Jung and the Shadows of Essentialism

Jung and the Shadows of Essentialism

Following the statement I made previously – that of working through concerns I’d been chewing on a while – I am reminded of something that struck me when I was reading a primer on Jung and his psychoanalytic program (Jung: A Very Short Introduction, by Anthony Stevens). This will, I suspect, sync up with larger issues I’d been intending to articulate for a while – perhaps to be covered in a subsequent post.

They’ve got the whole bloomin set at Heffers…

It was, true to its name, just a short work, and what with the limitations on depth I wouldn’t take it to speak accurately for Jung or his positions in a nuanced manner. So, this isn’t so much an issue with him or his stance, but rather that of the author’s interpretation (unless of course it is an accurate portrayal, which would be…unfortunate). I’d be happy to learn that I’ve got the wrong end of the stick on this one, and for this to become a springboard for further dialogue. I don’t have the book itself in front of me, so I’m afraid I’m working off notes I took at the time of reading and my memory – hopefully this doesn’t result in too uncharitable a presentation of the position.

So, your man Anthony there has spent a good portion of the work, up to this point, hedging his bets on Jung’s more radical propositions, arguing the weaker case for the archetype thesis (that which states that there is a collective unconscious in all of us, which is populated by figures of distinct characteristics. The way that we come to terms with these figures, the way that they express themselves through us, so the argument goes, bears heavily on our own psychological health and well-being throughout life) saying that this proposition is best understood not in the fully fleshed–out sense of actual, volitional individuals acting under their power in a mystical space beyond that of the physical (how would we gain access to this? Where is the proof of it? Is there any way to verify it as one thing and not another? …No?) but rather as something similar to the concept of ethology found in biology.

Ethology, a relatively new sub-discipline, examines the behaviour traits of animals in their natural environment, trying to gain insight into what motivates certain actions on a repetitive level. Some of these things can be explained by knowledge passed down by parents, or the result of external stimulus from the environment around them, but there are other behaviours that seem to be innate, which we do see quite a bit of. Where do they come from? The answer, seemingly, is in the composition of the animal – its genetics, its evolved nature fitting into the environment. Our author argues that archetypes, and the collective unconscious, should be understood along the same lines. That the archetypes themselves are nudges towards certain traits, that the collective unconscious is best understood as the architecture of our minds as they have been built up over evolutionary time. It’s not a terrible way of rendering an abstract description of a psychology in material terms, harmonising the theory with what we are beginning to learn about the biology, while cutting out a lot of the woo. So far so good.

But then, we come to a brief comment on sexuality:

“The specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited tabula rasa theory of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of anthropological and scientific evidence.”
You what, mate?

C. G. Jung, well-known TERF

I’m no big fan of orthodoxies, be they academic or otherwise, but this is just such nonsense.

The hand wave of ‘mass of anthropological and scientific evidence,’ without actually mentioning where one might look for any of this, is risible. Especially since said “mass” points in entirely the other direction! What ought we to make, then, of the two spirit descriptor amongst North American Natives, or the Hijra of India and Southeast Asia? What do we make of the wealth of anthropological and sociological evidence demonstrating the link between patriarchal societies and the conception of a binary gender? Not only is gender a social construct, but even biological sex is being shown to be much more fuzzy than a simple male/female divide with the occasional, quickly surgically-reassigned hermaphrodite thrown in for jollies. Also, in what way does any of this require “a tabula rasa theory of human development”? Who even does that? If this is being invoked in the Lockean sense, this is a gross misapplication – that was only ever meant as an explanation of epistemic acquisition, not personality or identity, and even then it was defined by pre-existing, innate rules. Phah!

Biological Sex – it’s kinda complicated, mmkay?

I can appreciate the desire for a definitive, bold stance, one that carves out a position in a radical way and acts to draw attention (infamy?) to the subject, but this seems like such a weird hill to choose to die on. More strange is the about face, initially arguing for a rapprochement between theory and evidence, pruning away the eccentricities, gently, gently, and then to cite said theory in such a bold, declarative manner – for such a completely specious position. It struck me as deleterious to the initial effort, and, with the suddenness of its appearance, rather out of sync with the general tenor of the work itself. I can see that this move might be necessary to support some of the later arguments regarding the duality of the human self, but pinning them on outmoded conceptions of gender, and doing so in such an impudent manner, only serves to expose the poverty of the theory itself.

I’ll not give up on Jung as yet – I’ve a copy of the Red Book sitting on the shelf that I’ve been meaning to get through – but this did set off some alarms for me. With any luck, this is merely the prejudice of Stevens showing through, and not something inherent in Jung’s architectonic.