Do Jungian ‘archetypes’ make any difference?

Another post from the Critical Psychiatry Network

Jung has always been a bit of a mystery-man to me. And in particular, I don’t find his ‘explanation’ for how inheritance works at all helpful. For me, this is just one of life’s many puzzles.

How birds nest (or bees hive) is chicken feed compared to how hereditary works in general. Grandads’ diets influence grandsons’ coronary disease, at least they did in Scandinavia – I don’t have an explanation for this, and neither does anyone else – nor will anyone else.

Spinning new hypotheses for puzzling phenomena is something we do as infants – see Alison Gopnik’s TED talk. But the criterion it must satisfy for me, is — so what? Does the hypothesis, however farfetched, carry weight – does it make a difference, even if very, very small – if so, give it some house room – if not, don’t.

We have a very narrow input channel to our consciousness – some 6 or so items at any one time – it can easily be overloaded, or side-tracked. So we must be judicious at all times. Or, my favourite – responsible. I.e. we need to respond as realistically as we can – never 100% – that’s for the birds – but as near as we can make it.

The real cost or penalty comes from turning the most elusive entity in the entire cosmos, CONSCIOUSNESS, into a thing, a boring thing a that – say a bunch of neurones. Oh dear, what a come down. We reify at a rate of knots – that’s how we make any progress at all – but reifying thought-making itself, costs us dearly.

The exciting, indeed the delightful thing about human beings is their ability to think up something new, something sui generis, something that wouldn't have been there without them – that’s living – so to reduce this to some sort of clockwork, or ‘programme’, or AI, is to settle for less. Not something I favour, if I can avoid it.

Mysteries will always be with us – the secret, as always, is to winnow the wheat from the chaff.

Rock on

Bob