Archetypes: Toward a Jungian Anthropology of Consciousness

Abstract

It is very curious that C.G. Jung has had so little influence upon the anthropology of consciousness. In this paper, the reasons for this oversight are given. The archetypal psychology of Jung is summarized and shown to be more complex and useful than extreme constructivist accounts would acknowledge. Jung's thinking about consciousness fits very well with a modern neuroscience view of the psyche and acts as a corrective to relativist notions of consciousness and its relation to the self.

Staging the Shadow: Writing, Academic Subjectivities, and Hidden Selves

“…Our fantasy lives are rich sources of psychic energy derived from our connection to a collective unconscious replete with symbolic archetypes -universal archaic patterns which manifest in behaviours -that often echo human myths, poetry and the world of fantasy and dreams. In this sense, our thoughts and desires are not always our own but they are mediated by our unconscious and the world in which we live (McWhinnie, 1985;Laughlin & Tiberia, 2012).…”

Dreaming and Reality: A Neuroanthropological Account

“…This Western bias in part explains: (1) why Freudian dream analysis has been so attractive to so many 20th century ethnographers, because one need not pay serious attention to the manifest content of dreams, or to the pragmatic, utilitarian repercussion of dreams, and (2) why a Jungian approach has generally been eschewed, for it requires some phenomenological sophistication on the part of the fieldworker to understand Jungian methods (see Laughlin, 2011;Laughlin & Tiberia, 2012).…”

“…Given freedom from external contingencies, the neurognostic structures of the brain are freed up to generate intuitions and images that represent the dynamic relations deep in the psyche of the dreamer (Laughlin & Tiberia, 2012). It is entirely possible that, because of cellular interactions with the quantum universe, archetypal dream imagery may be produced by events outside the brain of the dreamer, as in co-dreaming, prescient dreaming, and so forth (Laughlin & Throop, 2001).…”

A Brief Comparison of the Unconscious as Seen by Jung and Lévi-Strauss

“…From this viewpoint, it is more than likely that there are common themes between psychoanalytic and anthropological thought. Moreover, the efficient results of Jungian psychotherapeutic praxis (Laughlin and Tiberia ) might be taken as indirect proof of the validity of the anthropological ideas that contributed to creating the Jungian theoretical framework, including certain Lévi‐Straussian ideas that will be briefly recalled herein. More than any other perspective, Jungian thought has played a fundamental role in explaining the possible origins of consciousness (Laughlin and Tiberia ).…”

“…Moreover, the efficient results of Jungian psychotherapeutic praxis (Laughlin and Tiberia ) might be taken as indirect proof of the validity of the anthropological ideas that contributed to creating the Jungian theoretical framework, including certain Lévi‐Straussian ideas that will be briefly recalled herein. More than any other perspective, Jungian thought has played a fundamental role in explaining the possible origins of consciousness (Laughlin and Tiberia ). In this article, we would like to revisit some aspects of the known critical comparison between Jungian and Lévi‐Straussian thought while also trying to enlarge this comparative debate using very elementary concepts of classical logic.…”