I am ideologically, and by my earlier training, an evolutionary biologist, and I try to look at everything through that lens. I’ve never focused that lens on the human psyche though, so I’m intrigued by Jung’s thoughts on this. You wrote that the Work is a shift away from the Ego world back to the instinctual world (I think!). The immediate question I have is why this schism occurred in the first place. Why did the Ego split off? I’m not a neo-Darwinist by any means (a la Dawkins), but I do wonder about the why of this.
Hi Keri,
A good question . . . and a good mystery. Jung and many others have speculated about the development of ego-consciousness. More recently, the evolutionary psychologists and biologists and the neuroscientists have thrown their hats in the ring. Since there are so many hats in there, I don't feel so bad about throwing mine in, too . . . even though I lack the scholarly expertise to add anything of much value.
I would say the first step, the first thing to establish is that the ego did indeed develop "out of the unconscious". We can surmise that this is true since 1) the human ego/consciousness (although not as unique as we have liked to think, as you point out) is still a pretty odd bird here on planet Earth . . . and there are distinct cognitive difference between humans and their closest biological ancestor, chimpanzees, and 2) if the human ego is a recent development in our evolution (perhaps as recent as 50,000 years ago, if it corresponds highly with brain development), "we" obviously didn't have it (in its current, recognizable state) before then . . . leaving hundreds of thousands (or is it millions, I have a poor memory for numbers?) of years of evolution since we split off from chimps.
#1 above rests on the assumption that human civilization, creativity, and language are the main measures of "ego-development". In other words, I would at least posit that the essence of the human ego is to be found more in the products of human sociality than in "raw intelligence", per se (although our capabilities there also exceed those of chimps). So, ego is a kind of consciousness directed at sociality and (I believe) one composed of language (where language is not meant to be confined to words alone, but can also include symbols, images, narratives, etc.).
A consciousness composed of language (insomuch as this is more than a poetic metaphor and has some validity even in scientific thought) poses a problem biologically speaking. We can map the neocortex and catalog all of the developments during the evolutionary span between humans and chimps . . . but although this may give us what seem to be a number of linguistic brain modules, these are not themselves
composed of language. When we look back at fossil records and artifacts of proto-humans, we find that they were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years that had very basic tool-making capacity (simple stone ax heads, mostly, I believe). But for those hundreds of thousands of years, the same stone ax heads were made without any deviation or improvement. That doesn't sound like the human species of today. I'd like to think that even someone as mechanically inept as me could manage to improve on tool design at least a bit in a couple hundred thousand years.
But around 50,000 years ago the archaeological record starts to show cave paintings, representations, and developments in tool design. I believe the current evolutionary thinking is that this was
homo sapiens . . . and that these ancestors were biologically identical to modern humans (i.e., that we have not evolved biologically since then). [Please correct me if I am bungling this; I'm working from memory]. So, if the ego is a biological adaptation, perhaps it "began" around 50,000 years ago. How it must have gradually emerged from the instinctual "unconscious" is still a matter of debate (and we may never know).
But what is (I think) more curious about ego-development is that the "modern ego" seems to have many different characteristics than this "ancient ego" . . . and these differences can't be explained by evolution alone. My guess is that the brain modules that evolved to make the ego possible were enormously plastic. In our modern societies, they are capable of producing an ego like the ones we are familiar with today. But if we had been born 50,000 years ago with exactly the same genetic make-up we have now, we would have adapted perfectly well to the tribal human culture of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
I have recently been thinking of this post-biological ego-development as a kind of secondary evolution, an evolution that doesn't have the same constraints as material evolution, because it is not based in the "materia" of genetic mutations, but in the abstract materia of information (Dawkins might say "memes", but there are some flaws in that construct, I think). In other words, what human beings have that other species don't seem to have is access to this "hyper-drive", abstract, "evolutionary" process. By "evolutionary" here, I primarily mean "adaptive". We are super-adapters. Whereas other life forms must rely on biological, genetic mutations for the majority of their environmental adaptations, humans can rely on their enormous cognitive plasticity to find ways to adapt to changes in environment that might even destroy many other species (this plasticity also allows us to be extremely mobile).
I think that if we stick with scientific data, we are ultimately faced with
the great mystery of human egoism, i.e., that it cannot be entirely "biological", because it seems to be able to adapt significantly faster than biological evolution can permit. The highly plastic cooperative of brain modules that allows for the ego is thus capable of creating an "artificial intelligence" . . . where "artificial" means, merely, not entirely biological or material (even if it is rooted in materiality). This artificial intelligence can then adapt to an immense array of social situations by "act of cognition" alone . . . or by directed learning, rather than through random mutation.
So, with that pie in the oven baking away, let's jump to psychology. Let's look at the ego phenomenologically and dissect it a bit. I haven't read all of the essential writings coming out of contemporary cognitive studies, but I know (via Daniel Dennett's writing) that there is this notion of the ego-consciousness as a "Multiple Drafts" model. Now, I am a layman . . . but I'm also a writer, so I feel as capable of understanding the ego as "multiple drafts" as any scientist. I know this from the craft, from the creation of fictions. What Dennet and a number of others have settled on (and I wholeheartedly agree) is a notion of consciousness as a continuous narrative . . . and a narrative made up of numerous other sub-narratives ("drafts") hierarchically pieced together.
These narratives are all caught up in a system of information processing where various streams of information ("streams of consciousness" as we writerly types have called them for some time now) are constantly being related to other streams. These relational processings are (in my opinion, but I doubt this is a unique idea) valuated (or ranked, quantified, weighed) largely on the basis of their usefulness. Now the tricky question, the one that really needs to be asked here is: based on their usefulness
to what?
This is where the phenomenology of consciousness gets really slippery. I think that cognitive valuation of information is assessed based on the usefulness
to the ego. And that's fascinating, because the ego (as hypothesized earlier) is
not material! But if we dissect this "sense of selfhood", we can pretty easily see that it is composed of narrative stuff. For instance, when I think, "Whom am I?" I think about what I believe in, what I like, what I value, who I relate to, where I belong (and don't belong). I "am" the way I respond to the world (both outer and inner). I am not a thing, per se, but a complex of intricately inter-related responses that all rotate around an imaginary axis, a center of gravity (Dennett: "center of narrative gravity"). As this complex encounters more and more information, it acquires a certain quality of "mass". More information is related to other information. This cognitive relationality becomes enormously intricate. And the more of this narrative mass we have, the more we are able to relate things to it . . . and perhaps the more inclined we are to value things that most readily relate to our narrative mass. I.e., eventually, our mass becomes self-perpetuating . . . favoring self-similar information and ignoring or devaluing self-
dissimilar information.
But before we get too wrapped up in the vortex of our phenomenological consciousness as "center of narrative gravity", we need to step back and ask "why?" Why would evolution produce such an adaptation? What we have here is a cognitive structure so plastic (or adaptive) that it can adapt to all kinds of environmental situations with unprecedented rapidity. In the "center of narrative gravity" model, our consciousness (as non-material) takes on a quality of arbitrariness unlike any other animal's. We can "invent" ourselves. Even as our environments (our experiences) help construct us, we can interpret and mold them. We can do this by reshaping the clay of our selfhood. We can't entirely control what happens to us (in many circumstances), but we can change the self that reacts to these things, thus granting them different meanings and values.
It seems logical to hypothesize that we have evolved this arbitrary, self-making intelligence (or the capacity for it) because it aided our survival (in numerous ways . . . both as individuals and as a species). But it also seems likely that the measure of "mass" of this narrative ego is a product of the "mass" of the culture the individual is part of. As this cultural mass grows (probably as various tribes integrate and tribal population and diversity increase), the individual egos have to learn more relationality, adapt to more otherness, more and more information.
In other words, we needed to be able to grow an "ego like a goldfish" that can just keep growing and growing, adapting to increasingly complex societies (fish bowls, aquariums, ponds, lakes . . .) and their languages and rules of interaction. I think it would be a mistake to assume that human beings "became conscious" 50,000 years ago . . . or that our consciousness is a universal essential to our survival. It is all too easy to look around and recognize, even in our modern tribes, how little true consciousness there is. By "consciousness" here, I mean the sense of awareness of our own narrative structure and the arbitrariness of our systems of self-creation and information valuation.
Even in the Jungian community (with its emphasis on individuation), this kind of consciousness is fairly rare (or is to be found only in very limited pockets in most individuals). We generally don't understand that the "selfhood" we are made up of is highly arbitrary, only a fabric of fictions that can usually be traced back to simplistic, defensive strategies (usually rooted in early childhood and adolescence). We are entirely capable of taking a highly complex philosophical system like Jung's and manipulating it into a basic personal defense strategy . . . rather than using it as a tool with which to "become conscious". We like to think we are tremendously "evolved" because we collect such complicated and vast ideas. But the complexity of these ideas is mostly used for strategic purposes. Foremost among these strategic purposes (I think) is self-protection.
I would posit that the impetus (and probably one of the "instincts") behind ego-formation in our species is basic self-preservation. The center of narrative gravity that is the human ego "coheres" as it does (around its axis) in order to fortify the individual against danger and death. This is all the more essential in a species like ours that it radically social and dependent on other individuals to achieve maximum survivability (and equilibrium with the environment). But all organisms must be highly self-protective in order to survive (a protectiveness that is generally only sacrificed for the betterment of the "tribe" or for the perpetuation of one's genes, if we take a page from Richard Dawkins).
If, then, the ego is a "selfishness strategy", it is really no surprise that it is (or appears to be) "in charge" of mediating between the individual and others. I believe that, when we peal apart the human ego, we will find mostly self-protection strategies. Even as we develop "ethical consciousness", we continue to formulate better, more plastic, more adaptive strategies for selfhood . . . better and better ways to exist among the various groups we must relate to. The ego is filled with highly complex fight or flight strategies . . . and these strategies are largely concerned with individual survival. We humans are merely capable of abstracting these strategies many levels beyond the immediate, instinctual response that all animals exhibit. We can propose complicated, imaginary scenarios to ourselves that allow us to avoid dangers or threats to our selfhood.
It is pretty clear to us, additionally, that our egos are primarily concerned with protecting themselves or their narrative gravity (or personal fiction) even more so than they are with protecting the physical organism that houses them. Egos go through all kinds of convolutions that are dramatically destructive to the living strategies for the organism as a whole . . . and just for the sake of protecting their arbitrary narratives. We might think of this strategical breakdown as neurosis or "complex".
It is here, perhaps most of all, where evolution shows its typical, anything-but-divine hand. Egos are amazing "tools" for their plasticity and adaptability . . . but they are like exotic, Italian sports cars: they break down very easily. We have to spend much of our time carefully maintaining them . . . rather than racing around maniacally. Our physical bodies, for instance, are much less temperamental. I suspect that this is the mark of a relatively "new" adaptation, biologically speaking. And the more we ask of our egos, the more likely they are to break. I am thinking of modernism, huge cultures, technology, world wars, industrialization, etc.
But in this phenomenological examination of our egoic fragility, we also discover that our consciousness, our entire consciousness, is not composed of, nor is it entirely dependent on, the arbitrary language-construct we call the ego. I would refer you to my earlier postings on the ego and the Self in this forum for more detail on this (i.e., how do the ego and the Self interact . . . and why). What we find in depth psychology (especially in Jung's psychology, I think) is that we do not only have instincts for egoism and ego-making . . . we also have instincts for ego-regulation. We seem to have a consciousness (or the unconscious, if you prefer) that helps "fix" broken down ego strategies, that tries to reorient the ego in an adaptive manner. Another unconscious, self-regulatory process oriented to equilibrium achievement.
I simply call this conglomerate of unconscious instincts: the Self . . . in the Jungian fashion. But, I am very particular about not mystifying the Self. Sometimes I call it the "instinctual Self" or the "whole organism". To me, the Self is entirely biological . . . and this is where I tend to part ways with most Jungians. In my way of seeing, "spirituality" is a particular genus of egoic narratives that are constructed from the ego's perspectives of our biological instincts. The archetypes are, simply put, instincts. They are not gods. They are not souls or soul fragments. They are not "primordial images". They are not "mind" (assessed materialistically . . . phenomenologically they are very much these things). They are material, natural, logical, ordered instincts . . . and therefore, they have adapted throughout our evolution to the specific environmental needs our species has been faced with. As they bear the stamp of evolution (and therefore, environment), they are quite studiable and comprehendible. After all, they are what we need in order to survive (our environments) . . . and we can see them mostly prefigured in other species (especially in other apes).
The way the ego perceives the Self and its interactions with the Self (narratively, anthropomorphically, projectively, numinously, etc) is, I believe, the foundation of "mysticism". But when we examine many of the common mystical transformation experiences, we see that they cluster around rites of passage . . . mostly ones that involve a change in relationship between oneself and others or between the individual and the tribe. The end of adolescence, courtship/partnership/marriage/mating, a group-advocated role for the individual in the tribe, parenthood, old-age/retirement from certain social duties, illness and death . . . all of these stages call for different individual strategies, different ways of relating to the tribe. Each redefines the individual in relationship to the group. Each is part (an archetypal part) of human sociality . . . and similar stages can be observed in other social animals. We understand in these animals that such stages are instinctually rooted. Our phenomenological experience of the archetypal unconscious indicates that we are every bit as subject to such instincts. We merely experience them as mysteriously compelling narratives, "Callings", visions, personages, spirits, etc.
But how does the chimpanzee experience its instinctual drives? We know primarily that certain behaviors are compelled. It is the same with humans, but we have special access to our own imaginations . . . in which instinctual forces are portrayed as gods or synchronicities or some kind of spiritual phenomena. How else would we experience these instincts? Instincts are like "wills", and we think of will as a human trait, we see it anthropomorphically. If something is "willing" us, exerting influence on us . . . it must have consciousness, intention, intelligence, desire, libido, selfhood. This is how our projective consciousness sees things: in relation to itself.
. . .
The emergence of the ego from the Self/unconscious is a process that almost definitely has a neurological component. Our brains continue to grow and "wire" themselves throughout our childhood. We gradually develop a sense of self with which we confront (and fend off) the world and its rules, orders, and others. Human children, as you know better than me, are extremely vulnerable and incapable of defending themselves or surviving without parental protection (as compared to many [all?] other animals). Between this innate, long-term frailty and the abstract complexity of human society, a child's primary "concern" (an unconscious concern) is self-fortification. Self-fortification is a basic way of adapting to an environment (especially when one has no power whatsoever in that environment). The child is compelled to develop a sense of self that integrates as painlessly as possible into the human world . . . and this requires strategic thinking. How do I obtain the resources (e.g., love, protection, food, gratification of desires, respect, etc.) I want?
Children are innately brilliant strategists. At extremely early ages, they are able to intuitively figure out how to manipulate adults (especially the parents) into providing what they (the children) desire. I know I was a very devious strategist as a small child. My brother (13 years younger than me) was perhaps even better. My two year old son is incredibly willful, already realizing he will be able to outlast most declarations of parental "discipline".
I believe that as we grow up, we simply develop increasingly complex strategies to deal with our increasingly complex group environments (of course, some of us don't; sometimes we stick to "infantile strategies" . . . which the Freudians have a special knack for spotting). But these strategies serve the same general purpose as an infant's strategies: they serve to protect us and give us the best possible access to resources.
Yet the process of ego construction tends to orient the individual to the group, the group that is made up of laws, hierarchies, challenging relationships, numerous closed doors that one wishes were open, etc. This orientation tends to take us away from our instinctual foundations. We no longer think of ourselves as organisms that have flesh (or are one with their flesh . . . even our body obsessions like "body-building" are fraught with a kind of abstraction or detachment). Our sense of self is entirely strategic, made up of stories, abstract rules and formulas, arbitrary superfluities.
We (as egos) have emerged from the unconscious, but we have simultaneously lost of foundations, our source of sustenance and libido, our feeling of connection to things (matter itself, as opposed to laws and rules and abstract notions). We have many myths about this, most famously (in our culture) the biblical story of the Fall from Eden. Of course this particular myth seems to correspond with the moment of realization that we are no longer being provided for by the unconscious (and perhaps the tribe, as well). Yet many people function quite adequately in human society without any consciousness that they have lost something "primal" or "divine".
Most of us don't realize we have "fallen from Eden" until our ego-strategies start to break down, no longer functioning as protections and resource accessors in our societies. To place this stage in an "instinctual time-line", I would guess it corresponds to the end of adolescence. I believe we have acquired/formulated almost all of our ego strategies by the end of adolescence. Most later developments (that aren't restructurings guided by instinct) are merely adaptations of adolescent strategies to "adult" scenarios. At the end of adolescence we are at the peak of our socialization . . . although we are typically unconscious of how we have been formed. Our modern societies allow this state of adolescence to be perpetuated almost indefinitely.
But our instincts have other plans. I think we have an instinct to segue from adolescence (in which we are highly socialized, but in an unconscious, dependent way) to adulthood (a redefinition of one's relationship to the tribe in which one acquires specific social responsibilities). The adolescent individual (even if s/he is 50 years old) is still dependent on the providence of the unconscious, still has a child/parent relationship with the unconscious. This is hardly practical, especially when ego construction has pulled one so far away from one's instinctual foundation. The umbilical cord is stretched to its limit. After it breaks, the ego's attitude of dependency will become increasingly dysfunctional and probably lead to neuroses (and the proverbial "mid-life crisis" is the most common manifestation of this delayed adolescence in our society).
But instinct provides a transition here from parent to partner. The instinct manifests as a powerfully compelling desire to gravitate toward the partner, a "mystical partner" who seems to desire something heroic and individualistic out of us. This partner Calls us. The Calling is a calling away from the parental, providential/dependent relationship to the unconscious and toward an interactive, conscious, personally responsible relationship to the unconscious (to one's instincts . . . but also to others in the material world). Jung called this instinct the anima/animus.
The thing about these archetypal instincts is that they do not just compel us inwardly, but "insist" on being projected outward and onto others. My guess is that this is precisely how all instincts "feel" to all animals. Something willful inside bursts out and compels the animal to act upon the Call. In this case, to find a mate. But whereas other animals follow these instincts and move more or less gracefully from adolescence to mating to having and raising offspring, we humans frequently break down. Our instinctual drives are not always easily integrated into our complex cultures and groups structures. Our mating rituals are still extremely instinctual, but we have a terrible time giving up on old, adolescent or infantile ego strategies.
We might want a partner who loves us "for who we really are". But we may also be used to relating to our "love interests" like a child relates to a parent (as "resource-providers"). We might also fall in love with our instinctual projection, our mystical partner, but never be able to coordinate this with real human others in the world.
Tribal cultures have generally developed rites and rituals that help transition us through these stages, these passages. The tribe acknowledges and sanctifies these passages. But modern society does not have very effective rites of passage. Instead, we have psychotherapy! But it is a radically imperfect system . . . and not one available to everyone. It brings all kinds of problems into the passage that don't exist in tribal, ritual cultures. Transference, for instance. Transference (or we could call it Eros) works more or less harmlessly during the rites of tribal cultures, because the entire tribe is responsive to it, and the formalities of the ritual conduct it, give it a kind of specific shape, a conduit. The ritual allows the transference to be guided, to be turned on and shut off at the proper moments. But in psychotherapies, this transference is often too volatile to be properly conducted by the therapist. It can become destructive or inflating . . . which is why the Freudians try to steel themselves against it at all costs. The Jungians have a more participatory tactic, but I still think they are in over their heads much of the time. Transference is still not adequately understood . . . probably because the notion has been divorced from biology and instinct and abstracted into a very intellectual realm.
In any case, I have already gone on far too long about this. I have written about the transition from parental to partner unconscious elsewhere:
Agism and the Animi in the Jungian Mindset. And I have talked about the animi work on a number of threads. So I will leave off here.
Yours,
Matt
