Depth Psychology and Symbolic Anthropology: Toward a Depth Sociology of Psychocultural Interaction

Phenotypic plasticity and archetype: a response to common objections to the biological theory of archetype and instinct

“…By contrast, I provide evidence for their presence (Goodwyn 2022), by showing how the body and our physiologycrafted by our genetic inheritanceare the ultimate basis for the archetypal elements. The metaphorical connection between danger/the unknown/the unmanifest and darkness, and the metaphorical connection between safety/knowledge/the manifest and light do not emerge in everyone by accident.…”

“…The men pushed him through the hole painfully, but then he emerged, and they danced and carried him to a feast in which he was celebrated. As Roesler notes, this dream contained numerous elements of tribal initiation rituals found around the world (for examples, see Van Gennep 1960;Goodwyn 2016).…”

“…Historically, depth psychologists have been utilizing innate-motivators-that-can-be-overridden and calling them instincts or drives since the days of Freud, up to today. Jung-oriented depth psychologists like Anthony Stevens (2015), John Haule (2010), and myself (Goodwyn 2012) have argued similarly that archetypes are what such human innate impulses/instincts/drives must look like subjectively when symbolized by the human imagination.…”

“…One common objection to the idea that archetypes transmit via biological mechanisms is the structural argument of Claude Lévy-Strauss (1976), elaborated on by Pietikainen (1998) and commented on by Roesler (2022a, p. 79), who remarks that this objection has not really been addressed by Jungians. Though Pietikainen's version of this argument was addressed in the responses to his original article, and I have commented on Lévi-Strauss and Jung elsewhere (Goodwyn 2014(Goodwyn , 2016) I will provide my own counter-argument here. Succinctly, the structural argument states that the similarity found in rituals and stories around the world is merely due to humans facing similar structural problems and therefore inventing similar-looking solutions to those problems.…”

Archetypes: The Contribution of Individual Psychology to Cross-cultural Symbolism

“…CCS is a given-again, at the basic imageassociation level, not necessarily the fully formed symbol level-so there is a need to explain why it occurs, not only as a general question, but also because it relates to clinical technique. Scholarship here has been difficult due to historical interdisciplinary academic divisions (Goodwyn, 2014). Nevertheless, to answer it we will need to look closer at what exactly Jung was proposing.…”