FromMatter and Psyche from the Point of View of the Psychology of C. G. Jung

TheArchetype as a Category of Experience

Asis generally known, there were two discoverers of the unconscious,SigmundFreud and C. G. Jung. They rediscovered a fact that had long been underdiscussion but had not been empirically investigated, namely, that there is apsychic reality beyond ego consciousness. Freud primarily saw the unconsciousas a realm where repressed sexual drives exist. For Jung, however, theunconscious is, in addition, a realm in which subliminal perceptions, incipientprocesses of psychic development—,that is,anticipationsof future conscious processes—,and in general all creativecontentsare constellated. Actually, there was also a third independent discoverer ofthe unconscious, the French mathematician Henri Poincar, who found theunconscious in himself through a personal experience. He was looking for anexplanation for the so-called automorphic functions but was unable to find theformula. Then he intuitively glimpsed the solution to this problem in a kind ofhalf-awake, half-asleep vision. On the basis of this, he came to the conclusionthat there must exist in man a second unconsciouspersonalitywhich, to his great astonishment, was even capable of valid mathematicaljudgments.

Indirecting his primary attention to the drive aspect of the unconscious, Freudsought to link up with the medical knowledge of his day, with brain physiology,endocrinology, and research on general biological processes altogether. Incontrast, Jung from the beginning had consciously avoided creating any suchpremature equivalences between the unconscious and physical and materialprocesses. Indeed this was not because he did not believe in suchrelationships, but rather because he was convinced that the phenomena shouldfirst be investigated much more in the psychic realm per se before connectionsto somatic processes were established. In this way, he was also seeking tocounter the materialistic prejudice of his time, which was inclined to draw thehasty conclusion that the psyche was an epiphenomenon of physiologicalprocesses. Jung was convinced that a link with physiology would manifest itselfnaturally when both fields had gone far enough in their research. This link nowseems little by little to be peeking through in a very unexpected place, whereno one had anticipated it—,in microphysics. In my view, this shows how wiseJung's restraint was.

Asis well known, Jung developed and changed the so-called association experimentof Wilhelm Wundt. In this test, a list of a hundred words is put together, onepart of which is composed of words to which the test persons are expected to berelatively indifferent (like table,chair, water,glass,andso on), the rest of the list are words that might well hit some kind ofemotionalized content. The test person must associate something to each word asrapidly as possible, as for example: table—,chair,glass—,water, light—,dark.Assoon as a complex is touched, the response time slows down extraordinarily.When an important complex is touched, even the answers to the following wordsslow down, which is called a 'perseverance phenomenon.' Later thistest was combined with the psychogalvanic experiment. The breathing curve orthe electrical permeability of the skin can then be measured, and here asimilar phenomenon is encountered: at the moment when a perseverance—,a delayedanswer—, shows up, curve deviations...