Jungian Archetypes - Criticism of Jungian Understandings

Criticism of Jungian Understandings

Lacan, in his "return to Freud", took issue with that aspect of "the thought of Jung, where the relation between the psychical world of the subject and reality are embodied under the term archetype". He argued that "Jungianism - in so far as it makes of the primitive modes of articulating the world something that survives, the kernel, he says, of the psyche itself - is necessarily accompanied by a repudiation of the term libido". Freud himself however had been well prepared to accept the existence of "a primitive kind of mental activity ... the single analogy - and it is an excellent one - of the far-reaching instinctive knowledge of animals"; and it was indeed on the basis of "what Freud called 'archaic remnants' - mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life ... inherited shapes of the human mind" that Jung had explicitly built his theory of archetypes. His specific and contrasting claim was that they were "not in any sense lifeless or meaningless 'remnants'. They still function, and they are especially valuable ... just because of their 'historical' nature".

More general criticism of the concept of archetypes can perhaps be placed in two broad categories. There are those who deny any possibility of inherited ideas as unscientific - a point met (at least to some degree) by Jung when he insisted that it was instead the inherited propensity to generate representations that made the archetypes "the unconscious organizers of our ideas" (see above).

But those who could accept such inherited propensities still found "a basic ambiguity in Jung's various descriptions of the collective unconscious. Sometimes he seems to regard the predisposition to experience certain images as understandable in terms of some genetic model ... about the way human beings experience the world. But he is also at pains to emphasize the numinous quality of these experiences and there can be no doubt that he was attracted to the idea that the archetypes afford evidence of communion with some divine or world mind". Jung's last statements on that subject remained however firmly agnostic. "Many people would agree with me if I stated flatly that such ideas are probably illusions ... the denial is as impossible to 'prove' as the assertion".

A more technical objection derives from therapeutic practice, with the possibility arising that "an explanation of the archetypal situation ... may lead to inflation, if it is not linked to specific and personal emotional experiences". Some would go further, arguing that because "in Jungian theory, the psychologist's task is to lead others to see the timeless archetypal reality behind their personal psychological experiences ... using abstract, archetypal forces to explain human psychology", the result must inevitably be "a psychology which downplays the significance of human relationships". The patient is thus brought to realise that "what I did then, what I felt then, is only the reflection of that great archetypal dream, or epic story ... free of the individual pain of it", but at the price of individuality and human relationship, sacrificed for an unwillingness to "leave the safety of myth".