ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY
IS MYTHICAL REALISM
You have very Romantic eyes. Your eyes see only what they want to see.
—Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I. Direct Realism
Like an underwater kite whose body is too oval and whose tails are too long for flight, a bacteria known as E. coli navigates unsavory seas of the lower intestine with a running and tumbling motion. It picks itself up, runs and tumbles again, then arrives at last at some humble source of nutriment. This feat is unusual only when one realizes that the E. coli is a single-cell bacteria. How is it possible to possess in a single cell all the information necessary to execute such clownish, if vital, maneuvers?
To learn the answer, biologists removed the cell from its environment for laboratory analysis, expecting to find some memory device inside the cell structure. It was assumed that ”memory” activated the flagellum or tail of the bacteria and motored it tumblingly towards its food. But no memory device could be found inside the cell. Only when the cell was studied along with the structure of its external environment was it possible to account for this curious case of bacterial behavior.
For it was discovered1 that the nutriment which the bacteria kept tumbling towards was setting up a little trap of its own. This trap, with as sensitive a density gradient as the finest cobweb, flowed inward to the nutriment like steps on a down escalator. The bacteria only had to take the path of least resistance. It did this by running and tumbling with a random projection by its tail until it blissfully found itself tumbled into the less and less steep grade of the nutriment’s own net. Instead of finding food by some memory device encoded in its single cell, the E. coli was almost in the enviable position of having food find it. All it had to do was keep on tumbling. To understand the behavior of such things, it now appears a mistake to have gone the traditional route of analyzing memory. And while it is a bruising leap from hungry bacteria to human bacchanalia, it may also be something of a mistake to continue the study of man with the same assumptions.
James J. Gibson2 defines behavior as the encounter of an organism with its environment. Gibson holds the disconcerting view that memory is not necessary to explain perception. In jargon, this means that we do not have to assume that a perceptual stimulus is handled by a memory system that has to remember what a stimulus meant in the past in order to perceive it in the present. Instead, Gibson theorizes that we and the bacteria perceive the world directly, according to a process that he calls ”direct realism.”
His theory has major implications for many areas of psychology, but it is of particular interest, as we shall see, for archetypal psychology, where, in the pursuit of therapy for life’s wounds, memory is elevated to a fine art. Before looking at these implications, however, let us consider some theories of perception which direct realism would supplant.
The fundamental, omnipresent, and universal theory of perception which science and philosophy have worked with for the past few thousand years is indirect realism. This, simply, is the theory that perception is processed internally.
Indirect realism comes in all the flavors of psychological thought. Nativism, empiricism, and Gestalt psychology, for example, are all variations of indirect realism. Indirect realism has assumed for centuries that information picked up by the human organism is insufficient in itself to provide the richness we perceive. Not without memory the lift of a sunrise; not without memory the plays of Shakespeare or the seven lanes of the Los Angeles Freeway. To account for our richness of perception, indirect realism has always imagined a mediating process performed somewhere in the brain on information picked up by the senses.
The nativist argues that we are born with these epistemic mediators which process the information provided by the environment. Because perception must come through these mediators, reality is mediated, or indirectly perceived.
The empiricist or behaviorist, instead of postulating innate structures, argues that mediators are acquired by experience. But acquired or innate, epistemic mediators process perception in the same basic way in both views, which is indirect realism.
Gestalt psychology began as an attempt to be novel with indirect realism. It argues nonetheless that there is a dynamic internal process of organization, innately manifested, and grandly called autonomous field-forces, which mediates perception.
A theory of indirect realism, however, after centuries of trying, still cannot adequately explain even something so simple as the behavior of single-celled bacteria. Perhaps one reason it cannot do this is because its physics is so one-sided. Theories of indirect realism are the product of a Euclidean bias in their understanding of physical and geometrical laws.
This bias has led to two basic assumptions underlying experiments in indirect realism. The first is that a visual image is punctate or momentary. Because theories of indirect realism see visual images as static in time, illusion experiments, such as the famous Ames Room, never work if the subject is allowed to move through the space of the room. Indirect realism is a static theory of perception, and its experiments work only if images are static.
The second result of a Euclidean bias is the assumption that there is an isomorphic mapping of the image through the mediators. This literalistic interpretation of the stimulus means that size and shape are assumed to be preserved intact, or isomorphically, in indirect realism as they must be in Euclidean plane geometry.
Direct realism, by contrast, is non-Euclidean. Like Riemannian geometry it is more abstract and topologically oriented. Instead of an isomorphic mapping of the image, it takes the view that an object projected does not literally preserve information but preserves ratios, and even ratios of ratios of information. An example is when one preserves the ratio of a melody in music even as one changes harmonies or tempo.
What perceptual systems pick up, in Gibsonian theory, is some degree of adjacent order, some degree of successive order, some com-ents are obviously not static images, but relationships with this environment over time. They are time-bound. “Time-binding,” as Gibson3 calls it, brings the past, the present, and the future together. “Coming events cast shadows,” as he says in one of his more poetic moments. There is an imminence of the future in the present.
In a non-Euclidean approach to perception, what the organism is picking up when it perceives something—like the letter A on a sign no matter how large or how small it is printed—is the invariance of its structure. Invariance is the information which remains unchanged in a structure over transformations of time-space. Gibson’s startling claim is that these invariances occur in the environment and not in the head. We pick up these invariances, but we do not have to process them.
Gibson thus pushes much further some ideas of the great experimental psychologist, Warren McCulloch,4 who believed that what best characterized work of living brains was their ability to detect and use invariant aspects of sensory stimulation. McCulloch claims that these (invariant aspects) specified environmental universals such as shape, distance, size, position, and time. But what Gibson adds momentously to McCulloch’s theory is the argument that what is directly perceived is the value or functional utility (“affordance”) of objects and events for the organism. And the nature of these affordances, according to Gibson, is both “formless and timeless.”5
Gibson sees the process of perception as a continuous interactive relation between the organism and its environment. Since we have evolved to perceive invariants, they are ecologically significant, and they exist only over time. We do not perceive them in discrete cross-sections of the information flow, like shoppers checking the lettuce in a grocery store, but in constant longitudinal relations picked up by a continuous process loop, a living radar. Gibson is more interested in what the information is that the interaction of the organism and the environment determines, rather than how the information-processing capabilities of the organism work after they are presented with information.
A dog, for example, with his big nose picks up on a gradient of smell in his environment as he moves closer and closer to it, into denser and denser regions, until he has found the object. He does this, Gibson would say, not by remembering past smells but by picking up on a perceptual gradient that is located directly in the environment. The perceptual gradient provides or “affords” an invariance of smell over time.
The unit of perception here is the transformation over time-space of perceptual stimuli. The environment of the dog, as the environment of the bacteria, is sensitive to variance and invariance. Environment is everything that provides opportunities for perception. But the organism that picks up variances and invariances in the environment is only picking up critical relationships, or density gradients, in structures. This is called critical realism, as opposed to a naïve realism which would argue that the organism picks up everything in the environment and then sorts it all out in the brain through mediators.
Gibson therefore conceives the senses in a brilliant new way, as active rather than passive, as systems rather than channels, and as interrelated rather than mutually exclusive. Since the senses function to pick up information and not simply to arouse sensations, he calls them “perceptual systems.” Moreover, the pickup of stimulus information by perceptual systems does not require having sensations. Sensation, in other words, is not a prerequisite for perception, and sense impressions are not the raw data of perception—that is, they are not all that is given for perception.
Such a theory flies in the face of Locke, Helmholtz, Wundt, Titchener, and others, who laid the groundwork for modern cognitive psychology.
Gibson shows that the anatomical equipment of the body, furthermore, is not divided up neatly among the senses, and that perceptual systems do not have exclusive possession of certain organs. The brain does not have to integrate successive visual or other sensations in immediate memory. The invariance of perception with overlapping stimulation (the sound, odor, heat, and light that together tell us our house is on fire) may be accounted for by invariant information and by a tuning of the entire system to invariant information. The development of this tuning—what Gibson calls the education of attention—depends on past experience but not on a storage of past experiences. While memory in the traditional sense of stored engrams is not required, a new vision of memory is obviously required. For an observer learns with practice to isolate more subtle invariants during transformations over time.
How are the perceptual systems organized then to pick up information? The traditional view was one of hierarchy. A hierarchical organization would mean that a supreme executive specified the arrangement of the information to effect meaning. In a hierarchy there would be a permanent centralization of power, and the properties perceived by the various agents of the system would not be commutable among each other. Their roles would never be exchanged There would never be a sub-set solution to a perceptual problem. In-stead, all members would have to be called upon for consultation on every problem. In this traditional holistic approach, the same problem would always have the same solution. A hierarchical vision of perceptual systems would thus be non-commutable, non-versatile, and inflexible.
Instead of hierarchy, Gibson envisions the perceptual systems as working in coalitions6with each other. There is a decentralization of power. The organization is mutable. Any agent of the system can have central control of power at any one time. Perceptual roles can be exchanged. There are subset solutions where all members are not required to solve a problem. Coalitions, furthermore, may reveal parallel computations, where the same problem can be computed in two places concurrently. The system might look like a hierarchy sometimes—some agent is in control—but the style is flexible, and cross-talk between the agents takes place.
The beauty of Gibson’s approach is that when the senses are considered as perceptual systems all theories of perception become at one stroke unnecessary. No longer is it necessary to ask how the mind operates on the deliverances of senses, or how memory of past experiences organizes the data, or even how the brain processes nerve inputs. Now the question is simply what information is picked up. The individual is not seen as constructing an awareness of the world but as detecting the world from invariant properties in the flux of events.
The implications of Gibsonian theory for cognitive psychology are obvious and perhaps even devastating. But it is the implications for archetypal psychology, not so obvious and perhaps far from devastating, that we are interested in pursuing here. For an examination of archetypal psychology from the perspective of Gibsonian theory not only corroborates some far-flung procedures of that much-misunderstood godchild of Jung, but clarifies and resolves some of its uncertainties and embarrassments in regard to science and scientific thinking. With a Gibsonian perspective on perception, the darker reaches of archetypal psychology suddenly become freed of their cramped and suicidal confinement in a nineteenth-century perception theory. In revisioning archetypalism in the light of direct realism, archetypal psychology suddenly seems the only psychology now practiced whose theory is ecologically responsible to the environment of psyche.
II. Science and Archetypal Psychology
Archetypal psychology has evolved in the past several years into a new perspective on Jung’s analytical or complex psychology. Instead of Jung’s hierarchical system of psyche dominated by an individuated self, archetypal psychology sees a coalitional system of psyche in which multiple archetypal fantasies interdominate. In this view, Jung’s psychology is seen as monotheistic, singular or unitary in its psychic organization, while archetypal psychology is polytheistic or pluralistic. The premise (there is no goal) of archetypal psychology is that psyche is always to be deepened (“soul-making” as John Keats and James Hillman call it7), regardless of consequence to the self who carries it (actually, in archetypal psychology, it is psyche that carries the self). This means that regardless of moral, physical, or emotional values of the particular archetypal fantasy or fantasies ensouling someone, those fantasies are to be lived to the depths of psychic experience for the sake of deepening the space that is there called soul.
With a description of itself as unblushingly Romantic as this, is no wonder that scientists from other behavioral areas are loathe to certify or even look at archetypalism as anything with which they can have commerce. What Edwin Boring said of Jung and psychoanalysis in 1929 could be said even more of Hillman and archetypal psychology today:
We can say, without any lack of appreciation for what has been accomplished, that psychoanalysis has been prescientific. It has lacked experiments, having developed no technique for control. In the refinement of description without control, it is impossible to distinguish semantic specification from empirical fact.8
While Jung and some of his followers were at pains to respond to these charges on behalf of analytical psychology, insisting that it was a kind of science, Hillman on behalf of archetypal psychology has gone the other way, categorizing such views as Boring’s under what he calls “the science fantasy of psychology.” For Hillman, the science fantasy of psychology in no way bears on archetypalism. Archetypal psychology thus does not imagine itself or the psyche as belonging to science, “even social or behavioral science.”9 Rather than apply the science fantasy to psyche, Hillman would apply the archetypal method of psychologizing to science. “For science also,” he maintains, “is a field for soul- making provided we do not take it literally on its own terms.” The enemy, as Hillman emphasizes throughout all his work, is literalism, of not seeing through (psychologizing) the literal surface into the significant depths where psyche dwells.
Archetypal psychology does not see the soul literally either, but uses that term “as a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.”10 Thus the soul is free of any literal location, and distinct from body, brain, or any aspect of the physiological. Of course, soul is distinct from these only in terms of literalism: once the body, brain, or aspects of the physiological are seen as “subtle,” that is, once they too are deliteralized, such distinctions of location become irrelevant.
There are several objections that archetypal psychology would have to someone trying to apply a “science fantasy” to it. At the center of archetypal psychology (if it has a center—it may have a lot of corners and no center) is the realization that “a human life is actually a personification of the soul, a projection of it, contained by it.”11 This realization views so-called “human psychology” as “fundamentally intolerant, a daytime application of all the humanistic fallacies—egoistic, naturalistic, moralistic, pragmatistic,” in which the night activity of soul imagining makes manifest the soul’s constant struggle to leave us (epistrophé or return to the Gods). It is a struggle which “human psychology,” according to Hillman, misreads entirely: “its inability to admit the distinct admit the distinct reality, the full reality, of soul, so that all our human struggle with imagination and its mad incursions, with the symptoms of complexes, with ideologies, theologies, and their systems, are in root and essence the unpredictable writhing movements of Psyche freeing herself from human imprisonment.”12 Thus, a major dimension of soul psychology is not human at all. It is the dimension of Gods. But not, of course, literally! Soul psychology is a dehumanizing psychology to the extent that it attempts to see through humanism, and the human, into soul. But seeing through, deliteralizing, the human, for the sake of soul, does not literally mean abandoning the human. What archetypal psychology proposes in its dehumanizing is a revisioning of the human from a soul perspective. That revisioning of human behavior is implicit in archetypal psychology as a psychology. Thus, it is still keeping faith with the integrity of a soul psychology to see it as concerned with behavior.
Hillman’s use of the term “soul” is a deliberate repudiation of the various modern terms that have been substituted for it:
So that where the soul is often denied a place in modern psychology, the soul is still represented in all its classic ambiguity by such concepts as psychonic energy, vital energy, bio-energy, nervous energy and the like, all combinations of mind and matter … In short, it is our contention that the flow of energy model as an explanation of emotion has replaced the soul model, and that the energy model, untenable logically and empirically, is only intelligible on the basis of the earlier model, the soul.13
He rightly scoffs at “visceral brain theories,” “the hippocampal formation,” and the like as substitute concepts for soul.14 He objects to the physiological location of emotion,15 and insists that emotion be seen “as a total pattern of the soul.”16
Thus, while “the psychic aspect of emotion is given to introspection as those unique qualitative feelings, specific vegetative and muscular proprioceptions, and patterns of representations of each emotion,” it is the psychic aspect of emotion that is the fundamental cause of emotion. “Without psyche there is neither experience nor behavior.”17 In arguing the indivisibility of psyche, it would appear at first that archetypal psychology excludes biological and physiological research from contributing their material to the mainstream of its thought. Archetypal psychology derives from Jungian psychology, but offers some significant differences. It does not differ, however, in its adherence to the view that the psychological (soul) somehow absorbs the physiological (body) without at the same time being accountable to it.
Michael Fordham18 has reviewed the cautious views of Jung on the mind-body relationship (as expressed in the Tavistock Lectures) where Jung seemed to stress the view of synchronicity to account for psychosomatic behavior. Fordham compares other Jungian views on this subject, including that of C. A. Meier, who tried to find a symbolic formula “transcending the opposites of psyche and soma.” (Archetypal psychology would not of course maintain that they are opposites.)
Fordham himself tries to relate archetypal patterns to those being studied by ethologists, and suggests that archetypes might be arranged in a hierarchical order analogous to the nervous system. He thus expresses shock and proceeds “rather shaken” to a paper by Leopold Stein, which relates archetypes to “genes, enzymes, catalysts or pheromones” and concludes that “the biological analogon to the self would appear to be the vast realm of the lymphoid stem cells and/or the undifferentiated mesenchyme cells of the reticulo-endothelial system.”
As we have already seen, however, Hillman’s classic study, Emotion, is full of such theories as Leopold Stein’s attempts at a physiological location of psyche. It is one characteristic of what some call “second generation” Jungian thought that it still seeks this direct physiological bridge to psyche, as it is one characteristic of archetypal psychology (third generation?) that it does not. In fact, as we have seen, Hillman, from Emotion to Re-Visioning Psychology, repudiates such attempts with increasing fervor as his non-literal soul-space expands to almost empire status.
The traditional Jungian position is not easily abandoned, as seen in a recent paper by Robert Stein who also refers to Meier’s views on the synchronicity question in the mind-body relationship. Meier asserts that the relationship presupposed synchronicity itself to be a third factor to psyche and soma, and more importantly, higher than either. To this, Robert Stein asks, “How can we connect to this third mysterious power which transcends both psyche and soma, and is responsible for symptom formation in both?”19
For archetypal psychology, however, the third mysterious factor, so much discussed, so little understood, is really a false issue from the very beginning, since archetypal psychology does not see psyche and soma working as Cartesian opposites in the first place. What is so surprising about synchronicity once one assumes that soma is subsumed by psyche? There is no need to work out a factor called synchronicity—only, we might suggest, the basic factor of “chronicity,” which is the time of the soul itself. Instead of saying, spookily, that some events are “synchronistic,” we should see all events as “chronic.”
It is, after all, only with Cartesian dualism that one needs a concept of synchronicity—if body is taken as fantasy, it too is soul and a dualism is uncalled for. There is nothing to be “joined.”
Furthermore, all discussion of illness as “psychosomatic” is a form of this Cartesian distinction as well. Archetypal psychology cannot make “psychosomatic” a special category either. For many of the same reasons, after all, archetypal psychology does not “treat” the extremes which the soul enfolds as illnesses or diseases, does not set out to cure them, and quite the contrary, blesses such pathologizing as the soul’s right (of way).
It is not surprising then that soul psychology sees little if anything in scientific research. Concerned more with differentiation than integration, there is no normality in individual life on which to base a research, let alone a science. In fact, there is “the absolute non-normality of each individual person. If the fundamental principle of psychological life is differentiation, then no single perspective can embrace psychological life, and norms are the delusions that parts prescribe to one another.”20 From such a perspective, it would appear that science, as we know it today, is not only not wanted, but repudiated as well.
We are compelled to step away altogether from an ideal norm of man and a statistical norm of man. To take pathologizing thoroughly means the collapse of any normative psychology that is derived from external standards. Studies, experiments, research results, typicalities, have no bearing on soul-making except to provide materials for fantasy, and ideal types of behavior drawn from saints, sages, or statistics have value, not for behavior, but as metaphorical models for the personified imagination.21
It is apparent from all this that archetypal psychology rejects scientific, experimental, and research-oriented approaches to its subject, the soul, because the soul is intractable to these approaches. Furthermore, if “without psyche there is neither experience nor behavior,” then psyche or soul is imagined as processing experience or behavior. Archetypal psychology comes to this key observation metaphorically, or poetically, because it finds empirical science wanting. Empirical science, because of its inherent literalist bias towards evidence, fails to account for experience or behavior as the archetypalist understands it. To the scientist who asks for empirical evidence of all the richness of fantasy and meaning afforded by the soul, the archetypalist replies, if he replies at all, that archetypal psychology does not rest on an empirical style of verification but on intuited truths of a larger imaginal order. The soul’s role can only be intuited by intellect or feeling, never proved or tested, never experimented on or researched.
The scientist then scoffs and goes off unsatisfied. The archetypalist, in turn, speculates on the fantasy of science. While this is usually the end of an unfriendly encounter, there are two questions that could be asked, which, if answered, might bring both sides a little closer. The first question is one which the archetypalist should ask of himself. What is the status of archetypalist intuition as it applies to the elaboration of theory? The second question is more difficult. Does it make any sense in science to say there is no experience or behavior without soul?
III. Intuiting Archetypal Theory
The “science” of Mathematics has never recovered from the publication, in 1931, of Kurt Gödel’s “Incompleteness Theorem” (or “Gödel’s Proof,” as it is sometimes called).22 Having assumed for two thousand years that the axioms of Euclidean geometry were consistent, self-evident truths, mathematicians had to try desperately to prove this consistency in the nineteenth century when Bolyai, Lobachewsky, and Riemann suddenly postulated systems of non-Euclidean geometry and even denied the truth of Euclid’s parallel axiom. It remained for Gödel to show that any adequate, consistent, arithmetical logic is incomplete because there exist true statements about the integers which can never be proved within arithmetical logic itself. Thus, no final account could be given of the precise logical form of valid mathematical demonstrations. Gödel, astoundingly, turned to “intuition” as an explanation of how mathematical and geometrical concepts are grasped.
“Gödel’s Proof” thus stripped the human gears off all Turing machines and calculators, which work according to a fixed set of directives that correspond to the fixed rules of inference of formalized axiomatic mathematical procedure. Mathematics had served as the backboard “science” off which cybernetics played its robotized game of mental tennis. Once Gödel showed that there were many problems in elementary number theory that could not be treated by a fixed axiomatic method, he in effect destroyed the empiricist, mechanistic model of the brain as a network of components and forced recognition of the ultimate incompleteness of any model that did not regard an intuitive function. In other words, no machine could be programmed to intuit knowledge.
Jungians, of course, have long pursued the archetypal side of mathematics. Wolfgang Pauli, for example, in attempting to work out “the basic intuitions” of mathematics according to Jung’s concept of archetypal ideas, commented on “the historical fact that Kepler expanded and regularly made use of the term archetypus and archetypalis, and actually in the same sense as Jung, namely, as ‘prototype,’ ‘primal image.’ ”23
Marie-Louise von Franz, in a more recent work, argues that natural integers, as true symbols, originate autonomously in archetypes and function as “a preconscious psychic principle of activity.”24 Von Franz looks at numbers as though they were dynamic natural phenomena. Each number is thought of as containing a specific activity that “streams forth like a field of force.”
From the standpoint of direct realism, however, there is no need to see a difference here between nature and psyche, as if number somehow worked differently in each. Instead of calling number “a preconscious psychic activity” with an autonomous archetypal capability, direct realism would see number as a formalization of invariance in the environment. It is picked up by our perceptual systems, though we are not conscious of the perception. The activity of number, “streaming forth like a field of force,” as von Franz says so poetically, is perceived tacitly.
Thus, even with direct realism, number concepts contain, as von Franz argues, a primary energetic character which alone forms the requisite for our arithmetical thought processes. All we need do, to do mathematics, is pick up on them.
Without intuiting (or picking up on) this formless, archetypal invariant called number, there is no way science can construct, ever, a true mechanical mathematician. With this realization, cybernetics has been forced to modify its earlier optimism drastically, and with the greatest reluctance to recognize the limitation, from cybernetics’ point of view, that man is an archetypally “inspired” being.
The recognition of Gödelian formula has thus led to a sweeping revolution in the so-called “hard” sciences.25 The mathematician, J. R. Lucas, for example, sees Gödelian formula as the end of Mechanism, the idea that minds can be explained as machines. “The Gödelian formula,” he says, “is the Achilles’ heel of the cybernetical machine. And therefore we cannot hope ever to produce a machine that will be able to do all that a mind can do: we can never, not even in principle, have a mechanical model of the mind.”26
What then is intuition? Jung defines it (CW 6, §§770–71) as “the function that mediates perceptions in an unconscious way … As with sensation, its contents have the character of being ‘given,’ in contrast to the ‘derived’ or ‘produced’ character of thinking and feeling contents.” But this is the old or indirect realist way of conceiving intuition and it is precisely this, with its epistemic mediation in the form of “givens,” that we are challenging. Jung further envisions intuition as “subjective or objective: the first is a perception of unconscious psychic data originating in the subject, the second is a perception of data dependent on subliminal perceptions of the object and on the feelings and thoughts they evoke.” These Cartesian distinctions, as we have already suggested, are further artifacts of indirect realism, although the notion of subliminal perception here suggests that Jung at least sees the source of intuition as part of a perception continuum. In an even further elaboration, however, Jung claims “concrete intuition mediates perceptions concerned with the actuality of things, abstract intuition mediates perceptions of ideational connections.” This distinction also is unnecessary once one realizes that “abstract” or “ideational” invariants are directly perceived from the environment, as direct realism now shows.27
Following Gibson, we would suggest that intuition is a process that extracts information stored in the environment, not in the head. It is only an extreme of the same perceptual continuum at work at any time—except that a part of the information it perceives is tacit, another part explicit. Traditionally, intuition had to be explained as a mysterious tapping of knowledge stored or encoded in the brain because the affordances of some invariances could not be interpreted in the linear, Euclidean sense of indirect realism. Once we realize that all invariants are formless, however, we also realize that much of what is perceived at any time is tacit, or not rendered explicit to intellect. In other words, when, in the past, we realized or suddenly made explicit such tacit information from the environment, we had to classify this area of perception with a special term, “intuition.” Actually, this term, too, (like psychosomatic, or synchronistic) is an unnecessary artifact of the days of indirect realism.
Once we understand how intuition is the perception of information from the tacit environment, other artifacts of indirect realism will be made clear as well. Chomsky’s theory of language, for example, rests on the observation that experience with a limited sample of the set of linguistic utterances yields an understanding of any sentence that meets the grammatical form of the language. But a child must acquire his first language from speech he hears around him and this speech is too meager and too full of errors to enable him to induce the correct structure as quickly as he does. Chomsky argues therefore that the child must have some a priori knowledge about the structure—innate knowledge about language—that evolves in acquiring language.
Direct realism shows that all this a priori information stuff (the Kantian synthetic a priori categories of mind) is unnecessary. The perceptual systems simply attune themselves to the invariant structure afforded by the language itself. Language affords invariance by defini-tion. (Otherwise, it is not a language.)
The natural stimulus of invariance to which perceptual systems have evolved are change or non-change (transformation) over time. From this approach, another artifact of the days of indirect realism may be Lévi-Strauss’s scheme of binary opposites: instead of “structure” (binary opposites perceived in the components of a myth) direct realism would emphasize the primacy of the transformations themselves. Thus it would not presuppose innate predispositions toward binary thinking, or anything so limiting as that the human mind is a binary computer.
The archetypalist, in following an intuitive route to his language of psyche and archetype, is not doing anything that is inimical to science, once science itself is understood as resting on the same intuitive base. In this sense, it is all the more appropriate to say, as archetypalists do, that there is a science fantasy at work in “science.” For scientists are those who think all their perceptions are explicit and can be accounted for explicitly, while archetypalists are those for whom most perceptions are tacit and can be accounted for only intuitively. In talking of soul, therefore, or any of the other poetic terms in his therapeutic bag, the archetypalist, like the poet, may be challenged only to the degree his intuitive theory takes him in accounting for human behavior. He should not be asked to change his vocabulary, and he cannot be challenged as to the kind of theory he offers merely because so much of it must rest on intuition.
IV. Mythical Realism
Let us return now to the inside-out world of James J. Gibson, whose work on perception has underwritten some of the excursions we have thus far attempted in relating archetypal psychology to science and science to archetypal psychology. For Gibson’s work with one stroke cuts through some of the lingering dilemmas and uncertainties of both sides, and offers a direction in which to pursue the question of what science itself might say about the soul as it shapes human experience. As Gibsonian perceptual systems are understood at present, they apply to the direct perception of events in the environment. The organism picks up these events without using a central processing capacity to construct their meaning. In other words, events afford meaning directly. Some direct realists, like Robert Shaw and Michael McIntyre, would apply this theory to the perception of ideas from the environment, as much as Gibson applies it to the perception of objects. “Percepts, concepts, memories, ideas, and other contents of mind usually considered private and subjective,” they say, “are in fact as much ‘out there’ as particles, stones, tables and stars.”28 Robert Verbrugge, who applies a theory of direct realism to the study of metaphor, attempts to show that metaphor, analogies, and a whole range of creative, imaginative behavior may be a direct realist pickup of invariants in the environment. Just as Gibson “de-imaged” optics, Verbrugge tries to deliteralize metaphor.29 For these scientists, “ideas are not in the mind, nor objects in the world, but … both are in the meeting of mind and matter,”30
To see it all this way, in a direct realist “meeting of mind and matter,” is to jump the parapsychological, the psychosomatic, the synchronistic questions of Jung’s psychology onto new ground.
There is then much for an archetypalist to consider in a theory of direct realism which portrays archetypalism as environmental. Let us look at a few areas of concern to archetypal psychology which a theory of direct realism would advance by placing them “out there.”
It would first call for a re-location of Jungian psychology’s long-cherished and much-maligned notion of the Collective Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious would be seen as a night version of the environment. Everything preserved in language, culture, and humanity—everything that can be called environment—becomes an environmental unconscious. Since the environment, in Gibson’s sense, is anything that affords an opportunity for perception, the environmental unconscious is a tacit description of the present state of humanity. Just as language, culture, and the rest of humanity are evolving, the collective or environmental unconscious is evolving. It is not a reconstruction or static body of past events.
Just as we have evolved to pick up critical invariant relationships in the (day) environment, we also pick up critical invariant relationships from the environmental unconscious. They are, of course, the same environment. We do not pick up everything in the environment (naive realism), only critical relationships conducive to the ecology of the organism. In the same way, we do not pick up everything from the environmental unconscious, only critical relationships (myths, complexes) to what we might call an ecology of psyche. Once we pick up these critical relationships, their meaning becomes explicit and no longer tacit. In this sense, the tacit environment remains “unconscious.” What we have been calling “intuition” therefore is nothing but an explicit perception from the tacit environment.
The invariant relationships which we pick up from the environmental unconscious are what archetypalists call archetypes. An archetype is an invariant relationship. These invariants or archetypes carry with them what Gibson calls affordances. One of these affordances which an archetype carries is what an archetypalist would mean by a God. The affordance of a God is picked up from the environmental unconscious and becomes personified, for the sake of discussion, as a God. The property of these invariants becomes formalized in language as a myth. Since there are many invariants and many affordances of these invariants, it is necessary to say that there are many Gods, or to be polytheistic in one’s imagining (one’s poetic description) of these affordances.
We might consider here too whether “the ego” is an affordance of an invariant or an invariant in its own right. Depending on whether one follows Hillman or Jung, the ego is but one affordance of a very important invariant, or that invariant. Accordingly, the organization of the various archetypal affordances one lives with will be a hierarchy (Jung), with the ego affordance dominant, or a coalition (Hillman) with the ego affordance working from a decentralized position with other affordances or psychic figures cross-talking and exchanging roles. Perceptual direct realism, as Gibsonian theory develops it, would suggest that Hillman’s coalitional approach is to be preferred over the traditional Jungian hierarchical one.
The psychological pickup and preservation of a myth or affordance of an invariant from the environmental unconscious does not necessarily represent an isomorphic transfer of the myth. What is picked up is a ratio of properties from an event which becomes transformed into a metaphorical perception, or one’s personal myth. But this personal myth is always being tuned with the environmental or collective myth as one continues to live with one’s psychological perceptions.
Instead of postulating a place called memory as the storehouse of the Collective Unconscious, with all the problems such a notion entails, we can now see that memory is a product of hierarchy and thinking in terms of mediated indirect realism. What has been called memory is an attunement or sensitivity to invariances. Memory is archetypal awareness.
Dreams, fantasies, and the imagination, in this view, are transformational aspects of perception. The dream performs transformations on a myth or theme or archetypal invariance according to our complexes. These transformations are metaphorical, not isomorphic. The images of a dream are infinitely transformable according to our complexes. Image is an aspect of an invariance, not the critical stimulus for perception. The invariance itself, over time, is the critical stimulus for perception. We perceive archetypes directly. They are immediate (non-mediated). They are not “elsewhere,” unknowable, noumenal, or uncertain; they are not some sort of per se separable from the phenomenal environmental world Hillman is right when he says that “the error of empiricism is its attempt to employ sense-perception everywhere, for hallucinations, feelings, ideas, and dreams.”31 But the error is even greater than that, as we have been trying to show. It is in seeing an isomorphic mapping of image as the stimulus even to ordinary perception (if there is such a thing). Hillman would change all this by distinguishing imaginative images: “We perceive images with the imagination, or better said, we imagine them rather than perceive them, and we cannot perceive with sense-perception the depths that are not extended in the sense world.”32 But direct realism goes further, and repudiates the notion of “sense-perception” altogether, in favor of perceptual systems for which the senses are not data processors. Thus, there is really no need to talk about depths that are not extended in the sense world, since no depths are. All depths (formless invariants) extend into the environmental unconscious. The depths of the imagination are perceivable, however, in a direct realist view. All is depth, as well as movement. All is “formless and timeless,” in Gibson’s phrase.
We call this approach to archetypal psychology “mythical realism,” because it sees myths as picked up from the environment directly. They do not originate in the soul, which is one’s personal tuning to the environmental unconscious, and they do not originate ex nihilo. From the pathologized vista of archetypal psychology what the individual perceives (in his pathology) is not an isomorphic myth event (in other words a literal myth) from the environmental unconscious. He perceives a symmetry within some event which is unique or personal to the perceiver, and which becomes formalized, even literalized, as myth. Gibson says we must work towards a tuning of our perceptual systems—an education of attention, a continual refinement of the differentiation of invariants. Hillman says our aim should be soul-making, which we do by differentiating archetypes, complexes, and myths. But when we consider direct realism from an archetypalist position, and archetypalism from a direct realist position, are they not similar in purpose? Both emphasize an increase in attention at a crucial point of contact with environment, one assumed to be the environment of day, the other the environment of night. Are they not aspects of the same environment? The difference is that Archetypal Psychology stays true as a psychology to the poetic basis of mind it intuits from the personified figures of dream, the deified images of myth, and the metaphorical forms of the imagination. Archetypal psychology is mythical realism.
NOTES
1. Cf. Julius Adler, “The Sensing of Chemicals by Bacteria,” Scientific American 234, no. 4 (1976,): 40–47.
2. James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966).
3. Quoted from a lecture given at the University of Connecticut, Fall 1976.
4. W. S. McCulloch and W. H. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115–33.
5. “The concept of affordance is somewhat related to these concepts of valence, invitation, and demand but with a crucial difference. The affordance of something does not change as the need of the observer changes. Whether or not the affordance is perceived or attended to will change as the need of the observer changes but, being invariant, it is always there to be perceived. An affordance is not bestowed upon an object by a need of an observer and by his act of perceiving it. The object offers what it does because it is what it is. To be sure, we define what it is in terms of ecological physics instead of physical physics, and it therefore possesses meaning and value to begin with. But this is meaning and value of a new sort”; James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, edited by Robert Shaw and John Bransford (Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977), 78.
6. For a discussion of coalitions, cf. H. von Foerster, “On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environment,” in Self-Organizing Systems, Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Conference, 5 and 6 May 1959, edited by Marshall C. Yovits and Scott Cameron (Oxford, New York, et al.: Pergamon Press, 1960); Robert Shaw, “Cognition, Simulation, and the Problem of Complexity,” Journal of Structural Learning 2, no. 4 (1971); and W. J. Davis, “Organizational Concepts in the Central Motor Networks of Invertebrates,” in Neural Control of Locomotion, edited by Richard M. Herman, Sten Grillner, Paul S. G. Stein, and Douglas G. Stuart (New York and London: Plenum Press,1976).
7. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. ix.
8. Edwin G. Boring, History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950 [1929]), p. 713.
9. “A mythologizing that prefers many perspectives to operational definitions, a psychologizing that asks Who? and What? rather than How? and Why?—a personifying that subjectifies, a circular errancy that is not to be corrected, and a pathologizing that is not to be treated (to say nothing of the naturalistic, and empirical as ‘fallacies’)—all make it impossible for a psychology based on psyche to imagine itself as science”; Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 169
10. Ibid., p. x.
11. Ibid., p. 174.
12. Ibid., p. 175.
13. James Hillman, Emotion: A Comprehensive Phenomenology of Theories and Their Meanings for Therapy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 77.
14. “These attributes: an affinity and sensitivity to symbolism, a connection to the ancestral past, a kind of dream consciousness which perhaps does not sleep, and a functional utility in joining mind and body, have also been, in different times and places, postulated for the soul”; ibid., pp. 108–9.
15. “With this we can conclude, stating that the locus or loci of emotion has not been found because it cannot be found, either in spatial structures or in localized physiological functions, because the ‘complex underlying process’ or ‘central representation of a definite performance,’ i.e., that for which we are looking, is best understood as the soul. Thus the cerebral structures and pathways involved in emotion do not pinpoint emotion to these targets, nor can such areas even be said to operate centrally, release autogenically or initiate emotion. They are but circuits of interacting servo-mechanisms (another way of putting the traditional concept of the circulation of the psyche throughout the whole person)”; ibid., pp. 114–15.
16. “Emotion is the soul as a complex whole, involving constitution, gross physiology, facial expression in its social context as well as actions aimed at the environment. Emotion is the soul in its ancestral and learned past, physiological present and social aims”; ibid., p. 269.
17. Ibid., 273.
18. Michael Fordham, “Jungian Views of the Mind-Body Relationship,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1974): 166ff.
19. Robert Stein, “Body and Psyche: An Archetypal View of Psychosomatic Phenomena,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1976): 66ff. As Stein sees it, “disturbances between psyche and soma are best viewed as equivalent manifestations of a power which is obstructing the free circulation of the stream of life, and disturbing the natural harmony of the opposites. The effect which psyche has upon soma, and vice versa, then becomes of minor significance compared with the power which is affecting them both.”
20. Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 88. Cf. also his “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology,” Eranos-Yearbook 43 (1974).
21. Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 89.
22. Cf. Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof (New York: New York University Press, 1958).
23. Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time: Reflections Leading toward a Unification of Depth Psychology and Physics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 18 n.
24. Ibid., p. 75.
25. In his book Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970), Jean Piaget discusses the problem that Gödelian formula has created for science, and in particular for his work with “epigenetic” structures or “action schemata.” Since "action schemata" are conceived as mediating perception, however, Piaget’s real problems, as we see them, are the age-old problems of indirect realism. A more venturesome (yet still indirect realist) approach is taken by Michael Polanyi, whose life work is the study of intuition, or what he calls “tacit knowledge.” Polanyi shows that he process of formalizing all knowledge to the exclusion of any tacit knowing is self-defeating, whether in mathematics—where a theory can be constructed only by relying on prior tacit knowing and can function as a theory only within an act of tacit knowing—or in any other “science”: “It is a commonplace that all research must start from a problem. Research can be successful only if the problem is good; it can be original only if the problem is original. But how can one see a problem, any problem, let alone a good and original problem? For to see a problem is to see something that is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars. The problem is good if this intimation is true; it is original if no one else can see the possibilities of the comprehension that we are anticipating. To see a problem that will lead to a great discovery is not just to see something hidden, but to see something of which the rest of humanity cannot even have an inkling. All this is a common-place; we take it for granted, without noticing the clash of self-contradiction entailed in it”; The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 22.
26. J. R. Lucas, “Minds, Machines and Gödel,” in Minds and Machines, edited by Alan Ross Anderson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 47.
27. Cf., for example, the works of Robert Shaw and Robert Verbrugge, cited below.
28. Robert Shaw and Michael McIntyre, “Algoristic Foundations to Cognitive Psychology,” in Cognition and the Symbolic Processes, edited by Walter B. Weimer and David S. Palermo (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1974), p. 360. It is interesting to note that James Hillman’s recent work is moving in this same direction: his 1976 Eranos lecture, after refusing constructed modes of perception (typology), concluded with an appeal to looking at the “face” of the world, the environmental physiognomy. He argued that the collective unconscious is presented directly by the “face” to the animal eye, as, quoting a poem of Wallace Stevens, “the lion roars at the enraging desert.”
29. Robert Verbrugge, “Resemblances in Language and Perception,” in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, op. cit.
30. Shaw and McIntyre, “Algoristic Foundations to Cognitive Psychology,” p. 360.
31. James Hillman, “The Dream and the Underworld,” Eranos-Yearbook 42 (1973): 273.
32. Ibid.
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1977): 131–52
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