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ABSTRACT
Jung’s notion of the archetype remains an equivocal concept, so much so that Jungians and post-Jungians have failed to agree on its essential nature. In this essay, I wish to argue that an archetype may be understood as an unconscious schema that is self-constitutive and emerges into consciousness from its own a priori ground, hence an autonomous self-determinative act derived from archaic ontology. After offering an analysis of the archetype debate, I set out to philosophically investigate the essence of an archetype by examining its origins and dialectical reflections as a process system arising from its own autochthonous parameters. I offer a descriptive explication of the inner constitution and birth of an archetype based on internal rupture and the desire to project its universality, form, and patternings into psychic reality as self-instantiating replicators. Archetypal content is the appearance of essence as the products of self-manifestation, for an archetype must appear in order to be made actual. Here we must seriously question that, in the beginning, if an archetype is self-constituted and self-generative, the notion and validity of a collective unconscious becomes rather dubious, if not superfluous. I conclude by sketching out an archetypal theory of alterity based on dialectical logic.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jon Mills, PsyD, PhD, ABPP is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto and runs a mental health corporation in Ontario, Canada. Recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship, he is the author and/or editor of twenty books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies including Inventing God (Routledge, 2017); Underworlds (Routledge, 2014); Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2012); Origins: On the Genesis of Psychic Reality (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010); Treating Attachment Pathology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis (State University of New York Press, 2002); and The Ontology of Prejudice (Rodopi, 1997).
Notes
1. For Hegel (Citation1807, Citation1817/1827/1830a), ‘appearance is essence’ (PS § 147); ‘essence must appear’ (EL § 131), for nothing can exist unless it is actual, hence it must manifest. Elsewhere I have shown how Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit anticipates psychoanalysis (Mills, Citation2002b) and that the human psyche is derived from an unconscious abyss, whereby unconsciousness appears as consciousness, its modified and evolved form.
2. In discussing the unus mundus, Jung alludes to an archetype as a ‘transcendental entity’ (CitationCW, 14, p. 536), what he earlier conceived of as ‘psychic entities’ (CitationCW, 8, p. Citation231).
3. Throughout his CitationCollected Works, Jung refers to archetypes acting as autonomous agents within the mind (see Mills, Citation2013a for a review). In fact, he states that ‘they are experienced as spontaneous agencies’ where their very ‘nature’ is derived from ‘spirit’ (CitationCW, 8, p. Citation216).
4. Although I have read very little of Giegerich’s works, what appears at face value is his annexation of Hegel’s Logic into his discourse on soul. In The Soul’s Logical Life (Citation2001), he gives us a clue. In discussing the soul’s ‘complex dialectical logic,’ he refers to Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic, which might serve as a model for the kind of abstract thought required to do justice to the complexities of the plight of the modern soul. Psychology needs the ‘labor of the Concept’’ (p. 26). Compare to Hegel (Citation1812): ‘The beginning is logical in that it is to be made the element of thought that is free and for itself, in pure knowing. It is mediated because pure knowing is the ultimate, absolute truth of consciousness’ (p. 68, italics in original), hence the ‘labor’ of Begriff. As Hegel would say, logic is the ‘absolute ground’ (p. 67). Here Giegerich appears to take Hegel's Logic as the starting point of any discussion—from metaphysics to psychology, and then applies the logic of the dialectic to the notion of soul or what we would call the modern day subject or the living personality of each individual’s psychological makeup. He appears to take the extreme stance of absolute interiority as inner infinity (as logical workings) that he privileges over all other aspects of mind—hence thought is preferred over image, affect, imagination, instinct, or action. This amounts to an extreme form of idealism that does not create a mediatory split between inner and outer, only that there is no outside. Where does the dialectic go from here? I assume a return to absolute interiorizing. This seems very solipsistic, if not untenable, and is not particularly faithful to Hegel’s overall system, because this stance of radical interiority only highlights spirit in particular moments. One must question his notion of the absolute autonomy of the psyche, which he equates with absolute negative interiority, a rather omnipotent proposition at that. Here he seemingly takes Hegel's Logic as the coming into being of pure self-consciousness through dialectical relata and then applies it narrowly to the internal configurations of the psyche. In Hegel's (Citation1817/1827/1830c) system, psychology is the sublation (Aufhebung) of the soul (Seele), which he articulates in his section on Theoretical Spirit in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The feeling soul is a general, affective unconscious condition of the psyche that dialectically unfolds and raises itself to the standpoint of cognition and psychological dynamism. But Logic conditions all of this, like the biblical Genesis. Geist is pure thought (kind of like God) that disperses its essence into the materiality of nature (creation) (see Citation1817/1827/1830b); and then the soul (outlined in the Anthropology section of the Encyclopaedia) is the germination of the human spirit that developmentally makes its way dialectically from its material embodiment (as an incipient mind—here more like an infant) to the ego of consciousness as subjectivity (consciousness); and then proceeds in the Phenomenology (Citation1807, Citation1830) from subjective mind (the inner workings of each conscious being) to objective mind (society and worldhood), only to come full circle to culminate in Absolute unity in full self-consciousness as world spirit realized through the Idea or Concept of the process of its own becoming as pure knowing—hence pure thought thinking about itself and all its operations. And yet this is the return to itself as the culmination and fulfillment of its Logical nature as pure thought thinking itself into being and fulfilling its own development as a spiritual-mental force grounded in a rational process. Perhaps Absolute Spirit is something similar to the concept of the anima mundi within the unus mundus, but more impersonal.
5. In Hegel’s (Citation1812) Wissenschaft der Logik, he is very clear: ‘Essence determines itself as ground’ (p. 444, italics in original).
6. Cf. Hegel (Citation1812): ‘Ground is first, absolute ground, in which essence is, in the first instance, a substrate for the ground relation; but it further determines itself as form and matter and gives itself a content’ (p. 445, italics in original).
7. In Hegel’s (Citation1812) Wesenslogik, he states, ‘The truth of being is essence’ (p. 389, italics in original).
8. Cf. Hegel (Citation1812): ‘Appearance is that which the thing is in itself, or its truth’ (p. 479).
9. We may perhaps, not inappropriately, follow a similar formula as the discipline of physics that claims to have discovered the Higgs field through inference and indirect evidence.