"A Critique of Jung’s 'ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis' postulate on various grounds" .
(under development)
Important terms: 'undifferentiated consciousness' viz discriminatory consciousness'; ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis; Racism, Nazi, Anti Semitism, Depth psychology
Dangerous Science: or The dangers of Pseudo science.
To begin with, we first have to see how these words ‘primitive and ‘civilized’ happen to derive their meaning through a process of identity and difference and in doing so we need to trace their ontological evolutionary history, and when we do so, we discover in its spiritual development a ever growing blindness in regards to the original nature of this difference which in its social and cultural deployment nevertheless remained unconscious to it proponents (namely Jung), and this in my view has far-reaching consequences for the whole history and the historical development of Depth psychology
This unconscious history can today be traced back to the Greeks via Romans who had developed and mastered a dubious technique of mapping the world of ‘the other’ where their fears got personified as and with ‘the other’. The ‘Other’ is a rational projection which operates by systematically distorting the other and thus privileging oneself. This self privileging once grounded automatically leads to the threshold what today is known as the rhetoric’s of ‘Erasure’, a colonizing process that operates by systematic mapping the other as inferior, ignorant, inefficient, lazy, undeveloped and superstitious and thus once mapped this ontological difference and derived moral superiority gave them (the Greeks and Romans) the inevitable right to intervene into the lives of others and assimilate or eliminate the other in the interest of the betterment of the other.
So its clear from the outset that these raciest theories were not based on disinterested scientific facts or true physiological study but rather its empirical foundations was predicated on a dubious aesthetics of intrinsically superior and inferior consciousness which were intrinsically and hegemonycaly culture bound in its outlook.
It ignores ones own Historical Environment:
If I was an individual thrown/born in the Tundra, its people and their ways, the environment will dictate a lot on how I develop and use that mature intelligence (Self as embodied consciousness), In this sense individual Intelligence and social skills are always environment specific and rooted in the surroundings it finds itself engaged with.
For Jung and other, the environment doesn’t play any role, or atleast I don’t see in their work why a particular people develop particular skills and mythology. Rather what we see is how a euro-centric culture develops a method to map, cluster and reduce all situation dependent specific 'Self' or intelligence to its own given markers.
This is a major flaw, compounded by the fact that they ( Jung and others who promised a psychological cure) themselves had no way to confront their own bias, prejudices and thus failed miserably to look meditatively into how ones own (undeveloped unconscious personalities comes to influence and shape ones own scientific work.
(please mail me for more details and to discuss the issue)
The Problem of Universals:
(please mail me for more details and to discuss the issue)
The Dangerous Aestheticisms:
"the Self as something given in itself independent of its historical - Givenness"
"Moral compliancy of celebrated authors and even those who had some influence failed to speak up due to the implicit belief that they were serving Science to save psychoanalysis and preserve it from complete Nazification"
(please mail me for more details and to discuss the issue)
From the perspective of Evolutionary Neuroscience:
(please mail me for more details and to discuss the issue)
This bring us to the other aspect:
How do they arrive at their basic premises (difference where civilized presences itself over and above primitive)
Jung and others used words like animism...paganism etcetera to represents a undeveloped or 'undifferentiated consciousness'. In their zeal or blindness they bypassed a major question that is that they completely failed to explain how this ‘difference’ can be equated with mans ‘psychological’ development where an intrinsic biological difference be maintained between 'undifferentiated consciousness' from 'discriminatory consciousness'
But their total failure to show how consciousness in a primitive societies lacked a developed personality, was compounded by the fact that they had no credible ways to measure maturity (without falling back to the dubious raciest vocabulary )
This posed a serious problem, like how do we measure personality and intelligence independent of the environment and habitat as well as the survival skills and strategies (knowledge base as coping practices) perfected thereof by the natives that descried the best possible development viz and viz the challenges thrown by their situatedness.
How to convincingly prove that in these societies an individual lacked a mature character or a developed personality; that is the individual lacked a true 'discriminatory consciousness' of the white race where difference could be traced back biologically to embryonic levels of development. To this end Jung developed the Psychology of 'Types'
There are other fundamental problems like how do we escape from the ideological traps, that is, how is one to scientifically deduce the ‘Ideal’ (cultured and developed) from where others can be either declared as undeveloped, primitive, etc.
If the raciest theories are to be given empirical coloring then they had to first prove that 'the primitive' do really equate empirically with 'undifferentiated consciousness' viz and viz 'discriminatory consciousness' (independent of culture and society) thus empirically grounding the fact that they truly are incapable of mature and intelligent choices.
but; If I was in the Tundra, the environment will dictate a lot on how I develop and use that mature intelligence and how intelligence shows up as coping practices grounded in the challenges that my environment throws up to me.
This flaw in Jung and others is compounded by their total blindness or failure that exposes them to the same undifferentiated consciousness (through which they posit their difference), This then meant (in a paradoxical way) that, they too lacked the intelligence and maturity to confront their own bias, prejudices and look meditatively into how their own undeveloped personality, culture, tradition independent of the habitat, that is times and environment (urban or rural) and how these comes to influence and shape ones self and work. ‘
These unconscious 'undifferentiated consciousness' surprisingly has remained the true backdrop, womb upon which Jung and Freud built their edifice.
Detailed Working Notes:
*Jung and Freud before him took the child development image and from there reduced things to either (pre linguistic.- where the ego has yet to develop and then applies this (along with various cultural biases that were in circulation in his time)...he in doing so totally distorts them (in the dialectical dichotomy of the primitive and the civilized)...and one can see today how and why of it)
*when Jungians pose that "the emergence of ego-consciousness in individual development parallels the emergence of ego-conscious in the history of the human species as a whole (‘ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis’). In mythologies of the world he identified a stage of historical development he called ‘The Separation of the World Parents’. In this stage the original ‘uroboric’ unity of the world gives way to a stage of discriminatory consciousness. The world once experienced as a seamless whole comes to take on distinct features through the imposition of dialectical oppositions. A whole series of oppositions, male/female, heaven/earth, good/evil etc. stem from a primary opposition of the emerging ego separating from the Mother Unconscious."
I only see how Hegel keeps getting recycled everywhere
* "Now if we were to ask what would happen if there were no schools, and children were left entirely to themselves, we should have to answer that they would remain largely unconscious. What kind of a state would this be? It would be a primitive state, and when such children came of age they would, despite their native intelligence, still remain primitive- savages, in fact, rather like a tribe of intelligent Negroes or Bushmen. They would not necessarily be stupid, but merely intelligent by instinct. They would be ignorant, and therefore unconscious of themselves and the world. Beginning life on a much lower cultural level, they would differentiate themselves only slightly from the primitive races. This possibility of regression to the primitive stage is explained by the fundamental biogenetic law which holds good not only for the development of the body, but also in all probability for that of the psyche.
According to this law the evolution of the species repeats itself in the embryonic development of the individual. Thus, to a certain degree, man in his embryonic life passes through the anatomical forms of primeval times. If the same law holds for the mental development of mankind, it follows that the child develops out of an originally unconscious, animal condition into consciousness, primitive at first, and then slowly becoming more civilized." The Development of Personality_ CW 17, para 104-5, Princeton University Press:
What Jung is saying above is that, you leave 2 Jews and 2 Aryans on a deserted island and, the Jews will still grow up to be Jews and Aryans as Aryans.
Generally Human cell division is a building block of a flatworm as much as it is a building block of a human pre-frontal cortex, in the same way Jung is telling that the Jews will be Jews and Aryans will be Aryans and a bushman will become bushman because their personality development and growth , just like the cell growth are saturated from the outset by phylogenesis (genetically transmitted unconscious) or (archetype)
if we breakdown the last para, its Jung’s schizophrenia starts showing through.
*It could be said fairly enough that the word 'Race', in itself posit no hidden measure and that only when the ’WE’ is subsumed under the word ’Superior’, that problems arise, and we its quite clear from their published works that Jung as well as Haeckel did precisely just that.
*Jung's crime multiplies because he was installed by the Nazi party, and till 1944 (though he did not write any thing major except on astrology and Ufo after 1938 ) he till 1944 openly flouted his theories as being scientific and empirical; (and till his death bed never ever apologized, or regretted, or questioned his theories and the ramifications they entail viz a viz holocaust and this could be due to a lack of reality consciousness and further complicated by extreme pampering and severe sycophancy triggering exasperating self idolatry bordering of cultic Nymphophilia) (and what more did Hitler’s fanatics want but a scientific proof of his/their delirious theories) his crime become unpardonable esp in the light that he provided scientific credence to their (Nazi) madness and so played the most vital part in their anti-Semitism and the resultant holocaust.
* Jung saw the madness of Germany in 1933 as the unleashing of a specifically German archetype to which in 1936 he gave the name Wotan. ( a glorious religious symbolism)
“You see, it is as if the self were trying to manifest In space and time, but since it consists of so many elements that have neither space nor time qualities, it cannot bring them altogether into space and time.
And those efforts of the self to manifest in the empirical world result in man: he is the result of the attempt. So much of the self remains outside, it doesn’t enter this three dimensional empirical world (Zarathustra, 240). - Jung’s seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
What does it mean then for the ego to make conscious the archetypal flooding that has occurred in time and space? Jung presents two tasks for the ego: 1) it must recognize that it is up against an archetype, an elemental situation, and 2) it must hold its own, that is, fight for its own existence in the flood of decadence and the decay of Kulter and Zivilization:"You have to swim, to use every means possible to defend your own against the flood, you must wrestle with those archtypes, and only when you are really up against it to the last breath, only then, the revelation may take place" (Zarathustra, 239). The importance of the struggle is that in functional terms the archetype"contains the picture of the conflict, the danger, the risk, and also the solution of it" (Zarathustra, 239). Solutions do not come easily. It requires immense struggle with the archetypal situation.
Jung’s seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra took place on June 3, 1936, a couple of months or so after the publication of his "Wotan" essay which came out in March of 1936
The revelation Jung mentioned above is what he calls a reconciling symbol "which unites the vital need of man with the archetypal conditions" (Zarathustra, 239. These solutions, however, occur only when resistance to the archetype has utterly spent itself, when all the old solutions have been tried and found wanting:"when the conditon of man is such that we have no more force to resist or oppose with our ideals” “ the old ideals are the worst enemies of the new” “ and if our resistance is utterly gone then the manifestation of the new symbol can take place" (the new Symbol was the transvaluation of all values as hoped by the Nazi into a "New World Order" )
In his essay "Mind and Earth" originally written as part of a larger piece in 1927 and then rewritten as a separate shorter essay in 1931 (Collected Works, 10, 29), Jung affirmed the Phylogenetic Law set forth by Ernst Haekel that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that "the development of an individual of the species recapitulates the evolution of the species as a whole" (Kerr, 237). But how does Jung interpret the Phylogenetic Law in relation to archetypes?
In "Mind and Earth" Jung states in purely physical racial terms that the archetypes form the "chthonic portion of the psyche" and "they are inherited with the brain structure" (Collected Works, v.10, 31).He goes on to use the analogy of a building to describe the psyche:upper floor built in the nineteenth century, ground floor in the sixteenth century "reconstructed from a tower built in the eleventh century. In the cellar we come upon Roman foundations, and under the cellar a choked-up cave with Neolithic tools in the upper level and remnants of fauna from the same period in the lower layers" (Collected Works, v. 10, 31). Consciousness “ where we live “is the upper floor which is continually influenced by "the living and active foundations" (Collected Works, 32), that is, by the unconscious archetypes.
The active powers to be is further prophesied by mixing racial politics and psychology
"The greatest achievement in the transplantation of a race in modern times was the colonization of the North American continent by a predominantly Germanic population" and "As the climactic conditions vary very greatly, we would expect all sorts of variations of the original racial type [italics mine]" (Colloected Works, v. 10, 45).
Jung published "The State of Psychotherapy Today" in 1934. We know that Jung had joined the General Society for Psychotherapy in 1928 and was elected vice-president in 1930 (Emil Kretschmer was president). When the Nazis came to power, Kretschmer refused to align (Gleichschaltung) the society and its journal ZentralblattfuerPsychotherapie with Nazi beliefs, so he resigned. Jung took over as president of the society on June 21, 1933. Part of the president’s position included the editing of the journal.
So we see in the 1934 essay entitled "The State of Psychotherapy Today and the question of racially conditioned archetypes" (By a broad reduction of religious features to global archetypes and who shall or has the right to inherit the future)
"The Jews have this peculiarity in common with women; being physically weaker, they have to aim at the chinks in the armor of their adversary, and thanks to this technique which has been forced on them through the centuries, the Jews themselves are best protected where others are most vulnerable. ... in this respect much less vulnerable than 'we'are (Collected Works, v.10, 165).
Who is the "we" here to whom Jung is referring? Apparently, Jung is including himself among the "we" of Germanic peoples.
Jung continues: "Moreover, we have been entrusted by fate with the task of creating a civilization"(Collected Works, v.10, 165). Here Jung is identifying himself with those (including the Nazis) who saw the goal of the revolution in the creation of a "new man" and a "new society." More to the point, however, Jung says that " The "Aryan" unconscious, on the other hand, contains explosive forces and seeds of the future yet to be born, and these may not be devalued as nursery romanticism without psychic danger (Collected Works, v.10, 165)
Jung here is beginning a comparison of the unconsciousness of races
If This is still not racism then what is it?: especially when differences in the unconsciousness of races are valued as superior over another and then published for an audience that includes Nazi Germany, then it seems to me it is racism.
It begins to get ugly as Jung goes on:"The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host for their development" (Collected Works, v. 10, 165-166). One of the mainstays of Nazi ideology was the superiority of the Aryan race over inferior ones like the Jewish race. This inferiority was couched in parasitic terms; that is, the Jewish race was incapable of creativity and thus had to exist as a parasite off of other races and cultures.
"The ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish" (Collected Works, v.10, 166), but I think the point has been made. These strange sounding racist comments come dangerously close to Nazi propaganda.
as noted above : "Jung had joined the General Society for Psychotherapy in 1928 and was elected vice-president in 1930 (Emil Kretschmer was president). When the Nazis came to power, Kretschmer refused to align (Gleichschaltung) the society and its journal ZentralblattfuerPsychotherapie with Nazi beliefs, so he resigned. Jung was invited by the Nazi to take over the General Society for Psychotherapy as president and on June 21, 1933 he took over its reins, Part of the president’s position included the editing of the journal."
In the following years, Jung as we have seen initiates the concept of “'ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis'” and develops it as his main tour de force in 'Symbols of Transformation' and continuously updates it to include this as the main driving force behind the veil of “The Miller Fantasies” thus providing scientific credence and proof to their (Nazi) delirious ideology esp. at a time and hour, which only goes on to show a serious lack of character.
So much for his theory of Individuality and Individuation.
By ingesting “'ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis'” within the otherwise Jungs most original contribution (his initial work on “The Miller Fantasies”) Jung misses the most interesting aspect, that of the Tantra, that is, the 'Self' as the network of confabulations"
Ps: Tantra means "to weave" the web of 'Maya'
