three people, including the four crew

members.

Ten months later, a group of Dutch psychologists probed what members of

their university communities remembered about the crash. The
researchers asked a simple question: "Did you see the television film of
the moment the plane hit the apartment building?" Fifty-five percent of
respondents said "yes." In a follow-up study, two-thirds of the
participants responded affirmatively. They also recalled details
concerning the speed and angle of the plane as it hit the building, whether
it was on fire prior to impact, and what happened to the body of the plane
right after the collision. These findings are remarkable because there was
no television film of the moment when the plane actually crashed.
(Schacter, 2001, p. 112)
This demonstrates suggestibility; imagination fills in the gaps of memory the way

water fills crevices in a riverbed. This is especially instigated if we literally witness

something similar, such as many Dutch people who likely watched hours of film after the

crash and had imaginative conversations about the actual crash itself. "Suggestibility in
memory refers to an individual's tendency to incorporate misleading information from
external sources—other people, written materials or pictures, even the media—into

personal recollections" (Schacter, 2001, p. 113), whereas misattribution occurs without

overt suggestions. Misattribution is more of a binding problem. Yet suggestibility is not

constrained to incorporating information from one context to another, it also

imaginatively and freely fabricates. In the Dutch research example, people did not

incorporate images of the plane crashing into the building from anywhere else—there

were no images of that moment. Their imaginations filled in this moment with vivid

details. In the indexing of memory, our brains experience considerable overlap and an

amalgamation of memory occurs, creating general memory structures. How many of our
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memories are the filling in of what we believed specifically happened from a retrieved

memory gist?
We rely on emotional conviction for memory's validity, but this is a tenuous

relationship, as demonstrated in eyewitness evidence in trials. In an experiment to test

suggestibility, eyewitness testimony, and feelings of confidence, researchers subjects

viewed a security video of man entering a Target store and were then told that moments

following the scene they witnessed of his entering the store, the man murdered a security

guard. Research participants were then shown a series of photos and asked to identify the
murderer, but unknown to them the man in the video was not in any of the photos they

received. A group of participants received positive feedback from the researchers when

they chose a photo, another group received no feedback at all, and another group received
disconfirming feedback. All of the subjects were asked to rate how well they were able
to view the suspect, and their certainty, clarity, and other features of their memories.
"Compared with those who received disconfirming or no feedback, people who received

confirming feedback claimed higher confidence and trust in their memories, a better view
and clearer recollection of the gunman, and heightened recall of facial details" (Schacter,

2001, p. 117).
Researchers at Williams College asked a group of subjects seated at computers to
type in a series of spoken letters; some were instructed to type quickly, some leisurely.

All of the subjects had been instructed not to press the ALT key, as this would result in

crashing the system. None of them hit the ALT key, but a researcher falsely accused

them of doing so. Half of the group had a witness, who was really a part of the research

team, claim to see the key being hit; there was no witness for the other half. Almost 70%

of the entire group eventually signed a confession that they hit the ALT key and 35% of

the group that had the witness and were instructed to type fast also had detailed memories

of how they made the error (Schacter, 2001, p. 122).

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In another study, researchers asked participants to rate their confidence about

whether various experiences from childhood had or had not happened to them. One

group of subjects then participated in a supposedly unrelated task of having a clinical

psychologist interpret their dreams. The psychologist suggested that their dreams
indicated repressed memories of upsetting experiences, such as being abandoned by

parents, which the subjects had indicated confidently had not happened to them. Two

weeks later, the entire study group was asked again to indicate their confidence that
various experiences had or had not happened to them. The majority of the dream

interpretation group now claimed to remember one or more of the experiences suggested

in the dream interpretations to have happened to them; this change was not found at all in

the control group, who did not receive interpretation of their dreams (Schacter, 2001, p.

126).

Suggestibility studies indicate the role of expectations and authority in producing

false memories, significant reasons why it is an ethical issue for psychotherapists of all
modalities to be educated on matters of the mind and memory. Elizabeth Loftus, a

leading memory researcher at the University of California Irvine, who has consulted on
many criminal and sexual abuse trials that used recovered, repressed memory as
evidence, conducted the well-known "Lost in a Mall" experiment in which subjects were
told that a trusted family member had told them about a time in their youth that they got

lost in a mall and had a frightening experience. Over a series of three interviews with the

subjects, a full 25% of them came to believe and remember being lost in the mall.

Sabbagh, among other researchers concludes, that "if a psychotherapist believes ... that
psychological symptoms, dream images, confused emotions, are the signs of

unremembered child abuse, she may convey this to the client as a truth" (2009, p. 101-
102). Schacter notes that correlations do not prove causation: we do not know to what

extent early trauma aids in creating a tendency towards false memory or if a tendency

towards false memory creates early trauma (2001, p. 130).

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Are some personalities more suggestible than others? One study implicates a

talent for visual imagery as a culprit in an individual's susceptibility to suggestibility.

Those in a suggestibility study who produced false memories "scored higher on scales

that measure vividness of visual imagery than did individuals whose recollections were

more accurate" (Schacter, 2001, p .125). These results make sense in that vividness of
imagery is a common marker for veracity of memory. Further, others have found that

individuals with high scores in self-reported qualities towards lapses in attention and

memory are more likely to create false memories in studies than those who self-report

low scores on the same measures (p. 129). Suggestibility is one of the flaws of memory
in persons across the spectrum of normal or traumatized, yet an artistic, daydreaming,

creative personality is clearly implicated as being more suggestible and experiencing

more misattribution and confabulation than others, demonstrating the link between
psyche and memory. A fascinating inquiry into memory and imagination would be to test

the opposite; that is, if strong emotion or suggestibility can persuade one that a false

memory is true, can it also convince that a true memory is false?

Bias. The need for self-enhancement—egocentric bias—and the need for

congruence—consistency bias, lead to imaginative distortions of bias in memory.

Egocentric biases in memory reflect the important role that 'the self plays
in organizing and regulating mental life .... Numerous experiments have
shown that when we encode new information by relating it to the self,
subsequent memory for that information improves compared to other
types of encoding. (Schacter, 2001, p. 150)

Consistency and change biases occur when we reconstruct our past to be falsely

similar or different from our present to affirm a presently held image of our present life.

We assume consistency with the past when it doesn't stand out that we were different in

the past. Change bias is invoked when we believe we should have changed; this leads to

a tendency to see our past selves as more different to our present self than we actually

were in the past. Both of these biases are used to make us feel more comfortable with
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who we presently are by bringing about stability through consistency or change through
difference.

An example of consistency bias is demonstrated in the research of Daniel Offer of

Northwestern University, who conducted an experiment in which 67 men in their 40s

were asked questions about how they felt or believed in high school about various topics,

such as whether their parents encouraged them in sports or whether religion was helpful.

These same adult men had been asked these same questions when they were in high
school, and their answers from each time period were contrasted with one another.

The men's memories of their adolescent lives bore little relationship to

what they had reported as high school freshman. Fewer than 40 percent of
the men recalled parental encouragement to be active in sports; some 60
percent had reported such encouragement as adolescents. Barely one-
quarter recalled that religion was helpful, but nearly 70 percent had said
that it was when they were adolescents. And though only one-third of the
adults recalled receiving physical punishment decades earlier, as
adolescents nearly 90 percent had answered the question affirmatively.
(Schacter, 2001, p. 3)

In another example, married women were assessed as to their feelings about their

marriage at 1,10, and 20 years. Their 10-year assessments of their initial feelings
towards their marriage were worse than they actually indicated that they felt in the
beginning of their marriages. At the 10-year assessment, the women tended towards a

change bias because they wanted to feel that their present feelings of dissatisfaction were

better than they used to feel. At the 20-year assessment, the women demonstrated a
consistency bias and assumed they felt similar towards their marriages at 10 years as they
did at 20 years, but in actuality they felt more negative about their marriages at 10 years

than they did at 20 years (Schacter, 2001, p. 143). The happier the women were at 20
years the more they exhibited consistency bias towards their 10 year assessments.

Hindsight bias occurs when we filter memories through present knowledge. For

example, feeling sure before an election or sports tournament who will win, and when it

turns out differently, feeling that we "knew all along" it would happen that way.
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"Hindsight bias ... is ubiquitous: people seem almost driven to reconstruct the past to fit

what they know in the present" (Schacter, 2001, p. 147). Bias distortions in memory

demonstrate the role of the self-image in organizing and utilizing memory. And it points

out that a primary motivator of our cognitive tricks is the desire to avoid cognitive

dissonance: the experience of conflicting thoughts and emotions in consciousness.

Neither of these drives is to know or represent reality accurately but is determined by the

subjective needs of the self, which employs the imagination to those ends. "The self s

preeminent role in encoding and retrieval, combined with a powerful tendency for people
to view themselves positively, creates fertile ground for memory biases that allow people
to remember past experiences in a self-enhancing light" (Schacter, 2001, p. 151). Bias in

particular points out the relationship of the ego to memory; indeed, memory is a building
block of identity, while at the same time the ego exerts a top-down influence on the

organization, retrieval, and presentation of memory. Clearly, the ego plays a primary

role in the imaginative distortions of memory, pointing to the reality of the self inserting a

fissure in memory.
Memory's Cleave
Researchers, philosophers, and poets have long known that memory serves two
masters. Richard Kearney wonders, "how does memory . .. negotiate a passage between

its opposing fidelities to imagination and reality?" (2003, p. 51) These opposing

fidelities are memory's cleave, and the self is an important negotiating factor.

In a workshop on memory as part of a larger conference on Alzheimer's disease,

Boston University cognitive neuroscientist Andrew Budson, in response to the dismay of

participants that memory was not a reliable recording of experience, asserted that

memory did not evolve to reflect literal experience; it evolved as a highly successful

adaptation ensuring survival (Budson, 2010). In response to survival needs, memory

developed as a function of correspondence with reality. Correspondence is memory's

physiological function. With the capacity for symbolic thinking, and as the frontal lobes
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and autonoetic consciousness developed within imagination, however, another need of

memory evolved: the need for self-coherence.

British psychologist and autobiographical memory researcher Martin Conway, in

his theories of the self-memory system (SMS), explains that "one of the fundamental
conceptual issues in research into human memory is where (episodic) memories are best

thought of in terms of 'coherence' or 'correspondence'" (Conway, Singer, & Tagini,

2004, p. 495). In the SMS model, "both correspondence and coherence are equally
important, but for different reasons" (p. 496).

We assert that autobiographical memory emerges from the intersection of

two competing demands—the need to encode an experience-near record of
ongoing goal activity and the simultaneous need to maintain a coherent and
stable record of the self s interaction with the world that extends beyond the
present moment. The first of these demands we call adaptive
correspondence and the second, self-coherence. (Conway et al., 2004, p.
492)

Correspondence is the evolutionary need for memory to correspond to experience

in order to survive. It is thought that autobiographical memory's conceptualization of the

gist of experiences is one way that the mind resolves the overload problem of encoding
every experience; the generalized meaning of a group or set of memories is retained
rather than specific details. This abstraction is not inferring what actually took place, but

reflects a correspondence of the essential meaning of the memories from experience

(Conway, 2005, p. 596). Connecting back to Knox's argument that image schemas are

archetypes-as-such, and my counter-argument that image schemas and archetypes are

qualitatively different, as are perceptual and autobiographical memory, I further propose

that image schemas are appropriated by correspondence needs. Image schemas are
necessary for organismic adaptation and survival in their accurate reflection of the

physical world, while archetypes are represented in coherence needs and are necessary to

comprehend the meaning of the self.

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Coherence is a magnetic force in memory, present at encoding stages and re-

encoding on retrievals, that acts to shape memories to support current goals, self-

concepts, and images of the self. Core aspects of the self are supported by memories of
specific experiences (Conway, 2005, p. 595).

Indeed Rapaport (1952/1961), in a classic review of the relation of emotion

to memory, commented that memory should be conceived of "not as an
ability to revive accurately impressions once obtained, but as the integration
of impressions into the whole personality and their revival according to the
needs of the whole personality" (pp. 112-113). (Conway, 2005, p. 595)
I propose that the evolutionary development of human identity in self-image and

life story not only came about with the historical emergence of symbolic thinking but was
an integral part of developing the imagination as well in the increasingly competing

needs for correspondence and coherence. In this fateful historical trajectory, the self s
growing need for coherence split memory between experience and psyche.

As Slattery understands metaphors, I understand memory: "Metaphors ... are

bridges between psyche-soma energy fields" (2010, p. 449). The synaptic net of memory
provides the roots of identity in imagination. Employing metaphor, image, and story,
memory fills in the gaps of consciousness and identity through misattribution,

suggestibility, bias, and straight out confabulation. "A metaphor is, as Joseph Campbell
suggests, a transport vehicle—it allows movement from one reality field to another, to
cross over, to transgress, and to violate boundaries in order to open up a new energy field

of understanding" (Slattery, 2010, pp. 441-442). In the self s striving for a sense of

cohesion, the lacunas of memory are filled with metaphors to explain the naked emotions

dwelling there. Memory's cleave marks the boundary of the psyche as it lifts off from its
physiological beginnings, when memory turns into metaphors.
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Chapter 10
Psyche's Remainder

Whereas memory is a mediating function between the brain, experience, and

imagination, identity, able to claim pedigree in both physiology and psyche, is more

squarely an object of the imagination. In fact, identity can be understood as the aesthetic
aspect of the self. However, we need to guard against charges of imaginary as we

recognize the aesthetic and interpretive function of identity.

To the extent that one's aim is in fact an enlarged understanding of self, it

is ipso facto the case that this cannot possibly be accomplished by
recounting one's previous experience 'as it was'. What this means, of
course, is that life historical knowledge, in so far as it is predicated on
understanding rather than the retrieval of isolated facts, should never—
indeed, can never—be judged according to its 'correspondence' with what
was. (Freeman, 1993, p. 30)

When considering the imaginative element of memory, it must be accepted that

this creative and interpretive aspect to the historical truth of memory, and the self it
builds, is reality, not an illusive telling of reality. In regarding interpretation as imaginary
and illusive "we cut ourselves off from the possibility of thinking about historical truth

itself in a deeper and more comprehensive way than is often allowed" (Freeman, 1993, p.

33).

Self-Memory System (SMS)

In Conway's theory of the SMS, the self is a cognitive structure that organizes,

interprets, and uses memory exerting a top-down influence through goal seeking and self-

coherence needs. In this context, much of memory's imaginative nature is due to the

influence of the self. "Indeed, it has often been observed and long been known that

memories may be altered, distorted, even fabricated, to support current aspects of the

self' (Conway, 2005, p. 595). Cognitive structures of the self exist independently of

memory but memories are activated to support and ground various self-concepts. Self-
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schemas "are drawn largely from the influences of familial and peer socialization,

schooling, and religion, as well as the stories, fairy-tales, myths, and media influences

that are constitutive of an individual's particular culture (Bruner, 1990; Pasupathi, 2001;

Sjwedeer & Bourne, 1984)" (Conway, 2005, p. 597).

Conway's work involves trauma and accident survivors as well as individuals

with brain damage. His findings are similar to those of others studying trauma and brain

damage but includes the role of identity in the organization and interpretation of memory,

a factor lacking in other areas of memory research. "According to the present view of
autobiographical memory the SMS operates to protect itself from change (to maintain
coherence)" (2005, p. 598). One example is of a man and professional driver who was in

a head-on collision as a back-seat passenger. This man's memory led him to believe that
just before the moment of impact he saw what was coming, giving him time to intervene,

but he did not, leaving him with overwhelming guilt. As the man worked through his
traumatic memories and feelings in therapy, he discovered that in fact he did not see the
accident coming before impact; therefore, he could not have intervened. In Conway's

interpretation, this man's SMS chose to distort memory and bear false guilt rather than

confront his fear of lack of control in life in general, and in his career choice as a
professional driver in particular; hence the accident, an uncontrollable event, is directly
tied into this fear of the self whose coherence depends in part on feeling in control of
events (p. 598).

In a second example, an eyewitness of the moment of impact in the World Trade

Center Towers on 9/11 in New York City had an intrusive traumatic memory of

observing the impact of the plane into the Towers from above with no sensory data. Her

therapy involved actively remembering and constructing a memory from the actual

perspective she had on the street; as she did this the full sensory memory of sounds,
people's cries, and her own difficult emotions of fear and anger came up. From an SMS

perspective, this woman's SMS chose to fabricate a false intrusive memory of being
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symbolically above the affective reality of the experience than confront her feelings from

the perspective of the actual experience (Conway, 2005, p. 598).

This is quite a different quality of fabrication and confabulation in memory than

that discussed by Schacter and other memory researchers; the SMS theory brings in an

intention, albeit unconscious, of the ego to distort memory to protect itself from change

or threats to the coherence of the self-image. And it leads to another development, one
which I refer to as the "wrap-around effect" of memory's imagination. Essentially, this is

the dynamic of memory, in its imagistic and affective malleability, to mold itself around
strong and unconscious emotions, convictions, and intentions. In this way, memory is

metaphorically true even if literally false.

An example of this wrap-around process is given by Conway in his work with a

woman who suffered extensive right-hemisphere brain lesions which led to paranoia,
anger, physical disabilities such as being unable to walk, anosognia for her condition

(unable to recognize her disabilities), distorted memory, and confabulations. This woman
consistently and persistently claimed memories of being moved from room to room at

night and having arguments with hospital staff. She also claimed to walk and to visit her
home in Scotland, which was several hundred miles from the hospital. As is common
with frontal lobe lesions, this woman most likely had disrupted sleep, waking in the night

and being confused about where she was; this, coupled with intense paranoia, led her
SMS to confabulate and even generate false memories of being moved and having fights

with others. It is theorized that false memories will be generated to validate strong

emotions in order to maintain coherence (Conway, 2005, p. 599).

This is seen strikingly in some patients with psychological illnesses and in

other patients with brain damage. It may, however, be a general feature of
all autobiographical remembering and, perhaps, one of the reasons that
memory has been found to be so open to manipulations that create false
memories or which distort features of existing memories (see Conway,
1997a, 1997b; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994; Schacter,1997). (Conway, 2005, p.
600)
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Considering the imaginative malleability of memory and its relationship to the conscious

and unconscious aspects of the ego, I now will imagine the process of identity from the

inside out.
Nodal Points

Memory, whether accurate in its correspondence to reality or in its more

imaginative and metaphoric aspect, is caught by and collects around strong, fixed points

in subjectivity. What are these nodal points of identity? First is temperament, our
genetically determined neurobiological sensitivities to our environment, internal and
external, that develop into characteristic predispositions. Temperament is impossibly
complicated; many factors combine to produce a given predisposition and the research of

Kagan and Snidman, discussed earlier, measured just one factor: amygdalar excitability.

While temperament can be understood as what is traditionally referred to as "character,"

and to Jung's typologies, it is not synonymous with personality nor is it deterministic. As
Kagan writes, "no temperament is the foundation of only one personality type" (2010, p.

11) but rather each temperament "bias makes it relatively easy or relatively difficult to

acquire one family of behaviors, emotions, and beliefs rather than another" (p. 11). This
is analogous to clusters or families of genes that code for specific attributes existing
beside or clustered with genes that code for completely different things but the attributes

tend to express together. An example from Kagan and Snidman's research was the
observation

that high-reactive children were more likely to be of slender build with a

narrow face and blue eyes; low-reactive children were more likely to be
taller, heavier, and brown-eyed. A likely reason for this is that the genes
that contribute to the threshold of amygdalar reactivity influence many traits
including body size and eye color. (2004, p. 21)

In a similar relationship, personality attributes tend to cluster around temperamental

qualities although harsh or extreme conditioning experiences can alter our proclivities.
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Perhaps a better metaphor for temperament is a particular block of stone in

a sculptor's studio. The hardness, color, and size of the stone restrict the
variety of forms the sculptor might create, while leaving the artist
considerable freedom to produce a large number of aesthetic products from
a particular slab of marble. (Kagan, 2010, p. 11)
As Jung noted, conditioning that leads one to betray or falsely distort type can render

pathology, while returning to one's authentic or natural disposition leads to health and
vitality. "As a rule, whenever such a falsification of type takes place as a result of

parental influence, the individual becomes neurotic later, and can be cured only by

developing the attitude consonant with his nature" (1921/1971b, p. 332). As discussed in
earlier chapters, one's typology can lead to general and implicit interpretations of one's

self, such as introverts' belief that they are different than most others or something is

innately wrong with them, especially if they are raised in an extraverted culture or
conditioned to acquire extraverted qualities. Or perhaps an assertive, extraverted, loud

girl is raised in a home or culture that values quiet, supportive, mild-mannered women.
One does not need to experience harsh conditioning to feel a mismatch between

temperament and environment. It is at these junctures, where nature meets nurture, that
our wounds, our self-definitions, and our memories cling, and where the story of our
identity begins. However, whether one's temperamental bias was well matched with

conditioning circumstances or not, the hypothesis developed here is that the ancestral

legacy coded in our genes and expressed in our temperament offers neurobiological nodal

points in subjectivity around which complexes, as patterns of emotions, experiences,

interpretations, and memories, congregate.

Let us imagine the journey to identity from body to psyche using Kagan and

Snidman's research with high-reactive infants and children. Although his studies and

these examples refer specifically to the origin of anxiety disorders, it demonstrates how

we all interpret automatic, internal somatic-affective sensations.

A child inherits a unique neurochemical profile that lowers the threshold of

excitability in the amygdala and its projection to the orbitoprefrontal cortex (conscious
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reflection and inhibition). When the amygdala is activated, it leads to repetitive bodily

sensations and conscious feelings from which, in conjunction with the context of
relationship and circumstances, interpretations are consistently assigned. "Many

thoughts can become conditioned stimuli for a biological reaction, including

abandonment, danger, task failure, violation of a moral standard, peer teasing, rejection,

criticism, a disadvantaged status, lack of money, or insufficient time to accomplish a

required task" (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 100). The bodily sensations are determined
by innate neurobiological structure and chemistry but the interpretations are personally

felt and shaped by life experiences, especially repetitive experiences (pp. 102-103).

Changes in body sites at times produce changes in the conscious feeling state or tone.

"When that change is subtle, mildly unpleasant, and ambiguous in origin, the person
might articulate his feeling as shame, guilt, regret, illness, fatigue, or, perhaps, possession
by the devil" (p. 219). Interpretations made happen in a context not only of the larger

identity forming, but including the family myth and cultural, religious, historical context

as well.
Some individuals who have exceptionally low thresholds of excitability to the

amygdala will experience dysphoric moods more often and more intensely. A more
excitable amygdala and responsive sympathetic nervous system leads to greater cortical
arousal to sensation. Hence, high-reactives experience shifts in bodily feeling states more

readily and may have "more salient evocations of an emotion, that, in our culture, invites

an interpretation of a personal flaw" (Kagan & Snidman, 2004, p. 219). Neurobiological

nodal points are repetitive somatic-affective experiences that, coupled with characteristic

typological self-interpretations and significant relationship and circumstantial themes,

become the nucleus of psychic nodal points: complexes.

Typological or temperamental nodal points in our deeply subjective experience are

the collective stones in a riverbed that determine patterns in the current and that affect

surface ripples of the water while remaining hidden underneath. Temperament is not
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only our ancestral legacy, but it involves those regions of the brain that respond

subjectively to experience, yet are outside of the boundaries of the ego, though they are
eventually woven into the ego structure. Included in this stream are complexes and

internal working models (IWMs) of the personal unconscious. Although Conway's work

addresses a lack in memory research which typically leaves out consideration of the self s

relationship to memory, his research itself lacks inclusion of unconscious dynamics and

structures. This is the contribution of a depth psychological perspective.

A Congregation
The complex is a congregation, a holy mess of various unconscious psychic

structures held together by a strong affective theme orbiting a significant relationship—

with an individual, a collective, a circumstance, or a topic (e.g., father complex, family

complex, writing complex, or money complex). A complex can, and often does, involve

more than one relationship and topic as well. The psychic structures that compose a

complex are cognitive schemas, internal working models (IWMs), and memory, which
generate metaphors, images, myths, fantasies. From this psychic soup emerge archetypes
as distilled essential meaning resonating in a living, transforming symbol.
Our minds rely on mental schemas and IWMs, as well as memory, to organize
information, bringing meaning and cohesion to our experiences and to determine
decisions within current needs. The cognitive structure of the self or ego directs

attention, retrieval, and inhibition of memory. According to scholar F. C. Bartlett, the

imaginative nature of memory and the directing, often unconscious, intentions of the self,
lead to "rationalization, condensation, very often in a considerable rearrangement of
temporal relations, in invention and in general in an exercise of constructive imagination

to serve whatever are the operating interests at the time" (quoted in Sabbagh, 2009, pp.

66-67). Memory is a central component of schemas, IWMs, and complexes and a

building block of identity. In carrying out correspondence functions, memory is

introjective, imprinting reality in learned expectations, behaviors, and responses that

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ensure survival. In its coherence functions, memory becomes projective and malleable,

wrapping in imagistic resonance around intentions, desires, fears, and driving affects,
conscious and unconscious, of the self. In this way, the self needs memory and

imagination both to survive and to become.

Although there are similarities between IWMs and complexes, they are distinctly

different constructs of the unconscious. In short, IWMs are generalized interpretations

and dynamics of significant relationships, life situations, and self-other definitions.

Complexes, beings more fully of the subjective psyche, are stories, dissociated bundles of

associations around a wound that can be with a significant other or a quality of one's self
or a life experience.

IWMs are intimately related to, even constructed through, early attachment

relationships with significant caretakers. "The critical point of attachment theory is that
cumulative experiences are internalized to form unconscious 'internal working models'
which guide expectations and perceptions, so serving as a template for future
relationships" (Knox, 2003, p. 78). Knox continues:

Internal working models contain complex representational information

about patterns of relationship, particularly of self in relation to key
attachment figures .... These internal working models influence a
person's perceptions of, and attitudes and behavior towards, all subsequent
emotionally important relationships, but are not themselves accessible to
conscious awareness, (pp. 79-80)

Knox, like other theorists, connects IWMs with implicit memory, considering IWMs a

"particular manifestation" of implicit memory (p. 80). Like implicit memory, IWMs

contain generalized, abstract representations of memory, not the specific memories

themselves. In comparison, complexes contain the specific memories, myths, images, and

metaphors of the IWMs that cross through them.

Knox's theory connects cognitive structures with archetypal structures—as

discussed earlier, she considers the image schema the archetype-as-such—and she links
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the IWM with the core meaning of the complex. Like a series of legos, the IWM is the
personalized schema as the complex is the personalized archetype; the IWM is the core
meaning of the complex in a similar fashion as the image schema is the implicit imprint
of the archetypal image. This explanation is logically pleasing, but I don't think the

unconscious operates in such a linear manner. Through the repetitive process of storing
similar experiences in implicit memory, "core meanings emerge, through the process of

the internalization of experience and its subsequent organization into generalized

patterns" (Knox, 2003, p. 87). This, Knox claims, is the process that generates essential
meaning in the unconscious "rather than through the activation of some innate

predetermined pattern of meaning" as some traditional definitions of archetypes imply (p.

87). I agree with the process of essential meaning being generated from repetitive

experiences; however, I think there are likely many more factors and structures involved
than the simple correspondence between schemas and IWMs on the one hand, and
complexes and archetypes on the other.

A significant difference between IWMs and complexes is their form of

unconsciousness: complexes are dissociated whereas IWMs are implicit. The latter are

generalized structures of relationship dynamics where complexes are stories and

subpersonalities. Complexes are "splinter psyches" and the

aetiology of their origin is frequently a so-called trauma, an emotional

shock or some such thing, that splits off a bit of the psyche. Certainly one
of the commonest causes is a moral conflict, which ultimately derives
from the apparent impossibility of affirming the whole of one's nature.
(Jung, 1948/1969c, p. 98)

Where the IWM represents the dynamics in a significant relationship, which may be

maladaptive, the complex is more directly tied into one's nature and the wounds received
from experience.

The dissociation of complexes indicates a psychic and emotional wound that as

the ego evades becomes the magnetic force of the complex. "Apart from theories,
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experience shows us that complexes always contain something like a conflict—they are

either the cause or the effect of a conflict" (Jung, 1933, p. 79). Complexes are both

causes and effects of conflicts. Complexes are "vulnerable points" (p. 79); they are
wounds that "always contain memories, wishes, fears, duties, needs, or views, with which

we have never really come to terms" (p. 79). Complexes arise "from the clash between a

requirement of adaptation and the individual's constitutional inability to meet the

challenge" (p. 80); complexes personally embody memory. IWMs emerge as an

organizing principle; complexes converge around a story to be told.

In agreement with Knox, I do see a trajectory of development in the personal

unconscious from a congregation of various structures and objects—schemas, IWMs,
memory, metaphor, images, interpretations, complexes—to the emergence of core or
essential meanings in the archetypes. The one difference, and again, it is small but

significant, is that I do not regard any of these pre-existing phenomena as an archetype-

as-such. Further, the complex is built from all of the unconscious structures—IWMs,

schemas, memories—not in their entirety, but parts of all of them are caught in the
magnetic, affective field. Finally, a major distinction in my theory is that the nucleus of

the complex is a neurobiological nodal point represented in temperament and typology.

Slattery describes Jung's understanding of the complex as having two

components: "(/') a factor determined by experience and causally related to the

environment (exterior); and (//) a factor innate in the individual's character and

determined by his disposition (interior)" (2010, p. 443). Jung observed the physiological,

temperamental predisposition at the heart of complexes, seeing that while they can take
on an infinite variety of particular form, closer attention reveals primary, typical patterns.

These patterns, Jung asserts, derive from the early experiences of childhood; since the

experiences of any child can vary greatly, it is innate disposition which the basic patterns

of complexes congregate around. "This must necessarily be so, because the individual

disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of
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life" (Jung, 1933, p. 80). This reference to innate disposition is, of course, the

neurobiological profile and temperamental nodal point, which leads Jung, and me, to
conclude that "complexes are therefore, in this sense, focal or nodal points of psychic life
which we would not wish to do without" (p. 79). The temperamental navel gathers

around itself psychic nodal points.

Archetypes Revisited

Jung first discovered complexes in the word association test and then noticed that
they represented a limited number of themes. These affectively charged themes, he

found, are represented by a primordial image which Jung named the archetypes. He

considered the archetype to be the imagistic, symbol core of the complex, the psychoid
pressure that generated the complex from the collective unconscious. Metaphorically, we

can understand Jung's view of the psyche's structural process as similar to the earth, with

archetypes being tectonic plates deep within that push from the pressure of molten lava
creating a landscape of mountains, valleys, rivers, and oceans. I propose a different

origin of complexes and archetypes, one that reverses their order.

In his early work with complexes and the word association test, Jung concluded
that the complex is composed of a powerful, affectively charged image with an inner

coherence and relative autonomy (Jung, 1948/1969c, pp. 95-98). This image, discovered

secondarily, was eventually considered a priori to the complex and an archetypal core

from the collective unconscious. "He [Jung] said that the complex is 'embedded' in the
material of the personal unconscious, but that its 'nucleus' consists of an archetypal core"

(Knox, 2003, p. 95). This is where my theory parts from Jung.

As stated above, the nucleus of a complex is the temperamental nodal point. The

archetypes then emerge from complexes as the distilled essences of repetitive, personally

meaningful experiences. The archetypes that emerge are the symbolic, core meanings of

our typical, affective human situations and relationships. As Saunders and Skar (2001)
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note, the system they emerge from is complex and a certain range of archetypes emerge

from a repetitive range of experiences.

Like autobiographical memory, archetypes are a bridge from the brain and body to

the imagination and it is this propertythat gives archetypes the subjective feeling of being

pre-existent forms. They are generated from deep within our most personal experiences

and participate in the organization of future experience. However, I propose that

archetypes, like image schemas, are not a priori to particular experiences. We first have

personally charged, important, and repetitive experiences that collect around

temperamental, then psychic, nodal points which then give birth to archetypes. It is the
emergence from our neurobiology, that area of the spectrum of the self that lies outside

ego boundaries and is experienced as the collective unconscious, that gives archetypes
their numinous, not-me, wholly Other qualities.

It was not difficult to see that while complexes owe their relative
autonomy to their emotional nature, their expression is always dependent
on a network of associations grouped round a center charged with affect.
The central emotion generally proved to be individually acquired, and
therefore an exclusively personal matter. (Jung, 1959, p. ix)

It is this personally acquired affective theme of the complex that both ties together all of

the parts of psychic structures within it, and, is the primary emotional tone of the

archetype.
My point of departure with Jungian theory is the order of emergence of

complexes and archetypes. Knox extrapolates a theory of image schemas as

"evolutionarily derived value systems that arise directly out of... [a] model of neural

Darwinism—they match the functioning of the brain" (2003, p. 100). She continues that
"schemata are emergent properties of the nervous system and are prototypes which
aggregate repeated patterns of lived experience" (p. 100). In the idea of schemata as

prototype, correlated with archetype-as-such, Knox seems to view the schemata as innate,

contentless structures that exist prior to the particular lived experiences they arrange into
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patterns. I am in agreement that image schemas are emergent mental properties of the

brain but in the way that typological characteristics are emergent properties of the brain

in the subjective psyche. Recalling Hogenson's (2009) discussion of archetypes as

requiring a certain environmental context in order to be provoked in being—the ant

would not onotologically be the ant without the leaf, cutting—I maintain that the brain
and body hold the potential for certain functions and patterns that do not exist until the

particular experiences cumulate and in this cumulative pressure bring about the

underlying order.
Slattery writes that "psyche is a pattern-making, pattern-discovering quality of

consciousness, wherein the patterns expose the imprint of the archetypes" (2010, p. 447).

I would add that the patterns of psyche also initially generate the imprint of the
archetypes. A tenet of Jungian theory is the assumption that universal and general

structures pre-exist the particular, and while in some cases this is true—instincts precede
consciousness—it is not always true. I think when we cross the line to psyche and

consciousness, the rules change.

As mentioned, Jung first discovered complexes in the word association test; then,
in his study of complexes, he discovered what he called primordial images. Though he

considered primordial image and archetype synonymous, he focused on the term

archetype because primordial image led to confusion for others to interpret archetypes as

inherited images. It was after discovering the complex and its primordial image that Jung

posited the concept of an underlying, invisible structure, the archetype-as-such (Jung,

1948/1969a, p. 133). Jung must have felt that was he was drilling down into the psyche,

perhaps in a manner similar to his famous dream of the levels underneath his house

through which he moved back through human history and finally came to bones buried in

the earth "like the remains of a primitive culture" (1961, p. 158-9). This makes sense

subjectively, but as with Knox's "lego" theory of psychic structures, it appears too

logical, too ego-oriented, relying on the subjective felt sense of the ego.
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Only when a complex's personal layer of content is made conscious and

emotionally digested can one then wrestle with the deeper, universal issues of fate, a

problem that "gives expression to a conflict that it has been incumbent on man to suffer

and solve from time immemorial" (Jacobi, 1959, p. 26). In analytical psychology, the

image of consciousness and the personal unconscious are layers over the archetypal and

more general structures and content of mind. Consciousness, as a whole medium

including unconsciousness, does not operate in this manner; it is unified and plastic. That

is, learning in the present is imprinted within an existing matrix. Knowledge updates,

overwrites, and becomes enmeshed with previous knowledge. The suffering of the

personal material itself generates the archetype through psyche's creative process,

distilling and refining through consciousness the essence and meaning of the experience.

Suffering is the process of expanding consciousness; it is the imagination that processes

the past—represented by the wound—and generates new insights, enhanced capacity,

symbolic understandings, future possibilities. The general existential issues of fate are
not deeper, under layers of the collective unconscious, but a more profound awareness, a

deeper understanding of being a human being.

One could argue that the proposition that neurobiological nodal points are the

nucleus of the complex that then give rise to the archetypal image, is the brain structure,

the instinctual component, and the inherited predisposition of the archetype-as-such that
Jung referred to repeatedly in his work. My propositions are not novel; in 1959, Jacobi

draws on the parallels with a theorist in animal psychology, K. Lorenz, who used the term

innate schemata in 1935 to describe forms of innate reactions to certain stimuli and

situations. Lorenz felt these innate schemata were independent of experience and

inherited potentialities for forms, not the images or contents themselves (Jacobi, 1959, p.

42). Scientists and astute observers of animal and human behavior cannot help but notice
a general ground of order and structure to behavior, action, response, and thought. This

has led many, including Jung, neuroscientists, and cognitive psychologists, to posit
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content-less structures of the mind correlating to brain structure and development,

inaccessible as themselves to consciousness, since consciousness only registers content,

which are inherited with brain structure. The primary distinction in the theories of these

different fields is an a priori existence of the structures to content.

I do believe that neurobiological nodal points as a collective core of the complex

that generates archetypal material is what Jung observed and referred to as the brain

structure's predisposition for order. However, employing a separate concept of

archetype-as-such implies a direct causative relationship between physiology and

archetypal image, as does Knox's theory of image schema. Archetypal images and
experiences derive from a complex and unique constellation of experience with many
various structures. Jung cautions us to remember that "the archetype does not proceed

from physical facts but describes how the psyche experiences the physical fact"

(1951/1959, p. 154). The term archetype-as-such lends to literalizing archetypal

material, reducing it to physiology, which is as absurd as an author literalizing the

characters of his novel. Characters in a story have roots in the actual life of the artist and
others; they are powerful metaphors of real experiences and human realities with the
potential to transform us. Characters and the story they embody are real forces and a part
of reality. They are not literal or physical but describe the subjective experience of

literal, physical reality. They are the symbolic, living, imaginative consequence of

unique experiences of life.

"To define it from a functional point of view, we might say that the archetype as

such is concentrated psychic energy, but that the symbol provides the mode of

manifestation by which the archetype becomes discernible" (Jacobi, 1959, p. 75). This is

a tautological argument to posit that the secondary manifestation of an invisible structure

proves the existence of an initial invisible structure. Geigerich calls the archetype-as-

such concept "a circular argument... of which the known myths are only temporary and

culture-specific expressions" (2005b, p. 43). In arguing that only living myths can be
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applied to modern life, Geigerich asserts that the concept of a "positivized noumenal"—
the idea that a reality behind the phenomena produces archetypal image, symbol, and

myth—is a "bypass operation" allowing one to dismiss historical change and cultural

ruptures that change myths, symbols, and archetypes (p. 43).

The only problem with this way of thinking, this bypass operation, is that
this legitimizing assumption is itself not legitimate: for we are not permitted
to invent a positively existing psyche behind psychological phenomenology.
There is no such thing as a soul that produces psychological phenomena.
The phenomena have nothing behind them. They have everything they
need within themselves, even their own origin, their author or subject.
(Geigerich, 2005b, p. 43)
Symbols and archetypes do "present an objective, visible meaning behind which an
invisible, profounder meaning is hidden" (Jacobi, 1959, p. 77). Yet this invisible,

profounder meaning within the symbol is the nature of symbols themselves because they
are living, not static and complete, inviting a final interpretation. The comprehension of
the mysteries of the universe and human beings is a marriage of conscious and

unconscious; if consciousness has not yet perceived, fallen in love with, and cajoled the

archetype into telling its secrets, they do not yet exist. The meaning of archetypes and

indeed our life is created in the discovery and the telling.

Mythic Skin
Psyche is the metaphoric, creative, transformative medium of mimesis and myth.

Identity, as psyche's representation of itself in an individual life, is the mythic skin of the

self archetype. Where the self archetype is the symbolic, intuitive comprehension and

expression of the whole individual, identity is the storied, metaphoric, mythic

representation. The whole of the self is the entire organism: the potentials, known and

unknown, the body and brain, ancestral legacy, evolutionary history, the aspects of the

phylogenetic and the archetypal collective unconscious in its domain, the personal

unconscious and all of the structures of the mind and psyche, our potential, our future,

our becoming, all that is and remains unknown about us. "The collective unconscious is
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an imago of life" (Mogenson, 1999, p. 130). In comparison, the self archetype is an

impossible, intuitive grasp of an individual's wholeness in a microcosmic analogy of the

macrocosm's containment of the whole of existence.

A definition of myth that relates directly to the ideas expounded here comes from

Joseph Campbell. "Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images,

of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other" (1988, p. 39).

Considering this definition shifts the focus for Slattery from considering myths as stories

to

consider them as energy patterns of body and psyche that, when channeled
through particular corridors of mind, had the power to redirect both matter
and energy into new folds of understanding; one of the packets of
understanding is of course narrative. (2010, p. 436)
Identity, then, is the narrative myth provoked into being by the images, metaphors and

archetypes of the psyche as they collide and emerge from the body.
What are the elements of mimetic play? Image, metaphor, affect, and myth.

Mimesis radiates through symbols; so too, does identity, the storied telling of biography,

resonate with the archetypes that emerge from our own psychic flesh into images and
metaphors. Identity as a symbolic expression of the self is a metaphor and employs

metaphors. Metaphors "are clusters or knots of affects, of affective energy - what it

allows perception to open to via imagination. Metaphors are fiercely rooted in the world

of matter" (Slattery, 2010, p. 444). This imaginative element links and bleeds into
memory, for in the way that metaphors are like "energy fields that bridge some quality

between consciousness and the unconscious, and body-psyche" (p. 446), the imaginative

aspect of memory is a link between the brain and the psyche. Just as "metaphors open us

to the symbolic realm" (p. 446), so too does memory open a doorway to the

imagination's interpretation, understanding, and reworking of our life. The relation

between psyche, metaphor, and matter "exposes a pattern of consciousness which

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involves replication, repetition and similarity couched in difference" (p. 446). These are

also the elements of identity, understood as the temporal skin of the self.

The aesthetic process is a symbolic reworking of lived experience through the

imagination; in this way, we can say that identity is an aesthetic process. Identity is the

storied, mythic, analogical expression of psyche's creative process which includes

archetypes and expresses the self through the metaphor of self-images and story. As

Kuspit writes that the artistic process transcends temporal experience "by recreating it in

aesthetic terms" (2004, p. 9), identity is an imaginative re-creation of the complex

relationship between brain, mind, psyche, experience, fate, and culture that represents an

individual life. Imagination and perception share vision of images and the world, but
imagination goes further and interprets what is seen, distinct from the categorizing of
perceptions (Lieberman, 2003, p. 25). Unlike our perceptions, we can modify what we

imagine.

As much as we ourselves are 'written' by the various texts we read, we are

not done so without remainder. Helen [Keller] herself demonstrates this
point well: despite the fact that she continued to be plagued by the bric-a-
brac in her mind, so much of which had come to her through the texts she
read, she was still able to give out, in her own writing and in her own self,
more than she took in. (Freeman, 1993, p. 80; italics added)

Imagination begets the remainder from experience; it is a medium and a process

that generates more than it receives. What is aesthetic remainder? Identity expresses it,

but not wholly, for the remainder is our future and our potential at once. The remainder

is the imago of the self expressed through the mythic identity. "One becomes the person

one most essentially and uniquely is by means of the images that draw one's psychic

energy into a certain configuration of attitude, behavior, and motivation" (Stein, 1998, p.

66). Psyche's remainder is our becoming.

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Chapter 11
Concluding Thoughts

Critique of Jungian theory

Jung's theories articulate close empirical and intuitive observations of intensely

subjective experiences. Analytical psychology raises a flag and claims territory for the
value of the subjective psyche and this is as important a task today as it was a century
ago. My primary critique of analytical psychology's theories is the conflation of

imagination or psyche with matter to the point of reduction. Another critique is the

insular nature of Jungian discourse that has limited exposure to interdisciplinary

dialogues with fields outside of our comfort zone.

Freud has been accused of positing the a priori existence of the Oedipus complex

and then finding it everywhere; he became blind to the fact that the Oedipus complex was

his myth that filtered reality. The same phenomenon has happened in Jungian discourse
with the theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious pre-existing experience and

the personal unconscious.

Art critic Rudolf Arnheim wrote that "today in both psychology and the arts there
is a danger of confusing the elementary with the profound" (1966, p. 289). I believe

Jungian theory sometimes confuses this point and assumes a higher order thinking of the
species brain because it is primordial. This does not mean that the phylogenetic

collective unconscious does not hold wisdom for us, but that it should not be conflated

with the abstract, symbolic content that emerges at the other end of the archetypal

collective unconscious after the transformative processes of the psyche meeting

consciousness take place. The phylogenetic collective unconscious is conflated with the

archetypal collective unconscious in analytical psychology. We can state that each is the

same phenomena on different ends of the spectrum of manifestation, yet we cannot

overlook the many processes, structures, and necessity of experience and consciousness

in-between and pretend that there is a direct, linear and logical path of causation.
 249

There is a difference between the experiments of implicit processes of the right

hemisphere or procedural memory that occur outside of and without the inclusion of ego-

consciousness, and the archetypal collective unconscious. The former is the

physiological correlate of the collective unconscious; the latter is the archetypal

collective unconscious realized in the imagination. I resist writing that they are the same
phenomenon, even in light of dual aspect monism, because I want to stress that this is the

point of conflation in Jungian theory; that is, analytical psychology tends to literalize the

collective unconscious of the psyche as the phylogenetic collective unconscious

expressed in evolution and neurobiology. This is the shadow of analytical psychology:

the literalization of the imagination in the physical as the archetype-as-such. Clearly

neuroscience employs literalizing reductions, but the caution towards literalization is for

Jungians as much as for neuroscientists.

Neuroscience needs depth psychology. Science provides important data, but like

all solitary fields of knowledge, it is incomplete. The aspects of the self most valued by
human beings, "remembering, imagining, making judgments and planning, rely not on

data but on meaning" (Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005/2010, p. 24). Neuroscientists such
as Joseph LeDoux recognize the significant relationship of the unconscious to the self. "I
believe that these implicit or unconscious aspects of the self also play an important role,
in fact an essential one, in shaping who we are and explaining why we do what we do"

(LeDoux, 2002, p. 17). Neuroscience needs the subjective, embodied experience of

depth psychology not only to fill out its inquiry into the self but to know the meaning

behind their pursuits.

A key difference between my perspective and Jung's is that I consider the psyche

emergent from the body, whereas Jung's theories, though perhaps begun from this

premise, moved into an autonomous realm that appeared to be transcendent to the body,

and even time and space. Jung neglected to comment as a psychologist on this, claiming

that he could only speak of psychological phenomena. His language inferred two
 250

definitions of transcendence as beyond consciousness and transcendence to time-space,

and his theories, and their application from some of his followers, are resplendent or

contaminated (you decide which) with the rhetoric of a belief and assumption of a time-

space transcendence and autonomy of the collective unconscious.

This is where Jung erroneously believed that one's personal metaphysical or

religious beliefs could exist separately from one's professional intellectual pursuits.

Geigerich notes this move in Jung as well when, after discussing the "bypass operation"

of asserting archetypes-as-such behind the phenomenal expressions, he writes

Jung's trick was to disguise his metaphysical move before himself and us
by claiming that his archetypes, 'the unconscious,' the soul, etc., were just
empirical facts. So it seemed to him that it was not his, but empirical
reality's fault if he discovered a Hinterwelt behind the phenomenal world.
(2005b, p. 43).

Our religious beliefs—and by religious I mean our beliefs about a metaphysical,

containing reality, the process of life itself—are the ground of our intellectual
speculations and experiments. Our metaphysical beliefs are the ground of, and grounded

in, our worldly beliefs and work.

As academics, scholars, and scientists, we try not to contaminate our professional,

intellectual pursuits with our personal metaphysical beliefs in an individual expression of

the separation of church and state. But I do not think it is possible to completely separate
our personal convictions from our professional theories. Our wholeness does not exist in

such strict categories, though it seems to be the case at times. We need to recognize not

only the influence but the necessarily incestuous relationship between our private prayers

and our public proclamations.

Brain and Psyche: Structures of the Self

In the observations and measurements of neuroscience we see the empirical

observations of Jung. Implicit consciousness clearly exists autonomously from explicit

consciousness, what depth psychology refers to as ego-consciousness and Gazzaniga

 251

calls "the interpreter" (Turk et al., 2003, p. 71). The nature of implicit consciousness

parallels Jung's ideas of the collective unconscious and the reality and autonomy of the

psyche. Analytical psychology is built on the truth that there are forces and dynamics
within the individual psyche that do not belong to the individual. De-identification with

these contents and forces that bring one into relationship with the Other or the

unconscious is the principle method of individuation. In a similar manner, neuroscience

de-identifies with the dynamics of implicit consciousness and clearly delineates the

boundaries of the self and a non-self.

Though some neuroscientists still consider consciousness an emergent illusion of

the brain—I think Ramachandran feels this way—this appears to be an old conjecture in

the field. Most of the neuroscientists I researched are in line with Damasio when he

writes:

The oddest thing about the upper reaches of a consciousness performance is the
conspicuous absence of a conductor before the performance begins, although, as
the performance unfolds, a conductor comes into being. For all intents and
purposes, a conductor is now leading the orchestra, although the performance has
created the conductor—the self—not the other way around. The conductor is
cobbled together by feelings and by a narrative brain device, although this fact
does not make the conductor any less real. The conductor undeniably exists in
our minds, and nothing is gained by dismissing it as an illusion. (2010, p. 24)
The self is an emergent phenomenon in consciousness, yet, consciousness is

undeniably "real" though of a different nature than the brain. When the psyche is

understood as a complex system, this different yet real, nonillusive nature of

consciousness and its emergent phenomena becomes clear. The psyche emerges from the

brain in interaction with many variables inside and outside the individual, in the past and

the present, yet it cannot be reduced to the processes of the brain. As Jung said:

The psyche deserves to be taken as a phenomenon in its own right; there are no
grounds at all for regarding it as a mere epiphenomenon, dependent though it may
be on the functioning of the brain. One would be as little justified in regarding life
as an epiphenomenon of the chemistry of carbon compounds. (1954/1969, p. 8)
 252

Complex systems theory holds that the system itself contains its own laws and forces that
unfold over time (Siegel, 2010). As Kugler puts it:

As we scale up from physics to biology to psychology, each successive level of

complexity is sustained by regularities that are manifest on the level b e l o w . . . .
[However] the regularity of archetypes at the psychological level has its own
unique lawfulness. (2005, p. 142)

In agreement with the emergent perspective of Hogenson (2001, 2009), Saunders and

Skar (2001), and Knox (2003, 2004), I too see archetypes as the symbolic representation

from an incredibly complex psychic system, capturing the essence and meaning of our
individual experiences of self, world, and others, within and without.

The relationship between temperament and typology has been called "uncanny"

by researchers Kagan and Snidman (2004, p. 218). Jung's classifications of typology

were the result of an intensely close observation of the phenomenological reality of

subjective experience and ways of being. By comparing Jung's typology system with

Kagan and Snidman's research on how amygdalar excitation manifests in subjective

psychological experience, we can hypothesize that typology is the first lifting off of
consciousness in subjective experience from a neurobiological profile. Decades ago,

Jungian analyst C. A. Meier advocated for the academic and statistical validation of

Jung's typology system by Jungians. "We are all too much fascinated by the unconscious
instead of giving the typological mandala the due scope and application it so urgently is
asking for" (1986, p. 253). Meier refers to the fact that typological testing has already

been applied and adopted by non-Jungians without giving Jung credit. He is an advocate

for academic, statistical validation of Jung's typology and refers to the scientific work on

temperament and typology being done by Eysenck and others, whose work is referenced
in the chapter on temperament and typology.

Some of these authors are far ahead of us, which of course implies that some of
them know even better than Jung. And it is we Jungians who are responsible for
this trouble. Some of these scientists reach interesting results, which should only
encourage us to do something more in our own field. (Meier, 1986, pp. 254-5)
 253

Although I do not feel it is trouble or an urgent matter that others may know more

than Jung, I join Meier in advocating for interdisciplinary work with scientific methods in

areas of analytical psychology that can yield insightful results of the psyche and ground

Jungian theory in statistically demonstrable validation.

The seed of this dissertation was planted decades ago in my childhood fantasy of

having amnesia, wiping out my memories and my identity. Now, through this research, I

confirm for myself that autobiographical memory is the content of identity's story, but

the structures of the self are rooted beyond memory in temperament and typology on the
one hand, and represented in complexes and archetypes on the other. Memory is clearly

a function of imagination as much as of correspondence with reality, yet it is more

accurately understood as the bridge between typology and archetype. Memory holds our
learned response to experiences, represented in identity through complexes, and points to
our past. Yet the emergence of archetypes in the psyche represents the imaginative and

future face of memory. Archetypes are born of the past but through their imaginative,

creative, and symbolic nature, they represent our potential becoming.

The Joy of Discovery

"The tremendous complexity of psychic phenomena is borne in upon us only after
we see that all attempts to formulate a comprehensive theory are foredoomed to failure"
(Jung, 1936/1969, p. 125). This is where the dissertation—my attempt to formulate a

comprehensive theory of identity—must end, buttressed and resting up against the

tremendous complexity of the psyche. Upon reflecting on his theory of psychological

types, Jung writes that he could only see with hindsight that he had oversimplified things.

"I had tried to explain too much in too simple a way, as often happens in the first joy of

discovery" (Jung, 1933, p. 86). I, too, can perhaps be accused of simplifying a

complicated topic, yet just as strongly, my discoveries have been a complete joy.
 254

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