Psyche Science and Society: Essays on Jung and Sociology 2022045865, 2022045866, 9781138315518, 9781138315532, 9780429456268

Citation preview

PSYCHE, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

In this new volume, Gavin Walker attempts to open a conversation between sociology and Jungian psychology, both often overlooked by each other, through a series of wide-ranging essays. This book provides a Jungian counterpoint to the more accepted Freudian perspective in sociology by engaging with several key themes, including race, gender, urban sociology, religion and the environment. The chapters here consider methodological issues, such as how Jungian psychology might contribute to our understanding of human nature, and Jung’s – and sociology’s – complex and manylevelled relationship with anthropology. As a whole, this unique work provides an open-ended exploration of what sociology includes and excludes from its agenda, and asks how engagement with Jung might shift the centre of gravity of a heterogeneous discipline. Psyche, Science and Society will be of interest to academics and students working in the felds of analytical psychology and sociology, as well as psychoanalysis, anthropology, feminism, environmentalism, comparative religion and the history of science. Gavin Walker studied sociology at Glasgow College of Technology and the University of Edinburgh, and Environmental Science at the University of Strathclyde. He taught Social Sciences at West College Scotland until his retirement in 2020. He is the author/editor of Jung and Sociological Theory: Readings and Appraisal (2018).

PSYCHE, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Essays on Jung and Sociology

Gavin Walker

Designed cover image: Jackie Niam as rendered on Getty as the user who created this image. Courtesy of Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Gavin Walker The right of Gavin Walker to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Figure 1.1, p15: Copyright (1990). From Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar given in 1925 by C.G. Jung, edited by C.G. Jung and William McGuire. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc. Epigraph on p111: from On Aggression (Routledge edition), by Konrad Lorenz, Copyright © 1966 & 1996: Routledge; p214. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. (Captions: for p15 & p111 respectively) (Jung 1990 diagram 10, p133; reproduced by permission) Konrad Lorenz On Aggression (1996: 214) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Walker, Gavin B., author. Title: Psyche, science and society : essays on Jung and sociology / Gavin Walker. Identifers: LCCN 2022045865 (print) | LCCN 2022045866 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138315518 (hb) | ISBN 9781138315532 (pbk) | ISBN 9780429456268 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Sociology. | Jungian psychology. Classifcation: LCC HM585 .W34 2023 (print) | LCC HM585 (ebook) | DDC 301—dc23/eng/20221223 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045865 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045866 ISBN: 9781138315518 (hbk) ISBN: 9781138315532 (pbk) ISBN: 9780429456268 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429456268 Typeset in Bembo by by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Preface

vi

Introduction

1

1

Jung and race

9

2

Jung and the Nazi era

38

3

Jung and the sociology of religion

57

4

Sociology and the city: Jung and “mass society”

87

5

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

111

6

Jung and the sociology of gender

142

7

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

165

Index

192

PREFACE

The chapters in this volume represent explorations in the broad feld of sociological theory and Jungian psychology. This follows on from my previous volume Jung and Sociological Theory.1 That volume was taken up in large part with the writings of other authors, and space for editorial comment was limited. Here I try to extend the range and depth of the discussions that were started there. These chapters were mainly researched and written in the years 2018–2021. For the most part, the reading and the argumentation were already laid down when the Corona pandemic struck in the spring of 2020. Even so, Corona had its impact, especially through the closure of academic libraries. Development then had to focus on the argumentation, leaving the reading that should inform and guide it to be caught up later. The efect is diferent for diferent chapters: some delve deeper than they otherwise might have done; others are left as more free-ranging. But there is a time for free-ranging enquiry. It also made for fewer and longer chapters. As with the previous volume, my research has been isolated and without institutional support – one cost of that is limited access to internet resources. I am grateful to have had access to the libraries of Glasgow University, Strathclyde University, the Mitchell Library and the National Library of Scotland, and their staf have always been helpful. My thanks to Susannah Frearson, Alexis O’Brien, Katie Randall and Alice Maher at Routledge for their patience and support, to former colleagues at West College Scotland for their friendship, and as always, to my partner Susan.

Note 1 Walker, Gavin (2018) Jung and Sociological Theory: Readings and Appraisal. London and New York: Routledge.

INTRODUCTION

The chapters in this volume are intended as explorations, in the relations and resonances between sociology and Jungian psychology. They are presented here in the order they were frst conceived and drafted. Only broadly have I tried to maintain consistency, and there is no intention to ofer a synthesis. I might attempt something of the kind at a future date, but in my view, in dealing with so big a thinker as Jung, exploration must initially be open-ended. There is a bias in these chapters towards classical sociological theory – I include the Chicago School in this, and in principle Simmel, as well as Marx, Durkheim and Weber. (Incidentally, Simmel remarks on the need for a notion of collective unconscious, though he says little of it [Simmel 1977: 93–7, cf. 51–6].) It is from classical theory that subsequent sociology has taken its bearings; moreover we keep returning to the classical theorists as our later ventures run into problems or lose their way. Given Jung’s “classical” status in psychodynamic theory, it is his relation to classical sociology that most needs to be established. I will return to these issues. Likewise on the Jungian side, I have centred on the “classical” literature, especially Jung’s own texts, and have not considered “post-Jungian” approaches (Samuels 1985). Sociology must encounter Jung himself frst. Ideally a collection of chapters of this kind should be written theory-fair. However, the theory-fair stance is a difcult one to maintain; and there are limits to my competence as well as to my sympathies. I most regret not including a chapter on Marx and Marxism. This was initially planned, but it was squeezed out as the other chapters expanded to their natural length. It must wait to another occasion. Though I am not sure I am the best person to do it, being neither a Marxist nor a Marx scholar. It is too big a matter to be dealt with in passing; but one or two basic points can be made. There is no presumption that the attempt to bring Marx and Jung together must take its orientation from the Freudo-Marxist tradition. Indeed, one DOI:10.4324/9780429456268-1

2

Psyche, Science and Society

may ask why the Marxists ever turned to Freud: it was Adler who was the socialist, and his ideas on art, for example, ft better, say, with Marx’ conceptions of labour and alienation. Equally, there is no presumption that it would be philosophical Marxism that is the target. For me at least other approaches such as world system theory are far more convincing as sociology (Wallerstein 2004). Another point: while the occasional Jungian has considered Marx, there is still the question what Marxists might want from Jung (Walker 2018: 69f). Here again I might turn to Wallerstein (1991): his argument that following the events of 1968, Marxism has taken a less authoritarian turn and rather seeks a rainbow coalition of dissent. Especially I would point to green politics and to feminism. This would mean bringing Jung to bear on Marx’ notion of species being. There is precedent for this, Fromm for example with Freud (Fromm 1992: 24–33). With Marx and Jung, Radin might perhaps serve as something of an intermediary (Diamond 1981: 73f). But these remarks are provisional. A subtext running through these chapters is concern with anthropology, especially the cultural anthropology of the Boasian tradition. The ambiguities and confusions between the two disciplines are perhaps most striking in the sociology of religion. Indeed, if it is odd that the sociology of religion has not considered Jung, it is even more odd that it has not considered approaches from cultural anthropology such as those of Radin (1957 [1937]) or Lowie (1936). But that too must await another occasion; and there are other, wider, issues. It is from cultural anthropology that sociology gets the nature/nurture question, and the argument for social (or cultural) construction: that race is not biology but culture; sex may be biology but gender is culture. This in fact is a general strategy for how sociology is to deal with the non-sociological levels of reality, and as such it governs a whole range of issues (health and sickness, the natural environment, science). But to bring the argument across into sociology is not a straightforward matter. If you speak of nature and culture in a science of society (sociology), then you must also say something as to society and culture: you cannot blandly present a dichotomy of three terms. To put the point another way, culture as opposed to nature and culture as opposed to society are not the same thing, and you cannot just dither between the two senses. There is a need, then, for sociology to interrogate the division between social anthropology and cultural anthropology: the question whether human afairs should be seen as society, of which culture is a sub-set, or as culture, of which society is a sub-set. The term Kulturwissenschaft surely suggests that that division is in fact present albeit unrecognized in sociology too (Walker 2001, 2005, 2018: 206f). As to social constructivism, this takes extreme and moderate forms; but these are not variations on a single position. They have diferent logics and a diferent history. In the 19th-century Kantian revival, diferent schools arose: some attempted to establish the categories on an empirical basis; others left them as metapsychology. Durkheim followed the former school: he raised a sociological theory of the categories, and with it a sociological epistemology, a sociological supervision of philosophy. This would later be refned though contact with Saussurean linguistics

Introduction

3

(it could also be brought into relation with the Marxist notion of ideology). The result is extreme constructivism: nature is a blank screen onto which society projects whatever ideas arise from its own concerns, and which can accordingly be discriminated through sociological critique. Other theorists, including Weber, Simmel and Boas, followed the latter school: they kept the Kantian categories on their original status as metapsychology. They argued then for a moderate constructivism: nature presents constraints (in varying degrees) to what ideas we can maintain about it. This position does not entail epistemological claims nor ground critiques; rather its afnities lie with refexive analysis: the attempt to identify and discount for one’s own biases. (The origins of this lie perhaps with Nietzsche.) To my mind, it would be clearer if the extreme position were termed social constructivism and the moderate position cultural constructivism, instead of using these terms as interchangeable. (The interchangeable use of the terms constructivism and constructionism is harmless, however.) The approach to these matters through modern French post-structuralist theory does not reveal this history or diference. Rather it misleadingly presents a categoric choice between constructivism and essentialism. Incidentally, at various points in these chapters, I refer rather indiscriminately to the radical left, revolutionary left, critical tradition and so forth. The confusion is not (or not altogether) mine. In large part, it lies with the French post-war intellectual revival: its protagonists’ adoption of Marx’s values while side-stepping his materialism. A position it proved increasingly difcult to sustain. Concern with these questions runs all through these chapters; and indeed, an innate psychology, however conceived falls within the spectrum of nature-issues. Animals are not just anatomy and physiology: they are behaviour too; and that includes the human animal. Jung himself, incidentally, is fuent in the logic of constructivism. These chapters are written with two main audiences in view: the Jungian community and the sociological community. Both may be widely conceived, and there are others too who might be interested, say from comparative religion or anthropology. But as regards these two audiences, what things do I want to say to them? For the Jungians, there are three main points. The frst is that there should be engagement with sociology, and specifcally with the classical traditions. Jung is a perceptive observer of modern conditions, but I think it is deceptive to pursue a relationship with modern sociology on that account. I will expand on the reasons why in due course. Also it seems unlikely to give rise to dialogue – you cannot break through the stereotyping of Jungian thought by saying stereotypically Jungian things. The second point is how social structure can act to distribute culture: indeed, in civilized or complex as opposed to primitive societies this is typical. Though maybe some sociological approaches tend to treat it in ad hoc fashion (“sub-cultures”) rather than confronting it. Moreover, this social structure is typically confictual, characterized by systemic inequalities in power and economic position. I do not believe Jung was uncaring about this, but his interest in anthropology was matched by a total disinclination for sociology, and that has led to a tendency of

4

Psyche, Science and Society

over-simplifcation, a vision of unitary or coherent systems of ideas, beliefs and so forth. As a corrective to this, I make use at several points in these essays of Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory of culture, an approach to the more complex sociological situation grounded in the Durkheimian tradition – given that following Progof, there is something of a tradition of Jungian interest in Durkheim (Douglas 1982; Progof 1953; Walker 2018: 67f). The third point is a reassurance that Jungian insight can be communicated to a wider intellectual community: it does not have to retreat into a cult. Indeed I believe that Jung is on stronger ground as a scientist than contemporary Jungians seem to think. I say this primarily with regard to sociology and anthropology; but it seems to be true for biology and psychology too – something I did not expect when I began my researches. For sociologists, again there are three points. The frst is Jungian psychology as a resource. There are many possible aspects to this, given sociology’s methodological heterogeneity and range of concerns. There is certainly the question of a depthpsychology perspective on agency. But there are also questions of beliefs, ideas, symbols and so forth in religion, art, literature and even politics; cultural ambience and consciousness in modernity; sanity and madness. Or again, innate elements in gender psychology (and the critique of the Freudian tradition on incest). There might be further ramifcations, say into ecological or environmental matters. The Jungian resource would establish its own agenda: it would not be mere mechanical substitution of Jung for Freud. The second point concerns Jungian psychology as symptom: why did sociology not consider it before? This question might also be asked in regard to Janet and Adler. Especially one might wonder why Nadel’s extended consideration of Janet did not have impact on British sociology, given the importance of the 1950s in the emergence of sociology in Britain in its modern form (Nadel 1951: 289f). To me, this bespeaks wider, indeed systemic, error. If so, it does not stand alone. I have already pointed to sociology’s incoherent relation to anthropology – social anthropology versus cultural anthropology, confusions over the notions of society and culture, the methodological difculties in dealing with the non-sociocultural levels of reality. There are grounds for speaking of systemic error – if one has the temperament for it. This brings me to the third point: refexive analysis, to identify and discount for one’s own subjective bias. Mary Douglas argues for this on sociological grounds (Douglas 1992). Jung also argues for it, on psychological grounds: the subjective equation. Our preferences in sociological theory are surely infuenced by factors of temperament, and we should acknowledge that. This surely is a better alternative than mutual and destructive critiques – or simply mutual incomprehension. I want now to return to the issues of classical and modern sociological theory. On the face of it, these terms simply refect that fact that modern society – however defned, and leaving aside questions as to its origins – frst appeared in mature form in the 19th century, developing and changing through the 20th and now into the 21st centuries. But the terms as used often connote dissonance rather than

Introduction

5

straightforward continuity; and there are other ways to view the history. For example, one might focus rather on the frst half of the 20th century and the two World Wars as a disruptive episode: military priorities overwhelmed economic ones, the state was massively expanded, the economy was largely reoriented to wantssatisfaction rather than proft, and active participation of the wider population was required for the armed forces, armaments industries and the war economy (and administration) generally. This led to unstoppable demands for social and political reforms and a more inclusive society. For a time; the impact faded from around the early 1980s, and modern society – capitalism if you will – reverted to type. This is to highlight the essential similarity of the early and late stages compared to the middle. I do not insist on it, though it could be that comprehensive environmental crisis will again throw capitalist modernity of course as the two World Wars did. But there is merit in both views. Even so, it must be obvious that we do not know how long modernity will last, or how many stages it will have. Why then this persistent contrast of two stages? I would argue that besides classical sociological theory and modern sociological theory, there is also such a thing as contemporary sociological (or social) theory – the theory of “contemporary society”. This, the notion that modern society has changed, has taken on a new character, has been with us for some considerable time, indeed since not long after World War I. An early form is the theories of mass society that appeared in the 1930s, ranging right across the sociological spectrum (Giner 1976). In fact, much of modern sociological theory has this character, though the terms of the analysis may change (Elliott 2009). Steve Bruce speaks of “the sociologies of zeitgeist” (Bruce 2014: 35, 40f). Something else seems to be going on here. I would hazard that a major factor in this is urban sociology and the city: the relation of urbanism and urbanization to modernity. Striking here is the inability of the sociological tradition either to integrate or to critique the work of the Chicago School. The Ur-text of “contemporary” social theory, I suggest, is Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (Simmel 1964). It is Simmel, among the Continental theorists, who most infuenced the Chicago School, and it was the Chicago School in turn that most mediated Simmel to subsequent sociology, as symbolic interactionism or ethnomethodology. If Simmel’s essay is the Ur-text, the pivotal text surely is Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life” – pivotal in that it is this text that takes us from the urban sociology of the Chicago School to the theory of mass society (Wirth 1964). Wirth argues that besides such specifcally modern factors as capitalism and industry, modern society gets a signifcant component of its character from the city, a thing that is far older. He invokes Weber on the premodern city, but he does not use his arguments as to its signifcance: the thesis of a qualitative change in social interaction and mentality is Simmel’s. The Chicago School and its social ecology approach remains something of a sociological conundrum. An echo maybe of the situation between sociology and anthropology. Modern French social theory is in a diferent case. The French sociological tradition worked primarily by the comparison of modern society with primitive

6

Psyche, Science and Society

society, as opposed to grounding it in a historical account of its emergence. Consonant with this, it is the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who brought Saussurean linguistics into social theory, where it merged seamlessly with the cognitive anthropology/sociology of knowledge of the later Durkheim. The things that followed – structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism – have had very considerable impact on modern sociological theory internationally; but an account of modern sociological theory that puts most weight on this will not reveal the issues that I have just discussed. It will not identify “contemporary” social theory or zeitgeist sociology as something apart from or tangential to modern sociological theory, something that might be challenged. Other questions too may not be asked. Rationalism, idealism and determinism are none of them self-evident truths of sociological theory, and they have no greater afnity for confict perspectives than their opposites. The foregoing refections relate most to the chapter on the City. My starting point for this was Homans’ claim, that Jung’s essay “The Undiscovered Self ” fts “lock and key” with the theory of mass society (Homans 1979: 173–82; Jung 1964). Maybe so; but Homan’s cites Giner for this, without acknowledging that Giner is in fact highly critical of theories of mass society, holding that they are much inferior to the “real sociology” of the classical theorists and the Chicago School (Giner 1976). I agree. I have an uneasy sense that some Jungians reading this may feel that I have shot their fox. But my argument is that dialogue between Jung and the classical sociologies (including the Chicago School) is quite possible and would have greater lasting value – and in any case should be done frst. The refections also bear on the chapters on religion. This chapter arose mainly from a desire to evaluate Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory of culture by actually using it for something (Douglas 1982, 1992). In fact, I found myself referring back to it in a number of chapters: it is a useful device, for orientation at least. I also wanted, as already remarked, to show Jungians another side of Durkheim, one more appropriate to complex societies. But though I had had the idea for some time of using Douglas’ approach on religion, I  did not expect the argument to develop into a treatment of secularization and post-secularization. Jung is highly perceptive in these matters; but his thought seems to me to be aligned most closely with the classical sociology of Max Weber. The other chapters here may be left to speak for themselves. But I might comment on the chapter on ecology. This, the last to be written, was mostly drafted when the Corona pandemic was at its height, and when I did not have access to libraries. Accordingly, it has rather a “blue skies” character – parts of it at least. On refection I have decided to leave it that way. I do not believe that sociology can make the methodological breakthrough it needs to in this feld by playing safe and sticking to what it knows. Besides, I fnd the arguments interesting. Although my concern with Jung’s psychology is primarily with its implications for sociological theory, I do not regard it just as an intellectual tool (it is equally wrong to treat Freud that way). I also fnd Jung’s psychology intuitively attractive at a personal level. Most obvious here is his psychological typology and the four

Introduction

7

psychic functions; but I would go beyond that. A few times in my life I have had a dream that has felt especially signifcant, in which a dog appears. Now I  was never brought up with dogs as a family pet, always cats, and while I do not dislike dogs, I do not understand them or feel easy in their company, and I have never considered getting a dog myself. Yet the dog in these dreams always features as a powerful symbol of friendship and loyalty. That of course is in line with our culture’s image of the dog. But why would it be the cultural image rather than my own personal experience that enters my dreams? Again, consider the ethology of the human–canine relation. Domesticated animals such as the dog are not just wild animals that have been tamed. They are born with an innate predisposition to accept human contact, even to form intimate relationships, according to species. And it is a mutualistic relationship. If there is a human archetype in the dog psyche, why would there not be a dog archetype in the human psyche? Is not that how it works? Of course, this is not proof – it is difcult to see what would constitute proof for a determined sceptic. But it is persuasive grounds in my own experience for taking the Jungian hypothesis seriously. Critical rejection of Jung’s psychology is certainly possible, but an uncritical rejection of any psychology since John Locke is more difcult to justify.

Bibliography Bruce, Steve (2014) “What Sort of Social Theory Would Beneft the Sociology of Religion?”, in McKinnon, Andrew and Trzebiatowska, Marta (eds.) Sociological Theory and the Question of Religion. London and New York: Routledge (original publication Abingdon & New York: Ashgate Publishing), pp33–48. Diamond, Stanley (1981) “Paul Radin”, in Silverman, Sydel (ed.) Totems and Teachers. New York: University of Columbia Press, pp67–97. Douglas, Mary (1982) “Cultural Bias”, in Douglas, Mary In the Active Voice. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp183–254. (1992) “A  Credible Biosphere”, in Douglas, Mary Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London and New York: Routledge, pp255–70. Elliott, Anthony (2009) Contemporary Social Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Fromm, Erich (1992) The Revision of Psychoanalysis. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press. Giner, Salvador (1976) Mass Society. London: Martin Robertson. Homans, Peter (1979) Jung in Context. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Jung, C.G. (1964) “The Undiscovered Self ”, in Jung, C.G. Civilization in Transition (CW10). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp245–305. Lowie, Robert (1936) Primitive Religion. London: George Routledge and Sons. Nadel, Siegfried (1951) Foundations of Social Anthropology. London: Cohen and West Ltd. Progof, Ira (1953) Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Meaning. London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul. Radin, Paul (1957) Primitive Religion (new ed.). New York: Dover. (Original 1937) Samuels, Andrew (1985) Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Simmel, Georg (1964) “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in Wolf, Kurt (ed.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. London: Collier-Macmillan, pp409–24. (1977) The Problems of the Philosophy of History (trans. Guy Oakes). New York: Free Press.

8

Psyche, Science and Society

Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991) “1968, Revolution in the World System”, in Wallerstein, Immanuel Geopolitics and Geoculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp65–83. (2004) World System Analysis: An Introduction. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Walker, Gavin (2001) “Society and Culture in Sociological and Anthropological Tradition”, History of the Human Sciences 14:3, pp30–55. (2005) “Sociological Theory and the Natural Environment”, History of the Human Sciences 18:1, pp77–106. (2018) Jung and Sociological Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Wirth, Louis (1964) “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, in Wirth, Louis On Cities and Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp60–83.

1 JUNG AND RACE

Introduction Carl Jung has been accused of holding racist and anti-Semitic attitudes, and there are indeed remarks to be found in his writings that lend support to such accusations. My purpose in this chapter is to examine the part race plays in Jung’s thought, and in what terms – what conceptions of race he explicitly or implicitly held to. How far do the remarks point to systemic racism, how far are they incidental? I do this frst by an analysis of race theory, as it appears in the light of modern sociological and anthropological understanding. Race theories come in diferent kinds. I then proceed to examine various aspects of Jung’s thought, to see how they might relate to various race conceptions and theses. Before entering into this, one should note that Jung’s writings are not all of a kind. There is a spectrum, from formally scientifc and scholarly work to popular presentations, reminiscences and casual refections that are basically journalism, not to mention interviews and verbatim remarks. Not all of this should be given equal weight – or even taken into account, as Jung himself protests (Hannah 1976: 260). Again, there is change and development in Jung’s views over the course of a long career. One should also bear in mind Jung’s views on psychology as epistemology. Knowledge comes through the unconscious as well as consciousness, and all the psychological functions play their part: sensation, thinking, feeling and intuition. Forming a judgement is an organic process which comes in its own time: it cannot be forced. Not all of Jung’s statements refect considered judgements: he often suspends judgement, or lets intuition have free rein; and he makes a point of looking at the other side of the question. It is never easy to pin down Jung’s values or attitudes (Walker 2018: 196f).

DOI:10.4324/9780429456268-2

10

Psyche, Science and Society

Jung also raises the epistemological issue of the “personal equation”: the bias that we unavoidably bring to our enquiries through our own individual psychology. This might be a question of extraversion or introversion, of male or female gender – or of cultural background, race, ethnicity and nation. Jung’s earliest comments on Jewish and German psychology arose from this, contextualized with his comments on extraversion and introversion and relating directly to his break with Freud and Adler (Jung 1964e: 12–14). Jung has been accused of anti-Semitism, and of actual complicity with the Third Reich. So far as possible I want to leave those accusations to another chapter, and to focus here on race. However, the issues cannot be wholly separated. The frst need, then, is to consider race theory.

Race theories What things do we want to talk about when we talk about race? It should go without saying that in all sociological and anthropological approaches, race theory is a problem not a resource. That is, “race” is not biology, it is culture projected onto biology. That has been universally accepted since the end of World War II. Even so, the range is wider than is sometimes assumed. “Race” is used well into the 19th century as an undefned common-sense term, in regard to white men’s dealings with each other within Western countries, for example in the novels of Scott and Kingsley (Banton 1977 esp. chs 2 and 4). Thus, the Norman race are usurpers who deprived the Saxon race of their rights and freedoms, while the Irish are a Celtic race unft to govern their own afairs. This has to be set beside the more familiar usage – which indeed has its roots in Enlightenment philosophy, though we associate it more with biology – in regard to the exotic peoples encountered around the world in the course of exploration, trade, empire and colonization (Banton 1977, 1998). But this too takes diferent forms in diferent locations (Kuklick 2008; Barth et al. 2005). In America, the tone is set by the white settlement of the new continent. The biggest and most enduring issue has been the forced immigration of black African slaves, and its aftermath following the Civil War. But there are other concerns: Native Americans, Hispanics, immigration from the Far East and from Southern and Eastern Europe. In Britain the tone is set by the overseas empire, and its aftermath in immigration from the New Commonwealth, especially the Indian sub-continent and the West Indies. To an extent, it has been similar in France and Holland. In all of the foregoing cases, “race” has had obvious physical markers, above all skin colour. But in Central Europe, and to an extent in Europe generally, race has meant something quite diferent: Aryan, Semitic and Altaic (or Mongolian). These are linguistic or philological, not biological, categories, though they have led to enquiries in archaeology and prehistory seeking to identify the peoples who spoke those languages, and even to establish their physical characteristics. Taking all this together, we can defne race theory as the attempt to establish links between biology and culture such as would raise a moral hierarchy, so that

Jung and race

11

some races are superior and others inferior in such regards as intelligence, honesty, energy, rationality and courage – generally, their ability to create or absorb culture. However, there is a range of ways in which this could be argued, and the lines of causation adduced between biology and culture could be quite various. I will take up the biological side frst. The 19th century is the great century for the development of biological theory, as Biblical time gives way to geological time, and the discovery of extinct species makes it clear that the living world has been subject to change (Bowler 1984; see also Boakes 1984). But there is more to it than evolution, and more to evolution than Lamarck and Darwin. The frst opposition is rather between Lamarck and Cuvier. Cuvier was not an evolutionist: he held that there had been extinctions, and successive acts of creation, but the species was a fxed type and could not change. Lamarck held that species could change: parents could acquire new characteristics and pass them to their ofspring. It is Cuvier’s idea of the fxed species that is taken up in the theory of natural selection: the problem then is how the type can present an array for nature to select from. Darwin and Wallace argued for natural selection, but they also held initially to Lamarckian inheritance. As they turned to the question of human origins, however, diferences opened up between them (Boakes 1984: 2–8; Bowler 1984 passim esp. pp193–5, 216–24, 282–8; Fichman 1981 esp. ch 4). A factor in this was the demonstration by the physicist William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) that the Earth’s age was far less than the geologists averred; this left insufcient time for natural selection to operate. (Thomson based his argument on thermodynamics: radioactive decay was not then known.) Darwin reacted by putting greater weight on Lamarckian inheritance, and also by introducing the principle of sexual selection (Darwin 1874). He attributed overt race diferences to this, as a comparatively recent development. Even so, he argued for an evolutionary hierarchy between (or embracing) the races, based on natural selection and Lamarckian inheritance. Wallace (2002 esp. pp31f, 169f) held more closely to natural selection – it was he who accepted Weismann’s arguments against Lamarckism. Again, where Darwin emphasized sexual competition and selection, Wallace emphasized environmental adaptedness. He held then that all the human races stood on the same evolutionary level. The advent of a large brain and the ability to control the environment exempted humankind from natural selection. It was cultural evolution rather than biological evolution that defned human afairs – Wallace was far more aware than Darwin of this distinction. (He also made a far more favourable assessment than Darwin of the uncivilized peoples they had each encountered.) Wallace also argued that the human large brain had appeared before there was biological need for it: he attributed this to supernatural intervention (later he would take up spiritualism). In general evolutionary theory, Weisman’s separation of genotype and phenotype marks a major step forward: this excluded Lamarckian evolution altogether, and paved the way for the rediscovery of Mendel’s genetics, at the beginning of the 20th century. Radioactive decay was discovered at around the same time, and calculations of Earth’s age came back into line with geological opinion. Even so, it

12

Psyche, Science and Society

is not until the late 1920s that natural selection and Mendelian genetics are fnally brought together to form the new orthodoxy (Bowler 1984 ch 11). What can we take from all this? The frst point is, it is Cuvier’s idea of the fxed species type that ultimately underlies infexible racial hierarchies. Lamarckian inheritance would rather permit that the races might change their relative positions by their own eforts. Following this, however, it must be protested that it is wrong to forget Wallace, and to make an ikon of Darwin (there will be more to say on this later). It is not helpful to project the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1920s/1930s back into the 19th century. And Darwin does not aford a critique of race theory. But most importantly, what emerges is that even where biology is the lead factor in race theory, it can still take diferent forms, according as whether the weight is on evolution or on biogeography (Glick 2008). For the former, the argument is straightforward enough: the human races are successive stages in evolution, and some are more evolved – more human – than others. Indeed, they might have evolved from diferent apes (polygeneticism), as Haeckel for example argued. The biogeographical approach rather argues that there are diferent races in diferent regions – whether through evolution or creation. Cuvier identifed three human races, with the European superior to the Mongolian and the Ethiopian – not the origin of polygeneticism, but it gave the idea scientifc credibility (Banton 1998: 44f). Agassiz, taking Cuvier’s ideas to America, argued that the various races were created as specially adapted to their environments; he still adduced a hierarchy among them. But the focus might not be on racial hierarchies: taking each race as supreme in its own region, one could still raise questions as to interbreeding, when the races encounter each other (Glick 2008 esp. pp235f). These concerns might be for the physical as well as the moral consequences: the hybrid might be held to exhibit a poor constitution or low fertility. Or again, the hybrid might be more physically robust. Equally the moral consequences of hybridism might be harmful or benign; and indeed the physical and moral consequences might run in opposite directions. But the classic race theory points to malign consequences: the hybrid inherits the vices of both parent races and the virtues of neither. In the foregoing, the lines of (putative) causation run from biology to culture. But they can run the other way. Starting from the classifcations of languages as Aryan, Semitic and Mongolian, it seems reasonable to ask who were the people who spoke these languages, and what is their history? And then to use archaeology to try to identify physical – “anthropological” – types for them. The conception here rather goes back to Cuvier, who argued that the diferent races are diferent physical types that do not change, and that can be identifed by such characteristics as shape of skull. This was developed later in the century as craniology, as measured by the cranial index and identifcation of brachiocephalic and dolichocephalic types; and the approach could be applied to living populations to see what race they belonged to (Blankaert; Glick 2008; Stocking 1987 ch 2). For a time, this became a central activity in physical anthropology. Typically, the argument identifed the Aryans as a conquering race which had played the crucial role in the development of civilization, and rightly ruled over the others.

Jung and race

13

This is to infer biology from a cultural superstructure – rather than inferring culture from a biological platform. But the argument from culture to biology could also be made in a quite diferent way. It could be argued that a given people had developed cultural practices in sex and reproduction which had made for the selection of a certain physical – and psychological – “anthropological” type. By this argument, the biology is a cultural artefact – though no less real for that. Sombart argued this in relation to the Jews, and it was later taken up as an element of Nazi anti-Semitic polemic (Sombart 1982: 281f). (Conversely, the Roma were charged with failing to preserve their Aryan purity, and so becoming a mixed race degenerate people [Lewy 1999].) Martin Heidegger likewise held that it was the Jews who had invented this practice with the laws of Moses (Sombart pointed rather to Ezra), and that the Nuremberg laws were simply the German race belatedly paying the Jews back in their own coin (Trawny 2014). I have commented earlier that race has meant diferent things in diferent countries and regions of the world. It is another of the ironies of the history that in the crucial 19th century, it was in America, Britain and France that race theories were most prominent, while in Germany, they were rather looked at askance (Bunzl 1996; Massin 1996; Penny 2008). This applies not only in regard to the biology-led approaches; Gobinau the theorist of Aryanism was French, and his ideas initially received little notice in Germany. Chamberlain was English, though he later emigrated to Germany; his Origins of the Nineteenth Century did not appear until 1899 (Massin 1996: 80f; on Gobinau, Chamberlain, see Poliakov 1974: 233–8, 313–20). The dominant fgures were Virchow in physical anthropology, and in ethnology, Bastian. Virchow held to Lamarckian evolutionism in preference to Darwinian, and rejected outright Darwin’s theory of human descent from the apes (on secular, not religious, grounds). He was also sceptical of craniology: it did not reveal fxed types corresponding to distinct races, and he did not believe that it was possible to fnd biological races corresponding to the cultural/linguistic categories. He also carried out anthropometric research showing that in contemporary Germany, the races were mixed, and it was impossible to fnd physical types corresponding to German or Jew. Bastian argued for the psychic unity of humankind, and a multiple origin of culture. There were certain elementary ideas that were common to all humanity, though they might take diferent forms in diferent cultures; the diferent environmental conditions in diferent geographical regions were the main factor in this. There was a sequence of stages in cultural evolution, however; the diferent peoples had attained to diferent levels. Of course, there were dissenting voices, such as Haeckel, and their time came in the 1900s, when Virchow and Bastian died. But the key event is the emigration of Franz Boas from Germany to America in 1887, for Boas brought the approaches of Virchow and Bastian into American anthropology (Bunzl 1996; Silverman 2005: 258f). Boas rejected claims as to innate race diferences; rather he came to argue that a distinct American physical type was emerging among immigrant stock from various origins, in response to environmental conditions. More importantly, he held that physical diferences between the races had no psychological consequences, all

14

Psyche, Science and Society

races had an equal potential for culture, and it was culture alone that made peoples diferent. In short, “race” as a societal category was not biology, it was culture. This view became the dominant orthodoxy of anthropology, and in due course of sociology also: it is the origin of the modern view (including the orientation announced at the outset of this discussion, that race theory is a problem not a resource). Race classifcations, then, are not biology; they are society using evident biological features as cultural markers, just as it might use diferences in language, clothing, body decoration or other customs (Banton 1977 ch 8; cf. Weber 1978 Part 2 chs v, ix esp. pp921f, 932f). In short, race is simply another case of ethnicity. But ethnicity has two faces. An ethnic identity may either be ascribed to you by others, or something that you yourself assert. The former case takes us to race prejudice and discrimination, social disprivilege. It is on this that sociology and anthropology have traditionally focused. The latter case, asserted identity, more typical relates to social privilege. Upper strata often claim to be ethnically distinct from the common people around them, and may invoke some legendary act of conquest in the past, for example the Normans in England (Poliakov 1974 Part 2 chs 1–6; cf. Smith 1986). This has been refected in conquest theories of the state, though often there is no historical evidence for conquest, and in any case the aftermath of conquest can take various forms (Weber 1976: 69). But in general this dimension has received much less attention, or even acknowledgement, in sociology or anthropology. (It is quite common for these privileged status groups to orient their marriage practices to the perpetuation of a set physical type, incidentally. Especially in terms of skin colour or hair colour. It is treated much like animal breeding.) Each ethnic group seeks to assert its own meaning or value, and to resist the meanings others ascribe to it. There can be negotiated compromises here, as where an ethnic group accepts an inferior status in the present material world, while asserting a special value in the eyes of God or in the time to come, and so forth. But this is an arena of confict, not a consensual “value-order”. Weber points all this out in his analysis of status stratifcation, for ethnic identity is a typical aspect, even a characteristic form, of status stratifcation (Weber 1978: 387f, 933f). But the immediate sociological context for all this is the political struggles of empire and nationalism – primarily continental empires such as Habsburg Austro-Hungary or Czarist Russia, not overseas empires. This is a topic sociology was long reluctant to recognize: only in the 1980s did this begin to change (Arnason 2006 esp. pp50f). I have referred to these matters and their meaning elsewhere (Walker 2018: 210– 12; above pp66f, 75f). But it does relate back to the issues with which I opened this discussion: Norman, Saxon and Celt in 19th-century English historical novels. These things too are part of the “talk on race”.

Jung and race Race, biology and culture Where then does Jung stand in relation to all this? The frst point is that Jung is a German-speaking Central European, studying medicine at a Swiss university at the

Jung and race

A

15

B C D

E F G H

A = Individuals B = Families C = Clans D = Nations E = Large Group (European man, for example) F = Primate Ancestors G = Animal Ancestors in general H = “Central Fire” FIGURE 1.1

Geology of the psyche

Source: Jung 1990 diagram 10, p133. Copyright (1990). From Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar given in 1925 by C.G. Jung, edited by C.G. Jung and William McGuire. Reproduced with permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.

close of the 19th century, and developing a strong interest in anthropology then or soon after. He will presumably have been well-grounded across the range of the foregoing (real or putative) science. Elements of it appear in various remarks about race scattered in his writings. However, he never announces or expounds any particular theory on race. In fact, Jung does not speak of race very often, or say much about it – this should always be borne in mind when discussing Jung and race. There is a diagram that is sometimes discussed in this context (see esp. Lewin 2009: 113–9). It does not appear anywhere in the Collected Works, though Jacobi puts a slightly amended version into her introduction to Jungian psychology (Jacobi 1968: 50). Its original location is in the Seminars: the introductory course in analytical psychology conducted in English in 1925, where it forms a brief excursus towards the end of the 16th (and fnal) session (Jung 1990: 133f). That session is concerned with the structure of the psyche: the discussion is developed through four clear and confdent diagrams. That done, Jung says that he has often been asked about the “geology” of the psyche, and that he has tried to show this through

16

Psyche, Science and Society

a rough diagram. He then presents the diagram, together with some remarks explaining its diferent levels. The whole thing, diagram, labels and text, takes up just over a page. He then turns to other matters (a clarifcation of his methodological position of moderate constructivism). There is no follow-up. Looking at the diagram, the term “race” nowhere occurs. It might be placed on levels D and E: nations, and large groups of nations such as European man. But Jung does not explain how these levels are constituted or how they relate to each other. Moreover, there is no special focus on these levels as opposed to the others. Incidentally, the metaphor is geological not evolutionary. Jung does have comments elsewhere that apparently refer to this diagram (Jung 1966: 147f, 152 n8, cf. 275). But he also has another fgure, the house with its diferent foors and cellars representing the diferent eras: it is this that he refers to in the essay “Mind and Earth” just two years later (Jung 1964b: 31f). In Memories, Dreams, Refections, he says that it came to him frst in a dream in 1909 (Jung 1963: 155f). The diagram may nonetheless give us some insight into his thinking. However this may be, it is possible to identify or infer some of Jung’s initial commitments or predispositions (cf. Shamdasani 2003 Part 3 passim). Evolutionary theory was then, and remained well into the 20th century, a complex and contested feld (Bowler 1984 chs 7–10). Evolution itself was generally accepted; survival of the fttest less so. Many attempted to combine Darwinism with neo Lamarckism and other approaches: Haeckel for example. But while Jung accepted Haeckel’s biogenetic law (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), he did not follow Haeckel’s polygenetic and hierarchical treatment of human origins. Rather he accepted the more conventional “Darwinian” monogenetic view: the human race has a single origin, with racial diferentiation coming after its dispersion across the world (Jung 1966: 147f, 152 n8, cf. 275). But then there is the question of Darwin and Wallace (Boakes 1984: 2–8; Bowler 1984 passim esp. pp193–5, 216–24, 282–88; Fichman 1981 esp. ch4; Wallace 2002). I referred to this earlier, and will return to it again. Their relationship is a paradoxical one: Wallace made himself Darwin’s advocate, never his rival, and was in some ways more Darwinian than Darwin himself, for example accepting Weismann’s refutation of Lamarckian inheritance when Darwin was increasingly returning to it. As regards race, Wallace argued that all the human races were on the same evolutionary level in biological terms: the advent of culture had exempted humanity from natural selection, and it was cultural evolution that now separated them. Although he argued strongly for natural selection, he also held that it had its limits. Defnitive human characteristics such as the large brain had appeared before there was a biological need for them, and a supernatural factor must be allowed for to account for this. I am more concerned here to establish intellectual ambience than “infuences” as such. The disagreement between Darwin and Wallace on human origins has, I think, been something of a lost episode in the history of evolutionary thought, and the commonly heard charge that Jung was a Lamarckist, at least in his earlier thinking, does not appear to have considered Wallace. But it was Wallace’s rather

Jung and race

17

than Darwin’s approach that was taken forward by evolutionary psychologists such as Conway Lloyd Morgan and James Mark Baldwin, and Jung does cite these authors (Boakes 1984 ch2; Plotkin 2004: 40f, ch 5; Hogenson 2001; Jung on Morgan 1960b: 131, 1960d: 201n; on Baldwin, 1967: 14f, 1971: 308, 433f). Wallace’s reputation in scientifc circles was compromised when he became interested in spiritualism, but that would hardly have fazed Jung (Jung 1960e: 302). All this aside, Jung, as one might expect of a German-speaking Central European, seems to have viewed race largely in terms of the linguistic categories, Aryan, Semitic and Mongolian (also Hamitic: Jung was interested in the African as opposed to Middle Eastern origins of ancient Egyptian civilization) (Jung 1963: 251, 256, 1966: 149n8). He shows less interest in the biology-led race-theories. Nor indeed is he impressed with craniology or anthropometry: he appears rather to follow Virchow in scepticism as to whether distinct physical types corresponding to these linguistic/cultural races can be found. Rather we fnd him citing Boas’ ideas, pointing to the emergence of a common physical type in America subsequent to immigration – though he notes that other researchers have not confrmed this (Jung 1964b: 45, 1964c: 503). It seems to me the most reasonable view, then, that Jung’s thinking on race lies primarily in the German tradition of Virchow and Bastian, the same location as Boas himself (Bunzl 1996; Massin 1996; Gingrich 2005 esp. ch 2). The basic conception of this tradition is that humankind has a single origin, and an original psychic unity. Geographical determinants have brought subsequent racial diferentiation in terms of physical characteristics such as skin colour or shape of eye. They have also made for diferent trajectories of cultural development. But the two processes are essentially unrelated. The tradition of Wallace, Morgan and Baldwin would mark a convergence with this. At any rate, Jung’s position seems to be on these lines; and his concerns are mainly with the latter, cultural, processes.

Cultural evolution and biogeography One might almost say, then, that Jung is not interested in race as biology, but only as culture. This is made more complicated by the notion of the archetypes and the collective unconscious, for this notion mediates, forms a bridge, between biology and culture, which must raise questions as to biological or cultural transmission. Even so, one can say that so far as there is a biological dimension to Jung’ race concerns, this is in terms of biogeography rather than of evolution. The conception is of all humankind at a single level of evolution, and the various races adapted biologically and culturally to their regional environments, where they will follow their own cultural trajectories. Jung develops his approach to these matters against a backdrop of the ethnological theories of evolutionism and difusionism, which were current from mid-19th century up to World War II (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001 esp. ch 2). Evolutionism proposes the psychic unity of humankind and the multiple origins of culture. Humans everywhere have the same mentality, and will come up with similar

18

Psyche, Science and Society

ideas, technologies and so forth. Their diferent geographical conditions will be a big conditioning factor in this. Culture then develops through a sequence of stages; diferent peoples will achieve diferent stages, with the highest stage being found in the modern West. Exponents of this approach included Bastian, Tyler and indeed most of the Victorian British anthropologists. Difusionism by contrast argues that culture beyond its most basic levels is only developed by a few peoples of genius, and is transmitted by them to the others around them. In an extreme form (favoured by Rivers among others, and followed incidentally by Layard), all higher culture is attributed to a single civilization – in their case, Ancient Egypt. Either theory can be adapted to ft with a racial ideology, but clearly the difusionist theory has a greater afnity for it – as it has with conquest theories of the state. Linguistics-led race theories too have their afnities here – notably Aryanism. As Radin pointed out long ago, the evolutionist approach is a purely biological (or quasi-biological) theory: it is history-blind. The difusionist approach at least acknowledges the reality of migrations; nonetheless, it has a penchant for speculative histories, and it needs to specify the mechanisms of cultural transmission (Radin 1929). Jung very much takes the evolutionist side. He explicitly afrms the psychic unity of humankind: Bastian’s universal “elementary ideas”, realized in diferent populations as “folk ideas”, are repeated in his own conception of archetypal forms and archetypal images. (Jung later cites Bastian as forerunner [Jung 1970: 43, 79, 151].) And he takes a geographical determinist view, derived perhaps ultimately from Waitz: the various races each develop distinct cultures in their own regions. These cultures (in Jung’s treatment) will evolve organically in their own rhythm and their own time – and should be left alone to do so. Jung is aware of the diffusionist thesis; and he is strongly aware of the migrations of European peoples that lie beneath the linguistic race categories. Indeed, when he speaks of human groups diferentiating into nations, clans and so on, it is surely this history that he mainly has in mind. But he does not celebrate it – and as noted earlier, he does not identify a “race” level in his diagram of the “geology” of the psyche. It is rather the problems arising from migration and culture contact that will concern him. Jung proposes a co-evolution of psyche and culture, from hominid and indeed animal origins to its present condition. He sees this in terms of increasing diferentiation in the psyche: the emergence of consciousness, the separating out of the four psychic functions and so on. Jung is much taken with Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas here: “prelogical mentality” and especially “participation mystique”. If at frst he naively took this as an accurate account of contemporary primitives, his dealings with American anthropologists and his own ventures in New Mexico and East Africa during the 1920s brought him to moderate his views, and to identify it rather as an early stage in human evolution, an archaic or primordial condition (Jung 1960a: 104, 1964a). The mentality of contemporary primitives is closer to our own. And vice versa, of course: it is our modern mentality that Jung is concerned with. His view of the “primitive” mentality is that underneath we are still primitive, and would do well to realize it. (Stated more fully, he holds that contemporary

Jung and race

19

primitives live too close to their unconscious; modern Westerners have lost touch with the unconscious altogether; while the Oriental civilizations such as India or China have got the balance about right. Though there are other issues, to be discussed later.) For all that Jung utilizes Lévy-Bruhl’s conceptions, there are important diferences between them. As already indicated, Jung is interested in primitive mentality for its bearing on our modern mentality rather than for its own sake, and his view of it is more favourable than Lévy-Bruhl’s (e.g. Jung 1960e). But the real point is the converse of this. Lévy-Bruhl is a positivist: he takes an uncritical view of modern Western rationality, as epitomised in philosophy and science. He has a correspondingly clear and deprecatory view of the primitive mentality’s inadequacies and limitations. Jung’s philosophical orientation is rather to Kant and Schopenhauer: his view of rationality is critical. It too is a limited and inadequate thing; and the primitive mentality correspondingly retains a certain validity. A key text in the development of Jung’s argument is “Mind and Earth” (Jung 1964b; cf. Jung 1960f). Here Jung argues that the psyche has two aspects, one oriented to the spirit, the other to material existence. It is the latter he is concerned with here. This is to see the psyche as “a system of adaptation determined by the conditions of an earthly environment” (Jung 1964b: 29). The question is, then, what are the basic archetypes that are involved in this? Jung argues that primitives live in a participation mystique with their environments, projecting their psyches onto its features to create (as I would put it) a symbol-pregnant or dreamlandscape. He also invokes the biogenetic law: childhood recapitulates the childhood of the species. Here too, the child starts in a participation mystique with its parents; the development of a continuous and separate consciousness is gradual, and only completed at puberty. Jung then identifes the frst and most fundamental archetype as the mother. This starts as an all-providing all-encompassing Mother goddess. But as the child develops, this comes down to the actual personal mother, and the various aspects of Nature that were merged in her now emerge in their own right. The second archetype is the father; and the same considerations apply. It is interesting that Jung wrote his essay “Woman in Europe” at the same time as this, and there is interplay between the arguments (Jung 1964j). Jung does hold that there are innate diferences between man and woman, but he does not equate woman with Nature, man with culture or society. Rather, Nature has both female (the land, quiescent and fruitful) and male (rivers, storms, lightning) aspects, and society has both female (family, social relations) and male (law, the state) sectors. At puberty, the participation mystique of child with parent ends, consciousness and participation in society begin, and, as compensatory process, a new participation mystique begins with the opposite sex, mediated by new archetypes, the anima in man and animus in woman. Here again Jung does not argue that consciousness is male and the unconscious female. Rather both sexes have their consciousnesses, and each carries the unconscious for the other. Moreover, the whole of this occurs within culture – in humankind, psyche and culture imply or even refect each other.

20

Psyche, Science and Society

The point should be repeated here that Jung is proposing a mystical participation with the natural world. The foregoing are among the archetypes that are projected onto it, how the natural world is experienced and dealt with. At the same time, it is how both ones’ human biology and ones’ psyche are experienced and dealt with. At this primordial stage of evolution these things are not diferentiated. Jung then lends contrast to all this by turning to a consideration of migration: “Imagine a large section of some European nation transplanted to a strange soil and another climate” (Jung 1964b: 45f; cf. Jung 1964c). The greatest modern example is America: “The greatest experiment in the transportation of a race in modern times was the colonization of the North American continent by a predominantly Germanic population.” Jung claims that physical and psychic changes soon follow, as soon as the second generation – he cites Boas for the physical changes, though noting that other researchers have not confrmed his fndings (Jung 1964b: 45, 1964c: 503; cf. Darwin 1874: 196). These physical changes seem to create a single Yankee type regardless of climatic variation. But it is more the behaviour that Jung points to: the language, gestures, movements of the body and mentality. “I know the mother-nations of North America pretty well, but I would be completely at a loss to explain, if I relied solely on the theory of heredity, how the Americans descended from them acquired their striking peculiarities” (Jung 1964c: 507). One might attribute some elements of this to the old pioneer farmer colonist character. But taking the whole together, it seems rather to refect a process of psychic blending. The American is “a European with Negro behaviour and an Indian soul” (Jung 1964b: 49). There is no question of interbreeding here: it a psychic process. The “Negro” element shows in such things as laughter, gait, dance, music, volubility and lack of privacy. It is all on the surface, and there is to a degree a reciprocal infuence, of the white on the Negro. The Indian infuence is deeper, and is purely one-way. It is revealed in hero-motifs that select Indian fgures, in sport and athletics, their dedication and endurance of hardship, and in the shamanistic character of American religion: spiritualism, Christian science. It also shows in physiognomy: the physical changes Jung (and Boas) speak of seem to relate to America, not to Africa. How is one to evaluate these arguments? Taking the account of the primordial condition frst, there are two obvious objections. First is the use of the biogenetic law, childhood recapitulating the evolution of the species. But there were others, for example, Kofka, who also did this; and indeed it remained a central plank of Piaget’s thinking; and even though the biological “law” is chimeral, it could still be a valid conception for psychology (Ash 247–52; Rotman 126–30; for a modern view see Foster 2002: 381f esp. 386f). Second is the lack of comparative anthropology, the undiferentiated vision of the primitive as all one. This was characteristic of the evolutionist-comparative “armchair” anthropology of the pre-feldwork era – which Freudians and Jungians alike drew on uncritically (Radin 1929 esp. pp22, 24f, 28; Evans-Pritchard 1965 passim). Even so, Jung’s concern is with the primordial rather than the primitive: indeed as with Piaget and others, this is evolutionary psychology rather than sociological evolutionism. My own comment, however,

Jung and race

21

would be that this is an ethological or ecological thesis, rather than a sociological or anthropological one. It is deliberately one-sided, explicitly oriented to adaptation to the earthly environment. Its presupposition is that an animal species’ instinctive behaviour evolves with and adapts constructively to its environment. In the human case, the element of construction becomes particularly strong. This is if you will an essay on what the early Marx calls our species-being (Marx 1978a esp. pp70f, cf. 83). Radin suggested that this was something that psychoanalysis could bring to anthropology, penetrating the difculties of human plasticity and cultural variation; and that it was Jung’s approach that seemed most likely to do this (Radin 1933: 267; cf. Diamond 1981: 73f). Seeing it in this light, I would be inclined to keep an open mind about it. At any rate, I take the matter up again in a later chapter.1 As to the America thesis, this is more difcult. Jung does not make any attempt to explain how it could be happening. He simply presents it as a set of observations.2 The question then is whether others would see the same things. But again it seems to me to be an ethological or ecological thesis, in principle at least – Jung does have other similar comments, for example on the visible diferences between Jews from diferent countries (Jung 1964b: 45). And I am reminded here of the immigrant-host theory of race relations, with its four stages: competition, confict, accommodation and assimilation (Banton 1977: 101–11, 1998: 102–9; Park 1950). (This theory is more fexible in its original form than in some later versions and criticisms, but that must wait to a later chapter [vide Athens 2013].) Jung’s theory intriguingly suggests that at the level of culture and psyche, assimilation has an unconscious and reverse undercurrent – “the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil” is to be assimilated (Jung 1964b: 49). Jung’s propositions have other resonances with sociological and anthropological theories. The notion of the psyche having two aspects, one oriented to the spirit, the other to material existence, is a commonplace of neoKantian approaches throughout sociology and cultural anthropology. In the latter, it may be used to ground theories of culture change (social change), change coming from the material side – technology, environmental change, population increase – and continuity from the ideal, the values system. Though in the former, for example Weber, where there is a denser texture of evidence with a strong textual component, change might be held to originate on either the material or the ideal side. Again, Weber makes some remarks that relate to migration in (pre)history: the terms of the appropriation of the soil will have wider resonances, whether it is seen as the place of the woman’s work, or as “spear land”, seized or defended in war (Weber 1981: 26, 41f, 44). The former might make for an economic character for the culture, with matrilineal kinship and a stronger place for women in society, while the latter would make for a military character and for patriarchy. (These remarks were provisional: Weber was critical of race and migration theories, and of conquest theories of the state [Weber 1976: 69].) Incidentally Weber’s considerations on this extend to Old Testament history: the Jews’ conquest of the Holy Land,

22

Psyche, Science and Society

and subsequent conficts with the native peoples and their agricultural goddesses. Recent Jungian feminists too have shown awareness of this (Zabriskie 1990). Jung, however, puts his own spin on it. His concern is with the balance – or lack of it – between spiritual and material factors in diferent cultures. Chthonic peoples will show greater integration and balance between earth and spirit – though this can go too far. Migratory peoples are liable to become too exclusively oriented to the spirit, and reckless of their relation to the earth: I believe that the spirit is a dangerous thing and I do not believe in its paramountcy. I believe only in the Word become fesh, in the spirit-flled body, where yang and yin are welded into a living form. The danger inherent in the spirit is that it will uproot man, bear him away from the earth and inspire him to Icarian fights, only to let him plunge into the bottomless sea. The chthonic man is rightly afraid of this and instinctively defends himself against it, but in the most unpleasant way – by his “resentment”. Conversely, the man of the spirit fears and loathes the prison of the earth. It is, at bottom, the same kind of prejudice which the intuitive type has in regard to the sensation type: he confuses the latter with his own inferior sensation function. Naturally the sensation type has the same prejudice against the intuitive. When the two clash, both are aggrieved, because they feel that their most essential values have been misunderstood. The “other” in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge. (Jung 1964h: 485f) Jung makes these comments apropos the Swiss in relation to other Europeans. He also comments, apropos India, on the European migrations of the early Middle Ages, as something not yet ended that still informs our restless and ungrounded character (Jung 1964d: 524). Of course, he had earlier made similar comments in relation to the Jews – as possessing a dual culture, being more domesticated but less chthonic than the Germans (Jung 1964e: 12–14). He also says that Jewish culture runs continuous from the ancient world, whereas the German culture was disrupted, forced from barbarian to civilized in mediaeval times by the Catholic Church. Indian civilization by contrast is both chthonic and continuous with its long history (Jung 1958: 46f, 1964i: 527f). I doubt whether Jung is attempting a consistent typological thesis here – but it surely suggests a limited interest in the Jews. It is the Germans, or North Europeans, the makers, exponents and victims of modern civilization, that are his concern. I will return to this. Jung’s concerns, then, are not simply typological. They are also dynamic – and clinical. The evolution from the primitive mentality, increasing diferentiation and the growth of consciousness, has an organic rhythm. Disrupting this will have consequences. Disruption might come from migration, whether voluntary or forced; or it may come from interference by another culture at a higher level. I have already referred to this in regard to the mediaeval disruption of the German psyche: Jung

Jung and race

23

holds that this was decisive for the character of Western modernity. Jung also comments on it repeatedly in regard to European colonization and empire and its impact on native cultures: indeed he has a considerable polemic over this, notably apropos his meetings with the Pueblo Indian Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake) (Jung 1964f esp. pp89f; 1963: 232f esp. 233f). One should always remember that Jung is a critic of modern Western society – not least “the Aryan bird of prey with his insatiable lust to lord it in every land, even those that concern him not at all”. For the purposes of this chapter, the question is not whether this is valid science, but whether it is racist science. This needs to be considered at two levels, communication and content. First as communication: so far as the America thesis is concerned at least, Jung is telling a predominantly white audience that they are not as white as they think they are, that there are elements of the Negro and the Indian within them (including their womenfolk), although they do not know it. This holds both promise and danger: a tension between a high level of conscious culture and an unconscious primitive that is not found in the European and that requires management. This is hardly a racist message. Though one may protest that he is only addressing himself to American whites, and not to the other races, and that his remarks on Negroes and Indians (sic) are stereotyping and patronizing. As to content, earlier in this chapter I sought to defne race theory as the attempt to establish links between biology and culture such as would raise a moral hierarchy, so that some races are superior and others inferior in various regards of culture or psychology; and to point out the diferent ways that the link between biology and culture can be argued. Jung deviates from this in two cardinal regards. First, he has very little interest in the biology of race. Rather it is geographical factors and cultural adaptation that concern him. Second, it is hard to identify any moral hierarchy in what he is saying. Jung is certainly no white – or Aryan – supremacist. In fact, it is the white man – more specifcally, the North European – that is the only race that is ever indicted in Jung’s race psychology. It is a central and recurrent question throughout Jung’s works: why is the white man such a problem, to himself and to everyone else? Jung’s values are evident enough in his writings: his dislike of war, of imperialism and of colonialism, his fears for the future of humanity. Even so, Jung does sometimes let fall what on the face of it at least are racist remarks. He makes sometime use of the expression “going black inside”, referring to the supposed fate of Europeans in Africa or India: they become psychically assimilated to the natives (e.g. Jung 1964b: 47, 1964c: 507, 509, 1964j: 121; also 1963: 231, 245, 255). (This has not happened in America, due to the relatively small size of the Negro population.) Jung seems to have encountered the expression among the colonial English, and he may use it with a certain irony. But the expression is repellent even so. There is nuance here, however. The North European is vulnerable, the South European less so, because his own civilization is a relatively recent imposition and the barbarian is still an unconscious presence within him. Contact with more primitive peoples brings this out – and he is not used to dialogue with his unconscious. Later, in discussing India, Jung advocates that one should seek rather than

24

Psyche, Science and Society

avoid the encounter with native cultures, troubling though it may be. He says this again more clearly in his late refections on his ventures in the 1920s in North and East Africa (Jung 1963: 231f, 254f, 1964i: 527f). These, whatever their overt purpose, were also a symbolic journey into his own unconscious, something he still feared in the aftermath of the mental turmoil that followed his break with Freud. In fact, despite the expression used, it is not clear that race really is the referent. Jung makes similar comments (in 1927) in regard to the ancient Romans and their slaves, and to contemporary married and unmarried women in Europe (here apparently each afects the other) (Jung 1964j: 121). The real issue is participation mystique and loss of individuality. This refects the notion that primitive humans do not have individuality, that this is a later development (a view shared by others besides Lévy-Bruhl, e.g. Durkheim). The concern then is that we may lose our individuality by becoming merged in the multitude, in society; that this always represents a more primitive level. In the Tavistock lectures (1935), he says as illustration that you will fnd this happening to you despite yourself if you go to Germany (i.e. contemporary Nazi Germany). As to living among natives (“Negroes or Chinese”), he explicitly says, “It does not matter that his skin is black” (Jung 1977: 46–8). Perhaps the most overtly racist remark (cf. Lewin 2009: 142f, 349 n66) is the following, from a seminar in 1935: There is also that danger in the mixture of races, against which our instincts always set up a resistance. Sometimes one thinks it is snobbish prejudice, but it is an instinctive prejudice, and the fact is that if distant races are mixed, the fertility rate is very low, as one sees with the white and the Negro; a Negro woman very rarely conceives from a white man. If she does, a mulatto is the result and he is apt to be a bad character. The Malays are a very distinct race, very remote from the white man, and the mixture of Malay and white is as a rule bad. (Jung 1988/89: 643) This is typical of hybridist race theories (Glick 2008 esp pp235f; see also above p12). Even so, the context is a general discussion on whether psychic traits are subject to Mendelian inheritance in the same way as physical traits, and whether this is expressed in the imagery of dreams and visions – what primitives would call ancestral spirits. Where the parents are genetically ill-matched – for whatever reason – the child’s disposition may be difcult: the inherited elements do not ft or hold together, leaving a vulnerability to dissociation. The mixed race case is ofered as a side-light on this. (Incidentally, “bad” is constitutionally bad rather than morally bad: “a certain fragile, sensitive disposition” [Jung 1988/89: 644].) Subsequent discussion sees Jung afrm a basic psychic unity across all humankind and a diversity and equality of cultures (Jung 1988/89: 649). Jung is surely sincere in refuting the charge of racism, and indeed he is innocent of most forms of race theory. But this is his Achilles’ heel: anxieties as to race and

Jung and race

25

culture contacts. It is in this regard that he may be interrogated for racist views. Though it seems to be limited to the middle years of his career.

Interim analysis It might be worthwhile to pause to consider what has been established so far. I  have argued that Jung views race in biogeographical rather than evolutionary terms. Indeed, his thesis of the evolution of the psyche seems to have little bearing on race. The primordial (or primitive) mentality is common to all our species, prior to racial diferentiation. If any race is “diferent”, it is modern western man (and woman). Jung is a critic not an admirer of modern western civilization: it is the white race, above all the Germanic or Aryan white race, that is the consistent target of his race criticisms. Jung does not despise the primitive mentality; rather he regards it as something persisting within us that we should come to terms with. Equally, Jung does not use the terms “superior” or “higher”, “inferior” or “lower”, as moral categories: in fact he warns explicitly against doing so. Rather there is a natural balance between them that should be maintained. Jung certainly regards the psyche as the outcome of biological evolution: moreover it is species-specifc, the psyche of homo sapiens, not a generalized psyche at the highest (so far) level. But the evolution of the psyche has continued, to reach its present level of diferentiation and consciousness. There is a question then how far this further evolution is biological, how far cultural. Jung’s distinction of archetype and archetypal image seems to place the weight on the cultural side; which would also be consistent with infuence from Wallace, though the ideas of Lloyd Morgan and Baldwin might allow for culture-led developments becoming biologically embedded. It is in my view mistaken to charge Jung with Lamarckism, and equally unfair to charge him with failing to keep up with developments in evolutionary theory, the new Darwinian synthesis (Jung 1976: 450f; Shamdasani 2003: 263–7). Jung may simply have kept a better memory of other arguments and possibilities. Moreover we should allow Jung to view science as open enquiry, and not press him for defnitive statements of position that would simply be dogmas. But there are matters here that are best pursued in another chapter.3 Staying with race, Jung appears to associate this more diferentiated and conscious psyche with civilization in general, and then only with its leading edge; the mass of the people are still in a more primitive condition. It does not appear then to be race-specifc. Turning to the biogeographical aspect, there is on the one hand, physical adaptation to diferent regions; on the other, the diferent regions as cradles for cultural evolution. Here one could well argue for diferences at the level of the archetypes – not archetypal images, the archetypes themselves. Jung nowhere expounds this, and he shows no interest in comparative ethnology; but it is not hard to work out. Diferences of landscape, inland, coastal or ocean location, climate, hazards such as volcanoes or tornados; even the stars are diferent as you move further north or south. Again, there are key resources such as fint or bamboo, corn or rice, whose

26

Psyche, Science and Society

availability is diferent in diferent regions; even cultural choices such as whether to use cattle for milk, meat or traction. All this would surely enter and modify the array of archetypes (again, remembering possible Baldwin efects or the like). All this is to view the archetypes as mode of adaptation to a material existence, but they also contribute to the vocabulary of symbols for human afairs. But all this is to set up equivalent racial psychologies. There is nothing in it that would amount to a biological barrier that would impede one or other race from developing or acquiring culture. One might compare the diferent arrays of archetypes to diferent language groups – indeed Jung refers to these in his comments on race, though he does not explain the relationship. But Jung would never argue that, say, you cannot do philosophy in Chinese or Arabic! It is in keeping with this that Jung’s expressions of concern are about race contact – typically, contact between races at diferent levels of development. This may be oppressive, as with Western colonization or imperialism. But Jung also accepts that the consequences of race contact can be benign, and that race isolation can have its costs. In any case, there is no moral hierarchy here – except that again, it is the white race that is the target of criticism. All this raises the question, what does Jung use race for? What does he want it to explain? Many of his discussions come at the journalistic end of the spectrum of his writings (often inspired by Keyserling), speculating on the cultural diferences between various countries, such as America, India or Switzerland (Jung 1964 Part VII, frst three essays). It is interesting that unlike the anthropologists of the interwar years, he mostly does not do this in terms of psychological typology (Walker 2018: 15–18; Sapir 1994: 182–8; cf. Jung 1977: 47–8 on French and Germans for an exception). Rather he argues in terms of relations between the ego and the unconscious. This accords with his primary concern with psychosis rather than neurosis, and his view of schizophrenia as the characteristic ailment of our times – something that enters our culture and politics, not just our mental health. There is more than curiosity here: there is also a clinical interest. Beyond this, Jung uses his notions of race, paradoxically, not to stereotype, but to argue for individual diferences – to argue against applying a one-size-fts-all psychology to everyone. Diferences of race and nation – cultural diferences – contribute to individual diferences, and have to be taken into account. This in criticism of Freud and Adler and their schools. This brings us to the charge of anti-Semitism, and the questions of Jewish and German psychology.

The Jews and anti-Semitism: Jewish and German psychology I turn now to the question of Jung’s alleged anti-Semitism; his remarks on the Jews, and on Jewish and German psychology. As with the America thesis, this raises questions of content and context. Jung frst wrote about Jewish and German psychology in 1918, but he returned to the subject later, including during the Nazi era. Jung has also been criticized for his activities during the Nazi era, so these

Jung and race

27

matters will be considered together in another chapter.4 It is the content of Jung’s thought that is considered here. The Jews have a dual location in European history. On the one side, they are an ethnic minority, a diaspora people scattered in many lands, with a long history of persecution. That is not unique: it holds also for the Roma (Gypsies); and they too would become the targets of the Third Reich’s genocides (Kenrick and Puxon 1995; Lewy 1999: Panayi 2000 esp. ch 5). On the other side is the Jews’ distinctive cultural contribution to Western civilization. In the frst instance, this relates to the origins of Abrahamic religion. But more contentiously it is also the question whether there is a contribution beyond this, specifcally to Western modernity, and if so, how it should be evaluated. This can of course be a favourable thesis, if modern Western society is positively evaluated. But there is a characteristic anti-Semitic thesis here, identifying and condemning this further Jewish contribution, blaming the Jews for the origins of this civilization and for its malign character. This thesis has a long history. Marx speaks of the Jews in these terms in his early writings (Marx 1978b). This does not implicate Marx in much later events of course, nor does it necessarily represent his mature views (though see Poliakov 1974: 244–6). But the language that he uses should be remarked: the use of the word “Judentum” to mean “commerce”. This was once common, though one does not fnd it in modern German-English dictionaries. It is instructive then to compare the positions of Werner Sombart, perhaps the most prominent German sociologist of the 20th century up to World War II, and Max Weber (Grundmann and Stehr 2001; Sombart 1982; Weber 1978: 492–500, 611–23). I will give a more full account of this in the later chapter; in the meantime an outline will serve. Sombart argues that it was the Jews who were the driving force behind the making of modern Western civilization, from mediaeval times onwards (Sombart 1982). The Jews were by origin a desert-raiding people who saw Nature as something to be controlled, valued gold because it could easily be carried away, and learned to take interest from the raising of livestock. They brought this mentality into the European cities, and set themselves up as a merchant, huckstering people for whom everything could be bought and sold, everything had its price. The Germans by contrast were a people of forested lands who sought accord with Nature, an entrepreneurial people who actually made things, who valued labour and craftsmanship, the meeting of need rather than proft for its own sake. Capitalism then simply is the Jewish spirit (Sombart 1982: 281f). Max Weber, by contrast, argues that the origins of capitalist society lie in the Protestant Reformation, that the spirit of capitalism is that of certain forms of Protestantism, which were favoured by the businessmen of early modernity. The Jews had nothing to do with it – though they may indeed have made a contribution to the economies of the mediaeval cities (and of course Jewish prophecy lies in the far background of Protestant Christianity). Capitalism, at least in its distinctive modern form, is ultimately a creation of the Germans – though taken up among other Northern Europeans such as the English or Dutch.

28

Psyche, Science and Society

Jung, for all that he does not share the focus on economic history, clearly aligns here with Weber. It is the Protestant Reformation that he points to for the origins of modernity, and he sees the Reformation as specifcally a German afair. The Jews have nothing to do with it. Jung supports this with a theory of a lesion in the German psyche – a disruption of German cultural history, in the forced imposition of Christianity and displacement of paganism. The Germans were still too barbaric to accept the discipline and order of the Roman Church, and so revolted against it to create a more personal relationship to God (Jung 1958: 46f, 1964e: 12f; cf. 1964i: 527f). (Later, paganism itself would return, with the collapse of Christian values in the face of rapid industrialization and then defeat in war.) All this is a theory of the Germans: it is not a theory of the Jews. And it feeds into a polemic against the white man, not into an anti-Semitic diatribe. Jung is not inventing this, merely expressing it in his own terms. Diferences and relations between the Mediterranean civilization and the barbarian North were matters of long debate going back to mediaeval times (Poliakov 1974 chs 1–6 passsim). Freud has similar comments (Freud 1967: 113–7.) Again, where Christianity to all appearances was an organic growth of the Roman world (and readily enough accepted by the Germanic peoples who settled within its former provinces and adopted Romance languages), it was indeed coercively imposed on the peoples east of the Rhine who retained the German language – this made Latin, the language of liturgy, more alien and difcult to learn (Fletcher 1997). Jung does not tell us what authorities or sources he is familiar with here, but his remarks on the Reformation and thesis of a lesion in the German psyche are not simply some aberrant creation of his own. The foregoing considerations seem to me to refute the charge of systemic antiSemitism in Jung’s thought. Again, there is no evidence that he resented the Jews as an intrusive presence in “his” society. And as a Protestant Christian, his attitude towards the Jewish religion would surely incline to be positive. Jung’s general attitude towards the Jews, I would suggest, is mainly a factor of contemporary Jewish intellectual currents. He would encounter these both directly and indirectly, and through friends and colleagues: it is not simply a question of his dealings with Freud and Adler and their Schools or circles. Though that of course is a key set of issues. The post-Enlightenment emancipation of the Jews faced the Jews themselves with dilemmas (Rubenstein et al. 2002 esp. chs 2 and 3; Schama 2013 episode 3). Should they, now that they were citizens, abandon their separateness and assimilate to liberal secular society? Or let assimilation happen, through intermarriage, non-observance and the like? What could being Jewish now mean? Was it merely another religious denomination? Or was there a Jewish culture, or a Jewish nation? Did the Exile still have meaning, or should the Jews now return to Palestine? There was bitter debate over these questions, and the Jewish race theorists who now appeared, whether Zionist or not, were as exercised with questions of “race death” (or race suicide) as they were by anti-Semitism (Efron 1994).

Jung and race

29

Thus Jung’s oft-criticized remark in an essay in 1934: The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host for their development. (Jung 1964g: 165f, cf. 1973: 160f) In fact, Jung is echoing anxieties expressed by Jewish intellectuals such as Samuel Weissenberg since the turn of the century: the Jews have a folk culture, and they are now making contributions to the cosmopolitan high culture, but rather than creating an authentic Jewish art in doing so, they are merely borrowing the styles of others (Efron 1994: 110–2). (Much could be said of this: maybe both Weissenberg and Jung were wrong, in their diferent ways. But this is not the place to discuss it [vide Schama 2013 episode 4].) The Jewish emancipation was uneven and insecure: there were pogroms in Russia and the Dreyfus afair in France, as well as anti-Semitism in the German Empire and elsewhere (Rubenstein et al. 2002 es ch 6). But the situation in the Habsburg Empire, where Freud spent most of his life – and made his frst, notorious, accusations of anti-Semitism against Jung – was more complicated: an ethnically stratifed multi-ethnic empire in which the Jews were only one, albeit a distinctive, element (Sked 2001 esp. ch 5). There were two privileged nations, the Germans and the Magyars, and an array of mainly Slavic nations with varying degrees of disprivilege, besides the Jews, and most disprivileged of all, the Roma. It is not obvious why – or from whom – there would be talk of “Aryan” here: the Roma were Aryan; the Magyars were not. Where there was talk of Aryan and Jew, what seems to lie behind it, in part at least, is the privileged position of German as the language of university teaching and intellectual life. Jews tended to acquiesce in that, and then to demand parity as part of the cultural elite. The various Slavic nations rather demanded recognition for their own languages. Thus, at the University of Prague some teaching in Czech was progressively conceded in the aftermath of 1848, until fnally, in 1882, the university was formally divided into two: a German university and a Czech university. But it was the German university that Einstein and Kafka attended. (The Czechs were best placed among the Slavic nations to make such demands as these, in view of the historic claims of the Kingdom of Bohemia: others fared less well.) The point is that it is an error to read the Habsburg Empire through the lens of Nazi Germany – or to identify it simply with Vienna: the situation in Budapest was quite diferent. It is also an error to take complaints of anti-Semitism in this setting as index for a general denunciation of ethnic stratifcation and disprivilege. Of course, there is something to be said for accepting a cosmopolitan language of scholarship, and nationalist agendas can appear pointlessly disruptive. What Jung as a Swiss made of it all in his early contacts with the Freud circle – or what he should have made of it – is another question. At any rate, Jung’s correspondence shows that he was aware of a range of issues and concerns – whatever views he held of them (Jung 1973 esp. pp146f). They

30

Psyche, Science and Society

form a broader context for his statements on Jewish and German psychology, though as indicated earlier, it is his dealings with Freud and Adler that are at the centre of the vortex. His frst substantial remarks were made before the end of World War I (Jung 1964e: 12–14). The argument here moves from primitive mentality to the cultural history and mentality of the Germans: for them, Christianity split a lower barbarian half from an upper domesticated half; the latter may present the appearance of civilization but the former is still there and can break out again. This problem does not exist for the Jews: they already had the culture of the ancient world, and subsequently added to that the culture of the peoples they lived among. The Jews paradoxically have two cultures; they are more domesticated than the Germans but as a diaspora (sc. migratory) people, are not rooted in the earth as the Germans are. The German has too much of the chthonic quality, the Jew too little. Perhaps it is in compensation for this that Freud and Adler sought to ground their psychological theories on primitive sexual or power drives, and this may indeed be benefcial for the Jew in analysis; but for the German, it rather reawakens the inner barbarian, with potentially dangerous consequences. Jung has two underlying concerns here. One is the origins and character of modern civilization; the other is the subjective factor or “personal equation” in psychological theory. They come together in the problem of the nature of the German – not the Jewish – psyche. Jung’s concern with the personal equation goes back before World War I, to his demands for the psychoanalyst to undergo psychoanalysis as part of his or her training. It acquires force and focus with the development of his psychological typologies: Freud’s and Adler’s psychologies refected their own personal psychologies, Freud’s with its focus on sexuality refecting an extravert temperament, Adler’s with its focus on aggression refecting an introvert temperament. It is a pendant to this, that both their psychologies refected a ground in Jewish culture, while his own refected a ground in German culture. Jung would go on to bring the same argument into the psychology of gender: men, even male psychologists, deceive themselves as to women’s psychology (Jung 1964j: 113). Jung considers that psychology cannot be separated from epistemology, and that an objective psychology is not yet possible. One can only seek to identify and discount for ones’ own subjective biases; this applies to his own psychology too. (One might point out here that Adler split with Freud before Jung did, and for his own reasons; yet neither of them was willing to entertain an argument of this kind to explain their diferences.) There is another issue in the background: Jung’s clinical experience was with psychotics in a mental hospital, while that of Freud, Adler and their circle was with neurotics in private practice. Jung’s view of the psyche was always conditioned by his wider – or deeper – clinical experience. It led him to develop a distinctive focus on relations between the ego and the unconscious. His 1934 essay “The State of Psychotherapy Today” (from which the previous quote on the Jews and culture comes) is an important statement on the theory of psychotherapy in line with this (Jung 1964g esp. pp165f). The thrust of the essay

Jung and race

31

is that neurosis entails a confict between two things, the infantile attitude and the will to adapt, and the analyst must identify for each individual which side predominates in the neurosis. Freud and Adler only perceived the former alternative, in terms of the sexual or power instincts. But where the latter factor predominates the neurosis has a positive function, as drawing attention to a failure of adaptation in the individual’s life situation. It is an attempt by the psyche to heal itself. Jung criticizes Freud and Adler in this essay, for their refusal to admit the possibility of subjective bias, and their insistence, each, that their theories were objective and of universal application. He brings in race, that is, cultural background, as an example of subjective bias. His remarks here largely repeat and expand on those made in the 1918 essay, and they are both nuanced and balanced, for example: The Jewish race as a whole – at least this is my experience – possesses an unconscious which can be compared with the “Aryan” only with reserve. Creative individuals apart, the average Jew is far too conscious and diferentiated to go about pregnant with the tensions of unborn futures. The “Aryan” unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish; that is both the advantage and the disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism. In my opinion it has been a grave error in medical psychology up to now to apply Jewish categories – which are not even binding on all Jews – indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom. (Jung 1964g: 166) The immediate point Jung develops from this is that the mass phenomena of Nazism cannot be accounted for in terms of the Freudian or Adlerian theories of neurosis: they must be accounted for in terms of the German psyche and its cultural history. Jung might be faulted for returning to these matters at all now that the Nazis had taken power in Germany – that is an issue for another chapter. But as to content, Jung’s quarrel is with Freud and Adler and their followers, their psychological theories, not with the Jewish mentality as such; and it is the mental problems of the Germans, to which Jews tend to be immune, that is his concern.

Conclusion I have sought in this chapter to diagnose Jung’s attitudes towards race, frst by analysing an array of race theories, biology-led or culture-led, and then by trying to map the salient aspects of Jung’s thought onto it. This is the more difcult in that Jung never expounds his notions of race, nor says where he derives them. It has to be done by interpretation and inference, taking account of his intellectual location and what can be read in (or through) his writings and other statements. The main points are as follows. First, contrary to expectation, 19th-century German thought was notable for its rejection of race theories, especially in the physical anthropology of Virchow and the ethnology of Bastian. Jung as a German Swiss taking a medical degree at the end of the century would likely have been

32

Psyche, Science and Society

infuenced by this – putting him in the same camp as Franz Boas, who took their approach to America. Second, Jung would likely have been at least aware of Wallace as a signifcant and distinctive fgure in evolutionary biology, and an infuence on the psychologies of Lloyd Morgan and Baldwin. More research is needed here: not only was Wallace later side-lined in evolutionary theory; Morgan and Baldwin too were side-lined in the development of psychology, though for other reasons. I return to these questions in another chapter.5 The indications, then, are that Jung took a biogeographical rather than an evolutionary line in biology, and an evolutionist rather than a difusionist line in ethnology. Race is thus a matter of adaptation to diferent regional conditions – biological and cultural adaptation as parallel but unrelated processes. The various races all have the same potential for cultural evolution, though on diferent trajectories and at their own speeds. In keeping with this, such race concerns as Jung expresses are in terms of race contact, for example in European colonization, or on migration. It is in these regards that he may be interrogated for racist attitudes or values. Though I would argue that such racism as can be found is incidental rather than systemic, and is outgrown in his later years. This whole approach disavows moral hierarchies between races. Jung takes a critical view of modern western civilization: the only race that is ever indicted in his “race psychology” is the white man – especially the Germanic or North European white man. Jung does not implicate the Jews in modern western civilization, neither its origins not its defects of character. It is the Germans (in the wide sense) and the Protestant Reformation that he points to. And it is the German psyche not the Jewish psyche that most concerns him. Partly this is in terms of a wide focus on Germanic northern Europe and Western civilization and its history, partly a narrower focus on modern Germany and its political malfeasances and vicissitudes. Either way, Jung is not systemically anti-Semitic. In fact, the greater part of what Jung says on German and Jewish psychology is a factor of his dealings with Freud and Adler, though also conditioned by contemporary currents in Jewish thought. Immediately this comes out of his refections on extraversion and introversion; but it also and importantly refects his diferent clinical experience, and his concern that psychosis is a very diferent afair from neurosis and needs a diferent kind of psychotherapy. In my view it is not appropriate to subject such questions to ideological critique. In any case, Jung’s remarks on the diferences between the German and the Jewish psyche show too much nuance and balance for a simple accusation of anti-Semitism. (One should read the texts in full, and not rely on selective quotation.) Some closing remarks, then. Race can be difcult to talk about. In my analysis of race theories at the chapter’s outset, I pointed out that ethnic and racial identity can have two aspects, either as something attributed to you by others, or as something that you yourself assert. Typically there is a clash of meanings, ethnic and racial identity groups striving to ascribe identity to each other while resisting such attribution themselves. All this is typical of status stratifcation in general – status stratifcation is just as confictual as class stratifcation. Indeed, the ascribed

Jung and race

33

and asserted meanings may actually be the same in content; the struggle between ascription and assertion continues even so. This inhibits discussion. It is empty to propose that societies are held together or characterized by their cultural values, without some specifcation of what those values are – and the more so with subcultures, as being defned by their diferences from the mainstream culture and from each other. Yet all attempts at such specifcation are met with distrust and resentment, as illegitimate ascription. (It is tempting to say that as with Freud and sex, so with Marx and class: you can see the moral force of it even if you cannot accept it as science [cf. Jung 1960c: 55f].) At the same time, cultural practices do not become exempt from ethical scrutiny just because they are part of the culture of some allegedly oppressed ethnic or racial group. Sociological analysis should look at the whole situation, and not be too quick to take sides. Race theory as a cultural artefact cannot efectively be demolished by biological argument. Biological critique can dispose of some racial myths, but it can also support, embed or even generate others. Rather the point is that “human” is an ethical not a biological category. It may be that all the existing “races” are part of Homo sapiens sapiens, but what if we were to discover a surviving enclave of Neanderthals, say somewhere in Central Asia? Would they not be human too? Again, we might encounter extra-terrestrials who have no biological connection with us at all. We would have to accord them the status of human – and hope they would do the same for us. Equally, we might have to emancipate our computers and robots – or they might emancipate themselves – and the same considerations would apply. All this is long familiar from science fction. We should not be arguing these matters as though this were still the 19th century. Philosophically, it is not self-evident whether it is better to afrm or to deny diferences among ourselves – whether in race or other terms (consider diference feminism.) Both positions carry their dangers. To say that we are diferent risks the creation of hierarchies of greater and lesser worth, of privilege and disprivilege. But to say that we are all the same can too easily mean, everyone is the same as me; anyone in whom I cannot recognise myself is evil, mad or subhuman. (The belief that all men are equal is ancient: it has rarely included women. And introverts may well distrust extraverts, at least in an extravert culture, for their tendency to stigmatize introversion as mental illness.) But then again, a too-ready acceptance of diference can paralyse moral judgement. To my mind, this is an antinomial problem, an insoluble dilemma. But it is one of the merits of Jungian psychology, that it teaches us that we can live with ambiguity, that intuition can grasp it even where intellect cannot resolve it.

Notes 1 See Chapter 7, pp175f. 2 Actually, Jung had frst commented on this much earlier, in an interview for the New York Times in 1912 (Jung 1978 esp. p15f).

34

Psyche, Science and Society

3 See Chapter 5, esp. pp134f. 4 See Chapter 2. 5 See Chapter 5, pp134f.

Bibliography Arnason, Johann P. (2006) “Nations and Nationalisms: Between General Theory and Comparative History”, in Delanty, Gerard and Kumar, Krishnan (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. London: Sage, pp44–56. Ash, Mitchell G. (1995) Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Athens, Lonnie (2013) “Park’s Theory of Confict and His Fall from Grace in Sociology”, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 13:2, pp75–87. Banton, Michael (1977) The Idea of Race. London: Tavistock. (1998) Racial Theories (2nd ed.). Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Barth, Fredrik, Gingrich, Andre, Parkin, Robert and Silverman, Sydil (2005) One Discipline Four Ways: British, German, French and American Anthropology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Blanckaert, Claude (1988) “On the Origins of French Ethnology: William Edwards and the Doctrine of Race”, in Stocking, George (ed.) Bones, Bodies, Behaviour. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, pp18–55. Boakes, Robert (1984) From Darwin to Behaviourism. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Bowler, Peter J. (1984) Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Bunzl, Matti (1996) “Franz Boas and the Humboltian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharacter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture”, in Stocking, George (ed.) Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, pp17–78. Darwin, Charles (1874) The Descent of Man (2nd ed.). London: John Murray. Diamond, Stanley (1981) “Paul Radin”, in Silverman, Sydel (ed.) Totems and Teachers. New York: University of Columbia Press, pp67–97. Efron, John (1994) Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland and Nielsen, Finn Sivert (2001) A History of Anthropology. London and Sterling: Pluto Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1965) Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Clarendon). Fichman, Martin (1981) Alfred Russel Wallace. Boston: Twayne Publishers (Division of G.K. Hall & Co.). Fletcher, Richard (1997) The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. Berkeley and Los Angles: University of California Press. Foster, Mary LeCron (2002) “Symbolism: The Foundation of Culture”, in Ingold, Tim (ed.) Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge, pp366–95. Freud, Sigmund (1967) Moses and Monotheism. New York: Vintage Books (Division of Random House). Gingrich, Andre (2005) “The German-Speaking Countries”, in Barth, Fredrik, Gingrich, Andre, Parkin, Robert and Silverman, Sydil (eds.) One Discipline Four Ways: British,

Jung and race

35

German, French and American Anthropology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp61–153. Glick, Thomas F. (2008) “The Anthropology of Race across the Darwinian Revolution”, in Kuklick, Henrika (ed.) A New History of Anthropology. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell, pp225–41. Grundmann, Reiner and Stehr, Nico (2001) “Why Is Werner Sombart Not Part of the Core of Classical Sociology”, Journal of Classical Sociology 1:2, pp257–87. Hannah, Barbara (1976) Jung His Life and Work. New York: Putman’s Sons. Hogenson, George (2001) “The Baldwin Efect: A  Neglected Infuence on C.G. Jung’s Evolutionary Thinking”, Journal of Analytical Psychology 46:4, pp591–611. Jacobi, Jolanda (1968) The Psychology of C.G. Jung (7th ed.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original 1942) Jung, Carl G. (1958) Psychology and Religion: West and East (CW11). New York: Pantheon. Jung (1960) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1960a) “A Review of the Complex Theory” (1934/48), pp92–104. (1960b) “Instinct and the Unconscious “(1919), pp129–38. (1960c) “On Psychic Energy” (1928), pp3–66. (1960d) “On the Nature of the Psyche” (1947/54), pp159–234. (1960e) “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits” (1920/48), pp301–18. (1960f) “The Structure of the Psyche” (1927/31), pp139–58. (1963) Memories, Dreams, Refections. London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1964) Civilization in Transition (CW10). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1964a) “Archaic Man” (1931), pp50–73. (1964b) “Mind and Earth” (1927/1931), pp29–49. (1964c) “The Complications of American Psychology” (1930), pp502–14. (1964d) “The Dreamlike World of India” (1939), pp515–24. (1964e) “The Role of the Unconscious” (1918), pp3–28. (1964f) “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” (1928/31), pp74–94. (1964g) “The State of Psychotherapy Today” (1934), pp157–73. (1964h) “The Swiss Line in the European Spectrum” (1928), 479–88. (1964i) “What India Can Teach Us” (1939), pp525–30. (1964j) “Woman in Europe” (1927), pp113–33. (1966) Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (2nd ed.) (CW7). London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1967) Symbols of Transformation (2nd ed.) (CW5). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1970) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (2nd ed.) (CW9i). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1971) Psychological Types (CW6). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1973) Collected Letters Vol 1: 1906–1950. London: Routledge. (1976) Collected Letters Vol 2: 1951–1961. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1977) “The Tavistock Lectures”, in Jung, C.G. The Symbolic Life (CW18). London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp5–182. (1978) “America Facing Its Most Tragic Moment”, in C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (ed. William McGuire and R.F. Hull). London: Thames & Hudson, pp11–24. (1988, 1989) Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar in Two Parts (ed. J. Jarrett). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original 1934–1939) (1990) The Seminars Vol 3: Analytical Psychology (ed. William McGuire). London: Routledge. (Original 1925)

36

Psyche, Science and Society

Kenrick, Donald and Puxon, Grattan (1995) Gypsies Under the Swastika. Hatford: Gypsy Research Centre, University of Hertfordshire Press. Kuklick, Henrika (ed.) (2008) A New History of Anthropology. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell. Lewin, Nicholas (2009) Jung on War, Politics and Nazi Germany. London: Karnac Books. Lewy, Guenter (1999) “Gypsies and Jews Under the Nazis”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13:3, pp383–404. Marx, Karl (1978a) “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co, pp66–125. (1978b) “On the Jewish Question”, in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton, pp26–52. Massin, Benoit (1996) “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany”, in Stocking, George (ed.) Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, pp79–154. Panayi, Panikos (2000) Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany. Harlow: Longman (Pearson Education). Park, Robert (1950) “The Nature of Race Relations”, in Park, Robert Race and Culture. Glencoe: Free Press, pp81–116. (Original 1939) Penny, H. Glenn (2008) “Traditions in the German Language”, in Kuklick, Henrika (ed.) A New History of Anthropology. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell, pp79–95. Plotkin, Henry (2004) Evolutionary Thought in Psychology: A Brief History. Maldon, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell. Poliakov, Leon (1974) The Aryan Myth. London: Chatto Heinemann for Sussex University Press. Radin, Paul (1929) “History of Ethnological Theories”, American Anthropologist 31:1, pp9–33. (1933) The Method and Theory of Ethnology. New York and London: McGraw-Hill. Rotman, Brian (1977) Jean Piaget, Psychologist of the Real. Hassock: Harvester. Rubenstein, Hilary L., Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, Edelheit, Abraham J., and Rubinstein, William D. (2002) The Jews in the Modern World: A History Since 1750. London: Arnold (member of Hodder Headline Group). Also New York: Oxford University Press. Sapir, Edward (1994) The Psychology of Culture. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. (Also in Walker [2018] pp 24–8 “Culture as as-if psychology”) Schama, Simon (2013) The Story of the Jews (DVD). BBC Worldwide Ltd. Shamdasani, Sonu (2003) Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverman, Sydel (2005) “The United States”, in Barth, Fredrik, Gingrich, Andre, Parkin, Robert and Silverman, Sydil (eds.) One Discipline Four Ways: British, German, French and American Anthropology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp257–347. Sked, Alan (2001) Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815–1918 (2nd ed.). Harlow and London: Longman (imprint of Pearson Education) Smith, A.D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Sombart, Werner (1982) The Jews and Modern Capitalism. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. (Original 1911) Stocking, George (1987) Victorian Anthropology. New York and Toronto: Free Press (Macmillan). Stocking, George (ed.) (1996) Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press. Trawny, Peter (2014) Heidegger & the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (3rd ed.). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Walker, Gavin (2018) Jung and Sociological Theory. London and New York: Routledge.

Jung and race

37

Wallace, Alfred Russel (2002) Infnite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology (ed. Andrew Berry). London and New York: Verso. Weber, Max (1976) The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London: New Left Books. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. (1981) General Economic History. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Zabriskie, Beverley (1990) “The Feminine Pre- and Post-Jungian”, in Barnaby, Karin and D’Acierno, Pellegrino (eds.) C.G. Jung and the Humanities. London: Routledge, pp267– 78. (Also in Walker [2018] pp149–58)

2 JUNG AND THE NAZI ERA

Introduction There has been lasting controversy over Jung’s conduct during the Nazi era (e.g. Goggin and Goggin 2001 ch 5; Grossman 1999; Lewin 2009; Maidenbaum and Martin 1991 nb. Appendix A: Bibliographic Survey, pp397–403; Jung 1964 items in Part 3 and Appendix; 1973: 131f). Charges against him include collaboration with the Nazi state, publishing essays and making statements that supported Nazi anti-Semitic race theory, and seeking to use the Nazi state to further his career and ambitions. They can extend to systemic anti-Semitism and racism (also misogyny), a general sympathy or afnity between Jungian thought and Nazi ideology, and even to passing of as science what is really no more than a crypto-Nazi mythology – though not all would endorse the latter point. These charges were frst brought by Jewish psychoanalysts and psychotherapists – unsurprisingly, since the Nazi government targeted them for expulsion from their profession, and forced them into exile or the concentration camps. But they are also infused with the lasting bitterness of Jung’s split with Freud many years before. Controversy is still largely centred in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities, and in its terms – Jung himself always refuted the charges, but some Jungians accept them at least in part (Jung 1964b, 1973: 131f, 1978b; Jafé 1971; essays in Maidenbaum and Martin eds. e.g. Samuels 1991, Sherry 1991, Samuels 2016 chs 12 & 13). An unavoidable feature of the controversy then is the reciprocal critique of Freudian and Jungian psychology. Some Freudians (e.g. Homans 1979) accuse Jung of having unresolved Oedipal conficts from his personal relationship with Freud. Winnicot (1964; cf. Saban 2016) diagnoses a childhood schizophrenia. That is to silence Jung by making a case of him. Controversy then extends to the question whether Jungian thought is in fact capable of yielding insights that merit consideration, or is merely intellectual error or worse. DOI:10.4324/9780429456268-3

Jung and the Nazi era

39

It has to be said that scholars coming from outwith these circles who have encountered the controversy while engaged in wider enquiries have been rather cool about it, for example Cocks (1985 esp. pp127–35, cf. 20181 esp. 133–50), Ellenberger (1994: 675–7) or indeed, Poliakov (1974: 286–90, 372–5). Cocks (1991: 157f) has also criticized its protagonists, on both sides, for over-reliance on psychodynamic argument, lack of respect for historical methods and evidence, and lack of objectivity. I have been in two minds as to whether to write on this topic. I have done so frstly because some sociologists may have heard of it but without details, and others might want to know what stance I take towards it. Secondly, for those coming from the Jungian or more broadly psychotherapeutic communities, because on some aspects it is possible to ofer sociological insights. Besides these considerations, however, I have already touched on some of the issues in the chapter earlier on Jung and race, and I do not consider it tenable to treat the Jews and anti-Semitism as a separate issue from race in general. Even so, I have not sought to treat the issues comprehensively, and do not claim that sociology can ofer any resolution.

Collaboration: the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy afair The charge of collaboration relates to Jung’s activities mainly in 1933–5, and to the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and its successors. There are many accounts of this, varying in detail, and only an outline is ofered here. In Germany during 1926–7 there began moves towards bringing together psychotherapists of all persuasions in a single professional association. (Some neurologists and internists also joined, even a few psychiatrists.) From this arose the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (Allgemeine Ärzliche Gesellschaft fϋr Psychotherapie). Although mainly German, it also attracted members from a number of European countries. Its journal, the Zentralblatt fϋr Psychotherapie, became the leading journal of its feld. In 1932, the eve of the Nazi accession to power, its president was Professor Ernst Kretschmer (best known for his theories linking temperament to physique). Jung was vice-president. When the Nazis came to power, they instituted a policy of Gleischsschaltung (“cultural co-ordination” or synchronization). Kretschmer saw that the Society would be targeted, especially in view of its international character; moreover, the new regime regarded him with distrust. He resigned, and Jung took over, at frst as vice-president, later as president. He resolved to try to limit the damage foreseen by restructuring the Society. This would entail meetings with ofcials of the German Ministry of Culture, to get their agreement to what he intended. The core of the restructuring was to split the society into two levels, an International Society (International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy: Überstaatliche Ärzliche Gesellschaft fϋr Psychotherapie) with himself as president, and a German Society (German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy: Deutsche Allgemeine Ärzliche Gesellschaft fϋr Psychotherapie) with some fgure acceptable to

40

Psyche, Science and Society

the Nazis as president – one M.H. Göring was fnally chosen. Members in other countries (including Switzerland) would also form their own national societies in due course. The constitution of the International Society could not be amended by simple majority; this required a quorum from all the national groupings. Control of the journal would lie with the International Society, but extra pages could be added for circulation in Germany only; Göring as co-editor would control this. Individuals could hold their membership in the International Society rather than their national society. Jung says that his main intention was to protect psychotherapy in Germany from Nazi interference or outright suppression, though also to keep the special concerns of the German situation from spilling out into the other branches – a matter of particular concern for Jewish psychotherapists (Jung 1964b, 1973: 131f esp. pp135f, 1978b). The journal would then continue to circulate in Germany; moreover Jewish members at risk of being expelled from the German society could take membership in the International Society and thus protect their professional standing. Matthias H. Göring was an elderly and somewhat undistinguished psychiatrist and neuropathologist; he was also a cousin of Reichsmarschall Herman Göring. Perhaps one should not make assumptions from that as to his character: Albert Göring, the Reichsmarschall’s youngest brother, was openly hostile and even obstructive to Nazism (Esler 2016). Consideration might rather have been on the lines that the ofcials of the Culture Ministry would be deterred from putting forward a preferred candidate of their own, since the Reichsmarschall might take ofence and over-rule them; while the man himself seemed harmless. However that may be, the choice was made by the German psychotherapists, not by Jung himself. At any rate, Cocks’ account of him is not wholly unfavourable (Cocks 1985 esp. pp53–60, 110–21, cf. 2018: 31–6 esp. p36, 103–6). Though Jung did in fact have trouble with him. A weakness of Jung’s plan was that the journal was actually printed in Germany. Jung then could only protest inefectually when Göring put material into the journal for international circulation that should only have circulated in Germany. This notoriously included the declaration that Hitler’s Mein Kampf should be studied and accepted as a basis for the discussion of psychotherapy (Sherry 1991: 121). Jung guessed that Göring might have made the statement for protective coloration – and it does call for interpretation (Jung 1973: 144f esp. 151–3). But it proved highly damaging that his essay “The State of Psychotherapy Today” (to be discussed later) should have appeared in the same issue (Jung 1964f; see also 1964b). C.A. Meier, who became managing editor of the journal, says that in fact it was never fully “conformed” (or co-ordinated), and continued to print unbiased reviews of books by Jewish and foreign authors throughout the 1930s (Jafé 1971: 83). On his own showing, Jung did not act here out of any clear foresight as to how evil the Nazi regime would turn out to be. Rather he thought that such autocratic episodes of enforced conformity by state or church had happened before, and that they would expect to crush any protest or argument. Scientists and intellectuals of all kinds should wait for times to change; doctors meantime should continue to

Jung and the Nazi era

41

heal the sick (Jung 1964b: esp. pp536–9). His view of the Nazi state at that time was that, while disturbed by its irrationality, he thought it possible that it might turn out well (Hannah 1976: 209–13; Jung 1964a: 205f, 1964c: 236f). He abandoned this view around 1935 or 1936, and it was one error he did later admit to. Should Jung have done what he did? The Society and its journal existed, they were open to Nazi takeover and abuse unless this were prevented. But should he have refused to have dealings with the Nazi ofcials, and resigned or spoken out in protest? This question, how Jung ought to have acted, raises the general question, how ought one to act? That is a question of moral philosophy. There are many positions and debates here of course, but for present purposes it may serve to contrast two basic positions, deontological and consequentialist, that have been at the basis of debate for over two centuries (Raphael 1994 chs 4–6). Deontologists hold that we should follow a moral law, for example the Kantian categorical imperative; follow it for its own sake, without regard to the consequences of our doing so. Consequentialists hold that we should judge our actions by their consequences, so far as these can be foreseen; for example the utilitarian principle of seeking the greatest good of the greatest number. There is a lively debate between the two positions. Deontologists object that consequentialism is no morality at all, mere expediency; and besides, we cannot know the future, to foresee the consequences of our actions. Consequentialists object that blindly following a moral rule frequently has consequences that are both foreseeable and perverse, and that we cannot just wash our hands of them and say we were following a rule. There have been developments and refnements on both positions, but no resolution to the debate. I do not bring this up out of mere pedantry. It seems to me that Jung’s critics do very much tend to argue in deontological terms. It is wrong to have dealings with the Third Reich, obligatory to speak out against it, and these are absolute (and self-evident) moral requirements in themselves, irrespective of consequences. Whereas Jung guided his actions (and his words) by the attempt to bring about good consequences, or avert bad ones. If the diference lies at the level of premises, then clearly no resolution to the argument can come from squabbling over the details of who did or said what. It also follows that critical attack can go both ways, at least so far as Jung’s critics were contemporary with events. It took fve years of total war to bring down the Third Reich. It was not brought down by intellectuals refusing to have dealings with it, or speaking out against it. At least, it might be retorted, Jung tried to do something. One might seek to cool the dispute through refexive analysis – attempting to identify and discount for one’s subjective bias. This however is itself an intractable issue between Freudians and Jungians. But it might be approached in sociological rather than psychological terms. I have made such proposals elsewhere, and later in these essays will be much concerned with Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory of cultural bias as a powerful approach of this kind (Douglas 1982, 1992). But while marking the possibilities, I will not pursue this here. Jung’s association with the Society and journal lasted formally until 1940, but it was a dead letter long before that: Jung had come out as an opponent of Nazism by

42

Psyche, Science and Society

1936, and was recognized by them as such. As regards his later view of the Third Reich, the Nazi leaders were openly speaking of partitioning Switzerland and annexing the German-speaking regions to the Reich – plans were drawn up and forces deployed for this when the war came, though the plan was not carried out. The Swiss government meantime responded by banning Nazi-sympathetic political parties and preparing for a lengthy war of resistance (Schwartz 1980). I would guess that Jung, as a Protestant German by culture, probably viewed the situation in the light of folk memories of the Thirty Years’ War, and regarded it with something akin to despair (e.g. Jung 1977, 1978a).

Anti-Semitism and the Jews Jung has been charged with anti-Semitism. I have already commented on this in the previous chapter. It is wrong in my view to treat “race” and anti-Semitism as separate issues. Race is always a matter of culture not biology; the alleged relations between biology and culture may be variously argued, that is all. Also, the Third Reich targeted others besides the Jews, notably the Roma (Kenrick and Puxon 1995; Lewy 1999; Panayi 2000). But with the Jews, unlike the Roma, there is a question of their signifcance for Western civilization: whether this only relates remotely to the origins of the Abrahamic religions, or whether it relates more immediately to the economic character of modernity. In that regard, it is instructive to compare Jung’s position with those of Max Weber and of Werner Sombart. All three are critics of modernity. But what part in its making do they attribute to the Jews? Sombart changed his position over the course of his career: he began as a Marxist and ended as a Nazi (Grundmann and Stehr 2001). Here I am mainly concerned with his earlier work The Jews and Modern Capitalism, which frst appeared in 1911 (Sombart 1982). Sombart is not especially anti-Semitic in this work; rather he is disdainful towards anti-Semitism and towards the Jews alike. His thesis is that the Jews played a key role in the revival of cities in early mediaeval Europe, and in the subsequent economic development that has led to modernity. Sombart makes a distinction between the entrepreneur, who actually creates things, and the trader, who merely trades in the things others have made, between labour and workmanship and an eye for what is needful, and mere money-making without efort. It is the trader role that he attributes to the Jews, and that he claims has given modernity its malign character. The Germans rather have been entrepreneurs, and hence vulnerable to Jewish exploitation. It is the Jews that have given capitalism and modernity its “spirit”: capitalist society is Jewish society. As I have commented in the previous chapter, this bears some similarity to the early essay of Marx on “the Jewish Question” (Marx 1978a). Indeed, Sombart’s contextualizing narrative is still strongly Marxist: the origins of the bourgeoisie and capitalism in the mediaeval cities, the predatory relation of commerce to industry (Marx 1978b esp. pp150–4, 176–84. Note: Sombart is unlikely to have known this

Jung and the Nazi era

43

text in 1911). But as regards the Jews, Sombart is putting his scholarship behind long-held popular belief. Weber by contrast argues that modern (rational) capitalism was created and got its “spirit” from Puritan Protestantism. This draws on developments in the Jewish religion in ancient times, but otherwise has nothing to do with them. The Jews did play an important role in the cities of mediaeval Europe, and continued to do so; they may have brought sophisticated economic practices from the ancient Near East into mediaeval Europe, though these could have come by other routes. But so far as they occupied any special economic location, this was due to their “pariah” status which both gave them the monopoly on certain activities and punished them for utilizing it (similar things are found in the Indian caste system). Again, the Jewish religion’s requirements did not drive one into rational capitalist activity as did those of Puritan Protestantism (Weber 1978: 492–500, 911–5, 615–23). Sombart and Weber are not talking about exactly the same thing. Sombart’s concerns are focussed on European economic history, and he regards the revival of cities, crafts and trade in early mediaeval Europe as marking the beginning of capitalism: the modern era is in continuity with this. Weber’s concerns by contrast range all through World history, including the ancient world, and he has a far wider range of sociological interests, including both religion and the sociology of power – and also including a comparative study of cities. The cities of mediaeval Europe as centres of crafts and trade were of a piece with such things elsewhere in World history. Everywhere they have their specifc features, and they can all be broadly described as capitalism. But the rational capitalism that characterizes Western modernity came some hundreds of years later, and was unique in history. And it was not the Jews who gave it its character, but the Puritan Protestants. Sombart is not much interested in the Jews in the ancient world or the development of the Abrahamic religions, though he does show some interest in development in Jewish thought after Roman times. Weber is interested in ancient Israel as part of the Ancient Near East and the ancient world more generally. He is also interested in the development of Judaism as the background to the Abrahamic religions, and to Protestantism in particular. As to racial character, Sombart argues that the Jews only became a race in the Diaspora, through their unwillingness to intermarry with others, and that their culture and temperament are culturally (rather than biologically) perpetuated through their religion. Sombart invokes geographical determinants of culture and temperament here. The Jews were originally a desert nomadic people, hence their attitude to nature as something to be controlled. Attitudes of intellectualism and rationality come from this, as also does a propensity for money lending – livestock goes with taking interest; money and gold ofer ways of taking wealth with you in fight. As against this, the Germans were a forest (sylvan) people of the North. This makes for an emotional relation with Nature, for settled agriculture and ties to the land, patrimonial relationships and a “just price” subsistence economy. Perhaps surprisingly: Sombart does not call the Germans heroic or warlike – rather the

44

Psyche, Science and Society

original Bedouin Jews were that – nor the Jews lacking in honour. He does say that the Jews tend to exhibit intellect rather than physique, and he speaks of conficts between Jewish intellect and cunning and Gentile (not just German) strength and violence. Sombart speaks of this last as something proverbial (Sombart 1982: 281f). Weber by contrast says very little of this kind – though he notes that “pariah” status entails endogamy. He deprecates race theories generally, and regards concepts of ethnicity and nation as problematic: he makes occasional comments on the Jews in this context (Weber 1976: 68f, 1978 Part 2 ch 5, nb. 398 n1). Generally, he seems to regard any putative Jewish mentality as arising either from the requirements of their religion or from their disprivileged position in society. Other issues, for example the in-group and out-group morality, he says are virtually universal: it is those who do not do this who are exceptional. Personally, Weber deprecated – and opposed – anti-Semitism. What then of Jung? Jung is not interested in the economic history, only in the broad character of modern civilization; but in most regards he surely aligns with Weber. He attributes the character of modern society to the Protestant Reformation, and does not implicate the Jews in it; he has no quarrel with the character of mediaeval European cities, whatever part the Jews played there; he is only interested in the Jews in history as originators of the Abrahamic religions. As to the Protestant Reformation, that was the work of the Germans. Jung is far more concerned with the German psyche – or German cultural history – than with the Jews. Some of his remarks echo things that Sombart says, for example Jews exhibiting intellect rather than physique, or conficts between Jewish intellect and cunning versus Gentile strength and violence. But such beliefs were proverbial, and Jung’s comments do not exactly amount to endorsements. In this important regard, then, the role of the Jews in cultural history and the making and character of modernity, Jung must be acquitted of the charge of systemic anti-Semitism. But there remains the question of his statements on “Jewish psychology”. This phrase has two senses: the psychological theories of Jews such as Freud and Adler, and the collective (or generalized) psyche of the Jewish people. Though of course it was part of Jung’s thesis that the frst refected the second, and was limited accordingly. Those who defend Jung’s statements and writings on the Jews use a range of arguments (cf. Lewin 2009: 32–8). The original statements come from World War I, long before the Nazi era, and are refections on the subjective equation – in great part apropos the diferences between Freud and Adler as extravert and introvert (Jung 1964d: 13f)). When looked at in full and in context, the statements are nuanced and balanced; they describe diferences not make value judgements. Early in the Nazi era, Jung used his words to dissemble his actions: he sought to avoid being stereotyped as an opponent of the Nazi regime while he dealt with the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy situation. Again, he did sometimes confront the Nazi regime, for example, a public lecture in Germany that extolled Freud; including a long essay by a Jewish author in his latest book (Harms 1991: 41, 43).

Jung and the Nazi era

45

However, as with the “America” thesis discussed in the previous chapter, there are two aspects to the matter: the content and the context. As regards the content, I  pointed out in the previous chapter that some of Jung’s remarks, for example on the Jews having no cultural form of their own, echo long-standing concerns expressed by Jewish intellectuals such as Samuel Weissenberg (Jung 1964f: 165f; Efron 1994: 110–12). But should Jung have continued to speak of “Jewish psychology” (in either sense) in the Nazi era, in face of the Nazi persecutions of the Jews? This, as earlier in this chapter, raises questions of how one is to judge it. Is it an absolute rule that certain sentiments should not be expressed, or do we consider the consequences of doing so? It seems to me that if consequences are adduced by Jung’s critics at all, it is on a very crude sociological model, that the audience constitutes a naïve and undiferentiated mass, and the media of communication act as a sort of hypodermic needle that injects the message straight into the recipient’s bloodstream. That is far too simplistic. People relate to the media actively not passively: they select and they interpret, in the light of their cultural background, current life situation, and other more idiosyncratic factors. There are many audiences not one. Moreover, these audiences are not naïve; anti-Semitism was a long-standing presence in the culture, right across Europe – though not everyone subscribed to it, or did so in the same terms. Against this, there is the tendency for people to select media channels that they expect will carry content that is congenial to them. This is commonly held to be an acute problem now, with the internet and social media displacing the mass media, but it was always there, with newspapers and magazines, for example. On the other hand, the danger that used to be pointed to was that of state censorship and control of broadcasting – though radio broadcasting was international, and listening to it hard to control. As an example of the matters in view here, consider the following often-cited passage (the text is dated 1934): The Jewish race as a whole – at least this is my experience – possesses an unconscious which can be compared with the “Aryan” only with reserve. Creative individuals apart, the average Jew is far too conscious and diferentiated to go about pregnant with the tensions of unborn futures. The “Aryan” unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish; that is both the advantage and the disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism. In my opinion it has been a grave error in medical psychology up to now to apply Jewish categories – which are not even binding on all Jews – indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom. (“The State of Psychotherapy Today” [Jung 1964f: 166]) How then might this text read to: (a) a fervently anti-Semitic Nazi; (b) someone who accepts “traditional” anti-Semitic views without giving them much thought; (c) someone who is aware of anti-Semitic beliefs and ideas but is not convinced by them; and (d) someone who is strongly opposed to all kinds of anti-Semitism?

46

Psyche, Science and Society

I would guess that cases (a) and (d) would reject the statement with scorn; they would want simple, robust black-and-white statements. Cases (b) and (c) however might welcome the nuance and balance here, and the element of the unexpected (Slavs?), as provoking thought. I do not know that it would change attitudes – what does change attitudes? – but it might promote openness of mind and even dialogue. Jung sometimes evokes popular stereotypes when he speaks of the Jews, but that is not necessarily to endorse them. To me it seems that the tone is often Adlerian: the neurosis (syndrome) is purposive, it makes sense in terms of their life-situation, it is not really culpable. It might be better if they followed a conscious strategy, but it might also be better if the pressures were taken of them. Consider the following passage – from the same essay, a few lines earlier: The Jews have this peculiarity in common with women; being physically weaker, they have to aim at the chinks in the armour of their adversary, and thanks to this technique which has been forced on them through the centuries, the Jews themselves are best protected where others are most vulnerable. (Jung 1964f: 165) It may be objected, how must these passages read to Jewish refugees? But there is no consensus here: Jung has always had Jewish defenders, and Jewish colleagues and associates who had reservations about his position but did not think it wicked (e.g. Harms 1991 and other essays in Maidenbaum and Martin eds; Jafé 1971). Jung’s accusers tend to be specifcally Freudian or Freud-infuenced, not simply Jewish. Again, one might ask how this might lie with the policy makers and political elites. But how policy makers make their decisions, and where “expert” advice – including unsought amateur expert advice – fgures in it, is a feld of enquiry in itself. It may also be worthwhile to set this in context. Consider the following, from an essay originally published in 1928: The Occidental burns incense to himself, and his own countenance is veiled from him in the smoke. But how do we strike men of another colour? What do China and India think of us? What feelings do we arouse in the black man? And what is the opinion of all those whom we deprive of their lands and exterminate with rum and venereal disease? I have a Red Indian friend who is the governor of a pueblo. When we were once speaking confdentially about the white man, he said to me: “We don’t understand the whites; they are always wanting something – always restless – always looking for something. What is it? We don’t know. We can’t understand them. They have such sharp noses, such thin, cruel lips, such lines in their faces. We think they are all crazy.” My friend had recognized, without being able to name it, the Aryan bird of prey with his insatiable lust to lord it in every land – even those that concern him not at all. And he had also noted that megalomania of ours which

Jung and the Nazi era

47

leads us to suppose, among other things, that Christianity is the only truth, and the white Christ the only redeemer. After setting the whole East in turmoil with our science and technology, and extracting tribute from it, we send our missionaries even to China. The stamping out of polygamy by the African missions has given rise to prostitution on such a scale that in Uganda alone twenty thousand pounds sterling is spent yearly on preventives of venereal infection, not to speak of the moral consequences, which have been of the worst. . . . No need to mention also the story of sufering in Polynesia and the blessings of the opium trade. That is how the European looks when he is extricated from the cloud of his own moral incense. (Jung 1933: 246f, cf. 1964e: 89) There is no nuance or balance here: it is a forthright attack, such as Jung never made on the Jews. Jung is a critic of modern Western civilization, and it is the Germans, or at least the Germanic peoples, not the Jews, that he blames for its character. There is another side to the question. What impact did speaking out against Nazi anti-Semitism actually have? States with sophisticated propaganda machines (or industries with sophisticated public relations) know how to turn criticism and protest to their own account, to stereotype it and discount for it. Critics and opponents are often at pains to avoid this, if their opposition is to be efective. Consider global warming or genetically modifed foods in our own time. To “do the right thing” does not excuse you from the consequences of your actions, the more so if you simply refuse to exercise foresight. As I have commented before in this chapter, bringing down the Third Reich took a fve years’ war. There were no easy answers.

Psychotherapy and psychiatry Jung has been accused of seeking to further his standing and career by making Jungian psychology the main form of medical psychology in Nazi Germany, at the expense of other forms such as Freudian psychoanalysis. This relates back to the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy afair. It also relates to accusations of Nazi sympathies, or questions of an afnity between his thought and Nazi ideology: I take this up later. There is some basis for the accusation, insofar as most psychotherapists in Germany at the time of the Nazi takeover were Jews. The Nazis quickly moved against them – though in fact they were not fnally expelled from the German Medical Society for Psychotherapy until 1938 (when Jews were also forbidden to practice medicine generally). The German Psychoanalytic Society had held aloof from the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy from the outset, and continued to do so. Jung’s restructuring of the society, and the provision that membership could be

48

Psyche, Science and Society

held in the International Society rather than the (new) German Society, then, may not have beneftted the Freudians (if indeed they knew of it, or were willing to avail themselves of it). But that was hardly Jung’s doing. But there is a wider and deeper context (Cocks 2018 chs 2–6). The situation of psychotherapy in interwar Germany was precarious; this in spite of its successes in treating shell-shock during the war. Medical psychiatry maintained its nosological and organicist orientation and was largely hostile, although neurologists and internists were more open. Those few psychiatrists who were interested wanted its practice to be limited to psychiatrists (this included Kretschmer, incidentally; Jung disagreed). It was not taught in the universities. Psychotherapists then saw the way to protect their position as to get formal recognition for psychotherapy as a profession. (Cocks holds that it was in Nazi Germany that they achieved this: this thesis is central to his work.) Add to this that psychotherapy was widely identifed with Freud and his theories. Indeed, Nazi ideologues such as Julius Streicher polemicized against all psychotherapy as “Jewish science” – though with a special hatred for Freud (Cocks 2018: 59f). These things defned the main concerns of psychotherapists in Germany when the Nazis took power. Accordingly they sought to use Jung with his high international standing and distinctive theoretical position both to protect themselves from take-over or marginalization by the psychiatric establishment, and to distance themselves from the charge of “Jewish science” (Cocks 2018: 148). Too much should not be made of this, however. It quickly became apparent that M.H. Göring was a more efective protector – especially as the Nazi regime became less ideological and more instrumental in its dealings. When the Göring Institute was set up in 1936 Jung’s infuence declined. Besides, there had always been voices raised in the psychotherapeutic community as to the appropriateness of Freudian theory to Germans and to Germany. Many found Adler’s theories more congenial: community spirit (Gemeinschaftesgefuhl), the individual as a biological and social entity rather than a bundle of drives, character rather than personality with its ambiguities and conficts. M.H. Göring was an Adlerian, as were his closest associates. This was refected in his attempts to launch a new “psychotherapy in the spirit of the National Socialist world-view”, though this also included Jungian elements (Cocks 2018: 31–6, 104, 109). (Adler too of course was a Jew. He was also a socialist.) But psychotherapists of all persuasions welcomed the Nazi takeover and the new Germany. In fact, the Nazi attitude even to Freudian psychoanalysis did not simply amount to the condemnation of a “Jewish science”. That certainly was heard, for example from Streicher, but there were other voices, and these soon prevailed. Thus, a certain Franz Wirz, chief administrator for university afairs, addressing psychotherapists in 1936: the Party did not oppose the science of psychoanalysis itself, only its practice by Jews. No one refused to use the Wasserman test (for syphilis) on the grounds that Wasserman was a Jew (Cocks 2018: 158f). Jung always claimed that his concern in these afairs was to protect the future of psychotherapy in Germany. Evaluating this, one should remember Jung’s early years

Jung and the Nazi era

49

in the Burghölzli mental hospital, at a time when schizophrenia was termed dementia praecox (premature senility), and was held to be organically caused and untreatable. Writing in 1939, Jung comments on the great improvement in conditions in mental hospitals due the introduction of occupational therapy and psychotherapy – “that whole desperate crowd of utterly degenerate catatonics has practically disappeared, on account of the mere fact that they have been given something to do” (Jung 1960c: 247, cf. Jung 1960b: 214f). It should not be assumed that Jung was simply concerned for the right of psychotherapists to make their living – while treating neurotics as outpatients or in private practice. (And he was surely within his rights in invoking medical ethics [Jung 1964b: 538f].) In any case, the control of psychotherapy in the Third Reich lay with M.H. Göring. He seems, largely through his family relationship to Herman Göring, to have been able to follow his own line without interference. He himself, as already said, was an Adlerian not a Jungian, as were his closest associates. But notwithstanding his initial attempts at a “Nazi psychotherapy”, he came increasingly to run the Göring Institute in eclectic terms: Freudians, Adlerians, Jungians and others (Cocks 1985: 53–60, 2018: 31f, 103f). Jung himself had no involvement with the Institute or with psychotherapy in Germany (Cocks 1985: 130, 2018: 139). Beyond this, Nazism was not ideologically coherent, and had no set attitude towards psychotherapy. It certainly was not deterministic: it believed in the blood, but also in the will (Cocks 2018: 224f). Moreover the Nazi regime was chaotic: each of the major fgures struck out his own personal empire, and guarded it jealously against the others, while Hitler played them of against each other (Kershaw 2000, esp. ch 4). There was no possibility of an ideological position being taken. One might also suggest that many of these fgures had served on the front line in World War I and might know something of “shell-shock” and its possible treatments: they would not be willing to be told what to think about it by those such as Goebbels or Himmler who did not have that experience. But it is a moot point. In fact, the Third Reich’s attitude to medical psychology was instrumental not ideological – as also was its attitude to general psychology (Cocks 1985, 2018; Geuter 1992; Ash 1995 chs 19 & 20). Although there was a lasting division as between organicist psychiatry, and psychodynamic psychiatry and psychotherapy, with a presumption that the latter was for Germans and the former for degenerates or racial inferiors (Cocks 1985: 13, 2018 passim e.g. 224f). In sum, there was no way for Jung to further his career or standing in Nazi Germany, and it did not in fact happen. (As to whether he was “ambitious”, that is easily said, but there is no evidence for it.) Jung certainly argued that his psychology was more appropriate to Germans than that of Freud or Adler; he had argued this since 1918 at least (Jung 1964d: 13f). But one should remember that a fundamental diference between his psychology and theirs lay in their diferent clinical experiences, Jung’s primarily with psychotics, Freud and Adler and their associates almost wholly with neurotics. Jung would argue that the Nazi episode was more explicable in terms of psychosis than of neurosis (Jung 1964g, 1960d: 314f and n 11). Its aetiology lay in cultural history

50

Psyche, Science and Society

rather than in, say, family patterns or child-rearing practices; it was a problem of the collective unconscious, not of the personal unconscious. Though as stated earlier, he also thought it possible at the outset that it might turn out well. As regards the possible impact of Jungian medical psychology in Nazi Germany, one might consider the issue of eugenics (Bashford and Levine 2010; Weindling 1989; Cocks 2018: 112f, 194–6, 235–7). Eugenics is not limited either to the Nazi era or to Germany: eugenics policies continued in Sweden and the USA until the 1960s and 1970s. But the Nazis did institute a strong eugenics programme immediately on taking power. This featured the typical eugenics policies of sequestration and sterilization found everywhere. There was also euthanasia (sic), though eventually this policy raised protests and was abandoned. In many ways, the Nazi eugenics programme was a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. As everywhere, these policies had the support of the medical profession, including organicist psychiatry. Psychotherapists however opposed it. The conditions targeted included alcoholism, homosexuality and schizophrenia. Organicist psychiatry held these to be organically caused conditions for which no treatment was possible. Now Jung was an authority on schizophrenia, and it is at the heart of Jung’s psychology that schizophrenia is a psychogenic condition and is amenable to psychotherapy, a view he maintained throughout his career (Jung 1960a passim). This surely must have been a resource for the psychotherapists against the eugenics programme – though whatever was achieved here would be to the credit of M.H. Göring and his staf, rather than Jung himself. This is a practical issue, concerning actual lives and deaths, not an abstract question of ideologies, sympathies or career ambitions.

Other issues: Jungian psychology and Nazi ideology Jung has been charged with Nazi sympathies, possibly unconscious, or with providing the Third Reich with a psychological ideology. This last charge may be quickly dismissed: the Third Reich did not seek a psychological ideology. There was no coherent policy and no coherent state to form one. Even if such a thing had been wanted, it might surely have better been found in the typological work of Ernst Jaensch: the S- (or synaesthesic) type and the J-type – which Adorno et al. would later invert as the basis for their Authoritarian Personality (Brown 1965: 477f). Against this, Jung’s pleas for toleration for the introvert would surely receive short shrift. M.H. Göring’s short-lived attempts at a new German psychotherapy were Adlerian in orientation, albeit with Jungian elements. But there was no interest in such a thing: the Third Reich’s attitude to medical and general psychology alike was instrumental not ideological – and piecemeal – as I have already said. The charge of Nazi sympathies is based on certain statements and texts from the early 1930s, when Jung was still in two minds as to how the Third Reich might turn out. Beyond this, though, it is argued that Jung’s thought was ideologically

Jung and the Nazi era

51

aligned, or possessed afnities, with that of Nazism, and that they drew on common sources. Thus, Grossman argues that Jung was both sympathetic towards and acceptable to the Nazi regime due to a current of romanticism that was deeply embedded in his work: that is, an emphasis on the emotional and irrational, on fantasy, symbol and myth; a belief in the merits of synthesis over those of the dissecting intellect; and a reverence for nature and the organic. (Grossman 1999: 100) So far as Jung’s thought goes, Grossman makes a good case. Whether it amounts to a critique is another question. Grossman presents a lengthy analysis of romantic thought, but he does not provide any critical context (Grossman 1999: 100–7). He simply presents it as something inherently wayward, to be distrusted. A more balanced account might antithesize romantic thought with classical thought – the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism that starts with Locke and is carried forward in amongst others, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim and Freud. Then it might ask how they each have been implicated in subsequent evils. This is a big question, and might merit consideration at length on another occasion. In brief, however, the diagnostic characteristics for classical thought could be given as: conceiving Nature primarily as the inanimate world, its paradigmatic sciences as physics and chemistry; viewing Nature as a feld for Man to manipulate and exploit without limit; and defning Man in terms of reason or rationality, and of citizenship as a member of society. As against this, romantic thought conceives Nature primarily as the living world, its paradigmatic sciences biology and geography; it views Nature as having value in itself, and setting limits to our activities. With this, its view of Man as irrational, emotional and instinctual (not merely “embodied”) points to a personal destiny beyond or in confict with society, in terms say of art or love. Consideration of the two together raises a number of issues. In their pure forms, they were surely the preserve of intellectual and cultural elites. Any wider uptake would be more rough and ready; moreover what would emerge in time would be a rough and ready mixture of the two (with other elements besides). That seems to be how it is by the 20th century, across the modern world generally. And it does not make for easy moral generalizations. Where do the roots lie of our environmental crisis; where do the roots lie of Green politics? Did not classical thought deny women’s ftness for citizenship, their reason and with it their full humanity? Are not race theories explicitly stated by leading Enlightenment thinkers before the advent of romanticism? (Poliakov 1974 ch 8). Which of the two gave birth to eugenics? Racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism are of very wide occurrence in (and beyond) modern western society. In practice, they do not seem to have compelling afnities or disafnities with either classical or romantic thought: they can fourish in either environment, though they may take diferent forms.

52

Psyche, Science and Society

Nazism is not simply a consequence of romanticism. That is to commit the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. It is also to ignore the ideological and structural incoherence of Nazi Germany, and the pragmatism of many of its policies and leaders. It is also to ignore the tyranny of Stalinist Russia: also very evil, but surely with classical rather than romantic thought in its background. Other objections to the thesis can be made. It might be that someone whose ground lay in romanticism might not have the inner defences against Nazism that those whose ground lay in, say, materialism or rationalism might have; by the same token he (or she) might have other defences that they would not have. It is those who speak the language who can best judge whether what is being said in it is true or false. The thesis under consideration here is a particularly insidious one, not merely because it looks only for what it wants to fnd, but because it does not come out and say what it is saying. And I think it should be challenged on that. If there is any truth in it, why did Jung not become a Nazi? Many others did; and there were certainly material advantages if he did so. Whatever held him back, it was inner factors not outer factors that did so. What were they? It is up to his accusers to answer that question. His defenders are under no obligation to balance their case for them.

Conclusion As I indicated in the introduction, my reasons for writing this chapter were frstly, to give an orientation to readers from the sociological community who might only have heard of these matters; secondly, to ofer sociological insights on certain aspects of them for those (mainly from the Freudian or Jungian communities) already engaged. For the frst, I make no claims to be either impartial or comprehensive: I merely seek to indicate the outlines. For the second, the major point is the comparison of Jung with Sombart and Weber: this surely must acquit Jung of the accusation of systemic anti-Semitism. At least there was a rich vein of systemic anti-Semitism ready to hand of which Jung did not avail himself. Besides this, I have tried to point to a less brutal and mechanistic conception of ideas and beliefs “in society” and how they might be manipulated, one that allows of consciousness and agency and individual diferences among actual persons. As to “critiques”, I am sceptical. You can have a Freudian critique of Jung and a Jungian critique of Freud; a classical critique of romantic thought and a romantic critique of classical thought. None of these is privileged. I have dealt more briefy with those aspects where I could not see a sociological angle. Though in fact I have never seen consideration of eugenics and schizophrenia and the possible bearing of Jungian psychology in these controversies (perhaps I have not read widely enough). Even so, it is difcult to avoid wider comment or evaluation. I have remarked that scholars such as Cocks, Ellenberger or Poliakov who have come across the

Jung and the Nazi era

53

Jung controversy in the course of wider enquiries have been somewhat cool about it. Cocks especially shows that there was far more going on, and that Jung’s role did not have the importance that either his accusers or defenders claim. He also points to a general bad conscience in the psychotherapeutic and psychiatric communities in Germany (and Austria) in relation to the Nazi era: this is where the psychotherapists obtained the status of recognized profession that they sought (Cocks 2018 ch 15 esp. pp385f). If that is so then the Freudian accusations against Jung gain credibility from the backdrop of silence from this quarter. For my part, the question it raises is, what justifes the focus on Carl Jung? There were thousands upon thousands of intellectuals, academics and professionals who went along with the Third Reich, often lastingly and with real enthusiasm (and with little damage to their subsequent careers). Jung’s part was both brief and ambiguous: he had come out against the Third Reich by the mid-1930s, and in regard to the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, he surely acted against it rather than for it. Would any general historian of the Nazi era single Jung out for comment? Or has he been singled out and charged because he is Jung? Besides this, I feel there should be more attention paid to structural factors, in the German political system in which Hitler came to power, and in the Nazi state itself (Kershaw 2000; cf. Cocks 2018 ch 16). Hitler was a skilled and determined political tactician, with disciplined cadres and a mass party behind him; the opposition and the establishment alike were unsure of themselves, opportunistic and divided. (Compare our own problems now with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson!). And in the Nazi state that subsequently emerged, he and his associates had their hands on the levers of power. Psychodynamic theory (of whatever kind) can ofer insights of a distinctive order, in terms of unconscious structures of meaning and emotion that might condition as a mental set how people interpreted their situations and contingencies, what choices they made or acquiesced in, their willingness to submerge their individualities in the mass. But this is only one aspect of the matter. And it is only diagnosis, it does not point to action. There is far too much faith expressed in intellectuals and others “speaking out” – without any coherent theory of the role of intellectuals and their limitations. In another aspect, the Nazi era was grounded on a structural failure of the German political system. Efective resistance to the regime could have taken the form of assassination, army revolt, or military intervention and regime change by one or more foreign powers – which is what fnally happened. But what could intellectuals do? What should they do? Finally, then, it is my opinion that the controversy over Jung’s activities, the accusations and the rebuttals, must take more account of the general history of the Nazi era, and that ultimately it is the historians of that era we should look to for a balanced judgement.

54

Psyche, Science and Society

Note 1 Cocks (2018) is the 2nd edition of Cocks (1985): revised, expanded and restructured. Where possible I have given references to both editions.

Bibliography Ash, Mitchell G. (1995) Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press Bashford, Alison and Levine, Philippa (eds.) (2010) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford: Oxford University Press Brown, Roger (1965) Social Psychology. New York and London: The Free Press (Collier-Macmillan) Cocks, Geofrey (1985) Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1991) “The Nazis and C.G. Jung”, in Maidenbaum, Aryeh, and Martin, Stephen A. (eds.) Lingering Shadows. Boston and London: Shambhala, pp157–65. (2018) Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (2nd ed: revised, expanded and restructured). London and New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary (1982) “Cultural Bias”. in Douglas, Mary In the Active Voice. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp183–254. (1992) “A  Credible Biosphere”, in Douglas, Mary Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London and New York: Routledge, pp255–70. Efron, John (1994) Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ellenberger, Henri F. (1994) The Discovery of the Unconscious. London: Fontana. Esler, Gavin (2016) “Seducing Napoleon”: Documentary on BBC Radio 4 on Albert Goering, broadcast January 2016. Geuter, Ulfried (1992) The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, New York and Oakfeld: Cambridge University Press. Goggin, James E., and Goggin, Eileen Brockman (2001) Death of a “Jewish Science”: Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Grossman, Stanley (1999) “C.G. Jung and National Socialism”, in Bishop, Paul (ed.) Jung in Contexts. London and New York: Routledge, pp92–121. Grundmann, Reiner, and Stehr, Nico (2001) “Why Is Werner Sombart Not Part of the Core of Classical Sociology”, Journal of Classical Sociology 1:2, pp257–87. Hannah, Barbara (1976) Jung His Life and Work. New York: Putman’s Sons. Harms, Ernest (1991) “Carl Gustav Jung, Defender of Freud and the Jews”, in Maidenbaum, Aryeh, and Martin, Stephen A. (eds.) Lingering Shadows. Boston and London: Shambhala, pp17–49. Homans, Peter (1979) Jung in Context. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Jafé, Aniele (1971) “C.G. Jung and National Socialism”, in From the Life and Work of C.G. Jung. London, Sydney, Auckland, and Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, pp78–98. Jung, Carl G. (1933) “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man”, in Jung, C.G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, pp226–54. (1960a) The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease (CW3). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1960b) “On the Problem of Psychogenesis in Mental Disease” (1919), p211–25. (1960c) “On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia” (1939), pp233–49.

Jung and the Nazi era

55

(1960d) “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits”, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp301–18. (1964) Civilization in Transition (CW10). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1964a) “After the Catastrophe” (1945), pp205–6. (1964b) “A Rejoinder to Dr. Bally” (1934), pp535–44. (1964c) “Epilogue to `Essays on Contemporary Events’” (1946), pp236–7. (1964d) “The Role of the Unconscious” (1918), pp3–28. (1964e) “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” (1928/31), pp74–94. (1964f) “The State of Psychotherapy Today” (1934), pp157–73. (1964g) “Wotan” (1936), pp179–93. (1973) Collected Letters Vol 1 (1906–1950). London: Routledge. (1977) “Psychology and National Problems” (1936), in Jung, C.G. (ed.) The Symbolic Life (CW18). London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp566–81. (1978) C.G. Jung Speaking: McGuire (ed). London: Thames and Hudson (1978a) “Diagnosing the Dictators” (1938), pp115–35 (1978b) “On the Attack in the Sunday Review of Literature” (1949), pp192–200. Kenrick, Donald, and Puxon, Grattan (1995) Gypsies Under the Swastika. Hatford: Gypsy Research Centre, University of Hertfordshire Press. Kershaw, Ian (2000) The Nazi Dictatorship (4th ed.). London: Arnold (Hodder Headline Group); New York: Oxford University Press. Lewin, Nicholas (2009) Jung on War, Politics and Nazi Germany. London: Karnac Books. Lewy, Guenter (1999) “Gypsies and Jews Under the Nazis”. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13:3, pp383–404. Maidenbaum, Aryeh, and Martin, Stephen A. (eds.) (1991) Lingering Shadows. Boston and London: Shambhala. Marx, Karl (1978a) “On the Jewish Question”, in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton, pp26–52. (1978b) “The German Ideology Part 1” (trans. S. Ryazanskaya), in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton, pp146–200. Panayi, Panikos (2000) Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany. Harlow: Longman (Pearson Education). Poliakov, Leon (1974) The Aryan Myth. London: Chatto Heinemann for Sussex University Press. Raphael, D.D. (1994) Moral Philosophy (new enlarged ed.). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Saban, Mark (2016) “Jung, Winnicott and the Divided Psyche”, Journal of Analytical Psychology 61:3, pp329–49. Samuels, Andrew (1991) “National Socialism, National Psychology, and Analytical Psychology”, in Maidenbaum, Aryeh, and Martin, Stephen A. (eds.) Lingering Shadows. Boston and London: Shambhala, pp177–209. (2016) The Political Psyche. London and New York: Routledge. Schwartz, Urs (1980) In the Eye of the Hurricane. Boulder: Westview Press. Sherry, Jay (1991) “The Case of Jung’s Alleged Anti-Semitism”, in Maidenbaum, Aryeh, and Martin, Stephen A. (eds.) Lingering Shadows. Boston and London: Shambhala, pp117–132 Sombart, Werner (1982) The Jews and Modern Capitalism. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. (Original 1911)

56

Psyche, Science and Society

Weber, Max (1976) The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London: New Left Books. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Weindling, Paul (1989) Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unifcation and Nazism 1870–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winnicott, Donald (1964) “Review of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Refections”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 45, pp450–55.

3 JUNG AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

Introduction To bring Jung together with the sociology of religion raises three obvious questions: where does he ft in; why has this not been done before; and what has Jung to learn from the sociological tradition? Other questions may emerge, of course. Jung was deeply interested in anthropology, but he ignored sociology completely. He is interested in religion primarily as symbolic thought and action, and he tends to view this, in the frst instance at least, in the primitive context, as collective consciousness or collective representations – though it is Lévy-Bruhl rather than Durkheim that he references. In dealing with religion in civilization and history, he is somewhat more concerned with divisions and conficts. Religion may become a priestly thing of empty ritual and dogma, while the living symbolic thought and activity are maintained by an elite that is marginalized or driven underground. Jung has much to say about the rhythms and dynamics of this, and though he does not seek to relate it to any established body of sociological theory, it culminates in a recognizably Weberian vision of modernity as rationalized and disenchanted (Walker 2012). As to sociology and religion, the history has been episodic, and any summary would be contentious.1 The classical theorists may have created the groundwork, but interest then faded: rather a “sociology of religion” emerged as a sub-feld (the Churches too turned to sociology, seeking solutions to their perceived problems). In mainstream sociological theory of the Parsonian era, the orientation to religion was functionalist. This situation, as with much in sociology, began to change in the 1960s and 1970s. Several factors played a part in this: a dawning awareness of “New Age” religion, and questions whether “religion” could simply be equated with the recognized churches (or whether the churches’ “interested” research could be trusted); the emergence of religious conservatism as a political force, especially in DOI:10.4324/9780429456268-4

58

Psyche, Science and Society

America; the infux of immigrants bringing in their religion with them, especially Muslims, with subsequent confictual political demands and even terrorism. All this has led to accusations and counter-accusations: that the sociology of religion had lost touch with sociological theory; that sociology – mainstream and sub-feld alike – had lost touch with peoples’ actual spirituality; that mainstream sociology is blind to religion and wilfully translates religious phenomena into other terms such as ethnicity; that sociology’s traditional conviction that modernity is necessarily secular is mistaken, or at least, we are now entering a post-secular phase or society. These issues, or some of them, will be considered in what follows. But I think that a more critical, and indeed refexive, view is called for. Classical sociology was ambivalent about religion: its central concern was with the emergence of a modernity that was not going to be religious. This might imply that religion itself was really a problem for anthropology – and it is in fact from anthropology that much of the theory of religion came. Durkheim’s ambiguous position as a founding father for both disciplines makes this a difcult question to focus. So also does the common distortion of Marx’ position, whereby the absence of need for religion under socialism crowds out the failure of ideology (including religion) under capitalism which is a condition for the socialist revolution. Meanwhile, of the three great founding fathers, it is Durkheim and Weber who really consider religion at length: Marx in fact has very little to say about it. Nevertheless, it is from Durkheim and Marx – or Durkheim with Marx conscripted – that the sociology of religion has taken its orientation: religion as beliefs, ideas, rituals and so forth functioning to hold society (or class society) together. That is hardly adequate to Weber. Weber certainly considers beliefs and ideas, but he also considers many other matters: religious roles and personages; religious propensities of diferent social strata; diferent trajectories of development in East and West; relations between religious and state bureaucracies; the economic bases and impacts of religious institutions, and so on. It is not just that his comparative historical feld is wider: he considers a wider range of sociological issues. The sociology of religion has taken some of this on board, especially the Protestant Ethic thesis and the rationalization and disenchantment of modernity. The rest it has tended to mine piecemeal, without systematic engagement. There has certainly been no question of letting Weber set the agenda. The force of these remarks will become clearer as the essay unfolds. Returning to anthropology, sociology’s consideration of religion has as already remarked been heavily dependent on anthropological approaches – Durkheim’s theory of religion is set among the Australian aborigines (Durkheim 1995). Victorian armchair anthropologists such as Frazer or Robertson Smith are not directly invoked, but they continue as indirect presences through their infuence on Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss and Freud. Fieldwork anthropologists such as Malinowski or Evans-Pritchard are also commonly considered. This refects acknowledgement of modern anthropology’s criticisms of the armchair anthropologists: that they had no direct experience of primitive societies, but relied on reports of uneven quality from missionaries and colonial administrators; that they wrenched the reported beliefs and practices out of context and forced them into preconceived evolutionary

Jung and the sociology of religion

59

schemas (Evans-Pritchard 1965). But there were other anthropologists, for example Robert Lowie or Paul Radin, who did have feldwork experience, and who produced empirically oriented general accounts of primitive religion that used only trustworthy ethnographic evidence, and interpreted it in context (Lowie 1936; Radin 1957 [1937]). This anthropology never seems to receive consideration. Radin, of course, is of particular interest here, owing to his long association with Jung. (Incidentally this anthropology is surely also the obvious resource for building out the sketch of primitive religion with which Weber introduces his general sociology of religion, though that must be a project for another time [Weber 1978: 399f].) I opened this chapter with questions regarding Jung and the sociology of religion; well, there are other questions to ask, as to sociology’s use of the resources available to it; and maybe that is where Jung fts in. But it is the third question that I will take up frst: what has Jung to learn from sociology? In this chapter, I will be mainly concerned with Britain and more broadly with Western Europe. This accords with my remark above on the need for a view that is not merely critical but refexive. Sociology is to some degree conditioned by the situation(s) in which it arises, and so should be scrutinized for the biases this might give rise to. Various frameworks might be used for this, but I want to start with Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory of culture – at least for orientation: much of the consolidatory argument will be in terms of Weber.

Sociology and refexive analysis: cultural theory Grid-group theory, also known as Cultural Theory, was introduced by Mary Douglas (1982, 1992), a leading Durkheimian anthropologist. It has been widely adopted and adapted since (e.g. Thompson et al. 2018), and has acquired a vast literature. But I want to stay close to the theory as developed by Douglas herself. I want to use the theory here heuristically and for orientation, rather than as committed explanation. There are reasons for this. The theory as Douglas frst states it is at a very high level of generality: indeed it can be used to compare primitive societies, as well as to analyse the diferent cultural sectors of complex societies; and these at any level of cultural development. Also, as Douglas (1982) initially states it, it utilizes micro-sociological argument, relating the individual to his or her immediate social setting. Later however (Douglas 1992), she uses it as macrosociological theory, moreover she proposes that it be used refexively – sociologists should consider their own cultural location and how this conditions their thinking. My own intentions are in line with this; but there could be problems of compatibility between the earlier and later forms which I do not want to spend time on. I also want to present the theory aetiologically, because I think it could be of interest to sociologically inclined Jungians – there has been something of a DurkheimianJungian tradition since Progof (1953; see also Walker 2018: 67f). Durkheim’s methodology generally uses a comparison of modern society with primitive society, with the emphasis rather on the latter, and the Jungian Durkheimians have

60

Psyche, Science and Society

tended to follow this. But one out of his major works, Suicide (Durkheim 2002), does focus on modern society, with considerations as to its structure, and it is this work which seems to me to underlie Douglas’s theory – though admittedly I have not seen her discuss its origins in these terms. I start then with Durkheim’s Suicide. Durkheim identifes two dimensions in society, integration and regulation. Integration is how far the individual is integrated into groups such as the family, church, trade union or professional association and so forth. Regulation is how far he or she is constrained by the norms and values of the conscience collective. From these, Durkheim derives four kinds of suicide. Egoistic suicide occurs where the individual is isolated, where integration is weak. Altruistic suicide occurs where integration is too strong (e.g. saving family honour, in Japanese tradition). Anomic suicide occurs where the norms and values of the conscience collective have lost their force. Fatalistic suicide occurs where the norms and values of the conscience collective are too strong, and the individual is overwhelmed. Altruistic and fatalistic suicide are not typical of modern society, although altruistic suicide is found among army ofcers. But the typical forms in modern society are egoistic suicide and anomic suicide. The former may a factor of a weakening of the state, for example, after defeat in a war. The latter is often a factor of economic swings – either boom or bust: too much money and no idea what to spend it on is a case of anomie. It is notable that Durkheim says very little about fatalistic suicide – where the other three types each receive two full chapters, fatalistic suicide only receives a couple of paragraphs at the end of a chapter (Durkheim 2002: 239n). It may have been found in the past among slaves and childless wives. Douglas’s considerations tend to refect this. Durkheim’s Suicide has been criticized on the grounds that the two dimensions, integration and regulation, are not clearly separated: how can the individual be regulated save by integration into regulatory groups? (Pope 1976 ch 4 esp. p30). One answer is by the internalization of the conscience collective, for example as a Freudian superego, but while this makes sense, it is not clear that Durkheim intended such a solution. Douglas’ grid-group approach then might be seen as an alternative attempt to solve this problem (cf. Thompson et al. 2018: 5f, 138). Douglas defnes her two dimensions as grid and group, each running from strong to weak. The group dimension asks if (or how far) your life is lived in relation to a single group with visible boundaries of membership. An extreme case would be a commune or small sect. If your various activities are divided between diferent groups, this places you rather towards the middle. At the opposite extreme, you are the centre of networks of relationships with no boundaries evident to you. The grid dimension asks how far you are classifed in terms of expectations that restrict your behaviour (high grid), or how far you have freedom of action – possibly with control over others (low grid). Thus, four sectors are set up: high grid/high group; high grid/low group, low grid/low group, and low grid/high group. Although the underlying conception might be Durkheimian, Douglas presents it, initially at least, in terms of agency theory and microsociology, how the

Jung and the sociology of religion

61

individual interprets and negotiates his or her immediate social situation – though she argues that this must be done within objective constraints (Douglas 1982: 188f, 247f). She argues then that the individual will tend to hold a consistent set of beliefs and values that serve to justify his/her actions and interactions, what behaviour he/she expects from others: a cosmology. This will show quite comprehensively in the way he or she sees the world, for example, nature, human nature, medicine, cooking, gardening, time, sickness and death (Douglas 1982: 205f). These will be diferent – and indeed mutually hostile – in the diferent quadrants. In a later discussion (Douglas 1992), this conception is used as macrosociology, with the quadrants named as hierarchist, isolate/fatalist, individualist/entrepreneurial, and enclave. A diagonal line from top right to bottom left – in terms of modern society, state to market – forms the central axis of society, with excluded groups bottom left and excluded individuals top right (see diagram). This central axis diagonal, incidentally, Douglas also sees in Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, a work of which she quite approves (Benedict 1935; Douglas 1982: 185, 230f). (It is perhaps even clearer in Benedict’s unpublished typology of high synergy/ low synergy [Maslow and Honigmann 1970].) One might also note that Douglas fnds it hard to say much about the top left isolate/fatalist quadrant, in her earlier presentations at least (Douglas 1982: 202). This is in line with Durkheim’s scant treatment of fatalistic suicide. The hierarchist position is characterized by group identity and loyalty, and a theory of distributive justice. Conficts are resolved by attributing diferent roles with diferent rights and duties; personal relationships tend to be predefned and formal. Society and nature tend to be seen as in harmony, indeed an elaborated metaphysics may state their analogy with each other. Dogma and ritual give this expression; there are restrictions on free enquiry or movement of information. The enclave position (going now clockwise) is characterized by group identity and loyalty, but groups are generally smaller and internally egalitarian. They lack mechanisms of confict resolution, and are likely to expel dissident members or else split. In personal relationships, this situation favours informal friendships. These groups are likely to be smaller, shorter-lived and with shorter time-horizons. Again there are restrictions on free enquiry or movement of information, and a general distrust of the outside world. The individualist position is characterized by rejection of all restrictions on personal autonomy, with emphasis on competition and getting allies or followers. Social interactions and relationships are pragmatic, with few or no binding norms; personal and even sexual relationships can be precarious. Failure in this location forces the individual up-grid – for example, a single woman with a career marries, has children, separates and is compelled to live as a single parent dependent on welfare. Notably the belief in equality in this quadrant actually co-exists with the systemic creation of inequality. This position rejects metaphysical dogmas and favours open speculation – science. The isolationist position is characterized both by exclusion from – or rejection of – group membership and expulsive pressures from the market/individualist

Psyche, Science and Society

GRID Limits on individuals’ options

62

Isolates fatalists

Central community - state Hierarchists Positive diagonal – modes of power and influence

Negative diagonal – self-withdrawal or exclusion Markets Individualistic entrepreneurs

Dissenting enclaves sects, communes etc.

GROUP Strength of group boundaries FIGURE 3.1

Grid-group theory of culture

quadrant. Individuals here are separated from each other by the roles and expectations accorded to them: personal friendships may struggle for expression in the face of this. They lack freedom and autonomy in the face of impersonal societal rules and categorizations: they meet this with a characteristic attitude of fatalism. As I have previously commented, Douglas’ remarks on this quadrant are often thin, and she sometimes confesses herself puzzled at its mentality. Importantly, Douglas argues that the grid-group conception should form the basis for refexive analysis: that we should use it to locate ourselves and so identify and discount for our own subjective bias (Douglas 1992: 260–2, 269). It is this conception that I want to use. Grid-group theory can be applied to politics. Traditional conservatism would be placed top right with the hierarchists; liberal-progressive positions bottom left with the individualists and entrepreneurs. Various dissident groups would be placed bottom right among the dissenting enclaves. Top left would be the apolitical and apathetic masses – though they can be unpredictably mobilized by the dissident parties, especially of the right wing. This might cast light on where Jung himself might be placed. He is often held to be a conservative, but Jung surely distrusts the state at least as much as the “progressive” forces of modernity. Grid-group theory suggests that he should be placed top left, with the excluded or isolated individuals, as basically apolitical. That seems more in line with his own stated views.

Jung and the sociology of religion

63

Again, there is the question of whether the quadrants of grid-group theory can be related to Jungian psychological types. Of course, the Jungian typology can generate more than four personality types – up to 16 at least; and the distinctions are not always easy to apply. Douglas states that she is not arguing for a sociological determinism of personality: individuals are negotiating their situations, within limits. The theory is psychologically open (Douglas 1982: 200). I would suggest, however, that we might look at two type situations. Where the society is open and individuals can move freely, then they might gravitate to whichever quadrant is congenial to them. If however the society is closed and forces individuals into one quadrant or another, this is likely to set up psychic conficts within the individual: either open deviance and the stresses of social disapproval, or outward conformity and inner psychic stress. This seems to me to be in line with Benedict’s arguments on abnormal psychology (Benedict 1935 ch viii; see also Walker 2018: 17–19). That stated, I would tentatively suggest that the group dimension, high to low, be linked with feeling < > thinking, and the grid dimension, high to low, with introversion < > extraversion. Though other and more detailed solutions might be ofered. It is religion, however, that is my main concern in this chapter, especially with Douglas’ challenge to sociologists to use grid-group theory refexively, to identify and discount for their own subjective bias. Douglas incidentally identifes herself as a hierarchist; but she also says that she suspects most of her colleagues (sociologists included, at least by implication) of being located in the bottom left individualist quadrant – and of never having questioned the intrinsic rightness of this position (Douglas 1982: 205, 1992: 266). Though later she seems also to envisage the possibility of isolates (which is where I would place myself); indeed implicitly of colleagues in all four quadrants. I propose then that, granted the focus on Britain and western Europe, we can identify four cultural attitudes to religion: the religious attitude, the sceptical attitude, the spiritual attitude and the mandarin attitude. Each of these attitudes, be it noted – their proponents, rather – is adamant that it alone has perceived the truth, and that the others are labouring under delusion; it regards the others with anger and contempt. •

• •

•

The religious attitude: our religious needs may be met in terms of one or other of the mainstream churches or religions. This I  would link with the bottom-right quadrant, the enclavist position. (This may seem heterodox, but the point of it should become clear as the argument unfolds.) The sceptical attitude: all religion is a deceit and an illusion: this I would link with the bottom left, individualist – market – quadrant. The spiritual attitude: there is truth in religion, but it is not to be found in the churches or mainstream religions. I would place this top left, the isolates, excluded individuals. The mandarin attitude: religion is not something you actually believe in, it is something that is a good idea, that serves to stabilize society. This I would place with the hierarchist (top right) quadrant, with the state (cf. Weber 1978: 476f).

64

Psyche, Science and Society

In Britain, the mandarin attitude is exemplifed in the attitude of the BBC. Indeed, the typical religious programme, on radio or television, takes the form of a confrontation between some representative of the religious attitude and another of the sceptical attitude, with the dice loaded carefully in favour of the religious protagonist – he gets to talk most, interrupt most, change the subject most, and so on. This is stage managed from the mandarin position, which itself declines to be interrogated. The spiritual attitude is by tacit consent frozen out completely; none of the players will admit to its existence. Some further points may be added here. None of these attitudes, save perhaps the mandarin, comprises an actual community. There are plenty of internal divisions and conficts; for example, the sceptical attitude might be held by businessmen, communists and evolutionary biologists; and there can be bitter conficts between Churches – for example, Catholic and Protestant (other than Anglican). Again, I have used the term sceptical rather than, say, materialist or atheist, because the sceptical attitude might well go with idealist philosophical commitments; equally, the spiritual attitude may well go with atheism, Buddhism for example. Much more could be said. But the point is the argument’s refexive potential. It is not simply a matter of the religious and the sceptic disagreeing over whether God created the world, or the religious and the spiritual arguing over where “religious” truth is to be found. It is also a disagreement between the sceptical attitude and the spiritual attitude as to how human afairs are to be understood: and this implicates the human sciences themselves, generally and especially in their consideration of religion. The sceptical attitude generally goes with a deterministic view of human nature – there are many forms of determinism, biological, psychological, sociological and philosophical. Just as they deny the soul or spirit, so they deny consciousness and free will, regarding the frst as an epiphenomenon and the second as an illusion. With the spiritual attitude it is just the opposite: to afrm the soul or spirit has a natural continuity with afrming consciousness and free will as real and central.2 The spirit or soul are essentially the same things expressed in diferent terms (as remarked earlier, religion here may be atheistic). This divide then cuts right across the human sciences – psychology, sociology and anthropology. Freud is a materialist sceptic; his psychology is deterministic. Jung and Adler are humanistic; they treat free will and consciousness as real, as do later existential psychiatrists such as Carl Rogers or R.D. Laing (or again, Maslow). Likewise Marx and Durkheim: the structure approaches in sociology are deterministic, whereas the action approaches are humanistic: Weber, Simmel, action microsociologies such as symbolic interactionism or ethnomethodology. The division also appears between social and cultural anthropology, the Durkheimian and Boasian traditions. With this goes a characteristic division in the human sciences as to what religion is about. For the sceptics/determinists, religion is about God and Creation – and it is simply bad science. They see no more in it than its social and/or psychological functions. The humanists/“intentionalists” rather see religion as a predecessor

Jung and the sociology of religion

65

to themselves, though of a less rational kind. Making free will and consciousness central naturally leads to the thought that when religious thinkers speak of our immortal souls, maybe it is our free will and consciousness they are trying to talk about. This makes possible a real conversation with religion, of a kind from which the sceptical determinists have excluded themselves: an actual engagement with theology. And it leads to a quite diferent conception of religion: a conception centred on salvation rather than creation, religious rejections of the world rather than cosmology – and quite possibly in atheistic terms. This applies especially to Weber and to Jung. I have argued elsewhere the overall similarities in their treatment of religion, culminating in a view of western modernity in terms of rationalization and disenchantment (Walker 2012: 61f). It needs to be realized that this is grounded, for both thinkers alike, in the critical philosophical tradition of Kant and Schopenhauer. Human reason, while quite useful, is imperfect and limited – limited not least by the fact that the world is not reasonable, is not a self-evident manifestation of Divine reason (the thesis of natural theology: there will be more to say on this later.) This is not the mere “sympathy” or “respect for religion” that accounts of the action approach to religion as told from the structure point of view sometime concede. Religion cannot be condemned, because fawed as it is, it identifes real problems, and we have nothing better. For the sceptics/determinists, then, religion is solely a matter of the bottom right quadrant, the religious attitude. This is seen critically, from the outside. The top-left quadrant, the spiritual attitude, they ignore. For the humanists/“intentionalists”, by contrast, religion is about both quadrants, the spiritual attitude and the religious attitude, and even more, about the conficts between them. And this is treated as meaningful, capable of interpretation and even dialogue. The identifcations I have made in the foregoing may be queried: “intentionality” and the spiritual attitude with the isolationist quadrant, determinism and the sceptical attitude with the individualist quadrant. A basic problem here is Douglas’ lack of clarity as to the isolationist quadrant, her inability to see anything positive in it, or that anyone might seek that quadrant rather than being forced into it. She does indeed consider total social withdrawal, and the “hermit’s voice” that “tends to be heard” (Douglas 1982: 204f, 231–8). But she wants to place it of-diagram, though she concedes other possibilities. Yet high grid always entails some release from competition and confict, and while it may not ofer material gains, it might ofer non-material gains (cf. Weber 1978: 503f). With this, some activities by their nature call to be carried out alone rather than in groups. Thus, poets or others in the arts, writers, some academics, as well as mystics and contemplatives, might fnd this quadrant congenial. Again, low group always implies rejection of religious metaphysics, seeing rather a meaningless world of impersonal forces. In the market/ individualist situation, all value is placed on the individual, and failure to cope is explained by the distribution of personal qualities. But the isolationist position is not necessarily defned by failure on the market. There could be a sense of inward (or future) achievement. The hierarchist notions of distributive justice, resolution of conficts in terms of diferent positions with diferent rights and duties, might be

66

Psyche, Science and Society

turned inwards: given an intra-personal rather than inter-personal direction. There is more to this than “fatalism”. However this may be, I have said that I want to use Douglas’ grid-group theory heuristically and for orientation, and I think that it is serving its purpose. There is more argument to come.

Sociology and refexive analysis: the two traditions I have myself made proposals elsewhere for refexive analysis in sociology, using A.D. Smith’s categories of territorial (or civic) and ethnic nations (Walker 2018: 210–2; Smith 1986; cf. Arnason 2006). I have argued that the two main traditions in sociology, the French and the German, came into being in these respective contexts, and that this conditions their characters and agendas. The French tradition is marked by its treatment of “society” as a moral order, and its limited treatment of political sociology, especially how political communities or associations are comprised. This seems to refect a desire to avoid acknowledging internal conficts, “nationalities questions” and other minorities problems. The German tradition by contrast has a strongly developed political sociology in which the processes of polity formation are thematized – state, political community or association, nation, are all distinguished and problematized. Here rather than a reifed notion of “society”, the supervisory concepts evolve during the last three quarters of the 19th century, from history through Geist to Kultur. Religion is intimately a part of this, indeed it is the reverse side of the coin. In the French tradition – and Marxism has largely gone with this – religion is treated simply as beliefs, ideas, values – the moral order that holds “society” (or class society) together. It does not go into religious history: the wars, persecutions, secessions and so forth, just as it does not go into the history of polity formation. In the German tradition however, most notably Weber, religion is considered in terms of a far wider set of issues. Leaving aside the comparisons of the World Religions in East and West, themes include the economic bases and impacts of religious institutions, relations between secular and religious bureaucracies, religious and secular forms of rulership, their inter-relations and transformations, impacts of canon law on secular legal systems, religious propensities of diferent stratifcatory groups, conficts between priests and prophets and so on. Beliefs, values and ideas are dealt with too, but the enquiry is not limited to this – or rather, they are not taken out of context. Underlying this are two diferent accounts of modern society and its origins. For modern western society has two origins. The one lies in the Enlightenment and the 18th century. The other lies in the Renaissance and the 15th century. The French sociological tradition has always oriented itself to the former, the German to the latter. If you take the starting point as the Enlightenment, then it easily follows to see modern western civilization as a rational, scientifc, progressive civilization emerging out of the religious superstition of the past. If you take the starting point as the Renaissance, however, then certainly there is an explosion of secular

Jung and the sociology of religion

67

knowledge (e.g. printing, experiments in art and science, the voyages of exploration), but there also follows the confict between Catholicism and Protestantism, which immediately morphs into politics and war. The ramifcations of this go wide. The Catholic Church conducted its afairs, as well as its preaching, in Latin; it was indiferent to vernacular languages, and would in principle provide a basic education in any language, with a higher education in Latin: in principle it would do this anywhere. But basic to Protestantism is the demand for religion to be conducted and administered in the vernacular language – and for a vernacular education to support and enforce it. This of course raises the question, which vernacular language? In both England and Scotland, the language chosen was English: the persecution of the Celtic languages starts with the Reformation (and continues into the 20th century). The English extended this policy to Ireland, though curiously not to Wales: rather Queen Elizabeth lent her support to the printing and distribution of the Welsh translation of the Bible. Presumably she feared a Welsh revolt at the same time as war with Spain. The predictable consequence was that Wales did not hold onto the Catholic religion, and the Welsh language has survived far better than the other Celtic languages. But the point is that religion, language, education and the forming – or forcing – of the polity all run together: and the history is violent. The modern international order of sovereign states (not “nation states”) has its origins in the Thirty Years War, the bloodiest war of European experience prior to 1914. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (the “English Civil Wars”) were concurrent with this. And the conficts did not end with the 17th century. Civil disabilities on non-Anglicans (and Jews) were only lifted during the 19th century. Again, there is the secession – or expulsion – of Methodism from the Anglican Church; and one surely understands little of British society if one does not query the Oxford Movement, the attempt to bring the Anglican Church back to Rome. Meanwhile the history was quite different in Scotland: attempts to impose the Anglican Church ended formally with the 1688 Revolution, though Anglicizing interference long continued, eventually bringing the Great Disruption in 1843. Education likewise took a diferent course in Scotland – it is notable how far, unlike in England, the Scottish Enlightenment was located in the universities, a diference that persists into the 19th century. Possibly the wars between Anglicans and Puritans left a distrust of the universities as hotbeds of religious unrest; at any rate, they rather became intellectual backwaters for the recruitment of the Anglican clergy. I have focused on Britain here, but the history is more general – as witness the Thirty Years’ War. And the German sociological tradition, unlike the French, takes this history as its background, the cauldron in which modern society was formed – for example, capitalism and its links with certain forms of Protestantism. To put it graphically, the French tradition proceeds as though “society” only comes into existence when history is over and done with, and can therefore be subjected to a “timeless” scientifc examination. (It is amazing how easily Marxists can be brought to accept this – especially those who seek to theorize advanced capitalism in terms of the return of ideology.) Whereas the German tradition concerns

68

Psyche, Science and Society

itself with the sociological analysis of the historical process. This in sociology, but to a fair degree, one can see it paralleled in anthropology: cultural anthropology, the Boasian tradition, is still far more inclined to ofer historical-developmental (or evolutionary) perspectives on the ethnographic record, than is the functionalist social anthropology of the Durkheimian tradition (or the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss). It is, or was for a time, common for historians to speak of a German Sonderweg, a distinctive German route to modernity. But given the importance of the French tradition in sociology, maybe sociologists should ask whether there is not a French Sonderweg – instead of treating it as a benchmark. The frst modern industrial societies did not typically emerge from a century of Catholic absolutism; 18th-century France is not a centre of capitalism in the way that say England or the Netherlands are; and the French have always tended to use the term “bourgeois” in a sense that is at best tangential to that of Marxism.3 I do not mean simply to denigrate the whole French tradition. It has its virtues: indeed this is ultimately where grid-group theory is grounded. But it does trouble me that in British sociology we seem so easily, unthinkingly, to accord it paradigmatic status. Like the French, we see “British society” as a moral order – a gift of the coastline – and not as a constituted thing with a history; we are averse to acknowledging internal conficts. Gellner, Smith’s mentor, laboured for years to get nationalism onto the sociological agenda (Gellner 1983). We are aware of the German tradition, but fail to see how deep the diferences go.

Jung and the classical sociological traditions on religion I began my analysis of the sociology of religion with Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory. Three points came from this. First, there is no simple identity of interests between religion and the state: they are two diferent things, and their relations may be various. Second, religion and the spiritual are again two diferent and often mutually hostile things. Third, sociology itself and the human sciences generally are deeply divided, in line with the division between religion and the spiritual. Taking this together with the division just discussed between the French and German sociological traditions, I suggest now that we can view the sociology of religion in terms of two poles. At the one pole, religion is viewed in terms of beliefs, ideas, rituals and so forth; in terms of the mainstream churches and other such organizations, and the relation between religion and power is viewed as unproblematic. This last may indeed be taken for granted rather than thematized. There may be anxieties as to whether society can survive without religion, or whether the decay of religion may lead to the emergence of other equally unhelpful ideologies. At the other pole, there is equal concern with religion and with the spiritual, and with the relations between them; relations between religion (and the spiritual) and power are problematized; and the range of concerns goes far wider than beliefs, ideas or rituals, into such things as roles and ofces, religious propensities of diferent status groups, economic bases and impacts of religious organizations, and so on.

Jung and the sociology of religion

69

Three observations follow. First, the sociology of religion as practised is heavily seated in the frst pole. It may make forays in the direction of the other pole, but it does not see it as an alternative pole or attempt systematic exploration or development. Second, it is only in this alternative pole that one fnds any real development of confict sociology. This is unexpected: approaching from the angle of religion versus the spiritual, one would look for the division to be along the lines of structure perspective versus action perspective. This leads to the third point: it is remarkable how far Marxism has been recruited to a consensus perspective. Little of Marxism’s character as a confict sociology appears in the conventional sociology of religion. It is in the light of these points that I want now to discuss Jung’s relation to the classical sociological traditions on religion. Mainly I will be concerned with Durkheim and with Weber. But something should frst be said about Marx. To relate Jung’s and Marx’ thought in any comprehensive way would take an essay in itself. But for present purposes, the basic issue is that for Marx, human sufering is grounded in oppressive class relations, the division between property and labour. Religion is a consolation for this, albeit one that fails to address the real issues (Marx 1978: 53f). For Jung, human sufering is grounded in the human existential condition: we are only loosely anchored to our instincts, and we have to live in a world that is not wholly amenable to reason. Religion is a symbolic resource – albeit an imperfect one – for coping with this situation. As Hamilton points out, Marx’ treatment of religion is not consistent with his treatment of art: both alike can serve ideological functions, but art is not held to be ideology and nothing more. But Marx did not develop a full account of religion, beyond these early indications (Hamilton 1995: 84f). Again, Jung takes care to distinguish “living” religion from institutionalised religion (“creed”) (Jung 1958: 8f, 1964e: 256f). Whether these things might point to some possible reconciliation of their views, however, would depend upon a range of issues that cannot be gone into here. Meanwhile, there is the question whether Marx would intend his comments to apply to modern society (Ling 1980). From the Communist Manifesto, for example, it seems not. Rather ideology will not feature in capitalist society in the way that it did under the precapitalist modes of production. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat meet in the naked cash nexus, the proletariat perceive their exploitation and oppression as previous labouring classes were never able to do, they will acquire class consciousness and make the revolution that will end class rule forever. In short, capitalist society is not going to be religious (Marx and Engels 1978 esp. p475). There are schools of modern Marxist theory that argue that ideology has returned, though not necessarily in the form of religion, and that this accounts for the persistence of advanced capitalism. But one can sense something spurious in the “Marxist sociology of religion”; it seems more an artifact of the sociology of religion than an expression of Marxist thought. Before turning to Durkheim and Weber, it may be as well to review what Jung is ofering (see esp. Jung 1960a, 1964c, 1970a; see also Jung 1960 passim). Jung holds that our species is only loosely anchored to its instincts, living rather through our learning capacity, in a world that does not altogether lend itself to this – a

70

Psyche, Science and Society

world that is enigmatic, unpredictable, even contradictory. At the base of how we cope, then, is the creation of symbols – a proactive not a reactive process; symbols through which we can intuitively deal with uncertainty, paradox, dilemma, and also secure our wayward psyches. Such symbols arise spontaneously from the unconscious, their power over us depends on that, and bear a metaphorical relation to the instincts, are archetypally informed. They rise from the unconscious into consciousness: this can only happen within an individual, but there must be some intercommunicability: a purely idiosyncratic symbol would not stabilize the psyche concerned. The symbols thus become an important element of culture. Entering consciousness and becoming a public thing, the symbol is exposed to critical scrutiny, and this, especially with changing conditions, progressively erodes its compelling quality, so that it becomes an empty and dead thing and is in time discarded. A new symbol (driven by the returned psychic energy) then arises in its place. The institutionalization of religion – dogmas, creeds, set rituals – may long delay this; and the process may be confictual. Rationalization and disenchantment accelerate and accentuate it. I do not go into the question of the transmission of the archetypes over time here. There are various possibilities, biological and cultural, and Jung ultimately left it open (Jung 1976: 450f; cf. Shamdasani 2003: 263–7). The point is rather that what is here is a theory of the reciprocal information of culture and psyche, with the relation between religion and madness at its core. It is a dynamic theory, set against an evolving consciousness and increasing diferentiation in psyche and culture – leading ultimately to our modern rationalized and disenchanted condition. One should realise too that a recurrent element in this is a phenomenology of the psyche. This does not run continuous through cultural history; it tends to appear when symbols are losing their power. But it has a long history, and is found in religious thought as much or more than in philosophy. Modern (psychodynamic) psychology is as much a rediscovery as something new. Finally, the sociologist evaluating this should be cautious: serious account has been taken of it in anthropology. This is clearest in Radin’s work on primitive religion; but Benedict’s considerations on abnormal psychology seem also to have been informed by Jungian psychodynamics (Walker 2018: 17–19; Benedict 1935 ch viii; Radin 1953 chs 3 & 4, 1957). Turning now to Durkheim, a handful of Jungian writers down the years, starting with Progof have sought to relate Jung’s thought to Durkheimian sociology (Walker 2018: 67f; Progof 1953 esp. ch 7, cf. de Angulo 1978; also esp. Greenwood 1990). At the centre of this is the attempt to relate Durkheim’s collective consciousness with Jung’s collective unconscious, through the mediation of LévyBruhl’s représentations collectives. In fact, Durkheim also uses this expression, preferring it to conscience collective in his later writings. But Lévy-Bruhl relates it to his notions of primitive mentality: prelogical mentality and participation mystique, and it is these, especially the latter, that Jung is drawn to, seeing there a close relationship to the collective unconscious and the archetypes. With developing differentiation, consciousness and the individual emerge, in psyche and culture alike

Jung and the sociology of religion

71

(the growth from child to adult is seen in the same terms [Jung 1964a]). But Jung does not relate the notion of collective consciousness to any specifc theorist – certainly not Durkheim. His usage of the term seems to be more common-sensical; and to relate mostly to modernity (see esp. Jung 1960b: 205f, 217f). A  person may lose his or her individuality, let himself (herself) merge in the collectivity, the mass. This too is “participation”, but it seems somewhat paradoxical to speak of unconsciousness in relation to a consciousness. To my mind, this collective consciousness is rather a culture where the symbolic elements have through too much discussion and criticism lost their potency and become mere conventions. One might better perhaps view this in terms of identifcation with the persona at the expense of the ego and losing any awareness of the inner psychic dimensions, rather than the naïve participation of “archaic man” or of a child. (It can of course leave you vulnerable to possession by a wayward archetype in the public culture.) At least so I see it. Jung refers at several points to Hubert and Mauss’ (1909) Melange d’Histoire des Religions, noting that they belong to the school of Durkheim: his only reference to Durkheim in fact, at least in the Collected Works (Jung 1970: 79). But it is rather Lévy-Bruhl that he assimilates their ideas to. Incidentally, he also has references to Spencer and Gillen (1904), Durkheim’s main source on Australian aborigines: clearly he had read this for himself. These Jungian ideas have their interest, but I do not think their authors realise how far Durkheim’s thought is inimical to their enterprise. Durkheim makes society predominant: he argues wholly from society to the individual. Progof argues that Jung does this too; that this makes his reasoning sociological rather than psychological (Progof 1953: 160f). (That does not follow, incidentally; sociology can as well argue from the individual to society.) But I think he is mistaken. It is at species level that Jung’s collective unconscious is collective, not that of any given society. To put the point diferently, Jung may agree that Man is a social animal, but Durkheim holds that Man (sic: he is less certain about woman [Durkheim 2002: 352f; Lehmann 1994]) is not animal, he is social. Society marks a radical break with biology; indeed, society is the God that creates Man. This precludes any innate psychology: it is the structure and rhythms of society that determine our consciousness. Lévy-Bruhl being a philosopher not a sociologist has no arguments of this kind. To put it yet another way, Jung is engaged in evolutionary psychology, while Durkheim is engaged in sociological evolutionism. Again, Jung would not accept Durkheim’s attempts to make society the basis of the Kantian categories, and he certainly would not accept Durkheim’s dictum that God is society transfgured (Durkheim 1995: 207f esp. 208, 351, 418f). In fne, I fnd in all these Jungian-Durkheimians the same three fallacies. They make Lévy-Bruhl far closer to Durkheim than he is; they do nothing to address the problem of integrating anthropology and sociology, efectively conducting all their arguments in the simpler arena of the primitive; and they assume that Durkheim defnes the paradigm for the entire discipline of sociology, without asking what methodological choices he is making, as against those made by other theorists of

72

Psyche, Science and Society

comparable stature such as Weber and Marx. Jung’s use of terminology from the French sociological tradition is just too seductive. This brings me to Weber (1978 Part 2 ch 6; 1970a, 1970b, 1970c: note esp. 1970a: 138f, 1970c: 350f). Here the environment is at once more favourable: Jung and Weber share a common philosophical ground in Kant and Schopenhauer, a similar view of the human existential situation and the limits of reason. They both take a balanced view of material and ideal factors, and are moderate constructivists (Durkheim is an idealist and an extreme constructivist) (Walker 2012, 2018: 199–201, 206f; see also above p2f). And they both focus on the individual. It is then the human existential situation that is at the basis of religion: we are thrust into a world that is not reasonable, neither in material nor ideal terms, nor just, nor even meaningful. Our reason, while quite useful within its limits, must increasingly confront insoluble – and painful – dilemmas as the rationalization of culture (and growth of consciousness) reveals and highlights the underlying irrationality of life. Individuals difer in their sensitivity and response to this, but the religious impulse is sui generis (Weber 1970b: 287f; cf. Radin 1953 ch 3 and 4). It is not an epiphenomenon of social factors, though they may condition its expression. Jung approaches this from the side of psychodynamics. Weber is more concerned with its inter-relations with social structural factors, especially in the economy, power and stratifcation. But as always with the action perspective in sociology, social structure is seen as cultural artifact; indeed as ongoing cultural process, in greater or lesser degree. Hence, the psychodynamics feed directly into the structures and processes, as with charismatic domination, for example, or the conficts between prophets and priests. But Weber and Jung come together in cultural history; indeed this provides the spine for their respective structural/processual analyses. This cultural history has two cross-cutting themes. One is an account of the developmental course of religion, centring on the emergence in the ancient world of religious prophecies of world rejection and salvation. The other is comparison of the World Religions: the diferent forms and trajectories of the salvation religions in East and West. These two themes come together in the consideration of Western modernity. It might be noted that for Weber, the base-line for the developmental account is the ancient world, a feld in which he had expertise. Considerations on the primitive are generally marginal in Weber’s sociology, and while he does exceptionally ofer a sketch of primitive religion, he does not develop it fully, nor put much weight on it (his refusal to begin his account by defning religion should perhaps be viewed in that context) (Weber 1978: 399f; 420n1). Contra Durkheim and Freud, Weber deprecates the notion of a universal stage of totemism. Incidentally he also makes what appears to be a rather guarded reference to Lévy-Bruhl (Weber 1978: 434, 406f). Weber concedes the “ideological” function of religion as securing social continuity in principle as regards Hinduism and the Indian caste system; but this for its stability and resilience is an exceptional case. More typically, religious ideas and beliefs appear as a patchwork quilt mirroring the various elements of the social

Jung and the sociology of religion

73

structure, punctuated by episodes where the religious conceptions of one group spread out over the whole array, only to break up again later. For example, the local and functional deities of Graeco-Roman paganism were displaced for a time by Christianity, but in due course reappeared as local and functional Christian saints. As to social continuity, Weber rates change high and continuity low in history, and mainly invokes vested interests and power, or inertia. Religion can in fact be a force for change – “changing the points on the railway and sending events down a new course” (Weber 1970b: 280). But all this is to see religion from the point of view of the social actor, and the contexts and consequences of his or her social action. It is not to see religion from the point of view of the social structure and its functional needs. Weber’s concerns with religion go wider than beliefs, ideas and rituals, into a range of structural and processual issues both within the religious sphere itself and its relations with the wider society. Indeed, Weber ofers something very like a comprehensive sociology of religion. As regards beliefs, ideas and rituals, a central theme is the confict between prophets, “driven” religious innovators, and priests, conservers of tradition; and also the work of intellectuals in rationalizing religious beliefs into a theology (or a secular philosophy). This mirrors Jung’s considerations on symbols and their fate. Religion is not epiphenomenal of societal factors, but they condition the forms and trajectories that it takes: which strata are its typical bearers, and what their fate is. Thus, privileged strata want immediate legitimation of their privileges; disprivileged strata want future compensation for their suferings. Urban artisanal and commercial strata, being more remote from organic life and the complexities of nature (or the risks of battle), are more given to rational conceptions than are agricultural or military strata: this has been a typical location of rationalizing intellectuals in the West. Politically dispossessed privileged strata may turn to otherworldly concerns: this has been more typical of rationalizing intellectuals in the East. This has contributed to the diferent character of Eastern and Western religion. And so on. Weber’s account is far more complicated and historically rich than the grid-group model that I  have referred to periodically through this essay, useful as that is for preliminary orientation. Jung’s and Weber’s approaches overlap rather than coincide. Jung has no formal treatment of social structure; Weber has no formal treatment of psychodynamics. It is in cultural history that their conceptions come together. Central to this is the contrast between the religions of East and West: their diferent cosmologies, theistic or impersonal; conceptions of salvation, types and trajectories of rejection of the World and their typical exponents, mystic and ascetic. In the West, this has led through the Protestant Reformation to the modern condition of rationalization and disenchantment. Here, in Weber’s terms, the hypertrophy of ends-rational action has driven out value-rational action (and tradition too, though Weber does not value tradition), and has left us astray in a world where we know how to do everything but do not know what things to do. He points to the decisive role the capitalist market economy has played in bringing this situation about – Jung rather points to philosophy and science (and technology). But the consequence is the

74

Psyche, Science and Society

same for both: the collapse of the symbolic world, leaving a radical disconnect between the rational and the irrational, consciousness and the unconscious, with a sharp devaluation of the latter (Jung 1964b, 1964c, 1964d, 1964e, 1970a). On the one side, then, the world of values has become a world of expediency; on the other, without the anchor of culturally embedded values, religion, the arts, even politics, have become at best, subjective and personal, at worst, trivial and unstable (and dangerous). Thus, we are cast into a meaningless and chaotic world in which we do not know how to live our lives: our sanity is precarious, a kind of low-level schizophrenia has become the malady if not the mentality of our times. There are diferences between Weber and Jung. Not least there are diferences of temperament and of values – I have suggested elsewhere that Weber is an ascetic while Jung is a mystic (Walker 2012: 61f). Even so, their approaches complement one another, and together they provide a coherent and powerful account.

Religion and modernity: secular and post-secular society What then of religion now? Do we have a post-secular society, as elements of contemporary debate claim? (see e.g. Turner 2010a; Wernick 2010; Arat 2018; Shewel 2018). I want to question this, in the light of the foregoing arguments. First, what is secularization? (cf. Wilson 1992). Secularization has two aspects. On the one side, the state ceases to favour one particular church, and acts rather as keeper of the ring among many churches, and indeed, sects and religions, and even atheism. The pioneer of this is the American constitution. In Britain, it is mainly a matter of the Church of England’s loss of its privileges, and the removal of civil disabilities on Non-Conformists, Catholics and Jews. This comes progressively in the middle decades of the 19th century. There is a counter-movement, the Oxford Movement and the emergence of High Anglicanism, which continues to seek reunifcation with Rome today. At the same time, the state now takes over the provision of education. Church schools may indeed continue as part of the state education system; but again, many churches now rather than one favoured church, and mostly to save money. (Scotland was diferent: Scots Presbyterians had not suffered civil disabilities, and Scotland had its own education system. The main impetus to secularization here came with the Disruption of 1843; when the two arms of the Church eventually reunited the Church got itself disestablished.) At the same time, there is the emergence of the mass media – mainly on a commercial basis, but typically with some state involvement in radio and television broadcasting. These developments together mark the loss of religious control over knowledge and information: a plurality of churches now contending with each other and with secular knowledge. In grid-group terms, all the churches now fnd themselves alike in the enclavist quadrant (Figure 3.1, p62). The second aspect is that people’s spirituality no longer resonates with the established churches or religious traditions. Many factors might make for this. In Jung’s view, it is endemic: symbols arise from the unconscious, come under rational scrutiny, and lose their numinosity. Weber’s account mirrors this, as I  have shown.

Jung and the sociology of religion

75

Religious history then is episodic. What makes the problem acute in our time is the comprehensive rationalization of life. Weber (and surely Marx) make the capitalist market economy the central factor: people know it is the workings of this that control their fates (Weber 1978: 485f). Science is more ambiguous: it can as well be a friend to religion as a foe – the Creation is God’s Bible; He has given us reason so that we can know his purposes by studying His creation. The modern quarrels between religion and science only really emerge in the 19th century – and then more in geology and biology than in physics (Burchfeld 1980). Philosophy has been a more consistent enemy. But it takes little acuity in either to see the problems of one also being three, or a baby being born to a virgin. People accept these things if they say anything to them. If not, they begin to create or fnd their own ideas and images. This is clearly in evidence by the second half of the 19th century: spiritualism, Theosophy, Far Eastern religions – dream interpretation and psychotherapy too. As I  have argued earlier, the human sciences themselves are divided between “spiritual” and “sceptical” approaches. The churches for their part became intransigent, insisting on a literalist interpretation of their dogmas – as one would expect from excluded groups, dissenting enclaves. Do then we now have a post-secular society? The reasons for thinking this are again twofold: the persistence of religious groups and their infuence in public afairs, and the emergence of new forms of spirituality outside the mainstream churches and traditions. A key issue in the former is the demand for separate education – one might note how the Roman Catholic church requires separate teacher training and certifcation, not merely separate schools. To deal with the frst of these needs a quite lengthy discussion of political sociology. There is nothing original here: it is all in Weber, or can be extrapolated from his writings (esp. Weber 1978 Part 2 chs v, ix; ch xvi or 1981 xxviii). The point is to look at the whole and see the pattern. I have not used his formal defnitions, but have tried to put it in plain English. First, then, the political unit should be termed the polity. The common practice of using “state” for this is sociologically unhelpful. It is also hard to avoid: I have used quotation marks in what follows where necessary. Polities come in many types, and a great range of sizes: I will return to this. The state, correctly, is the centre of authority that claims control over a territory and/or the people who live in it. The people over whom authority is claimed comprise the political association – better “association” than “community”. This will comprise a basket of status groups with greater or lesser degrees of political participation. Typically this will be matter for contest: one should not assume a consensual status order. This too I will take up later. The international (sic) order we have now originated in the Thirty Years’ War. The mediaeval order of Christendom, where the Pope would supervise or mediate between rulers, broke down in a dreadful war that could not be stopped. The order of “sovereign states” became the solution to this problem (these are not “nation states”: the nation only comes into it later). Each ruler would rule his (more rarely, her) territory and people without external interference, or supervision from any

76

Psyche, Science and Society

higher authority. He would also seize the monopoly of power, at the expense, say, of the feudal nobility – this, it should be noted, is state building not nation building. Typically he would also choose the religion. Ironically, this system of “sovereign states” would later be blamed for the dreadful wars of the 20th century, and higher authorities would be created to supervise and mediate between them – League of Nations, United Nations, even the European Union. Another term we need is empire. Empires are not necessarily overseas things, nor need they be large. Ernest Gellner gives an outline of the political structure of an empire (Gellner 1983 ch. 2, esp. pp9–13). One privileged status group – say a nation – spread thinly over the whole territory monopolizes power, ruling through a bureaucracy and with the support of a priesthood. It alone possesses a literate culture, with high arts and an education system. It rules over a congeries of peoples (nations as maybe) living in agricultural villages, each with its own language and demotic oral culture; all efectively the same but with little or no contact with each other. There are also towns where trades and crafts are found, often conducted by diaspora peoples such as Armenians or Jews. Gellner has the Habsburg Empire in mind; but Anthony Smith points out that in principle, Atlantic seaboard countries like Britain or France are (or were) no diferent (Smith 1986). Their territories are compact and have strong natural frontiers, and they have access to maritime trade: hence a strong state can emerge here and assert control over territory and people. But that only means that they are pressure cookers: the ingredients are just the same. It is as a factor of the break-up the Continental empires in the 19th century that the nation came to prominence – equally, the decline of their “international” infuence that facilitated the unifcation of Italy and Germany. What a “nation” comprises and whether it has an earlier history need not concern us here. But as Smith points out, Atlantic seaboard countries such as Britain and France have nationalities and minorities problems just as the Continental empires do, that similarly require management if they are not to erupt into unrest and violence. In the light of this – to jump ahead – one can see that post-colonial immigration to the metropolitan countries has merely compounded a situation that had long existed – component nations, minority languages, religious minorities, and “exotic” immigrant groups such as gypsies (Roma) or Jews. The biggest and most enduring danger of terrorism in Britain is not Muslim jihadis, it is Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. In France it is probably Corsican secessionists. The opposite situation to the empire is the city-state (Weber 1978 Part 2 ch xvi, 1981 ch xxviii). Here we should speak of a political community, for although there will be status diferences, still the citizens are aware of themselves as a community closed against outsiders, and identify themselves as such. It is the city that belongs to the people (e.g. Athens is the city of the Athenians), not the other way round. The citizens of the city state form a community closed to outsiders – foreigners may be classed as metics or even enslaved. Shared religion is a factor in securing this, and there is little if any tolerance for religious or other divisions. Again, the political system is chosen and is thematized as such: it does not come from tradition

Jung and the sociology of religion

77

or religion. The typical political forms are oligarchy, democracy and tyranny, and a rich literature of political philosophy, historiography and jurisprudence arises to discuss them. The city-state, though a feature of ancient and mediaeval rather than more recent times, has had tremendous importance in Western civilization. Weber was right to lay weight on it – and it is wrong to sweep it aside, and to treat democracy, universal citizenship and the like as purely philosophical concepts that arrived from nowhere (cf. Elliot and McCrone 1982: 33f). It is a truism that the typical or normal form of modern polity is the “nationstate”. This since the Treaty of Versailles, since issues of nations and nationalism were held to be among of the causes of World War I. In fact, most modern polities are not “nation states”, even those created at that time. Their basis is territorial, and the relation to national groupings is often incoherent. Perhaps this illustrates the legal proverb, hard cases make bad law. At any rate, there is another less noted process that is at least equally important: the dissolving of the mediaeval division between city and rural society (Elliot and McCrone 1982). It is a reciprocal process. The last vestiges of city autonomy are ended, but cities become the new centres of administration – and the burghers become an important class in the polities at large. From being citizens of their separate cities, they become citizens of a country, and this comes to typify membership in the political association for all (cf. Turner 2006 esp. p227). With this, the typical city-state dynamic of oligarchy, tyranny and democracy is brought into the larger polity. All this then comes into confict with the hierarchical status arrangements of the wider polity that Gellner described. In view of this, I would suggest that a better term for the typical modern polity would be republic. Its institutional arrangements and conficts are those of the city state, with only a gesture at those of the precedent kingdoms and principalities. The territorial realms conquered the autonomous cities, and the autonomous city conquered the territorial realm. As against this, the term nation state seems to mask the illusion that you can run an empire as though it was a city-state, that you can have both at the same time. You can in fact do this, if the population is culturally homogenous and preferably small. But most modern polities do not approximate to that situation. They approximate to empires, and the pretence that they are citystates creates an insoluble dilemma: how you can both have divisions – divisions that compromise the citizenship of some members – and not have divisions. It may be objected that they are not the same kinds of divisions. But we should look again at the grid-group diagram and ask where is this objection coming from.4 Excluded groups/enclaves (bottom right) are indrawn, distrustful of the society around them, and hold hard to their distinctive values. Hierarchists (top right) use status hierarchies and notions of distributive justice to contain and manage confict: they have the mandarin attitude to religion, useful, but you don’t actually believe in it, while the market individualists (bottom left) refuse to believe in the whole afair. As Douglas remarks, the market preaches equality, albeit while actually creating inequality (Douglas 1982: 225f). (Isolationists I leave aside here.) It is then a typical hierarchist objection, and it leads to typical evasions. Notable is the use of the terms community and culture: religious or ethnic groups are held to

78

Psyche, Science and Society

be communities, and to be entitled as such to their own culture, unhindered by others. Both terms imply consensus, and deny confict or oppression within the relevant groups that the state might concern itself with. But culture is not just what people do: it is also what people do to each other. It is quite false to treat culture as innocent and only society as malign – just as it is with community and society. Given the long and widespread history of patriarchy it is frequently women whose rights are left unprotected – whose citizenship is compromised. (It seems to me that often, in sociologically informed commentary on this, one sees beneath the surface the Durkheimian fallacy, that values can be ethically validated by their sociological function. Society is held together by its values; it is good that society is held together; any values that secure this are good values. The frst objection to this, of course, is that more correctly it is conficting groups that are held together by values, not society as a whole. The second is that society – or social groups – may be held together by all kinds of values: racial supremacism, jingoism, patriarchy, violent intolerance of reasoned argument, scathing contempt for “feminine” virtues such as compassion or love, and so on.) There are no easy solutions here. The two types, city-state and empire, both have compelling attractions, and both have unacceptable costs. And they are mutually exclusive. Granted some polities may not have to face this: if they are small, remote, geographically uninviting. But most modern polities cannot avoid it, and there is no way the two systems can be combined that does not entail some betrayal. To bring all this together, I  am arguing that there is no basis here for talk of a post-secular era. We simply have endemic conficts, the clash between two incompatible systems that have been bodged together. The one categorically separates citizen from non-citizen, according equality of citizenship exclusively to the former; the other seeks to reconcile various grades of citizenship within a status order which is in principle universal and inclusive. Hierarchists (top right, the state) naturally favour the latter conception: that, distributive justice, is how they manage confict. Individualists (bottom left, the market) favour the former: equality for all, no status diferences. Enclavists (bottom right) withdraw from and distrust the wider society, and insist on holding to their own ways and values, which must be accommodated (notably through separate education; possibly even for demands for separate law). Hierarchists will readily concede this; individualists will distrust it and fght against it. (Isolationists – top left – are less predictable. They might either side with the individualists or avoid the whole issue; but again, they can unpredictably be mobilized, especially for right-wing populism.) The vagaries of the economic environment may heat these quarrels up or cool them down, but it is a political confict. (Reducing poverty to control social problems is another evasion: it may be on revolutionary agendas but it is too often an empty piety on agendas for reform. Besides, enclaves are not all found among the poor.) The contradiction is written into the modern polity: it built up through the 19th century and characterized the 20th century, and continues to characterize the 21st century. It is modern in that sense, but it is not a new phase of modernity or post-modernity.

Jung and the sociology of religion

79

What of the second aspect, spirituality? Can we speak of post-secularism here? Again I am sceptical. The essential contours of the “new spirituality” surely emerged during the second half of the 19th century: Jung was already commenting on it in the 1920s (e.g. Jung 1964d). Has anything changed? Possibly. One development I would point to is the eforescence of fantasy in literature and, more recently, in flm. Fantasy is rich in archetypal imagery and themes. This is not new; Jung again pointed to it in the 1920s (Jung 1966). But since World War II, it seems to have changed its character, grown in stature. It takes on cosmic themes and ethical dramas, of mythical or even religious kind. It also shows awareness of an inner world as well as the outer world. The outstanding case is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It is interesting that this itself has the theme of the disenchantment of the world: when the evil magic is driven out, the good magic has to withdraw too; the elves and other speaking peoples fade and the time has come for the Dominion of Men. For this to come as fantasy, as art, does rather avoid conficts with established religion or with rational, for example scientifc, criticism. Indeed, it achieves two things that Jung might have predicted. One is that it transforms religion into a symbolic (or metaphorical) discourse. It makes no claims to be literal truth – in contrast to the intransigent position of the churches. The other is that it draws on the Judaeo-Christian tradition rather than Eastern religions – Jung for a time at least had doubts about Westerners abandoning Western religious traditions for those of the East, though he respected them on their own ground (e.g. Jung 1970a: 13f). I think one can also point to a range of other developments: environmental concerns, a lessening of “materialist” (consumerist) aspirations, warmer and more equal relations between parents and children and between the sexes, a positive embracing of sexuality, removal of taboos on sexual activity and also on female biological functions. In all, this suggests to me a change in sensibility: a less agonized and more accepting attitude towards the natural world, as something which presents constraints to our activities that we need to work around. We still have free will, but we need to consult, so to speak. This includes our psychology: instincts, emotions, the unconscious – indeed these things merge seamlessly with our biology. A phenomenology of the psyche has reappeared – again, as Jung would predict. I would again be cautious as to the social history. One may have the impression of the 1960s as the decisive decade of change, but one also has the impression of the interwar years as a progressive era, and of the years following World War II as more reactionary. Wallerstein speaks of 1968 as a decisive date, marking the emergence of a wide oppositional counter-culture in both the capitalist and the (then) communist world; and equally a challenge to western oppositional Marxism, a breakdown of authoritarian models leading to a rainbow coalition that would embrace dissent of all kinds (Wallerstein 1991). Even so, it seems to me that there is division and confict: the things I have just pointed to often get short shrift from the radical/ critical left. Bitter conficts soon emerged within feminism over sexuality (e.g. the

80

Psyche, Science and Society

Barnard Conference of 1982) – whether the meaning of sexual relationships or practices is objectively given in the wider structures of society, or whether they are informed by the subjective intentions of those directly concerned (Tong 2009 ch 2 esp. pp65f, cf. 243f). Indeed, the conficts are not limited to sexuality; they extend across the whole range of female biological functions: pregnancy, childbirth, breast- or bottle-feeding, emotional bonds between mother and child, and so on. Are these things to be accepted, afrmed even, or denied (e.g. the “technological fx” demanded by some radical feminists)? Again, with the emergence of third wave feminism, with its focus on the situationally determined diferences among women, ecofeminism became marginalized, accused of “essentialism” and of refecting white privilege (Tong 2009: 284f; Thompson and MacGregor 2017). Then too there is feminist spirituality, including Jungian feminism. All these things the radical left would denounce. (Admittedly, these conficts mainly erupted in America, but they have resonated in British and Continental feminism.) There is also a troubled relationship between green thought and the radical left. The Greens will always suspect Marxists of cornucopianism, denial of objective constraints in nature, afrmation of social problems and socialist solutions. The radical left meantime may accuse the Greens of romantic utopianism or even crypto-fascism. Overpopulation is an especially confictual issue (e.g. Lowe and Worboys 1980; Pepper 1996 esp. p172f, 188f). Moreover, Marxist attempts at environmental theory can exhibit a striking unawareness of feminism (e.g. essays in Benton ed. 1996 – Mellor excepted). Even the popularity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is bewailed by elements of the literary criticism establishment. All this again might be looked at in grid-group terms, as opposition and antipathy between isolates and enclavists – the enclave mentality, with its lack of mechanisms of confict resolution, restrictions on free enquiry or movement of information, and general distrust of the world, has a clear afnity with the radical left’s tradition of “critique”. Presumably temperament plays a role here too, given that in an “open” society, intellectuals can gravitate to the quadrant they fnd most congenial. If there is to be a rainbow coalition, refexive analysis might help to reduce the acrimony. Refexivity should go both ways, of course: there are real constraints, and oppressions, in social structure and dynamics. But it is not only Marxism that can teach that, while the radical left/critical tradition’s relation to Marxism has become increasingly strained and distant. These matters will come up again in later chapters, so I will say no more of them here. To bring the arguments together, then, I would be sceptical of any thesis that contemporary society is entering a new post-secular phase. It seems to me that this fails to separate heterogeneous phenomena, whose ground in large part lies in ongoing tensions that are endemic to the modern polity. Moreover, it is cherrypicking the evidence: there is at least as much evidence pointing to continued secularization, not least the weakening hold of the Catholic Church in modern Catholic countries. I do see some movement in regard to spirituality, but while this

Jung and the sociology of religion

81

has some weight, I am not sure I would go so far as to use words like resacralization. Rather it seems to me to be an undramatic development with a fair degree of continuity with what has come before. Of course, all this applies only to the core regions of modernity – basically Britain and western Europe. In the wider world, even America, diferent analyses would be required.

Conclusion Finally, then, what comes of trying to bring Jung together with the sociology of religion? At the outset, I pointed to three questions: where does Jung ft in; why has this not been done before; and what has Jung to learn from the sociological tradition? For the frst two questions, the answer is obvious enough. Jung fts in as part of an approach that the sociology of religion is aware of but is reluctant to accord systematic development. He fts with the reluctance to engage fully with Weber, let him set the agenda, rather than using him as a piecemeal resource; he fts with the failure to consider approaches from cultural anthropology such as those of Radin or Lowie. Jung is clear as to what religion is. Religion is our way of coping intuitively with the human existential situation, focusing on the world in its incomprehensible and irrational aspect, and the psyche in its unconscious symbol-forming aspect. This complements our useful but limited reason; the two have in fact a rather troubled quasi-dialectical relationship. Weber, for all that he declines to defne religion, has the same view of the human existential situation, infuenced by the same philosophers; and the Jungian themes duly make their appearance in his work. The culmination of this lies in a thesis of rationalization and disenchantment of modernity in which their contributions overlap and complement each other – and Jung is an acute observer of modern conditions. Besides this, Jung’s thought informs the work of an earlier generation of cultural anthropologists: Benedict on madness and society as well as Radin on primitive religion and its associated mentalities. There are the elements here of an alternative – a confictagency – approach. I have argued that the sociology of religion has two poles. At the one pole, religion is seen as beliefs and rites, is identifed with the mainstream churches, and the relation to the state or at least the status quo is assumed. At the other pole, religion is seen as a wider set of issues and roles, in which institutionalized religion and the creative religious impulse are in dialogue, even in tension, and the relation to the state or rather the ongoing political struggle is problematized. As practised, however, the sociology of religion is heavily seated in the frst pole, and does no more than make forays in the direction of the second. There are two themes in this. One is religion versus spirituality. Clearly this resonates with the question of the structure and action perspectives. The other is the origins and nature of modern society. If it starts with the Enlightenment, then the

82

Psyche, Science and Society

sociology of religion is essentially the sociology of secularization, the emergence of an unreligious society out of the religious past (with some marginal survivals). But if it starts with the Renaissance, then the sociology of religion is at once thrown into the conficts between Protestant and Catholic, and a complex sociology of polity formation with ramifcations into felds ranging from education to international relations. These are issues which have always lain between the French and German sociological traditions – and which British (English!) sociology, in a tradition that is both historically foreshortened and thematically constricted, has been unwilling to acknowledge until comparatively recently. Here the choice lies between the consensus and confict perspectives. It is a peculiarity of the sociology of religion, that these choices of perspective, structure and consensus, should lie together as they do. In its own terms, the sociology of religion perceives a choice between two orientations. Either the key to religion lies in its social functions: that is to see religion from the outside, a debunking brief. Or it lies in its subjective meanings: that is to see religion from the inside, and sympathetically. Either way, the governing assumption is that the subjective meaning must be a religious meaning; sociologists then have either balked at it or been too superfcially eager for it. But Jung and Weber point rather to a philosophical meaning, and one that lies on the spectrum of sociology’s methodological concerns. This calls for a deeper level of engagement – certainly more than a patronizing “sympathy”. That constitutes a failure to acknowledge how far its own methodological assumptions are implicated in these choices. It fails to ask whether there might be afnities between the spiritual, the creative impulse in religion, and the action perspective in sociology – more broadly, the humanistic (“intentionalist”) approaches in the human sciences. Or, conversely, to query afnities between scepticism about religion and determinism in the human sciences. In this chapter, I have called repeatedly for refexive analysis: sociologists should put themselves under scrutiny, seek to identify and discount for their own subjective biases. There can be various bases for this, in temperament, social structure and culture. I have made repeated use of Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory of culture – used heuristically, for orientation rather than as explanation. I  think that it has proved its value. As to what Jung has to learn from sociology, this again was a reason why I introduced Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory of culture. This however is not for the sake of refexivity: Jung too is an advocate of refexive analysis (the subjective equation). The point rather is that Jung’s interests in anthropology never extended to sociology. His anthropological infuences were various and he did not attempt consistency, but he does tend to fall back on notions from the French School such as collective consciousness and représentations collectives, and to treat primitive society as paradigmatic. He lacks then the notion that social structure can act to distribute culture; that in complex societies one does not typically fnd a single set of ideas, beliefs, values and so forth – a symbolic system – held in common by a whole “society”. Rather there are diferent groups with diferent beliefs and values, and

Jung and the sociology of religion

83

the symbolic “system” will refect this, and may feature elements of confict and/ or negotiation. Weber’s theory of stratifcation is a powerful tool here. But the conception is available even in Durkheimian perspective, if one takes Suicide, Durkheim’s most “sociological” work, into account. This issue aside, however, it seems to me that Jung has more to teach than he has to learn.

Notes 1 For some recent literature: Beckford and Demerath (2007); Beckford and Walliss (2006); Clarke (2008); Davie (2013); Doggett and Arat (2018); McKinnon and Trzebiatowska (2018); Turner (2010). 2 I am puzzled as to a positive term for this – indeterminacy is negative; while voluntarism goes too far. Perhaps “intentionality” would do – in inverted commas, to acknowledge that its conventional meaning in philosophy (aboutness) is diferent. 3 See Chapter 4, p101. 4 Figure 3.1, p62.

Bibliography Arat, Alp (2018) “Postsecularism: In Defence of a Fashionable Theory”, in Doggett, Luke, and Arat, Alp (eds.) Foundations and Futures in the Sociology of Religion. London and New York: Routledge, pp27–38. Arnason, Johann P. (2006) “Nations and Nationalisms: Between General Theory and Comparative History”, in Delanty, Gerard, and Kumar, Krishnan (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, pp44–56. Beckford, J., and Demerath, N.J. (eds.) (2007) Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. London: Sage. Beckford, James, and Walliss, John (eds.) (2006) Theorising Religion: Classical and Contemporary Debates. Aldershot: Ashgate. Benedict, Ruth (1935) Patterns of Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Benton, Ted (ed.) (1996) The Greening of Marxism. New York and London: The Guilford Press. Burchfeld, J.D. (1980) “Kelvin and the Age of the Earth”, in Chant, Colin and Fauvel, John (eds.) Darwin to Einstein: Studies on Science and Belief. Harlow and New York: Longman and Open University Press, pp180–95. Clarke P. (ed.) (2008) Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davie, Grace (2013) The Sociology of Religion: A Critical Agenda (2nd ed.). London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, and Singapore: Sage. de Angulo, Ximena (1978) “Comments on a Doctoral Thesis”, in C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (ed. William McGuire and R.F. Hull). London: Thames & Hudson, pp205–18. Delanty, Gerard, and Kumar, Krishnan (eds.) (2006) The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Doggett, Luke, and Arat, Alp (eds.) (2018) Foundations and Futures in the Sociology of Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary (1982) “Cultural Bias”, in Douglas, Mary In the Active Voice. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp183–254.

84

Psyche, Science and Society

(1992) “A Credible Biosphere”, in Douglas, Mary Risk and Blame. London: Routledge, pp255–70. Durkheim, Ėmile (1995) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. (2002) Suicide: A Study in Sociology. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Elliot, Brian, and McCrone, David (1982) The City: Patterns of Domination and Confict. London: Macmillan. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1965) Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Clarendon). Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Greenwood, Susan E. (1990) “Émile Durkheim and C.G. Jung: Structuring a Transpersonal Sociology of Religion”, Journal for the Scientifc Study of Religion 29:4, pp482–95 (also in Walker [2018], pp90–104). Hamilton, Malcolm (1995) The Sociology of Religion: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives. London: Routledge. Hubert, Henri, and Mauss, Marcel (1909) Melange d’Histoire des Religions. Paris: Alcan. Jung, Carl G. (1958) “Psychology and Religion” (The Terry Lectures 1938, rev. 1940), in Psychology and Religion: West and East (CW11). New York: Pantheon, pp5–105. (1960) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1960a) “On Psychic Energy”, pp3–66 (original 1928) (1960b) “On the Nature of the Psyche”, pp159–234 (original 1954) (1964) Civilization in Transition (CW10). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1964a) “Mind and Earth”, pp29–49 (original 1927/1931) (1964b) “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man”, pp134–56 (original 1933/34) (1964c) “The Role of the Unconscious”, pp3–28 (original 1918) (1964d) “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man”, pp74–94 (original 1928/1931) (1964e) “The Undiscovered Self ” pp247-305 (original 1957) (1966) “Psychology and Literature” (original 1930/1950). In The Spirit in Man, Art “Psychology and Literature” CW15, pp84–105. (1970) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 2nd ed (CW9i). Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ. (1970a) “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, pp3–41 (original 1934, revised version 1954) (1976) Collected Letters Vol 2: 1951–1961. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lehmann, Jennifer M. (1994) Durkheim and Women. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Ling, Trevor (1980) Karl Marx and Religion. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lowe, Philip D., and Worboys, Michael W. (1980) “Ecology and Ideology”, in Buttel, Frederick H. and Newby, Howard (eds.) The Rural Sociology of the Advanced Societies. Montclair: Allanheld, Osman, and London: Croom Helm. Lowie, Robert (1936) Primitive Religion. London: George Routledge and Sons. Marx, Karl (1978) “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction”, in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton, pp53–65. Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich (1978) “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton, pp469–500. Maslow, Abraham H., and Honigmann, John T. (1970) “Synergy: Some Notes of Ruth Benedict”, American Anthropologist 72:2, pp320–33.

Jung and the sociology of religion

85

McKinnon, Andrew, and Trzebiatowska, Marta (eds.) (2018) Sociological Theory and the Question of Religion. London and New York: Routledge (original publication Abingdon and New York: Ashgate Publishing). Pepper, David (1996) Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Pope, Whitney (1976) Durkheim’s Suicide: A Classic Analysed. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Progof, Ira (1953) Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Meaning. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Radin, Paul (1953) The World of Primitive Man. London, New York, and Toronto: Abelard – Schuman. (1957) Primitive Religion (new ed.). New York: Dover. (Original 1937) Shamdasani, Sonu (2003) Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shewel, Benjamin (2018) “Post Secularism in a Historical Light: The Axial Age Thesis as an Alternative to Secularization”, Religions 9:139, pp1–7. Smith, Anthony D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Spencer, Baldwin, and Gillen, F.J. (1904) Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London and New York: Macmillan. Thompson, Charis, and MacGregor, Sherilyn (2017) “The Death of Nature: Foundations of Ecological Feminist Thought”, in MacGregor, Sherilyn (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Gender and the Environment. London and New York: Routledge, pp43–53. Thompson, Michael, Ellis, Richard, and Wildavsky, Aaron (2018) Cultural Theory. London and New York: Routledge. (First publication Boulder Colorado 1990: Westview Press) Tong, Rosemarie (2009) Feminist Thought (3rd ed.). Boulder: Westview Press. Turner, Bryan (2006) “Citizenship, Nationalism and Nation-Building”, in Delanty, Gerard, and Kumar, Krishnan (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, pp225–36. (2010a) “Religion in a Post-secular Society”, in Turner, Bryan (ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp649–67. Turner, Bryan (ed.) (2010) The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Walker, Gavin (2012) “Sociological Theory and Jungian Psychology”, History of the Social Sciences 25:1, pp52–74. (2018) Jung and Sociological Theory: Readings and Appraisal. London and New York: Routledge. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991) “1968, Revolution in the World System”, in Wallerstein, Immanuel Geopolitics and Geoculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp65–83. Weber, Max (1970) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (ed. Hans Gerth & C. Wright Mills). London, Henley & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1970a) “Science as a Vocation”, pp129–56. (1970b) “The Social Psychology of the World Religions”, pp267–301. (1970c) “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions”, pp323–359. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. (1981) General Economic History. New Brunswick USA & London: Transaction.

86

Psyche, Science and Society

Wernick, Andrew (2010) “The Future of Religion”, in Turner, Bryan (ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp629–48. Wilson, Bryan R. (1992) “Refections on a Many Sided Controversy”, in Bruce, Steve (ed.) Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis. Oxford: Clarendon, pp195–210.

4 SOCIOLOGY AND THE CITY Jung and “mass society”

Introduction There is a widespread perception of modern society as urban society (LeGates and Stout 2000). The modern world is seen as a world of cities, vast impersonal metropolises in which people are perpetual strangers, isolated and lost. Cities are seen as the locus of alienation and loneliness, of insecurity, poverty and crime, social unrest. They are also seen as centres of cultural and intellectual life, and of material wealth and opportunity: the attitude to the city is ambivalent. And there are debates over what the city should be, how to create better cities for the future. The outstanding fgure in this through the 20th century was Lewis Mumford (Mumford 1995; cf. Green 2006). An important dissenting voice was Jane Jacobs (Jacobs 1962). There is some justifcation for this view (e.g. Hawley 1981). There has been an explosive growth in cities, both their size and their number, since, say, the beginning of the 19th century, accompanying an explosive overall growth in population. This has spread from the West across the world. The industrial revolution was underpinned by an agrarian revolution; as agriculture became more efcient, unemployed workers focked to the new industrial cities in search of work. The cities then posed massive problems in public health, demanding major public works in water supply, sewerage, waste disposal, street paving and lighting, slum clearance – not to mention political and administrative reorganization. The city then seemed to be at the heart of the emerging industrial society and its problems. Even so, the city has had a rather uneven career as a theme in sociology (Elliot and McCrone 1982; Savage et al. 2003). The reformist agenda of Geddes and Mumford never quite took hold. The main sociological approach to appear was that of the Chicago School (Carey 1975; Harvey 1987; Hart 2010). This dominated American sociology in the early decades of the 20th century, but fell out of DOI:10.4324/9780429456268-5

88

Psyche, Science and Society

fashion in the 1930s; the city disappeared as a sociological theme with it. It reappeared in the 1960s, partly as factor of renewed urban problems such as race riots and urban poverty. The main approach now was Marxist, especially in France; the Chicago School was recalled, but subject to criticism (Castells 2002, esp. Castells 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). But this too rather lost momentum as the century ended (with a rather warier respect for the Chicago School), and the city has apparently receded as a topic again. Turning to the classical theorists, Marx talks of the separation of town and country as an early expression of the division of labour: the separation of industry from agriculture. But his focus from there on is on the town: he sees nothing good in rural life. Under socialism, this division will disappear (Marx 1978; 150f, 176f; Marx and Engels 1978: 477; Engels 1978: 718–24). Durkheim has little specifc focus on the city, but he is strongly infuenced by Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City (Fustel 1980). Weber wrote a book-length study on the city, focusing on the city-state in the ancient and mediaeval West; but this, though translated, was largely ignored by those who sought to bring Weber’s work into the sociological mainstream (Weber 1978 Part 2 ch xvi; Elliot and McCrone 1982: 33f). As to Simmel, he, like the city itself, was sidelined during the middle decades of the 20th century; his essay on the metropolis and mental life (Simmel 1969) had to be rediscovered later. In all, then, the presence or absence of the city as a theme in classical sociology rather depends on whether or not you are looking for it, according to the fashion of the time. There is an afnity, if not an actual logical connection, between the city and the notion of mass society (Giner 1976: 113–7). This conception, though its origins lie in the interwar years, became very infuential in sociology in the decades after World War II, in popular as well as academic sociology (e.g. Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd [Riesman et al. 1961]), and it extends across the political spectrum (e.g. Frankfurt School Marxism). The metropolis seems invariably to be cited as a characteristic, even a symptom, of mass society. It seems likely that Louis Wirth’s infuential essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (to be discussed later) played a pivotal role in this (Wirth 1964f). Wirth was infuenced by and indeed translated Mannheim, one of the seminal theorists of mass society; he utilizes the notion in the “Urbanism” essay, and later expounds it quite fully (Wirth 1964a). Homans in a classic study from the Jungian literature argues that Jung’s essay “The Undiscovered Self ” fts “lock and key” with the notion of mass society (Homans 1979: 174; Jung 1964a). He relies for his understanding of this on Giner (1976), but fails to recognize that Giner is very critical of the notion of mass society: while insightful, it lacks the nuance and balance of the classical sociologists – to whom incidentally he assimilates the Chicago School. (Oddly, Giner does not cite Wirth). It is partly on account of Homans that I want to consider the city here. How does Jung relate, or how should he relate, to urban sociology and/or to the theory of mass society? What could he – or Jungians more generally – learn here, what could he contribute? Or are there temptations that they might be wiser to resist?

Jung, sociology and the city

89

Sociology and the city The theory of modern society as urban society has to face three problems: 1

2

3

The city in history. Are modern cities diferent from premodern cities, or do the crucial issues lie in the city as such? Or even, is it the premodern rather than the modern city that needs consideration? What is “modern” urban society being contrasted with? Rural society, society in the past, or both? How is this to be conceived, and what are the relations between the two? How does urban society relate to other causal or diagnostic factors for modernity, such as capitalism, industrialization, mass literacy, democracy and so forth? Which are the true causal factors?

On the city in history, there is categoric disagreement between Durkheim and Weber. For Durkheim, the ancient city is organized along kinship lines, and is really only a more advanced form of primitive society. He is following Fustel de Coulanges here, but this is also in line with the views of Lewis Morgan and also of Marx and Engels (Durkheim 1964 ch 6 esp, pp181–90; Fustel de Coulanges 1980; Morgan 1964; Engels 1972; cf. Marx 1978: 195 passim). For Weber, however, the city marks a break with “traditional society” as soon as it appears: the sociology of the city is defned by its class and status struggles, which together with the political forms that express them – oligarchy, tyranny, democracy – are very much the forerunners of modern capitalist society. The quasi-kinship arrangements of the ancient city (phylum, phatry, genos and their Latin equivalents) are functional equivalents of the mediaeval guilds, and mark the military character of the ancient city as opposed to the commercial character of the mediaeval city (Weber 1978 Part 2 ch xvi; 1981 ch xxviii, also 1976b: 68f). It must be added that modern scholarship, even in France, tends to endorse Weber’s views (e.g. Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977: 3–8; Finley 1981; Roussel 1976; Veyne 1984: 287–9). As to the urban-rural (or other) contrast, the obvious fgure here is Tönnies, and the contrast of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft – community and association (Tönnies 1955). The frst is characterized by warm emotional relationships centring on kinship, organic life, custom, strong ties to place; the second, by rational impersonal relationships, individuality, business, contract and law. These correctly are modes of association not types of society: they might be found anywhere. Even so, the contrast is basically that of mediaeval rural agrarian society with modern urban industrial society. Although Tönnies is not directly studied much now, he remains a strong presence in rural or community studies – indeed, it is due to this infuence that these are often taken to be the same thing (though I sometimes wonder if this is not an English obsession) (Savage et al.: 116; cf. Hillyard 2007 ch 1). Tönnies is also often taken to be the hidden presence behind urban sociology, though to my mind this may be questioned.

90

Psyche, Science and Society

Weber also uses the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, but he uses them diferently from Tönnies, and gives them a diferent sense (Weber 1978: 40–3, 360–3). In particular he distinguishes between Gemeinschaft and Nachbarheit. The latter he characterizes as an unsentimental brotherhood, giving help for example in fre or food, while the former, the feeling of belonging together, may link quite scattered persons. Weber is occasionally discussed as a rural sociologist, on account of his involvement in enquiries into agricultural afairs east of the Elbe (Weber 1970a, 1989; Riesebrodt 1989; Tribe 1989a). But his views on this (and indeed his involvement) came largely from his studies of the ancient world, especially the decline of the city and rise of the villa in the later Roman Empire: the change from the city-based civilization of Antiquity to the rural society of mediaeval Europe (Weber 1976 Part 2 ch 7; 1976a). This rural society is not just the peasant village: it is also the manor, the castle and the monastery. It has stratifcation with relations of property and labour; it has a state with concerns in military afairs and justice; it has a literate (and cosmopolitan) high culture. It is neither rural community nor rural society: it is, paradoxically, a rural civilization. It is with this that the sociology of the city is interwoven – though Weber is perhaps less clear than we might wish as to their ultimate interfusion in the making of modernity. Contra Cahnman (2015 esp. ch 11), I am not convinced that Tönnies ever had much infuence on American sociology. America was never a mediaeval European society: it has its own quite diferent development and history (Martindale 1960). Certainly, he seems to have had little infuence on the Chicago School. The Introduction to a Science of Sociology does not discuss Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, though there is an extract from another of his books (Park and Burgess 1921: 103–5). There are no citations in Park et al. (1967) or Park (1952), though he does discuss his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft elsewhere (Park 1950: 12–13, 23). Wirth’s (1926) review of his sociology is cool, and there are bare mentions in his later work (Wirth 1964: 165, 166; 326). Besides, the Chicago School’s usage of the concepts “community” and “society” is almost the opposite of Tönnies’: it is community that is characterized by symbiotic and instrumental relations, society by shared norms and informal social controls. It is also society that is the climax of the social-ecological succession: the city is held back in a state of immaturity. Moreover, the frontier is also seen in these terms: rural society only emerges when the frontier has stabilized or moved on. This is American history, not European history. One might expect the Chicago School to seek their polar opposite to urban society in American rural sociology. This however has its own history and character (Nelson 1969). The US government instituted policies for the improvement of American farming and rural life following the Civil War, and the agencies charged with administering this quickly became pioneers of sociological research and applied sociology. However, this sociology took its own course and took little account of the academic sociology that was emerging elsewhere and would become the mainstream. This situation persisted well into the 20th century (it may account in part for the mainstream’s unresponsiveness to Catton and Dunlap’s demands for a new environmental paradigm [Catton and Dunlap 1978, 1980]). At any rate, Wirth

Jung, sociology and the city

91

(1964c) comments on the difculties of using this literature. In fact, the Chicago School innovated their own study of rural society, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958; Park 1952: 205 & n33; Roberts 2010). According to Newby and Buttel (1980: 5f), Sorokin and Zimmerman (1929) brought European sociological perspectives, including Tönnies, into American rural sociology. But whatever its impact there, it had no apparent infuence on the Chicago School – in fact McKenzie’s (1930) review is hostile. MacKenzie was the leading fgure in the social ecology theorization of American society, an approach that would focus on the expansion and inter-relation of cities, and their functional integration of the local communities around them, with the development of frst rail, then motor, transport (McKenzie 1968; Hawley 1950 esp. Part IV). It is perhaps rather this that should be seen as the wider context, not least for Louis Wirth’s urbanism thesis. As to the signifcance of the city, whether it should be picked out for special consideration, the basic view of both functionalist sociology and Marxism and indeed post-Weberian traditions is, no, and I think that this would be widely agreed across modern sociology. Marx (1965 esp. pp99f, 121–39) speaks of the town-country split as an early expression of the division of manual and mental labour, leading on to the division of industry and commerce and hence to capitalism: but it is capitalism that is his focus (and besides, these texts only surfaced after the Bolshevik Revolution). Generally, then, it is modern – or capitalist – society itself that is the arena for study; the city is at best simply where modern society is to be found. The Marxist urban sociology of the later 20th century as discussed earlier basically reafrmed the common view. Weber’s own position both agrees and disagrees with this: the signifcance of the city lies in the past, not in the present. The autonomous city is no longer part of our world, but its presence is still felt: economic developments aside, the city is where much of our political and cultural heritage was formed, and we cannot fully understand our world without realizing that (see esp. Weber 1981 ch xxviii). The strongest focus on the city, however, comes from the Chicago School: a wealth of empirical research and a distinctive social ecological perspective (Park et al. 1967; Park 1952; also Wirth 1964). It is, however, always difcult to see how to relate this to the mainstream sociological approaches. From one point of view that is what Wirth attempts. His article “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (Wirth 1964f) became very infuential for urban sociology, though it was also widely criticized (Castells 2002b: 36f, 2002c: 390f; Savage et al. 2003: 107–22, 199–200). It is also important in bringing urban sociology together with the theory of mass society; but as I have already indicated, I have reservations about that conception. Another important theorist is Simmel. His essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” is classic: Savage et al. compare it favourably to Wirth’s (Simmel 1969; Savage et al. 2003 ch 5). It is an important source for Wirth; and in fact Simmel is a seminal infuence for the Chicago School generally. But there are problems. Simmel’s “essay” is more correctly a public lecture; it depends for its underlying theory on his Philosophy of Money, which is too wide-ranging and complex to be considered

92

Psyche, Science and Society

here (Simmel 2004; Poggi 1993). Moreover, there is also the question of Simmel and psychodynamics – Simmel is a much more psychological theorist than Wirth. He speaks of the unconscious – in another text he even concedes the notion of a collective unconscious (Simmel 1977: 93–7, cf. 51–6). He speaks of rationality and consciousness as being demanded by the metropolitan milieu, whereas rural social relationships are more grounded in the deeper levels of the psyche. At the same time, he makes no allowance for individual diferences of constitution or temperament, and some of his psychological statements are quite scientistic. In short, there is an essay to be written about Simmel and Jung, but it cannot be dealt with in passing. To a certain extent, however, Wirth does subsume his arguments. It is then Weber and Wirth that I consider here, with some refections on the Chicago School and (or versus) the theory of mass society; and also some considerations on recent feminist approaches.

Theories of the city: Weber Weber’s concern with the city is mainly with the autonomous city-state or city commune as a distinctive factor in Western history (Weber 1978 ch. xvi; 1981 ch. xxviii). He notes the difculties in defning cities in general, but points to certain characteristics: a relatively closed settlement, heavily built up, often wall to wall, its inhabitants living of crafts and commerce rather than agriculture, high land values and the laws for alienating house lots diferent, freer, from those for agricultural land. Weber is wary in regard to size of population or whether they are too many for the inhabitants to be personally acquainted; however, he stresses the city’s dependence on immigration: low hygiene among the poor prevents the reproduction of the population from its own fertility. He then argues that the city must be identifed in two dimensions, the economic and the political, and that external relations as well as internal factors must be considered. The city is based on two elements: a market and a fortress. The latter signifes the domination of a lord over the populace, not their common refuge against enemies. The lord will use exploited agricultural wealth for foreign trade to gain further wealth. Craftsmen gather around the fortress to serve its needs; a market then forms where they exchange goods with each other and with the peasantry. Such a city might be a centre for craftsman production, for the consumption of rentiers, or a play a middleman role in trade. If it is a maritime city, it might import its food, but an inland city must rely on its hinterland. The political relations can be equally various: the city might be the administrative centre for an empire, but in practice power might be fragmented among overlapping and vaguely defned jurisdictions, contested between feuding lords or clans, partly shared by craft guilds, and so forth. What has distinguished the Western city has been its character as a commune. It has its own law code and law courts, a degree at least of political and administrative autonomy, and its members identify themselves as a coherent group – there will be

Jung, sociology and the city

93

a city god or patron saint, in whose cult they share. Weber gives two reasons why such cities did not emerge in the Asiatic civilizations. One is clan membership with ritual mutual exclusions, from eating together, intermarriage and so forth – at the extreme case, the Indian caste system. The city as commune is the antithesis of this. The other factor is military. In the Asiatic civilizations, the army is bureaucratically raised, armed and maintained, and is wholly dependent on the patrimonial prince. In the West, by contrast, warriors have more commonly been economically independent and self-equipped: the king (prince) is dependent for their support on their good will. The city commune starts with an act of usurpation, a rejection of the prince’s patrimonial rule. This comes frst from the patrician strata, banding together through a coniuratio (sworn oath) in mediaeval times, an act of synoikism in Antiquity. This heralds the beginning of a typical set of status and class conficts, in which the relation between authority and legitimacy is always problematic (and problematized). The patricians may be forced to share power with the merchants; indeed they may be forced to leave the city, or to abandon their estates, live permanently in the city and join a guild; in which case they may forfeit their status equality with the rural nobility. In the ancient city, they might be forced to share power or usurped outright by the plebeians, the foot-soldier class of small property owners. Feuding between patrician families or status conficts may open the way for a tyrant, or cause a mediating law-maker to be called in. The lower commercial strata of craftsmen and small traders may force the privileged strata to share power with them, or even seize power and exclude them. There are diferences. The ancient city was a consociation of warriors (it was also characteristically a maritime city). Commercial activity was carried on by noncitizen strata: resident foreigners and freed slaves. Again, the city was the centre of military technique, and so controlled and included the countryside. The mediaeval city by contrast, especially the inland northern city, was dominated by its commercial strata. It was also largely demilitarized: the most efective military technique came from the countryside, the armoured knights. The city then was separate, excluded, from the countryside. The southern European cities were something of an intermediate type. They too were maritime, like the cities of Antiquity, incidentally. In both eras alike, the cities eventually lost their autonomy. But in Antiquity they lost it to the Hellenistic kingdoms or, fnally, the Roman Empire; and their bureaucratic rule strangled capitalism, such as then existed. In early modernity they lost it to the national states, and their rivalries caused them to ally with capitalism, which thus fourished. One might note here that though Weber speaks of “national states”, his discussions of “the nation” elsewhere are critical: the nation is a belief not a fact (Weber 1978 Part 2 ch 5 esp. pp395–8, ch ix esp. pp921–6; cf. Weber 1981: 336–7). In my view, in the post-Versailles world, we would do better to think of the typical form of polity as a republic. We are citizens not subjects. Our politics have the same forms – democracy, oligarchy, tyranny – as the city state, and our polities often have

94

Psyche, Science and Society

their origins in an act of rebellion. There is a heritage from the feudal kingdoms too, but much of it is empty form. I have discussed this in another chapter.1 The autonomous city has had great importance in the development of Western culture (Weber 1970d: 269, 282–4, 1978: 468–72, 481–4, 500–508, 1981: 316f). Most obviously, it is a centre for intellectual activity – not least political philosophy and historiography focusing on the city itself, and its typical political forms of oligarchy, tyranny and democracy. A condition for this in Antiquity is the absence of a strong priesthood. In mediaeval times thought has a more theological cast. But Weber also points to the remoteness of the city from organic life (Weber 1970b: 343–50, 350f esp. 355–7, Weber 1970c: 139f, Weber 1970d: 282–4). Intellectuals are interested in nature as a source of social metaphors rather than for practical manipulation. Biology and weather are too complicated and unpredictable for rational control: agriculture remains a realm of magic. But the crafts of the city such are more amenable to rationalization, within limits. Even so, dialogue between intellectuals and craftsmen is slow to appear: science only comes with the Renaissance. The city is also a centre of religion: indeed “pagan” is paganus, a countryman (Weber 1978: 470–2). Especially this means salvation religion, even before Christian times. A  factor in this surely is the poverty and poor hygiene of the cities: whereas in the countryside one might look for survival after death through one’s children and grandchildren, in the city one must rather look for a personal survival. This again is an aspect of the separation from organic life, the cycle of birth, death and reproduction. Equally, aspirations in culture have no “natural” limit: one can always want to achieve more (Weber 1970b: 355–7). Some of these considerations would apply to Asiatic cities too. But the Western city is distinctive, in mediaeval times at least, in producing intellectuals from the lower, commercial, strata. The mediaeval city thus becomes a centre both for Protestantism and for commercial activity. Their synergy would bring the take-of of the comprehensive rationalization of the modern world.

Theories of the city: Wirth Louis Wirth’s article “Urbanism as a Way of Life” has been called one of the most infuential articles in all sociology (Wirth 1964f; Castells 2002d: 37; Savage et al.: 107). Appearing frst in 1938, it can be thought of as an attempt to preserve the heritage of Chicago School urban sociology in the face of a rising tide of functionalism – and perhaps a more scientistic turn in sociology. However, its impact seems to have come most in the decades after World War II and to have extended beyond urban sociology as such into the theory of mass society: an issue I will return to. In terms of urban sociology, the article may have been infuential but it has also attracted much criticism (Castells 2002d: 36f; Savage et al. 2003: 107–22, 199f). This however has taken on its own momentum, and somewhat lost contact with Wirth’s own thesis, and its grounding in Chicago School social ecology – Wirth himself made signifcant contributions to this (e.g. Wirth 1964b). In my

Jung, sociology and the city

95

earlier comments, I  pointed to Hawley’s account (following McKenzie) of the expansion and integration of cities and local communities with the development of rail and motor transport (Hawley 1950 Part IV). Before presenting Wirth’s thesis, then, three things should perhaps be made clear. First, Wirth argues that there is an urban way of life and mentality, urbanism, that is as old as cities. What is distinctive for our times is not merely the growth of cities – urbanization – but that the urban way of life and mentality are now spreading through the countryside to pervade all of modern society. This does not wholly account for the character of modernity, but it is a distinct contributory factor, along with such factors as capitalism and industrialization. Second, while the urban way of life is spreading through the countryside, there are reciprocal processes. As cities expand, they take in villages and small towns that retain something of their rural character. Again, people migrate to the city, from the countryside or indeed from foreign countries, and they bring the rural way of life and mentality with them. Research then that shows persisting “community” within cities or urban-style conficts and impersonality in the countryside have no leverage on Wirth’s thesis. Thirdly, Wirth is not infuenced by Tönnies: his review of Tönnies’ sociology (Wirth 1926) is polite but unenthusiastic. Again, his later discussion of rural-urban diferences does not refer to Tönnies’ conceptions. Rather he uses the concepts of community and society in their Chicago School social ecological senses (Wirth 1964c, 1964e). Wirth proposes a basic division between urban and rural ways of life which has run all through history. He cites Weber in regard to the city in history, though he does not review his arguments, and indeed his own are somewhat diferent. But his focus is on the metropolitan city and on the modern era. Though he does not defne the metropolitan city as opposed to the city in general. I will return to this point. Wirth is also infuenced by Simmel’s (1969) essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”; indeed much of his reasoning is taken over from it, though with changes, as discussed earlier. Simmel’s thesis is a temporal rather than a spatial one: the metropolitan city is defnitively something modern, in contrast to the cities of earlier eras and rural or small town society alike. And he is particularly concerned with the development and contrast of 18th century culture and mentality with those emerging in his own time. Wirth’s concerns are diferent. Wirth starts his thesis by giving a basic defnition of the city: “a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals” (Wirth 1964f: 66). He then examines these points in turn, though their efects are often overlapping and mutually reinforcing. Large population: this implies heterogeneity, in personal traits, occupations, culture. This in turn will make for spatial segregation on lines of ethnicity, economic and social status, and so forth. Given this diversity, traditional norms and values and informal social controls will be weak or absent; instead there will be competition and formal social controls. So many people cannot all know each other personally:

96

Psyche, Science and Society

it would cause an inner atomization of they tried to interact with each other on that basis. Relationships then become segmentalized – limited to specifc, often utilitarian, purposes – impersonal, superfcial and transitory. This gives a sense of freedom, but also a sense of isolation, anomie. Reserve, indiference and a blasé attitude are protections against the inner fragmentation; sophistication and rationality likewise go with the utilitarian cast of relationships. These indeed may be predatory, especially given the market and the eforation of the division of labour. Protection against this comes from membership of organized groups such as professional bodies or corporations. Again, communication among so many people requires representation or delegation: the individual alone has little impact. Dense settlement: this makes for diferentiation and specialization, compounding the efect of large numbers. Subjectively, the city becomes a place of close physical contacts but social distance: we see uniforms rather than individuals – and the emphasis is on seeing, visual recognition. Equally we become more sensitive to artefacts and less sensitive to nature. There are glaring contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, order and disorder. Localities become diferentiated by their uses, for example for work or residence. This emphasizes the spatial segregations of the city: the population settle in diferent districts according to economic criteria of land and rental values, type of employment, and criteria of desirability such as noise, pollution, racial and ethnic membership, social status and so forth. The city comes to resemble a mosaic of often antagonistic social worlds with sharp transitions between them. At the same time, the diversity of personalities and modes of life can make for tolerance and a relativistic attitude, making in turn for rationality and secularization. Again, informal controls on behaviour cannot well survive here: rather there are formal controls and indeed devices for co-ordinating activities – the clock and the trafc lights. Lastly, close physical contact combined with social distance, congested movement and a fast pace of life with complex technology make for loneliness, tension and frustration. Heterogeneous individuals: this induces a ramifed and diferentiated status system in which the individual has diferent status in diferent groups without any co-ordinating principle, and thus a sense of instability and insecurity as characterizing the world. This feeds into his (or her) sophistication and cosmopolitanism. Moreover, group membership changes quickly, organizations and indeed residential localities do not hold together. The people then tend to become a fuid mass, vulnerable to advertising and demagogic politics. The market economy, as well as making for specialization, also has a levelling efect, and mechanized factory work and the money economy add an impersonality to this. The institutions of the city in recreation and entertainment, education, mass media, politics and so on are all geared to the average person rather than the true individual, who has to immerse himself (or herself) in mass movements in order to participant in the city’s social, economic or political life. Wirth concludes with some remarks intended to orient future research on the city, identifying three aspects: social ecology, social organization, and personality and collective behaviour. He discusses migration and other demographic factors

Jung, sociology and the city

97

such as age distribution and gender balance, family size, changes in birth and death rates: the basic theme is the inability of the city to reproduce itself. He discusses the location of the family: its relative loss of functions and separation from wider kin, fewer or even no children, tendency of wives to be employed, separate interests and activities of its members. Finally, he notes that the city makes for not only social problems such as crime, corruption and disorder, but also personal problems such as mental breakdown and suicide. Evaluation of Wirth should in my view ask how far his thesis rings true in terms of our experience of city living, rather than looking for its ideological or other implications. The Chicago School built up a wealth of empirical research on the city (including the Polish Peasant study): it is not arid theory or mere social commentary. That said, I will indicate some points here that I want to discuss later in this chapter. Wirth’s thesis focuses on the metropolitan city in modernity. He claims a historical dimension, but to my mind the relation between the modern metropolitan city and the city in history in his argument is precarious – though something can be retrieved from it. Again, Wirth is moving towards a theory of mass society: this becomes increasingly clear as his article proceeds. But this is not grounded as with other mass society theorists in some conception of the disappearance of class or of the failure of the class struggle. Rather it is grounded in the absence of any coherent theory of stratifcation in the frst place – as is general with the Chicago School. Finally, it is worth commenting that this is not altogether gender-blind “malestream” sociology – for all that its language is pre-feminist. The Chicago School were always aware of single and working and indeed deviant women, not just of wives and mothers; and Wirth’s remarks here on the family are not functionalist.

The city and gender The theories I have looked at so far came long before second wave feminism – though neither Weber nor the Chicago School (or indeed Simmel) are quite as gender-blind as others in the sociological “malestream”. But the city has been a focus for women’s issues: for example, women’s safety (more generally, personal safety) was an important element of Jane Jacob’s concerns (Jacobs 1962). There have been more recent collections of feminist work: Little et al. (1988), Booth et al. (1996) or Matrix (1984), for example. Darke (1996) gives a useful overview of issues. She identifes three themes: the city of property, the city of zones and the city of diversity. On the city of property, she gives a brief overview of patriarchy in the ethnographic record and in history, and argues that women have always been excluded from citizenship and public life, citing for example ancient Athens. Although in modern times women have been granted citizenship formally, they are still made unwelcome in certain public spaces through mechanisms of informal control, including the threat of violence.

98

Psyche, Science and Society

On the city of zones, she argues that urban development and planning have given the conventional gender roles concrete and lasting form. The urban centre is made accessible to men, while women as housewives and mothers are confned to the suburbs, with much poorer transport, job prospects and amenities. On the city of diversity, she argues that the city ofers possibilities for women to fnd communities of their own kind, including ethnic or racial identity, sexual preference and so forth. There are accordingly also possibilities for political action. Darke’s location is apparently in housing and urban planning, but she has a background in sociology (and architecture) (Matrix 1984: front pages). She does not cite the Chicago School apropos her city of zones, but the conception is in line with for example Burgess’ well-known analysis of the growth of the city (Burgess 1967). On the “city of diversity”, she does cite Wirth. It is her “city of property” that is most problematic, however. Her thesis really needs a specifc focus on the city in history, rather than a general overview of patriarchy. This might prove complicated. Women’s political inclusion was at least imagined in Plato’s Republic (and in Aristophanes’ plays). Perhaps what underlay that was an awareness that diferent cities had diferent laws, and that this came down to choice not to tradition – indeed diferent peoples had diferent customs. In the mediaeval cities, the Church might have imposed more uniformity. Besides, while there is or can be a real distinction between public life and private or domestic life (Rosaldo 1974), it does not simply equate with citizenship or political inclusion or exclusion. Athenian women attended the theatre, Roman women the games, and mediaeval women went to church. Again, the household itself can be divided between public and private regions, and it may be the locus of political activity, especially in an oligarchy – and women are not always excluded, as for example in Rome. It is still true that a formal political inclusion of women is a modern development; and that there are informal social controls against women in certain places. But this surely relates rather to the other two notions, the city of zones and city of diversity. Finally, the relation between property and public spaces is surely problematic. As noted, Darke does not relate her analysis to the zonal tradition of Chicago School sociology. In fact, none of the contributors to the three collections cited here does so. Bondi and Peake note the predominant infuence of Castells and the modern Marxist school on modern urban sociology (Bondi and Peake 1988: 21, 25). They are critical of the inadequacies of this approach in relation to women’s lives. But only one or two of these contributors are formally sociologists, and there are general problems in relating the Chicago School to other sociological approaches. I will return to this at the end of the chapter.

Jung: the city and mass society How do these accounts of the city bear on Jung’s thought? Perhaps the frst point is the city’s social heterogeneity, and its reliance on migration rather than reproduction. The problem these things raise is not the socialization of children, but the

Jung, sociology and the city

99

acculturation of adults. The city does not need a supply of pre-socialized individuals: it will appropriate whatever human material it is presented with. (In the same way, capitalism – contra Castells 2002d – does not need to “reproduce” its labour force: it needs to get a supply of labour from somewhere. It is quite capable of mining out one source and moving on to another: in fact that is usually what it has done. The 20th century era of “welfare capitalism” had more to do with two World Wars than with capitalism itself.) One can locate the family – and the life-course – in these terms. Children are brought up in the suburbs or satellite towns; they go to the city as young adults to complete their educations and fnd work, and there they fnd their partners; when they have children, they return if they can to the suburbs or the satellite towns to bring them up. (What they do after the children are gone need not concern us here.) The family does not have to be theorized in functionalist terms. Neither the upbringing of the children nor the relationship between the parents need be seen as “functional” – for the city, for capitalism or for patriarchy – and there is no necessity to “critique” the subjective meanings that the various parties fnd in these activities and relationships, and to impose a “correct” meaning of our own. That is not to deny that these relationships and activities may prove less than idyllic and indeed embed oppressions, as the discussions in the previous section show. Jung’s strategy in his psychology is to focus on adults living adult lives, and negotiating their social and cultural environments as adults. Childhood he tends to view as the unfolding of an innate pattern, in which innate diferences of temperament have play. It is problems in adult life that reactivate childhood “trauma”, a psychic equivalent to pain that warns us of our need to review our lives. There is nothing inherently unsociological in this approach. Turning now to Wirth, I suspect that Jung might have taken to Wirth’s article in a rather uncritical way, and specifcally as a theory of mass society; at least there is a temptation for Jungians to do so. Homans’ remark, that Jung’s essay “The Undiscovered Self ”, fts “lock and key” with the theory of mass society has some justifcation (Homans 1979: 174; Jung 1964a). But while Wirth may form a bridge between Chicago School sociology and the theory of mass society, that still leaves us the choice which way we should cross. Something more should be said here about this idea. According to Giner, the notion of mass society has a long prehistory, extending to the ancient world; but the idea comes of age after World War I. As such, its frst theorists are Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, and Mannheim, but “the condemnation of history that gave rise to the theory of mass society has diferent sources and a mixed parentage made up of many discontented liberals and nostalgic conservatives, some disillusioned socialists, and a few outright reactionaries” (Giner 1976: 86). Always the underlying idea seems to be that modern society has ceased to progress and is now degenerating – perhaps that was all it was ever really doing, in fact. Central to the process is the breakdown of social structure, and the emergence instead of an amorphous mass. This might include the proletariat ceasing to be a revolutionary class, becoming incorporated into capitalism. It might also include the disappearance of elite

100 Psyche, Science and Society

culture, and the emergence of mediocre mass entertainment in its place (cf. Swingewood 1977). Another common theme is the disappearance of the individual. It may be sociology that has taken most account of the theory of mass society, but much of it comes from outside sociology or at least from its margins; and there are overlapping or convergent criticisms of modernity from quite diferent disciplines, for example, Lorenzian ethology (Lorenz 1974). Freud also writes critically of modern society, as do other psychoanalytic writers. For all that Wirth speaks of mass society, he does not seems to me to be fully implicated in that approach. There is no condemnation of history here, no conception of social structure disappearing or social dynamics failing, history degenerating into stasis. Rather what lies behind his argument is simply the Chicago School’s lack of a coherent macro-sociology. Yet what is here is surely on the lines of the disappearance of a rural stratifcation system and the formation of an urban proletariat, albeit one divided on racial and ethnic lines (and, indeed, a white-collar middle class too). And there is a clear awareness of wealth and poverty, and of predatory economic relationships. I will return to these issues at the end. Granted this, the picture Wirth gives of the urban mentality is persuasive: even his critics admit this, while claiming that he attributes it to the wrong causes (Castells 2002d: 40f; Savage et al. 2003: 199f). But while it might seem intuitively attractive to Jungians, there are some points for caution. Thus, Wirth seems to favour a view of the individual’s psychology as a factor of interpersonal rather than intra-psychic processes – elsewhere he cites Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan (Wirth 1964d: 14–16). He has no conception of depth psychology. Equally, he writes of the impact of the city on the individual in a way that does not leave room for diferences of temperament – that is, he does allow for such diferences in principle but has no detailed considerations on it. Here again it might be interesting to bring in Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory as discussed in another chapter.2 This provides a breakdown of culture in broad terms of social structure – indeed the grid-group conception might be seen as something of a counter to theories of mass society. While the city is biased towards the low group side, all four quadrants are in fact to be found. I have suggested there how it might relate to the Jungian typologies. Again, there is the question of the city and mental illness. As Wirth describes the city milieu, it is not clear that it must inhibit projection into the symbolic realm or indeed, magical manipulation – premodern cities were not irreligious, though the absence of strong priesthoods in ancient city-states might also favour secular thought. Why then would the city environment be specially destructive of one’s mental stability? Ultimately, our vulnerability to mental illness is endemic in the human existential situation – at least, that is Jung’s view. But our special vulnerability in modern times is due to rationalization and disenchantment rather than to urbanism. It is these that have created the cultural desert bereft of a symbolic mirror in which we can see ourselves refected. The city may have played an indirect part in this process, in terms of its characteristic separation from organic life (a point that Wirth also notes [Wirth 1964f: 73]); but that is a factor of cities throughout history, not just modern cities.

Jung, sociology and the city

101

This leads fnally to Weber, and here there is a clear accord between Weber’s account and Jung’s thought, in particular as regards the city as being remote from organic life, and as a centre of rational activity and thought. Also of course the city as the centre for early capitalism and Protestantism: the beginnings of the rationalization and disenchantment of the modern world. As I have argued elsewhere, there is a quite wide-ranging correspondence between Jungian psychology and Weberian sociology, especially in terms of cultural history and religion (Walker 2012 esp. p61f; above p72f). This includes religious functions (e.g. priest, prophet) and temperaments, as well as the developmental tendencies towards religious rejections of the world, and their diferent characters, trajectories and fates in East and West. But while the city plays a signifcant role in this, the focus is on the wider social and cultural environment. Weber’s account might also suggest a critical appraisal of the sometime use of the term “bourgeois” to mean the middle-class city-dweller or cultural philistine. The roots of this surely lie in the mediaeval separation of the city and rural society: the disdain felt by the privileged rural strata with their military character and sense of honour for the commercial strata of the cities, the more so when these had education and cultural pretensions of their own. I am not clear by what right our modern critics and commentators have appropriated that attitude. Indeed, the usage seems to me to be both self-serving and intellectually empty – not to say, fully capable of reversing itself into a “critique” of romanticism as nostalgia for the rural life of the past. At any rate, in Weberian sociology the mediaeval burghers are not the inevitable precursors of the capitalist bourgeoise, while the modern white-collar middle classes are grounded in the labour market not the ownership of property. Moreover there can be spiritual as much as political avante-gardes; a matter that bears not only on the arts but on the human sciences themselves, as I have discussed in another chapter.3 It is surely refexive analysis rather than a privileged stance of “critique” that is called for here. (Marxists too have reason to be wary of theories of mass society.) In the meantime, there are Jung’s own refections on the arts, for example on fantasy and realism in literature (Jung 1966a). These will bear sociological consideration: as one might expect, the argument resonates with some of Weber’s considerations on temperament as a factor in religion (Weber 1970d: 286f). Jung also has refections of his own on the city. These are of various kinds, often though not always drawn from Jewish prophecy or early Christian writings (often, too, relating to his views on incest: I  discuss this in another chapter4). Some of these concern the city as symbol of the self, for example the city as a circle with four gates corresponding to the four psychic functions, a symbol of the unity of conscious and unconscious (Jung 1966b: 225f; 1977: 122f, cf. 178). Kerenyi too writes of the founding of cities, especially in Roman times: the mandala-like city plan and the religious rituals of its initiation (Kerenyi 1951: 13f, 19f, 24f). All this may recall Weber’s notions of the city as a founded thing, a commune with shared citizenship and common cult. (It might also suggest why modern rationally planned new towns tend to fail: it is not just big cities that are impersonal.) There are also other refections: the city may also be a symbol of the mother, pure or harlot (e.g. Jerusalem and Babylon) (Jung 1967: 207f, 213–7). Again, there are cities such as Jerusalem or Rome that have a special symbolic signifcance.

102 Psyche, Science and Society

Jung also speaks of the city in more mundane terms, as the centre of civilization compared to the backward countryside. Thus, modern woman is modern city woman; her condition has not penetrated to the peasantry (Jung 1964b). Generally, though, Jung appears to be hostile to cities: this is a part of his critical attitude towards modernity. He dislikes and distrusts city life, especially large cities, in terms reminiscent of Wirth, as noted earlier. Yet in a late interview he extols Switzerland as a country of many small cities (Jung 1978). He bewails the modern lack of contact with nature; cities should have gardens or allotments. He also bewails wage labour under capitalism, where the product is taken away from the worker and sold. Jung’s tone here is surprisingly Marxist. One should perhaps recall then that Switzerland was also a country of independent skilled craftsmen in felds such as watch and clock making. Among such people, it was typically anarchism that took hold, rather than Marxist socialism. It could be for reasons like this that Jung never felt bound to engage with Marx as a thinker (it could also be to the point that he detested Hegel’s philosophy: Jung 1960: 169–71). Although Green politics did not become part of the political mainstream until well after Jung’s lifetime. Finally, one might note Jung’s concern with the spiritual crisis of the Roman Empire as a limited parallel to our modern spiritual crisis: the waning of GraecoRoman paganism in favour of imported Oriental cults, leading eventually to the supremacy of Christianity (Jung 1970: 13f). As I  will show, Weber here might speak in terms of city states and bureaucratic kingdoms (and the eventual decay into feudalism) rather than western and oriental – though Mithraism, which was Persian in origin, is indeed oriental. But the social structural factors only condition the cultural development, which has its own dynamic. Indeed, developments in religion of this kind occurred far more widely than in the Roman world. Weber and Jung would both have been interested in the Axial Age thesis; but this is too big an issue to consider here (Boy and Torpey 2013). For Jung, spiritual crises generally lead to spiritual renewals: it is the rationalization and disenchantment of modernity that interdict the natural cycle now. Weber would not disagree. But Jung might also have been taken with the notion of Rome as a Wirthean metropolis in a cosmopolitan world: as stated earlier, he sees a parallel here to the spiritual crisis of modernity. I will return to consider this. In all, then, I  see a good ft here between the sociological analysis – Weber especially – and Jungian psychodynamics. Though a feminist perspective should also be brought to bear, for these matters relate closely to the history of patriarchy.

Conclusion The basic question of sociology and the city is whether there is anything to say: whether the city contributes anything to society that might not better be attributed to factors such as (for modernity) capitalism or industrialization. I have looked at two of the main theorists who argue for this, Max Weber and Louis Wirth. Simmel might also have been considered, but so far as his ideas are not subsumed by

Jung, sociology and the city

103

Wirth, they would need to be taken with his wider theses, which I do not feel I can do here. Weber is concerned with the city in history. Indeed, the city is pivotal to his construction of history. Weber may be called “the most profoundly historical of sociologists” (Finley 1981: 14), but it might be more telling to say that sociology generally has been too closely wedded to Enlightenment philosophy to have wholly taken on board the 19th-century revolution in history: the rediscovery of the pre-classical civilizations, the belated acknowledgement of the historic civilizations of Asia such as India and China. This does not imply, quite the reverse, that the pre-classical civilizations were in any way Asiatic. In Weber’s view, the ancient world comprised a single maritime civilization, located on the coastlands and navigable rivers of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and the river valleys of the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates, and extending from late in the 4th millennium BC to early in the 1st millennium AD. (Weber 1976b: 68f). Only at the end of Antiquity did this civilization split into European and Middle Eastern/North African sectors. It is matter for regret that Weber did not live to write more about the latter. But the polar types of the ancient world are not European and Oriental (or Aryan and Semitic!): they are bureaucratic kingdoms (including the Roman Empire) and city states (including the Phoenicians). It may be noted that this conception fully incorporates the Jews into Western civilization. Equally, it refutes the notion, persistent since the 19th century, that Western civilization is really Greek rationalism, and that religion is an Oriental intrusion. It also afrms a disjunction between civilization and the primitive, refuting attempts to bring them – and the sociological and anthropological disciplines – together through an evolution from kinship to class. History for Weber does not have origins, it has sources, and the sources we have simply do not show this. If it occurred, it was earlier in (pre)history, and nothing of it is known (Weber 1978: 370f). Weber’s views on mediaeval Europe are also heterodox. City and countryside are treated separately (cf. Marx 1965), but here each is given equal weight, and diferent cases are analysed in both felds – southern maritime and northern inland cities; patrimonial as well as feudal or Standestaat realms; and all this is set in a much wider and deeper matrix of comparative historical analysis. Mediaeval Europe is not simply the inevitable precursor of modern western society, and the burghers of the mediaeval city are not simply the nascent bourgeoisie. The decisive turn to modernity comes later and is historically contingent, and indeed only appears in certain locations. Weber’s vision of the emergence of modern society smacks less of evolution or progress than of the fruit machine: it is the constellation of factors that is unique, rather than the factors themselves, or some of them at least. The mediaeval city then is a historical entity in itself. It has a location in the general sociology of the city, and its signifcance for modern society lies at least in part in the continuity it provides with the city of Antiquity. For Weber, then, modern Western society cannot be imagined without the autonomous city. So much of our economy, politics, religious and secular culture developed there, and could only have developed there. To a fair extent, our

104

Psyche, Science and Society

modern societies are the city state writ large – though saying this one must be mindful of what eventually befell the city state, in Antiquity as well as at the beginning of modernity (Weber did not live to see the European Union, of course). Wirth is concerned with the city in modernity. Urbanism, along with such factors as capitalism and industrialization, makes its own distinctive contribution to the character of the modern world. Wirth’s work can be taken either as a gateway (one among others) into theories of mass society, or else drawn back to its origins in the Chicago School. It is the latter alternative I pursue here. Wirth argues that it is urbanism, the spread of the urban way of life throughout society, that is distinctive for modernity. Cities have always been cities – he cites Weber here, though his own arguments are diferent. But his focus is in fact on the modern metropolis, and he does not defne this. His defnition of the city is a defnition of the city in general. Even so, one can get a fair idea of the essential diference from his other writings, on community and society (esp. Wirth 1964e). In the modern metropolitan city, the ecological relationships are always escaping the formal political and administrative structures. These are based on the city states of the past; and in the small towns of 19th-century America they worked well enough. But the metropolis is too big, too diverse: they can no longer function. Social problems are identifed, but the measures devised to meet them do not reach their targets. Meanwhile, such politics as actual ecological groupings create cannot gain acceptance as legitimate or enter into dialogue with the administration. The metropolis then is a seething cauldron of frustrated and inefective administration and politics and persistent unresolved social problems. It is worth asking whether there were in fact any metropolitan cities before modern times; and if so, what might their mentality and its impact have been. I would say that there were: the most obvious example is ancient Rome. Giner indeed argues that a forerunner of mass society theory can be seen in the ancient literature, most especially in Rome of the late Republic and early Empire (Giner 1976 esp. pp20–4; I would have cited Petronius’ Satyricon, incidentally). Given that the ancient city included its hinterland, the urban mentality would not be confned to the cities. Indeed it is this era, when the cities were losing their autonomy, frst to the Hellenistic kingdoms, later to the Roman empire, that gives us the word “cosmopolitan”. At any rate, if there is truth in this then it rather vindicates Wirth’s claim, that there is an urbanism that is quite distinct from such specifcally modern factors such as capitalism or industrialization. It would also vindicate Jung’s view of the spiritual crisis of the Roman world as ofering a parallel to that of our own times. It is always a puzzle with the Chicago School how to bring their work together with other sociological perspectives. It seems to me there are two problems. One is that the Chicago School theorists have no formally stated macrosociology. They propose four levels (or stages) in human afairs: ecological, economic, political, and cultural: the frst two of these are really inter-societal; only the last two are fully “sociological”. The political stage is characterized by symbiotic relations and a coercive state; the cultural by shared norms and consensual order. They refer to

Jung, sociology and the city

105

things like class and the state, but without defning them or showing any systemic relations. This is a confict sociology with a material dimension, and often with left wing sympathies, but their main economic concept is the division of labour, and this is mainly used to explain the emergence of symbiotic relationships, the move from the ecological/economic to the political/cultural levels or stages (Park 1952 Part 2 passim). The other problem is that mainstream sociology seems largely to conceive society as a virtual reality, which is not located in a spatially distributed and structured landscape – or, for that matter, populated by biological persons with emotions, sex and reproduction, life-cycle and so forth. Partly this comes from Durkheimian idealism, which has no interest in material matters. Partly it comes from Marxism, which limits the material to the economic (whether economic determinism really is deterministic is a non sequitur in this context). Weber is more willing to admit such factors. As regards the macrosociology, the Chicago School’s account of the metropolis’ disconnect between social ecology and formal politico-administrative structures puts me in mind of Wallerstein’s notion of the semi-periphery (Wallerstein 2004). This is the intermediate location in the capitalist world system which is implicated in the control and exploitation of the periphery, but is itself subject to control and exploitation from the core. There is then the same impotence of the political and administrative structures: they maintain a token presence only, always subject to external interference and constraint. There is the same inability of the society on the ground to create a legitimate politics with administrative impact: the social problems are left to fester. In view of the structural complexity and lack of clear outcomes of the semiperiphery situation, the Chicago School’s failure to raise a coherent macrosociology perhaps makes sense. At the same time, it might also account for the difculty in creating an urban sociology that is consistent over time: the external regime keeps changing. Thus, the Chicago School’s vision of Chicago seemed incongruous in the era of Keynesian welfare economics that followed World War II; it appears more credible in the neoconservative era that ensued from the 1980s. (This change also caught the Althusserian Marxists such as Castells of guard.) Other things run between the city and the countryside besides the spread of the urban mentality and the movements of people. There are for example issues of the rural economy and of regional (under)development (Buttel and Newby 1980). But if the metropolis is to be located in the semi-periphery as I have suggested then it is not wholly implicated in these things, or at least it is also caught up in them. But there are also environmental issues. These are of various kinds, and exist at various levels. But as between city and countryside, they can run either way. For example, the city may appropriate rural water resources, even displacing rural populations to create reservoirs or hydroelectric schemes. Then again, upland practices in farming or forestry may create problems of soil erosion and fooding that have disastrous consequences for cities downstream. Matters such as these cannot be dealt with in terms of a virtual reality. Environmental processes in a spatially (and temporally)

106 Psyche, Science and Society

distributed and structured landscape, the whole natural environment in fact, have to be acknowledged. Again, there is the feminist concern with city and suburbs as discussed earlier. This leads to a fnal, refexive, issue: is the sociological discipline itself an artefact of urban culture – the remoteness of the city from organic life, the intellectual’s use of the natural world as a source of metaphors, while lacking empirical concern? (This would include Simmel, incidentally.) The approaches I have considered here, Weber and the Chicago School (to whom Wirth belongs), are relatively free from this fault. So also is Jung – who most strongly advocates this kind of refexive analysis.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See Chapter 3, pp76f. See Chapter 3, esp. pp59f. See Chapter 3, esp. pp64f, 79f. See Chapter 7, pp168f.

Bibliography Austin, M.M., and Vidal-Naquet, P. (1977) Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece. London: Batsford (B.T. Batsford Ltd). Bondi, L., and Peake, L. (1988) “Gender and the City: Urban Politics Eevisited”, in Little, J., Peake, L., and Richardson, P. (eds.) Women in Cities: Gender and the Urban Environment. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp21–40. Booth, Chris, Darke, Jane, and Yeandle, Susan (eds.) (1996) Changing Places: Women’s Lives in the City. London: Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd. Boy, John, and Torpey, John (2013) “Inventing the Axial Age: The Origins and Uses of a Historical Concept”, Theory and Society 42:3, pp241–59. Burgess, Ernest (1967) “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project”, in Park, Robert, McKenzie, Roderick D., and Burgess, Ernest (eds.) The City. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, pp47–62. (Original 1925) Buttel, Frederick H., and Newby, Howard (eds.) (1980) The Rural Sociology of the Advanced Societies. Montclair: Allanheld, Osman, and London: Croom Helm. Cahnman, Werner J. (2015) Weber and Toennies. London and New York: Routledge. Carey, James T. (1975) Sociology and Public Afairs: The Chicago School. Beverley Hills and London: Sage. Castells, Manuel (2002) The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory ed. Ida Susser. Malden MA. & Oxford: Blackwell. (2002a) “Urbanization”, pp15–33. (2002b) “The Urban Ideology”, pp34–70. (2002c) “Conclusion: Urban Sociology in the Twenty-First Century”, pp390–406. Catton, Will and Dunlap, Riley (1978) “Environmental Sociology: A  New Paradigm”, American Sociologist 13, pp41–9. (1980) ‘A New Ecological Paradigm for Post-exuberant Sociology’, American Behavioural Scientist 24, pp15–47.

Jung, sociology and the city

107

Darke, Jane (1996) “The Man-Shaped City” in Booth, Chris, Darke, Jane, and Yeandle, Susan (eds.) Changing Places: Women’s Lives in the City. London: Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd, pp88–99. Durkheim, Émile (1964) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press and London: Collier-Macmillan. Elliot, Brian, and McCrone, David (1982) The City: Patterns of Domination and Confict. London: Macmillan. Engels, Friedrich (1972) The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Lawrence & Wishart. (1978) “On the Division of Labour in Production” (excerpt from Anti-Dühring). in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., pp718–24. Finley, Moses I. (1981) “The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond”, in Finley, M.I. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (ed. B.D. Shaw and R.P. Saller). London: Chatto & Windus, pp3–23. Fustel de Coulanges, Denis (1980) The Ancient City. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Giner, Salvador (1976) Mass Society. London: Martin Robertson. Green, Adam (2006) “Matter and Psyche: Lewis Mumford’s Appropriation of Marx and Jung in His Appraisal of the Condition of Man in Technological Civilization”, History of the Human Sciences 19:3, pp33–64. Hart, Christopher (ed.) (2010) The Legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology. Poynton Cheshire: Midrash Publications. Harvey, Lee (1987) Myths of the Chicago School. Aldershot and Brookfeld: Avebury. Hawley, Amos (1950) Human Ecology: A  Theory of Community Structure. New York: The Ronald Press Co. (1981) Urban Sociology: An Ecological Approach (2nd ed.). New York: Wiley. Hillyard, Samantha (2007) The Sociology of Rural Life. Oxford and New York: Berg. Homans, Peter (1979) Jung in Context. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, Jane (1962) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. London: Jonathan Cape. Jung, Carl G. (1960) “On the Nature of the Psyche”, in Jung, C.G. (ed.) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp159–234. (1964a) “The Undiscovered Self ”, in C.G. Jung Civilization in Transition (CW10). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp245-305. (1964b) “Woman in Europe”, in C.G. Jung Civilization in Transition (CW10). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp113-33. (1966a) “Psychology and Literature”, in C.G. Jung The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature (CW15), pp84-105. (1966b) “The Psychology of the Transference”, in C.G. Jung The Practice of Psychotherapy 2nd ed (CW16). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp163-338. (1967) Symbols of Transformation 2nd ed (CW5). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1970) “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, in C.G. Jung The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 2nd ed (CW9i). Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ. pp3-41. (1977) “The Tavistock Lectures”, in C.G. Jung The Symbolic Life (CW18). Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp5-182. (1978) “On Man and His Environment” (interview with Hans Carol, 8/2/50). In C.G. Jung Speaking (ed. William McGuire and R.F. Hull). London: Thames & Hudson, pp201-4.

108 Psyche, Science and Society

Kerenyi, Carl (1951) “Prolegomena”, in Jung, Carl G. and Kerenyi, Carl Introduction to a Science of Mythology. London: RKP, pp1–32. LeGates, Richard T., and Stout, Frederic (eds.) (2000) The City Reader (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Little, J., Peake, L., and Richardson, P. (eds.) (1988) Women in Cities: Gender and the Urban Environment. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lorenz, Konrad Z. (1974) Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins. London: Methuen. Martindale, Don (1960) American Society. Princeton: van Nostrand. Marx, Karl (1965) Precapitalist Economic Formations. New York: International Publishers. (1978) “The German Ideology: Part 1”, in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., pp146–200. and Engels, Friedrich (1978) “The Communist Manifesto”, in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., pp469–500. Matrix Book Group (1984) Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. London and Sydney: Pluto. McKenzie, Roderick D. (1930) “Review of Pitirim Sorokin and Carle Zimmerman: Principles of Rural-urban Sociology”, American Journal of Sociology 36:1, pp35–7. (1968) On Human Ecology (ed. Amos Hawley). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Morgan, Lewis (1964) Ancient Society. Cambridge: Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press. Mumford, Lewis (1995) The Lewis Mumford Reader (ed. Donald L. Miller). Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Nelson, Lowry (1969) Rural Sociology: Its Origin and Growth in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Newby, Howard, and Buttel, Frederick H. (1980) “Toward a Critical Rural Sociology”, in Buttel, Frederick H., and Newby, Howard (eds.) The Rural Sociology of the Advanced Societies. Montclair: Allanheld, Osman, and London: Croom Helm, pp1–35. Park, Robert (1950) Race and Culture. Glencoe: Free Press. (1952) Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology. New York: Free Press. Park, Robert, and Burgess, Ernest (1921) Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Park, Robert, McKenzie, Roderick D., and Burgess, Ernest (1967) The City. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. (Original 1925) Poggi, Gianfranco (1993) Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. Berkeley: University of California Press. Riesebrodt, Martin (1989) “From Patriarchalism to Capitalism; the Theoretical Context of Max Weber’s Agrarian Studies (1892–3)”, in Tribe, Keith (ed.) Reading Weber. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp131–5. Riesman, David, Glazer, Nathan, and Denney, Reuel (1961) The Lonely Crowd (abridged ed.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Roberts, Brian (2010) “ ‘Ahead of Its Time?’ The Legacy and Relevance of W.I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki (1918–20) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America”, in Hart, Christopher (ed.) The Legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology. Poynton Cheshire: Midrash Publications, pp74–104. Rosaldo, Michele Z. (1974) “Women, Culture and Society: A  Theoretical Overview”, in Rosaldo, M. and Lamphere, L. (eds.) Women, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp17–42. Roussel, Denis (1976) Tribu et Cité. Paris: Université Paul Valéry de Montpellier.

Jung, sociology and the city

109

Savage, Mike, Warde, Alan, and Warde, Kevin (2003) Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Simmel, Georg (1969) “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in Sennett, Richard (ed.) Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Education Division, Meredith Corporation Sennett (ed.), pp47–60. (Original 1903) (1977) The Problems of the Philosophy of History (trans. Guy Oakes). New York: Free Press. (2004) The Philosophy of Money (3rd enlarged ed., ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby). London and New York: Routledge. Sorokin, Pitirim, and Zimmerman, Carle (1929) Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology. New York: Henry Holt. Swingewood, Alan (1977) The Myth of Mass Culture. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Thomas, W.I., and Znaniecki, Florian (1958) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. New York: Dover. Tönnies, Ferdinand (1955) Community and Association. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tribe, Keith (ed.) (1989) Reading Weber. London & New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1989a) “Prussian Agriculture – German Politics: Max Weber 1892–7” in Tribe, Keith (ed.) 1989, pp85–130. Veyne, Paul (1984) Writing History: Essay On Epistemology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Walker, Gavin (2012) “Sociological Theory and Jungian Psychology”, History of the Human Sciences 25:1, pp52–74. Wallerstein, Immanuel (2004) World System Analysis: An Introduction. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Weber, Max (1970) From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills). London, Henley & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1970a) “Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany”, pp363–85. (1970b) “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions”, pp323–59. (1970c) “Science as a Vocation”, pp129–56. (1970d) “The Social Psychology of the World Religions”, pp267–301. (1976) The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London: New Left Books. (1976a) “The Social Causes of the Decay of Ancient Civilization”, in Weber (1976) pp387-412. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. (1981) General Economic History. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. (1989) “Developmental Tendencies in the Situation of East Elbian Rural Labourers”, in Tribe, Keith (ed.) Reading Weber. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp158–87. Wirth, Louis (1926) “The Sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies”, American Journal of Sociology 32:3, pp412–22. Wirth (1964) On Cities and Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1964a) “Consensus and Mass Communication”, pp18-43 (frst published American Sociological Review 1948) (1964b) “Human Ecology”, pp178-188 (frst published in American Journal of Sociology 1945) (1964c) “Rural-Urban Diferences”, pp221-5 (apparently composed 1951)

110

Psyche, Science and Society

(1964d) “Social Interaction: The Problem of the Individual and the Group” pp3-17 (frst published in American Journal of Sociology 1939) (1964e) “The Scope and Problems of the Community”, pp165-177 (First published 1933 in Publications of the Sociological Society of America) (1964f) “Urbanism As A Way Of Life”, pp60-83. (First published in American Journal of Sociology 44:1 (1938), p1-24.

5 JUNG, LORENZ AND SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

These deepest strata of the human personality are, in their dynamics, not essentially diferent from the instincts of animals, but on their basis human culture has erected all the enormous superstructure of social norms and rites whose function is so closely analogous to that of phylogenetic ritualization. Both phylogenetically and culturally evolved norms of behaviour represent motives and are felt to be values by any normal human being. Both are woven into an immensely complicated system of universal interaction to analyse which is all the more diffcult as most of its processes take place in the subconscious and are by no means directly accessible to self-observation. Yet it is imperative for us to understand the dynamics of this system, because insight into the nature of values ofers the only hope for our ever creating the new values and ideals which our present situation needs so badly. – Konrad Lorenz On Aggression (1996: 214)1

Introduction There are two main sets of reasons why we might want to consider the psychology of Carl Jung and the ethology of Konrad Lorenz together. One is that Jung himself sought to give his psychology a grounding of this kind, acknowledging human animal origins and the continuing animal substratum in our psychology. He was not infuenced in this by Lorenz; his views were apparently formed by an earlier generation of theorists. Lorenz was aware of Jung: although initially critical, he later came to take a more positive view (Lorenz 1971d: 136f, 1973: 26f; Evans 1975: 57–9). Jung and Lorenz did meet and talk once, very late in Jung’s life: a dinner at a Zürich restaurant in February 1956. Apparently they found much to agree on (Hannah 1976: 329). It seems worthwhile then to enquire formally how Jung’s psychology might fare in the more modern ethological environment; there is also the question how Jung DOI:10.4324/9780429456268-6

112

Psyche, Science and Society

might comment on some of Lorenz’s theses. These matters, however, are more complex than they might appear, and I return to them at the end of the chapter. The other set of reasons lies in the possibility that Jungian psychology might form a bridge between Lorenzian ethology and sociological theory. This of course would entail a critical consideration of Lorenz’s own ventures in that direction. It would also mean grounding sociology on a scientifc rather than a philosophical conception of “human nature”. Not everyone will welcome this, of course. For some, it will raise fears of reductionism, biological determinism, “positivism” and the like. However, sociological theory is methodologically heterogeneous on such issues. The tradition of Durkheim is to seek only social causes for social phenomena, and to exclude psychological or biological explanations. This is often taken to be sociology’s default position, at least as regards structural theories such as functionalism or Marxism. Sociological determinism then is to be protected from the intrusion of determinisms from the natural world. For Marxism or feminism, there is an added dimension: the demand for a virtuous determinism at societal level which will make for our ultimate release from oppression, and for critique of vicious determinisms that would show our oppressions to be inevitable. As against this, the action approaches in sociology centre their explanations on our consciousness and free will. They take their ground in Kantian (or neoKantian) philosophy, with its resolution of free will and determinism, and its recognition of both ideal and material realms. This has its own strategies for dealing with causal infuences from the natural world. (It is also from here that the earliest and most logically coherent critique of positivism comes, the division between Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft.) This question of free will and determinism comes up in psychology too; and here too there are Kantian approaches. Jungian psychology is not deterministic. Nor is Lorenzian ethology: Lorenz takes a holistic approach to animal behaviour – comparative psychology, rather – which is as much concerned with purposive behaviour as with instinct, and he does not deny the existence of higher mental processes and explicitly afrms human consciousness and free will. In a Kantian universe, then, the issue that a scientifc as opposed to a philosophical conception of human nature raises is not biological determinism, but how an animal species can evolve free will and consciousness. I am aware that there are philosophers who have argued on similar lines, for example, Bergson, Santayana and Gehlen. But these are a disparate group, and have had little impact on sociological theory – though Schopenhauer, who is their forerunner, certainly has. In any case, it is as a scientifc conception that I want to follow it through here. Consideration as a philosophical conception must be left to another occasion. It also raises the question of the biological uniqueness of our species. Insightbased problem solving can be demonstrated in either chimpanzees or orang-utans; yet these are distinct albeit related species. So also with humans: we are not just chimpanzees – or orang-utans – who are better at solving problems. We are a different, unique, animal species, and our “humanness” is subject to that. Lorenz is

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

113

much concerned with the question what separates us from the animals – apes – we are most closely related to (Lorenz 1971e: 216f). Maybe it is time, then, that we questioned the philosophical truism that Man is a social animal. As a basic assumption for sociological theorizing, this always seems to me to say both more and less than it says: Man is a social animal; Man is the social animal; Man is not animal, he is social; Man is social, woman is animal. Meanwhile it carries with it no biologically literate attempt to consider what it means for an animal to be social – or what that has to do with our species.

Lorenzian ethology General ethology Konrad Lorenz’s career begins in the 1930s, as a leading fgure (with Niko Tinbergen and others) seeking to develop a new science of ethology (McFarland 1999 Part 3.1 chs 20–22. Main sources for what follows: Lorenz 1970 & 1971). This would in time become established as an evolutionary science of comparative psychology. The basic criteria for this were empirical observation rather than speculative theory, and an emphasis on the complexity of animal behaviour. The animal should be observed under natural conditions, though observation in captivity and information from laboratory experiments or even vivisections might also be used. But no one principle of explanation should be privileged: animal behaviour is a many-levelled afair. Lorenz cites a wide range of approaches, including physiological studies of refexes, Pavlovian conditioning, behaviourism, through to Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis and depth psychology. The basis for this is a new theory of instinct, or more accurately, of the relations between instinctive behaviour and learning (purposive behaviour) (Lorenz 1970b, 1973; also 1970a). This refutes the older views of, for example, Spencer and Lloyd Morgan, in two key regards. First, as regards ontogeny, the individual’s instinctive behaviour is not modifable by experience: instinct is conservative; second, as regards phylogeny, the evolution of behaviour is not a smooth transition from instinctive to learned behaviour as instinct is progressively modifed by learning. Two further points: an animal’s subjective state when engaged in instinctive behaviour does not refect awareness of its biological function; and an instinctive behaviour sequence cannot be explained simply with reference to its functionality or survival value: there must also be some account of how it originated. Lorenz then proposes an antithetical relationship. Instinctive behaviour cannot simply be modifed by learning, and the one does not lead to the other. Rather purposive behaviour can only enter when instinctive behaviour breaks down and makes room for it. Here it is instinctive behaviour that Lorenz speaks of: obligatory sequences of movements (or fxed movement patterns). These are driven by the organism’s inner state, irrespective of any input from the environment. Initially Lorenz compares this to a chain of refexes, though he later moves away from this conception: refexes involve some input from or response to the environment, but the impetus here can

114

Psyche, Science and Society

be entirely endogenous. However, the behaviour sequence may be initiated by an innate releasing schema (later, innate releasing mechanism – IRM) which “recognizes” certain elements in the environment, following its own course thereafter. More than this, the animal seeks out the situations, environmental elements, that will release its instinctive behaviour: it shows appetitive behaviour. If it cannot fnd the releasing schema, for example in captivity, the behaviour pattern may appear spontaneously – or elements of it, the beginnings of the sequence, may appear. Lorenz terms these “intention movements”, since they show the sequence the animal intends to perform. The key conception throughout this is of endogenous energy seeking release. Lorenz denies that animal behaviour can be understood simply as reactions to changed (or manipulated) conditions – the fallacy of behaviourism. It is what animals do when left to themselves that holds the key. He quotes McDougall with approval: “The healthy animal is up and doing” (Lorenz 1971c: 271, 1996: 42). Where the target of the behaviour is another member of the same species, the innate releasing schema and the instinctive behaviour sequence it releases will coevolve together. Typically the social behaviour of social species is of this order. Consequently it is very conservative, resistant to change. Lorenz terms these schemas “releasers”. They might take the form of visual or auditory or olfactory cues, but often these – the visual cues especially – are reinforced by stylized movements. Intention movements then often serve as releasers, hence they take on a “symbolic” meaning which may become disengaged from the original behaviour of which they were the initial stages. Lorenz initially speaks of formalized intention movements, but later he calls them “rituals”. He suggests a comparison of how they can change their meanings to processes in philology. (This will lead him later into extended analogies with human culture.) Lorenz holds that it is possible to trace the evolutionary history of this process through diferent species: most obviously with closely related species like diferent species of duck; but also where the evolutionary relationship is quite remote. Lorenz’s intention is not just ethology but a science of comparative behaviour, parallel to comparative anatomy or comparative physiology, with the same kind of bearing on evolutionary history. Indeed he argues that behaviour sequences can be a better guide to evolutionary history than morphological features, since particularly with social species it is less likely that convergent evolution can enter as a confounding factor. A comment here on imprinting. This is often highlighted in accounts of Lorenzian ethology: the way that (for example) a newly hatched duckling will accept and follow the frst moving object it sees as its mother. Species identity for future social or mating behaviour may also be learned in the same way. But this only applies to certain (mostly avian) species: it is not a universal process. Though there may be other processes of wider occurrence that invite comparison – the ability to learn from a single traumatic incident, for example. Opposed to instinctive behaviour is learned behaviour. Lorenz adopts the term purposive behaviour, as embracing both learning by conditioning (punishment and

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

115

reward – failure and success) and insight based learning or problem solving: he considers the work of Pavlov and Skinner, but also of Gestalt psychologists such as Köhler; indeed he puts great weight on this. At the base of this is the orienting response or taxis: how the organism orients itself in space. In its simplest form this might orient its movements, for example, withdrawing from danger or approaching food, but with evolution it becomes more sophisticated. Lorenz is infuenced by the ideas of von Uexküll here, on how the animal’s sensory apparatus fts it for its environment and style of life. Animals in more complex environments develop a more complex sensory apparatus – here Lorenz emphasizes visual perception – and more complex behaviour. For example, coral reefs present a three-dimensional space as opposed to the efectively two dimensions of the open sea; similarly with tree environments as opposed to plains. It is in complex three-dimensional spaces such as these that the perception of space is most developed, and this impacts on cognition. Visual perception provides the basis for Gestalt learning, learning by insight without prior experience – Lorenz is much impressed by the work of Köhler and others on problem solving in apes. But he also acknowledges learning by conditioning, which he terms (or equates with) learning by trial and error. Both processes can be seen in animal (and human) cognition – and both need to be taken into account. Indeed, Lorenz remarks on the parallel to his methodological concerns: there are Gestalt-type conceptions such as functionalism which look at the whole situation, and causal explanations such as the conditioned refex which focus on their specifc parts (Lorenz 1971b). The relation between functionalism and evolutionary history is of this kind: Lorenz is very much concerned to bring the two kinds of approach together. Taxes and instincts come together in animal behaviour. The orienting response often precedes the sequence of instinctive behaviour. Moreover, animals exhibit appetitive behaviour: they seek out the environmental stimuli that will release their instinctive behaviour. There is scope here for learning, for purposive behaviour. Even so, Lorenz points out that while the instinctive behaviour pattern may fulfl an evolutionary purpose, this has nothing to do with the organism’s motivation. The reward is in the behaviour itself: carnivores hunt to hunt, not to eat. The consummatory act is the killing of the prey – in itself an instinctive sequence of movements. Eating the prey constitutes a new sequence. Even so, while the instinctive sequence is resistant to modifcation by learning, it can nevertheless be broken up into shorter part-sequences, and here again learning can enter. Purposive behaviour and instinctive behaviour then are intercalated in higher animals; and the more the instinctive behaviour is broken up, the more openings for purposive behaviour are created. Some general comments might end this overview. Lorenz is a Darwinian. Evolution is based on the two processes of mutation and natural selection. It is a matter of short-term survival advantages: there is no long-term plan. And choices (so to speak) once made set the trajectory of future development: they set limits to its possibilities. For example, if a quadruped evolves so that its forelegs become wings, further evolution will not return it to being a quadruped. On the other hand, the

116

Psyche, Science and Society

wings might become vestigial, with no function. One must then know the actual evolutionary history: one cannot assume that evolution would of necessity have arrived at whatever would be most useful for survival. All this applies in behaviour just as it does in morphology. With this, Lorenz follows Darwin in pointing to sexual selection as a factor of evolution beside and often working against natural selection by extra-specifc factors. This is an important component of his argument, and his considerations on social animals follow the same logic: I will return to it later. The Darwinian model of evolution is a tree with branches: it is not a ladder with rungs. Highly evolved animals are typically animals that are adapted to a particular ecological niche, in terms of sophisticated instinctive behaviour. They may exhibit little purposive behaviour, and their survival may be precarious if their environmental conditions change. Less specialized animals may show more learned behaviour, and be more adaptive, and have a greater potential for survival over the long term. Finally, Lorenz holds that animals are active not reactive – “the healthy animal is up and doing”, in McDougall’s words. He also speaks of “the parliament of instincts” (Lorenz 1996: 72f). Animals go about with an array of behaviours “on stand-by”, ready and seeking release, any of which may prevail according to the circumstances encountered. Animal behaviour is purposeful, complex, many-levelled and fexible. Ultimately, the biological basis of free will is simply that animals live in a world that presents them with alternatives. It long precedes the human (consciousness may be a diferent question) – especially with the evolution of play (e.g. Lorenz 1971d: 177f).

Ethology and humankind This leads to Lorenz’s refections on the human species. These rather constitute an account of our species’ ethological location than a comprehensive human ethology – something that Eibl-Eibesfeldt rather undertakes (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989). Again, they are grounded in an account of the ethological preconditions of human evolution, rather than a theory of human evolution as such. There are various themes, with both continuity and development over Lorenz’s career. The basic themes however are, on the one hand, our relative freedom from instinctive behaviour patterns; on the other hand, the persistence of instinctive behaviour patterns. There are costs and benefts on both sides, but above all we need a greater self-awareness and judicious management. Humankind is the greatest danger to itself. The texts fall into two main groups: two essays from the early 1950s “Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies” and “Psychology and Phylogeny”, and two books from the 1960s and 1970s, On Aggression and Behind the Mirror (Lorenz 1971d, 1971e, 1977, 1996). Another text from this period, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, is an essay on contemporary human afairs: I am less concerned with this here (Lorenz 1974). A late text, The Waning of Humaneness, relates partly to this and partly to Behind the Mirror: it contains perhaps Lorenz’s most visionary refections (Lorenz 1988).

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

117

The earlier essays start with a methodological argument, that in biology and sociology alike one cannot (contra the prevailing fashion) argue solely from the whole to the parts, but must also consider the infuence of the parts on the whole. This may parallel the structure/agency argument in sociological theory, but Lorenz’s concern is with instinctive rather than purposive behaviour. This has an evolutionary history which must be taken into account: it is not simply a factor of its function. In particular, the social behaviour of animals is grounded in the coevolution of releasers and of the behaviour they release – with attendant emotions and rewards. The fact of co-evolution tends to make animal social behaviour patterns conservative, liable to persist irrespective of their survival value (functionality). This gives the context for Lorenz’s thesis on the ethological preconditions for human evolution. Lorenz identifes three factors. Most basic is the high development of visual perception. This is most strongly developed in tree-living animals that leap between and grasp the branches such as the various primates, and most highly developed of all in humans. It is this that is the basis of conceptual thought and of language – language is full of spatial metaphors. It is the basis of insightbased learning and of the understanding of cause and efect. The initial purpose of language is cognition; the communicative function comes later (Lorenz 1977: 129). (Later Lorenz cites Chomsky in support of this, though he may have got the idea initially from Gehlen.) The next two factors distinguish us from our primate relatives. We are specialists in non-specialization: we can run, climb and swim; no other animal can do all three so well. Lorenz points to other specialists in non-specialization: the raven and the Norway rat. All are characterized by the loosening of instinctive behaviour patterns, and the eforescence of exploratory behaviour and play. Such species can adopt quite diferent ways of living and adapt to a wide range of environmental conditions. Our success in spreading across the world – in contrast to the great apes – has depended on this. Lastly, there is neoteny, the retention of immature characteristics into adulthood. This applies to our behaviour too: while curiosity and learning appear only as a brief adolescent phase in the other non-specialist species, in humans they are life-long. Moreover, through language we are able to transmit and perpetuate what we learn. Lorenz maintains that this neotony is a factor of human self-domestication – a problematic thesis to which I will return. To sum up, human evolution has entailed an atrophy of instinctive behaviour, including instinctive social behaviour, and a hypertrophy of learned behaviour. In the face of this, Lorenz is concerned with the persistence, and also the status, of instinctive behaviour in our species. Aggression is a case in point: the relative absence of instinctive inhibitions on harming our own species as compared, say, with wolves; the limited learned restraints that only seem to operate with known individuals and not with strangers; the readiness to fght in defence of the social group – all compounded by the development of weapons. Our instinctive heritage here is at once too little, too much, and too infexible: and this is typical of the problem. There are other cases. Lorenz holds that actual instinctive motor sequences mostly survive in us only as fragments – curiously he does not consider women

118 Psyche, Science and Society

here, for example, childbirth and maternal behaviour (Lorenz 1971d: 162; cf. EiblEibesfeldt 1989: 187f). Mostly what we have are releasers, often in the form of motor display patterns. These include our caring responses to infants, but also to social signals such as smiling, laughing, frowning, withdrawal or rejection. All of these can easily become projected onto animals, or even onto features of landscape, cloudscape and so forth. We also have releasers which evoke in us quasi-aesthetic or quasi-ethical evaluations – Lorenz says the two cannot be separated. These include responses to beauty – sexual attractiveness and reproductive ftness – in the opposite sex; also of displays of courage or loyalty, or situations evoking protectiveness or sympathy. Again, these can be “misplaced” onto animals whose actual motivations or dispositions are quite diferent. Lorenz also holds, importantly, that we have an instinctive quasi-ethical repugnance to the ugliness that comes from domestication: obesity, sagging bellies, poor muscle tone, pug-headedness and so forth. This repugnance extends also to the deterioration of instinctive behaviours, for example child-neglect or sexual promiscuity. Again, I will return to this. It should be noted that at this stage, Lorenz is arguing that sociology and the other human sciences need to take these surviving elements of innate human psychology into account. But he explicitly rejects any possibility of reductionism, of ethology setting up its own sociology (Lorenz 1971e: 243f). In his later work, he moves increasingly towards doing this, to theorizing the relations and continuities between human instinctive behaviour and culture. The frst key text in this later phase comprises an extended and focused consideration on aggression (Lorenz 1996). Lorenz notes frst that there are diferent cases of aggression: between diferent species competing for resources or relating as predator/prey; the “critical response” where an animal is approached too closely to fee. But it is intra-specifc aggression that is his main concern. Intra-specifc aggression has important biological functions, especially as distributing the population over its available resources (equally, dispersing the population so as to limit vulnerability to parasites and disease). Animals may be territorial, fghting for food resources for their young, for nesting space and so forth. Animals that move around in groups are not territorial, but the males may fght to protect the females and young from predators. If so, there will be sexual selection among males for size and aggressiveness, and fghting among males for mating privileges. But this can also lead to female selection of mates on the basis of intra-specifc factors with wayward results: stags whose antlers are only of use in fghting each other, and not in defence against predators, for example. Lorenz argues that similar things lie in the background of our own species. Lorenz also argues that animals which can do real harm to each other, for example wolves, also have instinctive inhibitions against doing so. These are social animals, and there are behavioural releasers which signal submission, and efectively inhibit the other’s attack. Fighting here is ritualized, and serves to create and enforce a dominance order – which in turn limits fghting. All this concerns the males, incidentally; the females and young are exempt. But animals which cannot harm

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

119

each other, or which can fee, do not have these instinctive restraints: for example doves. (Lorenz is given to making ironic comments about the wolf and the dove as models for human conduct.) Our species originally comes under this category: our development of weapons then is not matched by any instinctive inhibition against using them against each other. These issues already appeared in earlier texts (Lorenz 1953 ch 12 esp. p217), but now they are given systematic development. Lorenz then describes four diferent types (or degrees) of sociality in social species. Most basic is swarming, in fsh or birds. There is no aggression here, and also no recognition of individuals. The obvious disadvantages in exhausting resources or spreading disease are apparently outweighed by the advantage of confusing predators – overloading their discriminatory capacities in selecting prey. Then there is sharing a nest or lair, for example, night herons. Here male and female share a nest, each driving of others of the same sex. They tend to copulate with each other, but do not recognize each other as individuals away from the nest. Again, they do not learn to recognize the inhabitants of neighbouring nests, but react to all their comings and goings as a threat. Then there are tribal communities as in rats. Rats live together quite amiably, with little fghting or dominance order, but carry out vicious inter-tribal wars, and are murderous towards strangers. Here recognition is by tribal smell, not by individual recognition. Lastly, there is group and pair formation by individual recognition, as with greylag geese. Here the basis of the bond is a ritualized turning outward of aggression – in the pair, among friends, and in the community as a whole. Though the fact that one can trace the evolution and original meaning of the releasers, the formalized intention movements, does not entitle one to infer the existential meaning. Greylag geese form a community of love, and their couples fall in love with each other. Lorenz argues that while human society might be mistaken for the rat type, it is really the greylag goose type that it most closely resembles. Taken in all, our species’ ethological heritage in regard to aggression is problematic. We have weapons, and lack instinctive inhibitions against their use. Some inhibition might arise from learning, seeing the consequences of their use, but this only seems to work with small intimate communities. It does not work in larger anonymous societies. We are too easily aroused to group defence, liable to “intertribal” warfare. Our “critical response” can be triggered by confned conditions or over-crowding. As already said, our instinctive heritage is too little, too much, and too infexible. What this calls for then is intelligent management based on biological understanding. The most basic point is to realize that aggression is an instinct not a response: a drive that seeks expression. It is pointless then to repress it or try to avoid arousing it (the critical response excepted). Besides, it has positive functions, for example in group or pair cohesion. Rather we must give it safe outlets (such as competitive sports), and police its unsafe outlets (such as Fascist politics. Lorenz advocates laughing at demagogues: another form of aggression). Again, we should be wary of situations – prisons, expeditions, crowded cities – that can evoke critical response aggression.

120

Psyche, Science and Society

Lorenz introduces a thesis in this work that human society, even though it is grounded in learned behaviour rather than instinctive behaviour as with social animals, nonetheless works the same way as animal society (Lorenz 1996 ch v esp. p56f; ch xiii esp. p223f). Our cultural rituals and traditions parallel the ritualized intention movements of animals that release social behaviour – notably those that defect aggression and reinforce bonding such as the “triumph ceremonies” of geese. (Lorenz has a Just So story about two Native American – “Red Indian” – chiefs inventing the ritual of smoking the pipe of peace [Lorenz 1996: 61f]). Indeed, they may refect or interact with the surviving instinctive elements in our behaviour, at an unconscious level. Trial and error play the equivalent part to natural selection; and diferent cultures are analogous to diferent species. The biological analogy is complex, in line with Lorenz’s evolutionary views. Evolution is a tree not a ladder; highly evolved species may overspecialize and become extinct when environmental conditions change, while less evolved species adapt and survive. Evolution is a series of short-term measures with no long-term plan; and sexual selection can have consequences that are wayward (“dysteleological”) in terms of natural selection. Cultural tradition, rites, taboos and so on are a product of their evolutionary history; we cannot simply interpret their function from their content (or vice versa). Lorenz both expands on and formalizes this thesis in subsequent works, Behind the Mirror and The Waning of Humaneness (Lorenz 1977, 1988). In the former especially, he sets out his epistemology, a position he terms (following Donald Campbell) “hypothetical realism”. This is a variant on Kantian philosophy: he accepts that we know the world subject to an innate perceptual/cognitive apparatus; but holds nonetheless that this has evolved biologically to be adequate to an objectively real world. Basically, then, he is considering the nature – and evolution – of this perceptual/cognitive apparatus: looking “behind the mirror”. Lorenz then reprises and develops his account of the evolution of human cognition (Lorenz 1977: esp. p113f cognition; 167f human mind and culture). The grasp of three dimensional space not only provides a basis for conceptual thought and for language, and for Gestalt problem-solving and learning. It also provides the basis for voluntary movement – Lorenz describes how for example geese, birds for whom fying is an infrequent activity, cannot simply fy at will, though other bird species can (Lorenz 1971d: 177f, 1977: 144f; cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 86f). In non-specialist species this freedom of action develops further through exploration and play. Consciousness originates in seeing one’s hand grasping an object: from this one learns that both grasping hand and grasped object are alike things out there in space (Lorenz 1977: 150f). (Apes, and some other primates, are unusual in that the hand – or forepaw – does come into the feld of vision.) Compounding conceptual thought and language is their transmission and sharing through tradition and imitation. With this, they cease to be individual things. The human mind is a collective mind. With this collective mind, culture appears. Culture is a new further level of reality, as life itself was a new level of reality beyond the inorganic. Culture is new way

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

121

of storing information, comparable to genetics but quicker and more adaptable. It is a way of storing individual short-term (learned) information so that it becomes collective and long-term. Thus, knowledge becomes available not just to the individual but to everyone. This gives us a great capability in manipulating the world in which we live. Through culture we can indeed inherit acquired characteristics. More than this, culture comprises a perceptual/cognitive apparatus, parallel to the physiological perceptual/cognitive apparatus already discussed. Culture determines what we can think, and what we can think about – Lorenz here cites Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967; Lorenz 1977: 174–6, cf. pp152f, 233). Lorenz argues that we have an instinct to learn, an innate capacity and drive that must be satisfed by contact with a specifc culture. He cites Chomsky’s theories of language acquisition here (vide Botha 1992 esp. ch 3). With this, he holds that culture is informed by our instincts – that our quasi-aesthetic and quasi-ethical innate responses and our traditional taboos, rituals and so forth run parallel and indeed, are intimately related and form a single fabric. The instinctive elements in this have a great importance in that they motivate us. As regards their content, they must be subjected to rational scrutiny; but a purely rational ethics with no motive force behind it must be inefective (Lorenz 1977 ch. 10, see also p105, 1996: 212f). Lorenz now gives an extended account of the analogies and continuities between ethology and culture introduced in On Aggression, in terms of cultural evolution and divergence as quasi-speciation, and a range of cultural invariants refecting the need for cultures to maintain separate identity and continuity – tradition, ritualization and reverence (Lorenz 1977 chs. 9& 10). Again one should note the infuence of Berger and Luckmann. Lorenz makes a point of it that the psychological barriers between animal and human, and between physiology and phenomenology, are two diferent things (Lorenz 1971a: 325f, 1977: 169f). The former barrier is horizontal, and evolution has crossed it. The latter is a vertical barrier that runs through both animal and human, and is uncrossable in principle. But the barrier applies to our reason only, not to our feelings. Some of our animal drives impact strongly on our consciousness, for example, sex, while important cognitive processes such as those involved in visual perception, are unconscious. Lorenz comes to relate this division to the division and functional diferentiation of the cerebral hemispheres – the “left brain” for analytical-technical functions, the “right brain” for emotional and integrative functions (Lorenz 1988: 77f). He terms these mind and soul, and makes a plea for the latter, for the validity of phenomenology and subjective knowledge. Culture has given us great capability in dealing with the world around us. We show far less capability in relation to our dealings with each other. Lorenz’s diagnosis of the human situation is that culture – “outward” culture – advances too quickly, and instinct and those elements of culture most closely tied to our instincts cannot adapt to the changes – especially in large-scale anonymous societies. This he suggests has been a reason for the decay of civilizations throughout history. It is a particularly acute problem in modernity (Lorenz 1974, 1988).

122

Psyche, Science and Society

There is then a split between mind and soul, and we need to give the latter more respect. Not only in our dealings with each other: Lorenz goes so far as to argue that our Gestalt intuition and our innate quasi-ethical and quasi-aesthetic responses – to courage or loyalty, beauty or ugliness, and so forth – in our own and other species can guide us as to what is healthful or unhealthful, in our own species, in other species, and even in the ecosphere. This refects Lorenz’s late involvement in Green politics, and is Lorenz at his most visionary.

Lorenz and sociological theory Consideration of Lorenz from the point of view of sociology should acknowledge that sociology is methodologically heterogeneous (moreover there is also anthropology). Afnities or disafnities with one or another theoretical tradition are not the same thing as relation to the discipline as a whole. Lorenz, then, is a Kantian, albeit of a distinctive kind. In sociological terms, this places him with the Kantian (or neoKantian) part of the methodological spectrum: with Weber, Simmel, the Chicago School, Boasian anthropology, even arguably Parsons (Parsons himself preferred to avoid methodological issues of this kind). It is also here that Jung belongs, of course. For structural determinist sociologies, instinct and free will both constitute just the same kind of logical intrusion – unless they can be functionally integrated, for example, shown to reproduce the sociological structures. That sex and reproduction naturally ft with such a strategy is part of the reason why these approaches favour Freud (Walker 2018: 201–5). In the neoKantian agency tradition, the logic is diferent, more accommodating. This allows us to consider Lorenz’s oferings as a set of substantive theses. Against this, Lorenz’s own position changes. In the earlier texts, he rejects any claim for ethology to raise sociological theory, and argues only that sociology must take our instinctive behaviour into account (Lorenz 1971e: 243f). But in the later texts, he is surely attempting to raise sociological theory himself, and this will call for critical consideration. Turning then to Lorenz’s substantive theses, his arguments on the ethological preconditions of human evolution may be taken frst. Since the central theme is the eforescence of purposive behaviour and the attrition of instinctive behaviour, this hardly raises issues of a determinist kind, though it does raise issues that will need to be taken up later. But for the meantime it is worth pointing out that his arguments are gender-fair. Women are as much specialists in non-specialization as men; the biological division of reproductive functions has to work around this. Lorenz in fact will attribute the sexual division of labour – and the division of labour generally – to human self-domestication (Lorenz 1971e: 236). Lorenz does not give us a detailed human ethology as Eibl-Eibesfeldt does. But there is no argument here that women are more instinctive or “closer to nature” than men. This indeed carries through to his later arguments, where human social behaviour is compared to that of the greylag goose: pair-bonding within a community of friendship, both sustained by the outward turning of intra-specifc aggression. Moreover, the male as

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

123

well as the female plays a part in parental care of the young (a point Eibl-Eibesfeldt confrms: Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 224f). This comparison is a matter of convergent evolution, on its merits. Lorenz does not feel bound to infer a patriarchal “primal horde” in our evolutionary history from primate analogies: indeed the argument is posited on how we are unlike the apes (Lorenz 1971e: 216f). As to the persisting instinctive elements in our behaviour, these are in principle no diferent methodologically from, say, fatigue or hunger. We take many such things into account as conditioning factors in our actions, attaching meaning to them more or less consciously (cf. Weber 1978: 4f). Mostly they comprise formalized intention movements in facial expression or body language. Lorenz indeed warns us against indiscriminate projection: camels are not supercilious, eagles are not noble, and we’ve got it entirely wrong about wolves and doves. Notably, Lorenz does not problematize our instinctive heritage as regards child-care and sexual attraction; indeed his view is positive. This is surely a contradiction of Freud, though Lorenz does not make an issue of this. It is aggression that he regards as problematic: again, something of a contradiction of Freud, though Lorenz does refer obliquely to Civilization and Its Discontents (Lorenz 1971d: 190; Freud 2002). Again, Lorenz makes a point of stating that the psychoanalytic tradition on aggression is more fexible than Freud’s own views, at least as conventionally understood (Lorenz 1996: xxvii). Oddly, though, Lorenz does not recognize the Adlerian element in neoFreudian theory: indeed, Lorenz seems to be unaware of Adler. But if sociology (and anthropology) has tended to give Lorenz short shrift, a part of the reason might lie in Lorenz’s non-committal attitude to Freud. Turning then to Lorenz’s aggression theses, these surely resonate with the question of consensus and confict in sociological theory: whether we are a peaceful co-operative species, and confict only a enters into our afairs as a pathology (a rather long-term pathology in Marxist view); or whether we are an inherently confictual species, though this might initially take time to emerge (population pressures might be a factor here). Sociology might pause to look at itself in the mirror here, and question its cognitive biases. Sociology is the child of the 19th century, a quite exceptional era in Western history, characterised by economic and social change and the absence of war (apart from a furry of activity around the 1860s). (Anthropology likewise: access to primitive peoples has often been contingent upon their pacifcation.) It has perhaps tended then to over-emphasize the economy and social order, and to underestimate the importance of the state and military afairs – Weber is something of an exception. Indeed, there is even an implicit ethos in the discipline(s), that to admit these things to consideration is to legitimate them. But Lorenz is clear that our instinctual heritage here is in part dysfunctional, both lacking restraints that it should have, and hypertrophied through intra-specifc competition. There are at least two clear implications for sociology and anthropology. One is that inter-tribal warfare has been endemic throughout human history (including prehistory and the ethnographic record). The other is that our species is lacking in instinctive or quasi-instinctive restraints on aggression

124

Psyche, Science and Society

that should limit it to adult males, with females and the young exempt. These both appear to me to be quite credible. Earlier, I have referred to Lorenz’s self-domestication thesis. This is the claim that our species is engaged in domesticating itself, in the same sense as we have domesticated other species, with the same kinds of damaging physical and behavioural consequences that we see in our domestic animals. These include shortened limbs, malformed heads, slack muscles, obesity, excessive eating and copulation, and loss of other instinctive behaviours including care for the young (Lorenz 1971d: 164f, 1971e: 231f). Lorenz holds that we retain an instinctive recognition of both humans and animals in their true wild forms and their decadent domesticated forms: a kind of instinctive quasi-aesthetics comparable to the instinctive quasi-ethics he discusses in the context of aggressive behaviour. This includes the releasers for mate selection (for both sexes), which in fact relate objectively to reproductive ftness. Lorenz argues that falling in love is one of the few forces of natural selection still at work in our species (Lorenz 1971e: 237). In the earlier texts, Lorenz puts self-domestication among the preconditions for human evolution: it accounts for the neotony which permits curiosity to be a lifelong rather than an adolescent phase, and indeed is implicated in the attrition of our instinctive behaviour that permits non-specialization and the explosive growth of learned behaviour. He cites the cave bear as another animal that domesticated itself, with similar consequences at least in anatomy (Lorenz 1971e: 232f). Selfdomestication then has then positive as well as negative consequences. But it is with the negative consequences that Lorenz is most concerned, and he notes how quickly these things can arise in domestic animals that are protected from natural selection and subjected to controlled breeding. In the later texts (mainly The Waning of Humaneness, also Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins), it appears specifcally as a contemporary concern (Lorenz 1974 ch 6, 1988: 41f; also chs 5 & 10 passim). The difculties with this are manifold. Firstly, it is hard to see how self-domestication could be a precondition for our evolution. The cave bear was a powerful creature which faced no predators, but our species could not have been in an equivalent position until it had acquired a certain level of culture. Secondly, as to the genetic damage, why would this appear as a problem now? Surely it would have appeared all through human history and prehistory? Control of sex and reproduction along lines of kinship, status, economic or political advantage and so forth run all through the human record; there is nothing modern about them. Whereas free marriage on the basis of falling in love is the common modern practice. Thirdly, if there has been a long term genetic decay in instinctive behaviour, how could the releasers for it survive? Could these releasers even have reliably functioned, through cultural barriers such as clothing or ornamentation or diet? Fourthly, if domestication is damaging us, how would we pick it out from other factors? History and the ethnographic record are full of cultural practices through which we damage ourselves, organically and behaviourally, to say nothing of the efects of poverty, squalor, poor diet and so forth. Lorenz apparently abandons the argument that self-domestication was a factor in human evolution: neotony and non-specialization are not limited to domesticated

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

125

animals. And this is not eugenics: Lorenz opposes controlled breeding and favours letting nature have her way. Again, there are notorious instances of genetic damage due to inbreeding (e.g. the Habsburg jaw); and I am appalled at what we have done with the breeding of dogs. Even so, Lorenz does seem to have something of a bee in his bonnet here. The discussions at the end of this essay might throw some light on the reasons why. Lorenz is infuenced by the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen – the infuence is reciprocal – especially as regards the undefned or incomplete (“worldopen”) nature of humankind, and the signifcance of language for cognition (Gehlen 1988). That said, there are also important diferences. Lorenz’s account of human evolution remains within the Darwinian mainstream. He holds that the attrition of our instincts is less than total and that the surviving elements have real value. And Gehlen almost wholly neglects the social dimension (human and animal). Lorenz’s thought is his own. In the earlier texts, Lorenz argues only for sociology to acknowledge the persisting instinctive elements in human behaviour. In the later texts, he moves towards raising a sociology himself. This indeed has its ground in the earlier texts, in the sharp division between instinctive and purposive behaviour. The social behaviour of social animals is characteristically instinctive behaviour. With this, the co-evolution of releasers and released behaviour makes it resistant to modifcation through selection pressures: it is inherently conservative. But Lorenz’s account of the ethological preconditions of human evolution stresses the fragmentation and attrition of instinctive behaviour, and the explosive growth of purposive behaviour. This has a transforming impact on human society. Indeed, it implies that humankind is not so much a social species as a cultural species – a view I, infuenced initially by Kroeber, have argued for some time (Walker 2001; Kroeber 1952a esp. pp160–5, 1952c esp. pp118f). Lorenz does not quite argue this, though he does argue that we show great capability in dealing with the world we live in but are rather inept when it comes to human afairs. But as regards the latter, he rather assimilates culture to instinctive behaviour, pointing for example to the functions of ritual in both realms, and arguing that our quasi-ethical and quasi-aesthetic innate responses inform or inter-relate with our traditional norms and values. Again, he argues for cultural evolution and divergence as a kind of quasi speciation. Lorenz references Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967). This indeed is a classic of modern sociology (Gray also utilizes it in his attempt to raise a Jungian “depth sociology”; he meets with many of the same difculties as Lorenz [Gray 1991: 144–6, 150f, 262–4]). But it is questionable whether it meets Lorenz’s arguments, and besides, it is itself open to criticism. Essentially this work is a rather arid essay, with little empirical content, on how is society possible, an attempt to reconstitute Durkheimian sociology on the basis of interactionist reasoning, avoiding the use of concepts of function or system. It does so, warts and all. It is an idealist approach, with no interest in the material world, but only on social interactions and structures. It is a consensus approach that fails to thematise confict – the only element of social structure that is regularly

126

Psyche, Science and Society

invoked is the division of labour. It has little sense of history, rather a vague comparison of modernity with the primitive or traditional. It focuses on social order and control, and on socialization: in all but name, it is a structural determinism, with society the same juggernaut that crushes the individual. Berger and Luckmann do consider human animal nature briefy (they do not cite Lorenz, though they do cite Gehlen), only to set it aside in favour of human plasticity and cultural determinism (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 55–70, 201–4). Again, they treat the personality as a product of inter-personal processes, not of intra-psychic processes. All this surely leaves no room for the persistence and infuence of instinctive remnants that Lorenz urges. As to Lorenz’s comparison of culture with phylogeny, this is simply a metaphor of a kind that sociology has been familiar with since the 19th century. The empirical feld is treated summarily; the sophistication of the argument only serves to make it immune from empirical test. And while there is a vague sense that traditional society has recently broken down, there is no sociological account of why, when or where it has done so. In short, what Lorenz has put forward here is in his own words “an illegitimate extension” (Lorenz 1971e: 243f). Outside of this, however, he has told us a great deal that sociology should surely take into account. Maybe Jung could point a way to how we might do so.

Lorenz and Jung Lorenz and Jung show some similarities in background and values, though there are also diferences. They are both products of German culture, with a scientifc education centring on medicine. Lorenz is a generation younger: the implications of this however are not straightforward and I leave them to this chapter’s concluding section. Jung came from Protestant Switzerland and remained personally religious; Lorenz from Catholic Austria and did not. They share a preference for the countryside over the city, an abhorrence for war and especially for nuclear weapons, a concern with over-population – their late essays in social criticism are quite similar in tone, though the specifc issues raised are not all the same (e.g. Jung 1964b; Lorenz 1974; cf. Hannah 1976: 329). Lorenz has a greater awareness of economics and social inequality: he even cites Marx with approval (Lorenz 1988: 140, 213). Jung is more distrustful of the state. Lorenz was involved with the Third Reich, more deeply than perhaps he later admitted; it is troubling that he continues to cite authors such as Eugen Fischer and Arnold Gehlen who were implicated in Nazi ideology (Proctor 1988; Hösle 2017: 232–40; cf. Plotkin 2004: 102–5). This also casts a shadow on his concerns with human self-domestication and genetic decay. Although he is criticized for this, he does not attract the same vindictiveness as Jung does, though Jung’s “involvement” with the Third Reich is contentious.2 Lorenz and Jung both got on well with women intellectuals and co-workers, including their own wives (Lorenz’s wife, Margaret Gebhardt, was a doctor).

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

127

As regards temperament, Lorenz speaks of experiencing alternating moods of depression and elation (Lorenz 1988: 237f). He also says that he came late to the notions of culture and mind, and that he was initially dismissive of both Freud and Jung (Lorenz 1977: 18; Evans 1975: 59). Again, he accounts for the origins of consciousness in seeing our own grasping hand as an object “out there” in the world; he does not ask when we frst realised that we dream. (He does speak at least once of his own dreams, but their interpretation seems to have been rather literal [Lorenz 1971d: 161].) I infer from these things that he was an extravert, with little awareness of introvert concerns: indeed his own physiological-objective approach would surely have masked them. The force of this point will appear later. As to their oeuvres, Lorenz and Jung are both engaged in raising what might be termed a general evolutionary psychology. Jung explicitly grounds his approach, especially the archetypes and the collective unconscious, in a conception of animal behaviour, while Lorenz has much to say about human behaviour. But we should be wary: Jung draws on authorities in psychology and anthropology; Lorenz rather looks back to authorities in zoology (though McDougall is a common infuence). There are implications here that must wait till the end of the chapter. Beyond this, the obvious diferences are frst, that Lorenz’s theories are grounded in a general account of animal behaviour, while Jung’s theories are grounded in human psychopathology. Second, Lorenz’s approach is objective: he speaks of behaviour, and of physiology in preference to psychology. Jung’s approach is phenomenological, and he speaks of psychology and the psyche. Yet this is by no means a categoric diference. Jung always kept a foothold in physiology (n.b. Jung 1960a: 270f), and Lorenz admits – though he comes to it late – the validity and value of the phenomenological approach. Incidentally, Lorenz quite coldly relates evidence from vivisection, while Jung says that he hated that aspect of his medical training (Jung 1963: 104f). Turning now to more formal comparison, there are three main themes: the topography of the mental apparatus; human evolution; and the human existential situation. These however are interwoven, so that we have to move back and forth between them. They cannot simply be taken in turn. For Lorenz, the basic topographical feature is the sharp division between instinct (the endogenous action sequence), and the orientative response. Both can evolve to greater sophistication; orientative response may turn to purposive behaviour; but the endogenous action sequence is immune to learning, learning takes place on the other side. The innate releasing schema (later, mechanism – IRM) is where the two sides meet. Instinctive action sequences can be broken up into sections, with IRMs releasing each section in turn. Social behaviour is made up of instinctive action sequences and “symbolic” IRMs – releasers – which have co-evolved. The basic opposition here (intuition versus instinct) appears in Jung too (Jung 1960b i: 132). But Jung follows the simpler view that Lorenz attributes to Lloyd Morgan, of purposive behaviour naturally emerging out of instinct as behaviour evolves to greater sophistication (Lorenz 1970b: 261f). Hence, where Lorenz argues that purposive behaviour can only develop as innate behaviour breaks down to make room for

128

Psyche, Science and Society

it, Jung rather argues that it is our learning capacity that breaks down our instincts (e.g. Jung 1964b: 287f). Even so, either way the relationship is antagonistic. Another common element (refecting McDougall’s infuence perhaps) is the view of a multiplicity of instincts holding each other in check, as providing the basis for the evolution of free will. For Jung, this also provides the basis for the dissociability of the psyche and the complex theory; but his detailed phenomenology of the (human) psyche has no analogue in Lorenz (Jung 1960b iii: 173f, 178f esp. p182, 1960b iv esp. pp115–9). Jung often stresses the conservative nature of the instincts. Lorenz provides a grounding for this; at least so far as co-evolution is involved. Curiously, however, while Jung does not know of Lorenz’s theory of the co-evolution of releasers and released behaviour in animal social behaviour, he does tend to reach for symbiotic relations, which equally entail co-evolution, when he speaks of animal behaviour, as with the yucca moth or the leaf-cutting ant (Jung 1960b i: 131f, 137, 1960b iii: 201). Conversely, when Lorenz speaks of domestication, he tends to view the relationship as tending towards parasitism, more predator-prey than symbiosis (there is a continuum, to be sure). This seems to me to point to a limitation in Lorenz’s approach: he does not think ecologically. (He says that only after reading Rachel Carsons’ Silent Spring did he become aware of environmental issues [Lorenz 1988: 206; Carson 1963].) Yet our relations with other species are surely a key aspect of our psychology, and have been since the Neolithic revolution – the domestication and exploitation of plants and animals. And these are surely reciprocal relations. But that is matter for another chapter.3 One quite disconcerting problem in relating the ideas of Lorenz and Jung is the great weight Lorenz puts on the notion of Gestalt, while Jung and the Gestalt psychologists seem almost wholly to have ignored each other. What then is the relationship between Gestalt and archetype? In fact Lorenz’s earliest remarks on Jung comprise a refutation of the claim that innate releasing schemas are “gestalts” – he says that the schema may not act as a whole: diferent features may release diferent parts of the action pattern piecemeal. Yet he concedes that the features themselves might be considered “gestalts”. Even so, he rejects Jung’s archetype theory as proposing innate Gestalt images. This response is apropos an article by Alverdes; moreover, Lorenz seems to have thought that Jung was proposing the archetypes as actual images, rather than propensities for image formation (Lorenz 1971d: 136f, 1973: 26f, 29, cf. p31; Alverdes 1937). Later, Leyhausen would ofer a resolution of the question that Lorenz seems to have accepted: the elements might be separable at the level of physiology, yet comprise a Gestalt at the level of phenomenology (Leyhausen 1973). Finally, in his late interviews with Evans, he concedes that he was initially too dismissive of Jung, and agrees that the archetypes are indeed innate releaser mechanisms – in terms which imply an element of Gestalt (imagination) (Evans 1975: 57–9). Lorenz’s main concern with Gestalten throughout his work is in relation to perception (auditory as well as visual, incidentally), and to insight-based learning –

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

129

generally, purposive rather than instinctive behaviour. But the question of their relation to innate releasing mechanisms remains. He says, Innate releasing mechanisms and Gestalt perception are very probably functions of the same central nervous organ system, which processes sensory data to give perception, even though these functions doubtless take place on quite diferent levels and . . . can exhibit quite considerable physiological diferences. (Lorenz 1971d: 136) One might expect that Jung too would link Gestalt perception with cognition and intuition rather than with instinct. Indeed, he points to the yucca moth (a classic example of symbiosis): this cannot be learned behaviour – the moth performs its actions only once in its lifetime – and the fact of its inheritance tells us nothing of how it originated. It must be intuition – the sudden irruption into consciousness of an unconscious content. Intuition resembles perception but is unconscious; it is “a process analogous to instinct, with the diference that whereas instinct is a purposive impulse to carry out some highly complicated action, intuition is the unconscious, purposive apprehension of a highly complex situation” (Jung 1960b i: 131f, 137, cf. 1964b: 282). This does point to archetype and Gestalt being equivalent concepts, albeit with diferences of nuance. Elsewhere Jung does speak of the archetypes in terms that are redolent of Gestalt: chaotic multiplicity and order, quaternities, circles, radial arrangements – and mandalas. This however is in the context of the individuation process, and accordingly refects a subjective concern with the psyche itself. I will take this point up later. In a later text (Jung 1960b iii esp. pp200f), Jung argues that, rather than postulating a “sub-conscious” beneath consciousness, we might compare consciousness to the visible part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, with instinct as the infra-red and the archetype as the ultra-violet; both extremes to be termed “the psychoid”. Consciousness then might be drawn towards either end of the spectrum, to physical urge or spiritual idea (Jung cites Janet’s terms partie inférieure and the partie supérieure. [Jung 1960b iii: 180f & n42]). But if the infra-red here can be equated with physiology, it is less clear what the ultra-violet equates with. The archetypes, yes; but what lies beyond the archetypes? We come up here against Jung’s notions of synchronicity and of the archetype as existing in the material world as well the psyche, and his concerns with parapsychology: matters on which Jung collaborated with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and which I regard as beyond my competence. Though so far as I can learn parapsychology is still sub judice (Gross 2015 ch 6). It is intriguing though that Köhler also maintained that Gestalten existed in nature, and were not merely epistemological (Ash 1995 ch 14). But this whole line of enquiry seems quite alien to Lorenz’s thought. Lorenz makes a point of it that the division in the human mind between subjective experience and objective physiology is not the same as the division between

130

Psyche, Science and Society

the human and the animal (Lorenz 1977: 167f esp. 169f; also 1971c: 266f). The latter is a horizontal division, comparable to the division between the inorganic and the living; both these barriers may be crossed by natural processes such as evolution. The division between subjective experience and objective physiology is vertical, an epistemological barrier that is uncrossable in principle. But the barrier applies to our reason only, not to our feelings. There are cognitive (“ratiomorphic”) processes of which we have no awareness, notably Gestalt perception, while many physiological states from lust to seasickness impose themselves on our consciousness. This may be suggestive for how Lorenz sees the role of the unconscious. But its main force is to validate subjective experience as a form of knowledge: to validate phenomenology. This grounds the division that organizes Lorenz’s later considerations on human afairs: the division between mind and soul or spirit. On the one side is conceptual thought and reason, our means for manipulating the world around us; on the other, our innate and/or cultural values and our intuitive sense, which guide our relations with each other. (Even here Lorenz is drawn back to physiology: he relates the two sectors to the division of the cerebral hemispheres: the left hemisphere for logical thought and language; the right hemisphere for emotional experiences and Gestalt perception [Lorenz 1988: 77f].) His plea then is for the latter: it is valid and indeed essential knowledge. It must give force to our values – reason may tell us what our values should be, but it does not compel us to obey them. It can also guide us as to how we should live in harmony with ourselves, other species, and the ecosphere. Our civilization has committed itself to reason and lost sight of the spirit (Lorenz 1988 esp. 95f, 171f). Jung might well agree with the topography here: the diagrams and discussions in the 1925 seminar seem to point that way (Jung 1990 diagram 9 & discussion pp128f; cf. diagram  10, pp133f). Citing Janet’s terms partie inférieure and partie supérieure need not be read as commitment to a vertical spatial metaphor, and the axis from infra-red to ultra-violet might as well be horizontal as vertical. But as to the epistemological barrier afecting our reason only, not our intuitions and feelings, I am not sure he would agree. Jung does not share Lorenz’s concern with the evolution of problem-solving behaviour in animals. The division between mind and spirit he would surely express in terms of the four psychic functions, thinking and sensation on the one side, feeling and intuition on the other. He would indeed sympathise with Lorenz, up to a point: we in the modern West have gone too far with conceptual thought and with the control of the outer world. But Jung would not accept the division into just two spheres, the world around us, and the social world. He would insist on a third sphere, the psyche (and indeed a fourth, our bodies, though I set this aside here); moreover, he would maintain a consistent phenomenological approach. We experience our psyches, and some of us at least are concerned to make sense of this experience. Indeed, we are concerned to make sense of the world around us too, and of our social world. The tendency is to interpret these spheres together and in terms of each other, to create an interwoven or superimposed symbolism for all three. At least that is the initial tendency (Jung

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

131

1964a, cf. 1960b vi). Against this is the tendency to separate them out – to withdraw the psyche from the other two – and to subject them to critical examination. There is a dynamic process here: symbols so subjected to rational scrutiny lose their vitality, and new symbols must arise to replace them – after a time. And the psyche when it ceases to be symbolised in the other spheres may become lost to view. It might be commented here that Lorenz’s theories of social behaviour tend to thematise aggression while taking sex and reproduction for granted. This at both the animal and the human level: it is dysfunctional aggression that he problematizes in human afairs. This includes his critique of modern civilization, its overcompetitiveness and exploitative attitude to the natural world. Sex and reproduction he treats as unproblematic. Jung again rather accords with this; he is critical of our civilization’s moral focus on sex at the expense of other things including aggression that surely more merit condemnation (Jung 1960b ii: 55f). He attributes this to the peculiar tension between the spiritual and sex, as a sort of spokesman for the instincts. This tension indeed has a long history in culture. Lorenz fnally conceded that the Jungian archetypes are innate releaser mechanisms (Evans 1975: 57–9). The archetypes he mentions include mother and father fgures, recognition of sexual attractiveness and reproductive ftness, or repugnance for socially abnormal behaviour such as maltreating children. These recall his earliest discussions, where he also speaks of situations of loyalty, courage, protectiveness and so forth (Lorenz 1971d: 254f esp. 259f, cf. 1988: 87–9). These last Jung would admit as archetypal, but others of Lorenz’s examples remain close to the organic pole and do not have the numinous quality that Jung looks for (Jung 1960b iii: 205f). Lorenz and Jung indeed are approaching this from opposite directions. Lorenz is looking for traces or echoes of instinctive and quasi-instinctive behaviour in cultural humans. Jung is looking at clinical material, ethnographic material, mythology and so forth, and judging how far its elements might be traced back to a basis in instinct. That carries with it questions as to its transmission, of course, including what is transmitted, content or only form. All this raises the question of how instinct transforms into culture. Lorenz here emphasizes the continuities and parallels between the two realms, relying at best – Just So stories aside – on the interactionist reasoning of Berger and Luckmann (1967). Jung rather emphasizes the distance between instinct and culture: psychic energy is diverted from instinctive to cultural ends through symbols which act as libido analogues, cultural substitutes for the original object of instinct (Jung 1960b ii: 45f). These symbols can only arise spontaneously from the collective unconscious: they cannot be made. This often occurs through dreams, or in shamanistic possession – commonly it is the work of susceptible individuals. Thus, where Lorenz puts weight on interpersonal processes and the collectivity, Jung puts weight on intra-psychic processes and the individual. Lorenz’s account then is rather fat and two-dimensional; he does not have a dynamic view of the unconscious, and has little to say on psychopathology. (His views on forms of dysfunctional aggression should rather be termed sociopathology.) Jung by contrast gives an integrated and dynamic account of psychopathology and culture.

132

Psyche, Science and Society

For Jung, to be conscious is to be conscious of oneself as an individual. The antithesis is to be in an undiferentiated state of “participation”, unconscious identifcation with the collectivity (or the parents, in the case of a child). For the conscious individual, relations with society are mediated through the persona, from which the ego keeps more or less of a sceptical distance – more, if he or she begins to explore their unconscious, and to embark on the individuation process. Cultures generally have a symbolism for this, and even a conceptual apparatus, though only a minority may actively engage with it. Western civilization lost this with the Enlightenment; psychodynamic theory is in course of restoring it. As against this, Lorenz proposes that the human mind is a collective mind. With language, conceptual thought becomes communicated and shared, and culture becomes a perceptual/cognitive apparatus which determines our thought. This conception again he draws from Berger and Luckmann, who in turn draw it from Durkheim. It goes with a general conception of society that sees the individual as no more than the sum of his or her roles and relationships; “individuality” goes no deeper than the division of labour. With this, the psyche is merely the product of interpersonal processes; there is no intra-psychic dimension or innate psychology. (Jung would surely diagnose this as typical post-Enlightenment thinking.) I doubt whether Lorenz grasped the full implications of the sociology with which he was seeking to converge. Lorenz traces the origins of individuality to the recognition (in some animal species) of others as individuals, for example, one’s progeny or mate. But he does not make this a reciprocal process, an internalization of others’ recognition of one as an individual. Rather he traces the origins of consciousness to seeing one’s own hand grasping an object: object and hand both things out in the world. This goes with his view of language as frst serving cognition rather than communication. It is an interesting insight into the paradoxes of human individuality and human sociality; but it needs development on its own terms. It does not ft with the idealist interactionism of Berger and Luckmann. The sociologist reading this might jump to some false conclusions. Jung did realize from his encounters with primitives that the contemporary primitive is at some remove from Lévy-Bruhl’s prelogical mentality; that rather refects an archaic or primordial condition. Equally, his notion of modern rationality is not as with Lévy-Bruhl simply Western philosophy and science: it is an ironic view grounded in the critical philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer. And it is the unrecognized persistence of the archaic in our modern psyches that concerns him, not the mentality of contemporary primitives. This is evolutionary psychology, not sociological evolutionism. So also is the work of Lorenz, of course: he too argues that free will and consciousness have evolved, though perhaps on a longer time frame. But as I have said, I doubt if he grasped the implications of the sociological arguments. I do not agree with Progof, that Jung argues that the diversion of psychic energy to the creation of culture is caused by the frustrations of instinctive behaviour that necessarily come from living in society (Progof 1953: 176f; citing Jung 1960b ii: 45f, cf. 1967: 417–20). That would accord with Freud’s (2002) thesis in Civilization and Its Discontents, and would refect a convergence with Durkheimian theory

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

133

(cf. Berger and Luckmann 1967: 201f). But even without Lorenz, the problems are manifest: other social species have not developed culture; indeed our own species was social long before it became cultural; and many animal species, including our own, exhibit displacement activities which discharge frustrated instinctive energy within an instinctive frame. At any rate, Jung on my reading simply argues that humankind has an excess of psychic energy beyond what is needed for instinctual purposes, and that this energy can be diverted to cultural purposes. Indeed, it is “human nature” that this should happen: our archetypal inheritance comprises a spiritual principle that is just as real as the instinctual principle and stands opposed to it. The frustration of libido is a process internal to the psyche, in the tension between undiferentiated instinctuality and individuation – the child and the adult it will become, that is already implicit within it (Jung 1960b ii: 45f). Incidentally, it could be interesting to compare Progof’s considerations on Jung with Nadel’s considerations on Janet, and on mental energy generally (Progof 1953 ch 7; Nadel 1951: 289f, esp. pp298–301, 313–23;). This was a widely found concern for a time, wherever the animal (or the psyche) was held to be active rather than reactive: to argue a “mental energy” and its relation or parallels to energy in physics. Jung’s essay is typical (Jung 1960b ii). Lorenz too is often said to hold a hydraulic model of the instincts. But to my mind both Lorenz and Jung are ultimately concerned with cybernetics rather than energetics (on Jung, see Bateson 1972: 461f, 488f). The energy system has to be taken into account as a set of constraints, but it does not ofer a complete explanation of behaviour or of mental phenomena (or of culture). The foregoing analysis suggests that diference of temperament accounts for some of the diferences in Lorenz’s and Jung’s thinking, as well as the formal diferences initially announced – that Lorenz ofers an “objective” physiological account of animal behaviour, while Jung ofers a phenomenological psychopathology. Extraversion and introversion might contribute to the diferences in conception between Gestalt and archetype. There are other diferences too. Though both Lorenz and Jung see the human existential condition in terms of loss of instinct (and have similar anxieties as regards modernity), Lorenz seems satisfed with a static timeless conception: a consequence simply of our evolutionary history. Jung by contrast is always reaching for a dynamic conception that will drive a cultural history, of which the modern condition is the (or a) specifc outcome. I will take this up in the next, concluding, section. There is also a philosophical question concerning their Kantianism. Lorenz’s hypothetical realism makes the human perceptual-cognitive apparatus the product of evolution. As such it may well be imperfect, though it must be adequate to the natural world. Paradoxically, this puts Lorenz closer to the natural theology that I discuss in another chapter.4 He does not problematize the world itself; he takes no account of the antinomial elements in Kant. Jung by contrast does: the world is not wholly amenable to reason, neither the natural world nor the human world, neither in its material nor its ideal aspect. It is very much the function of archetypal symbols in culture and psyche to enable us to live with uncertainty, paradox and

134

Psyche, Science and Society

dilemma. Jung has a much more agonized vision of the human existential situation than Lorenz does. It must be added that, if not more sociological, it at least relates to a diferent sociological tradition (incidentally it draws on Schopenhauer as well as Kant). Weber stands on the same philosophical ground.

Conclusion I set two questions at the beginning of this chapter: how do Jung’s attempts to ground his psychology in animal behaviour and consideration of human origins compare with the later ethology of Lorenz; and how far might Jung provide a bridge from Lorenzian ethology to sociological theory (and so to provide a scientifc as opposed to a philosophical conception of humanity)? This last question has been discussed in the preceding section, but there are still issues to be clarifed as to the frst one, and is it on this that I focus here. Though it will in fact lead us back to the other question at the end. As I indicated in my introduction, these matters are more complex than they might appear. Lorenz is an impressive fgure, for the breadth of his theoretical synthesis, its wide empirical grounding with primary focus on the animal in natural conditions, for its philosophical sophistication. Indeed, it seems probable that it is for reasons of this kind that later approaches such as sociobiology came to be set up in rivalry. There was no damaging critique, just a feeling of not ftting in with a diferent age and setting (Plotkin 2004: 105). But work in Lorenzian perspective still continues now. Even so, Lorenz’s oeuvre can be seen from two rather diferent points of view. It can be seen as the defnitive innovation in the science of animal behaviour – Lorenz and Tinbergen would share a Nobel prize for this. McFarland (1999) sees Lorenzian ethology quite unproblematically in these terms, as the classic development of animal behaviour in the Darwinian tradition. Though Lorenz himself did not see his feld as animal behaviour, but as comparative psychology. But his work appears in a somewhat diferent aspect when taken in the context of the longer history of evolutionary theory, or of evolutionary psychology (Bowler 1984; Plotkin 2004). Lorenz is very much a child of the “new Darwinian synthesis” – the synthesis of natural selection and Mendelian genetics which appeared in the 1920s and 30s. But to project this back onto Darwin himself is to obscure the divisions which arose between Darwin and Wallace, especially as they turned from the general theory of evolution to the question of human origins (Boakes 1984; 2–8; Bowler 1984:216f). Indeed, it is in efect almost to write Wallace out of the history completely. Initially Darwin and Wallace both accepted Lamarckian inheritance as well as natural selection. However, Darwin increasingly put less emphasis on the latter and more on the former. He also introduced an ancillary thesis of sexual selection, where a characteristic might carry an advantage in mating that outweighed its costs in survival: for example the peacock’s tail which makes it difcult to fy, or the stag’s antlers that are not used in defence against predators and are discarded and regrown every year (Darwin 1874). Part of the reason Darwin was doing this was

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

135

the intervention by physicists, notably Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who argued that the Earth’s age was far less than geological estimates made it, so that there would be insufcient time for natural selection to operate (Burchfeld 1980). Kelvin based his calculations on thermodynamics: radioactive decay was not known at that time. When that was factored in, Earth’s age expanded again and the problem went away; but that did not happen until the beginning of the 20th century. Incidentally, it was also then that Mendel’s genetics were rediscovered, though the implications for evolutionary theory were not seen until later. Wallace by contrast held increasingly to natural selection (Fichman 1981 esp. ch 4; Wallace 2002 esp. pp31f, 169f, 223f). He accepted Weisman’s arguments as ruling out Lamarckian inheritance completely; he was also sceptical as to Darwin’s thesis of sexual selection (he accepted male competition, but queried the notion of female choice), holding that natural selection often ofered a better explanation. Again, he argued that if the Earth had been hotter in the past, change would have been more turbulent and natural selection would have operated more quickly – surely a valid argument, though it proved to be beside the point. Wallace also disagreed with Darwin in the matter of race.5 Darwin argues for (or at least assumes) an evolutionary hierarchy among the races, grounded in natural selection and Lamarckian inheritance – though the overt racial characteristics, as grounded in sexual selection, are somewhat tangential. Wallace held that culture had exempted our species from natural selection, and that all the human races stood on the same biological level. Wallace was aware of the diference between biological evolution and cultural evolution in a way that Darwin was not. (He also had a much higher estimate than Darwin of the capabilities of “primitives”.) Wallace’s relation to Darwin is paradoxical. He always regarded himself as Darwin’s apostle rather than his rival, and in many ways, he was more Darwinian than Darwin himself. But precisely because he held so strictly to natural selection, he also argued that natural selection had limits. The key features of human evolution – brain, organs of speech, hand and upright posture – had all evolved before there was need for them. Some external agency must be responsible for this. This thought led Wallace into spiritualism, and his reputation sufered accordingly. But it should be pointed out that psychodynamic theory developed in part as a critique of spiritualism (Jung 1960b v: 302). Wallace’s theory of natural selection then points both to culture and to psyche. It was Wallace’s approach rather than Darwin’s that was followed by the succeeding generation of evolutionary psychologists, notably Conway Lloyd Morgan and James Mark Baldwin (Boakes 1984 ch 2; Plotkin 2004: 40–2; ch 5). These are authors whom Jung cites (on Morgan: Jung 1960b i: 131, 1960b iii: 201n; on Baldwin: Jung 1967: 14f, 1971: 308, 433f; see also Hogenson 2001). They did not either of them adopt spiritualism, or invoke an external agency. But they did make their own proposals for evolutionary theory: emergent evolution (Morgan) and “the Baldwin efect”, which would allow of change starting in behaviour and then becoming genetically embedded and transmitted. I will return to this point.

136

Psyche, Science and Society

Lorenzian ethology does represent progress, then, but progress of rather a dogleg kind. Evolutionary psychology petered out in Britain and America, though for diferent reasons. Baldwin’s career in America was destroyed by a personal scandal – ironically just as he had set up the career of Watson, who then led American psychology of in the direction of behaviourism (Boakes 1984 ch 6 esp. pp165f). What happened with Morgan is less easy to pin down – Boakes suggests that here evolutionary psychology became overshadowed by the statistical approach of Galton (Boakes 1984: 49f). Psychology in Britain in any case did not have the same kind of institutional presence in the universities, but was still in the era of heroic individuals (McDougall took that attitude with him to America.) Continuity then was not to be looked for. However that may be, evolutionary psychology now reappeared in Austria and Holland, but in other guise: overtly as a science of animal behaviour, with its roots in zoology rather than psychology, and oriented to Darwin – or at least the new Darwinian synthesis – rather than to Wallace. As with Lorenzian ethology and sociobiology later, this does not refect any damaging critique, but rather discontinuity. The history of evolutionary psychology then has been episodic. Plotkin places its current revival in the 1980s (Plotkin 2004). But while he gives Lorenz his due, he is full of praise for Morgan, and even more for Baldwin: they are far ahead of their time and have been wrongly neglected. He does not consider Jung, but I think that Jung might well be put in the same category. In particular, the problem of the archetypes and their inheritance or transmission should be seen in the light of such theories as Morgan’s emergent evolution or the Baldwin efect, or similar proposals from for example, Waddington. Call these neo Lamarckian if you will (the reasoning is not Lamarckian), they do receive consideration, albeit marginal, in mainstream biology. It seems to me quite wrong to claim or imply that he simply failed to keep up to date with contemporary developments in biology. His response to Fordham, for example, may simply indicate that he took a longer view (Shamdasani 2003: 263–7; Jung 1976: 450f – letter dated 14 June 1958). As to the common charge that Jung was a Lamarckian, this not merely misrepresents his position; it gives a false account of the whole history of evolutionary theory. Considering Lorenz and Jung then as located in a somewhat discontinuous tradition of evolutionary psychology, the diferences between them lie at two levels. For the frst, as previously discussed, Lorenz takes an objective, physiological approach, centred on consideration of animal behaviour, whereas Jung takes a phenomenological approach centred on consideration of human psychopathology. These are diferences of emphasis, not categoric diferences; they are compounded by the personal equation, Lorenz’s extraversion versus Jung’s introversion. One the second level, however, the issues if less obvious are more clear cut. Lorenz stands in a tradition that stems from Darwin, where the only factor to set beside natural selection is sexual selection – much of Lorenz’s argumentation comes from this. Jung however stands in a tradition that stems from Wallace, where the only (or main) factor to set beside natural selection is culture – which in turn implies mind or psyche. Though again, Lorenz does come to a late appreciation of mind and culture.

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

137

This is to take up the point announced at the end of the previous section, that while Lorenz and Jung both see the human existential condition in similar terms of loss of instinct, for Lorenz this is a static conception, a consequence of our evolutionary history, whereas for Jung, it is a dynamic conception to be cashed in a cultural history. Again, while their anxieties as to contemporary afairs are in many ways similar, only Jung undertakes to explain why the problems have only arisen now, in Western modernity. It is in keeping with this that Lorenz holds to a view of human afairs in biologistic terms, a vision of society (preferentially he says culture) as a sort of solipsistic super-organism a la Durkheim, of cultural evolution and divergence as quasispeciation. Human learned social behaviour must mirror instinctive social behaviour, and indeed interact with its residual elements to form a single fabric. For Jung, by contrast, there is a distance set, an alienation, between biology and culture. If culture is biologically anchored, it is so only loosely and in the long term. More immediately, culture follows its own rules: it is wayward and unstable (perhaps better, metastable). This vision would relate to those traditions in sociology and anthropology that have eschewed biological models – or at least, functionalism and evolutionism; ecological models might be another question – and have dealt with culture on its own terms. Their diferent positions in Kantian tradition also accord with this: Lorenz’s rather unproblematic hypothetical realism as against Jung’s more agonized approach: a world not wholly reasonable where we must live with uncertainty, paradox and dilemma. Though both see limits to reason (and Lorenz would agree about uncertainty). Returning fnally to the initial questions of this chapter, I do not think there is a simple question of comparing Jung’s earlier grasp of animal psychology with the later ethology of Lorenz. Rather we should locate them both in an evolutionary psychology which is still an ongoing if episodic project. Lorenz’s contribution here is monumental, but it is not the fnal word, and many of the diferences between Lorenz and Jung are simply diferences. That said, I do not see anything in Lorenz that undermines Jung’s psychology, while there is a good deal that supports it, including an explicit afrmation of the Jungian archetypes. Indeed, one might recall here that Lorenz argues that the human mind and culture constitute a new level of reality, just as life represented a new level of reality compared to the inorganic world. (He cites Nicolai Hartmann on this; Kroeber presents a similar conception [Lorenz 1988: 36f, 167f; Kroeber 1952b: 66–8].) Granted this, he goes on to argue that cultural and instinctive rituals, values and so forth are interwoven to form a single fabric. Questions of transmission or inheritance do not stand out in this conception, and in his remarks on the Jungian archetypes, Lorenz does not comment on possible Darwinian objections (Evans 1975: 57–9). Other points on which Lorenz tends to support Jung include the conservative nature of the instincts, the evolution of consciousness and will, and the problematization of aggression rather than sex and reproduction. Lorenz’s aggression thesis is original and goes far beyond Jung. Jung does consider sex and aggression biologically as relating to preservation of the species and preservation of the individual

138

Psyche, Science and Society

respectively, but aggression does not feature directly in his mid-1930s discussion of human instincts, and his psychological considerations on it here and elsewhere tend to be Adlerian in tone (Jung 1960b iv esp. pp115–8, cf. 1964b: 287f). Even so, I do not see that it would have led him to reformulate his psychology – indeed it fts well with his views on contemporary afairs. As to sociology, and whether Jung might form a bridge between it and Lorenz, here I  would hold Lorenz to his earlier methodological position: ethology can point to factors in human behaviour that sociology and anthropology must take into account, but it cannot go beyond that. These sciences must proceed on the basis of consideration of their own empirical feld; and only they can do this. The initiative to take account of lower-level sciences must lie with them. Lorenz’s later attempts at sociological theory then I would reject as over-reach: a failure both in principle and in detail. He sets up an opposition of culture and society but then dissolves them into each other, and gives us only a biological metaphor of a long familiar kind. And it has all the weaknesses long familiar in biologistic sociological theory: a consensus approach that turns history into evolution and has no dynamics of confict and change; an arid and top-heavy approach that pays no more than lip service to the empirical feld. Moreover, the sociology and anthropology of this tradition would not accept the kind of contribution Lorenz wants to make. Lorenz did well to consider Berger and Luckmann, but to my mind, they make so many concessions to Durkheim as to make their work pointless. Lorenz and Jung both see the human condition in terms of loss of instinct: humankind is the animal that knows many ways that it could live, but does not how it must live. If Lorenz is clearer on the origins of this situation, it is Jung who is clearer on its consequences and implications. Lorenz’s sharp division between instinctive behaviour and orientative behaviour, restricting learning to the latter, is well taken: it bears most usefully on the problem of society and culture, and the cultural nature of human society. I think there is also great merit in his aggression theses; and not least for the suggestions they make as to some forms of sociopathy. Not all pathologies of behaviour are psychogenic! But the analysis of culture as a symbolic realm, the interplay of culture and psyche and the life-cycle of archetypal symbols: these matters should be left to Jung. And psychopathology with them, and cultural practices of self-mutilation, whether physical or psychic. All this should be related to sociological and anthropological accounts, rather than referred back (further than Jung himself can refer them) to biology. I would maintain furthermore that the orientation of these sciences to their empirical feld demands a dynamic sociology of confict and change such as that of Weber, and that Jung’s thought has afnity with this. It is in these terms that Jung can provide a bridge from Lorenz to sociological theory.

Notes 1 From On Aggression (Routledge edition), by Konrad Lorenz, Copyright © 1966 & 1996: Routledge; p214. 2 See Chapter 2. 3 See Chapter 7.

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

139

4 See Chapter 3, esp. pp65, 72, 75. 5 See Chapter 1, esp. pp11, 16.

Bibliography Alverdes, Friedrich (1937) “Die Wirksamkeit von Archetypen in den Instinkthandlung der Tiere” (The Efectiveness of Archetypes in the Instinctive Actions of Animals). Zoologischer Anzeiger (Leipzig) CXIX:9/10, pp225–36. Ash, Mitchell G. (1995) Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Bateson, Gregory (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Chandler Publishing Co. Berger, Peter, and Luckmann, Thomas (1967) The Social Construction of Reality. London: Allen Lane (Penguin). Boakes, Robert (1984) From Darwin to Behaviourism. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Botha, Rudolf P. (1992) Twentieth Century Conceptions of Language. London and Cambridge: Blackwell. Bowler, Peter J. (1984) Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Burchfeld, J.D. (1980) “Kelvin and the Age of the Earth”, in Chant, Colin and Fauvel, John (eds.) Darwin to Einstein: Studies on Science and Belief. Harlow and New York: Longman and Open University Press, pp180–95. Carson, Rachel (1963) Silent Spring. London: Hamish Hamilton. Darwin, Charles (1874) The Descent of Man (2nd ed.). London: John Murray. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaus (1989) Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Evans, Richard (1975) Konrad Lorenz, the Man and His Ideas. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. Fichman, Martin (1981) Alfred Russel Wallace. Boston: Twayne Publishers (Division of G.K. Hall & Co.). Freud, Sigmund (2002) Civilization and Its Discontents. London and New York: Penguin. Gehlen, Arnold (1988) Man, His Nature and Place in the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Gray, Richard (1991) Archetypal Explorations. Hove and New York: Routledge. Gross, Richard (2015) Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour (7th ed.). London: Hodder Education. Hannah, Barbara (1976) Jung: Life and Work. London: Michael Joseph. Hogenson, George (2001) “The Baldwin Efect: A  Neglected Infuence on C.G. Jung’s Evolutionary Thinking”, Journal of Analytical Psychology 46:4, pp591–611. Hösle, Vittorio (2017) A Short History of German Philosophy. Princeton and Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Jung, Carl G. (1960a) “Schizophrenia”, in The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease (CW3). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp256–71. (Original 1958) (1960b) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1960b i) “Instinct and the Unconscious”, in Jung, C.G. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp129–138 (1919 repub 1928; with short fnal note 1948). (1960b ii) “On Psychic Energy”, in Jung, C.G. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp3–66. (Original 1928)

140

Psyche, Science and Society

(1960b iii) “On the Nature of the Psyche”, in Jung, C.G. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp159–234. (1947 repub 1954; expanded version 1954) (1960b iv) “Psychological Factors Determining Human Behaviour”, in Jung, C.G. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul, pp114–25 (1936 lecture printed 1937, repub. with slight alterations 1942) (1960b v) “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits”, in Jung, C.G. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp301–18. (1919/20 repub. 1928 rev 1948) (1960b vi) “The Structure of the Psyche”, in Jung, C.G. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul, pp139–58. (1927/28, expanded version 1931) (1963) Memories, Dreams, Refections. London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1964) Civilization in Transition (CW10). (2nd ed London 1970: RKP. Same page nos.) (1964a) “Mind and Earth” CW10; (1927/31), in Jung (1970) pp29-49 (original 1927, revised 1931) (1964b) “The Undiscovered Self ”, in Jung (1970) pp245-305 (original 1957) (1967) Symbols of Transformation (CW5) (2nd ed.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1971) Psychological Types (CW6). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1976) Collected Letters Vol 2: 1951–1961. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1990) The Seminars Vol 3: Analytical Psychology (ed. William McGuire). London: Routledge. (Original 1925) Kroeber, Alfred (1952) The Nature of Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. (1952a) “Reality Culture and Value Culture”, in Kroeber (1952) pp 152-66. (1952b) “So-Called Social Science”, in Kroeber (1952) pp 66-78. (1952c) “The Concept of Culture in Science”, in Kroeber (1952) pp118-35. Leyhausen, Paul (1973) “The Discovery of Relative Co-ordination: A Contribution Towards Bridging the Gap between Physiology and Psychology” (1954), in Lorenz, Konrad and Leyhausen, Paul (1973) Motivation of Human and Animal Behaviour. New York: Nostrand Reinhold, pp70–97. Lorenz, Konrad (1953) King Soloman’s Ring. London: Reprint Society. (1970 & 1971) Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour (2 vols). London: Methuen. (1970a) “Inductive and teleological psychology” (1942) vol 1, p351-370. (1970b) “The establishment of the instinct concept” (1937) vol 1, pp259-315. (1971a) “Do animals undergo subjective experience? (1963) vol 2, pp323-337. (1971b) “Gestalt perception as a source of scientifc knowledge” (1959) vol 2, p281-322. (1971c) “Methods of approach to the problems of behaviour” (1958) vol 2, p246-80. (1971d) “Part and parcel in animal and human societies: a methodological discussion” (1950) vol 2, pp115-195. (1971e) “Psychology and phylogeny” (1954) vol 2, pp196-245. (1973) “The Comparative Study of Behavior” (1939), in Lorenz, Konrad and Leyhausen, Paul (1973) Motivation of Human and Animal Behaviour. New York: Nostrand Reinhold, pp1–31. (1974) Civilized Mankind’s Eight Deadly Sins. London: Methuen. (1977) Behind the Mirror. London: Methuen. (1988) The Waning of Humaneness. London, Sydney and Wellington: Unwin Hyman. (1996) On Aggression. London and New York: Routledge. (English translation frst published by Methuen in 1966)

Jung, Lorenz and sociological theory

141

McFarland, David (1999) Animal Behaviour (3rd ed.). Harlow: Longman. Nadel, Siegfried F. (1951) The Foundations of Social Anthropology. London: Cohen & West. Plotkin, Henry (2004) Evolutionary Thought in Psychology: A Brief History. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell. Proctor, Robert (1988) “From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German Anthropological Tradition”, in Stocking, George (ed.) Bones, Bodies, Behaviour. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp138–79. Progof, Ira (1953) Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Meaning. London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul. Shamdasani, Sonu (2003) Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Gavin (2001) “Society and Culture in Sociological and Anthropological Tradition”, History of the Human Sciences 14:3, pp30–55. (2018) Jung and Sociological Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Wallace, Alfred Russel (2002) Infnite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology (ed. Andrew Berry). London and New York: Verso. Weber, Max (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

6 JUNG AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER

Introduction: feminism, sociology and gender theory My concern in this chapter is with fnding relations between Jungian psychology and the sociology of gender. This presents special problems. Sociology of course has always ignored Jung, and the post-Parsonian “crisis” of the 1960s with its reconsideration of the classical sociologies had little or no impact on this (Walker 2018: 65f). At the same time, gender sociology under the impetus of second-wave feminism moved through a more critical reappraisal of functionalism to Marxism, and then on to modern French social theory – structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism (Lorber 2010; Tong 2009; Whelehan 1995). This included a revaluation of Freud, moving on to Lacanian psychoanalysis. But again there was no consideration of Jung – nor any acknowledgement of Jungian feminism. Perhaps the problem is that Jung, precisely through his diferences with Freud over the centrality of sex and of childhood, simply does not ft with a sociological approach to gender. But it is striking that there was no attempt made to bring gender together with Weberian sociology, or indeed classical German sociology in general. Weber’s considerations on the family or on marriage had not been taken up in the “malestream” tradition; feminists now paid no regard to Weber’s critique of the socialist theory of the family (Weber 1978 Part 2 ch 3 & 4, 1981 ch 2; see also Weber 1978: 688–91). Again, Marianne Weber, if noticed at all, was dismissed as a “bourgeois feminist” (this has perhaps now begun to change: e.g. Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007; Wobbe 2004). Rosslyn Bologh proved something of an exception, but even she seemed torn between feminist use of Weber and feminist critique of Weber (Bologh 1990). Besides, she appears to be as much or more located in Weberian scholarship than in feminist theory, where her presence has been more marginal (Bologh 1987; Lichtblau 1989/90). DOI:10.4324/9780429456268-7

Jung and the sociology of gender

143

I do not wish to speculate on the reasons for this, political or intellectual. But it does raise questions: could it be that it is with a Weberian approach to gender that Jung would ft? And that Jungian psychology might form part of the apparatus for raising it? And that this would take quite a diferent shape from either malestream or feminist orthodoxies? What then would it look like? I should state at this point that, in point of history, I followed the reverse course of reasoning. It was the commitment to a Weberian approach to gender that came frst, and that led to me to Jung. If I were to use Weber in place of Marx, was there anyone I could use in place of Freud? This is in fact where my whole interest in Jung began. What is presented here, then, is based on the work I did at that time (i.e. the 1980s: Walker 1990) – in the light, of course, of developments in my thought in the years since. There might be many routes to a Weberian gender sociology: trying to critique or parallel other approaches; working with the piecemeal discussions in Weber’s own work; and seeking out related discussions in the Weberian literature (e.g. Collins 1975; Turner 1996). But I would still hold that there is need for a fundamental statement of strategy, taking Weber’s sociology as a major classical resource in its own right, and taking on the problem of gender from frst principles. We should know what comprises a Weberian approach to gender, just as we know what comprises a functionalist or a Marxist approach to gender. It may be thought something of an indulgence that I present this early work here now. But I feel that this is the elephant in the room, in regard to all that I have written, in this volume and elsewhere. All sociological argument has implications for gender, and if these are not made explicit, then they will be inferred – probably quite inaccurately. You cannot be forever protesting a heterodox view without saying what it is somewhere.

Weberian sociology and gender: theoretical orientation How then would you approach gender in Weberian perspective? (Leaving the question of Jung aside meantime.) In my view, there are three main landmarks: the sociology of power, the comparative historical method, and interpretivism. On the face of it, women’s oppression may be fairly summed up as the subordination of women to male authority. That is the language of power. Moreover it permits a focus on women as women, persons who are female: male control in sexuality, child-bearing, maternal care of infants and so on. These surely are the core issues. The exploitation of women’s labour may be interesting, but the sexual division of labour comes before the exploitation of labour: why was this labour allocated to women? “Woman” (as Marxists have long conceded) is not a relationship to the means of production: women’s oppression does not ft naturally with the vocabulary of Marxist class analysis. It is intuitively attractive to argue that the subordination of women to male authority as something general in society must be underpinned by a systematic (or systemic) exclusion of women from power in society. Moreover that in itself

144

Psyche, Science and Society

is a very widespread pattern in history; one that calls to be investigated. Weber’s sociology of power is one of his great contributions to sociology, and is the most important approach to it in classical sociology. It is an obvious resource to explore. Weber’s economic sociology is quite Marxist in its view of economic relations, but it is not structured in terms of diferent modes of production. His economic history rather examines the varying balance between oikos and enterprise, and their relations to markets. It is rather his typology of domination systems, for example, feudalism, patrimonialism and bureaucracy, that provides structure to his comparative historical sociology. To this I now turn. Traditionally, the sociological theory of gender – where it has not simply limited itself to modern society or capitalism – has been heavily reliant on anthropology. There seems to be an assumption that somehow, anthropology is privileged to work out the basic relationships between the human biology of sex and reproduction on the one hand, society and culture on the other, and that sociology’s task is merely to apply anthropological theory to a range of “sociological” societies. It is difcult to see what justifes this, or how it is supposed to work. If (if) primitive or simple societies and complex or civilized societies are based on different structural principles – kinship and class – then how can the explanation of gender be lifted across from the one to the other? The traditional argument is for an “evolution” from kinship to class, an exercise in the speculative reconstruction of prehistory. It is a most insecure form of argument, and besides, we have been doing it for 150 years and it always leads to the same places. Again, what justifes it? The relations between sociology and anthropology are a conundrum, but whatever divides the two disciplines, there are no methodologies available to the one discipline that are in principle not available to the other. Perhaps rather than asking the anthropologists what they know, we should be asking them how they know? Here we surely point to comparative studies (e.g. Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies), and to arguments on the social construction of biological sex into cultural gender (Mead 1935, 1962). The model for this is Boas’ work on race: the argument that race is not biology, it is culture. However, this cultural anthropological tradition does not really underwrite theories of evolution from kinship to class: these rather belong to social anthropology. And more to the point, the constructivist arguments are not specifcally anthropological. They are neoKantian, and are to be found in sociology too, notably Weber (e.g. as regards race: Weber 1978: 385f). Taking these objections together, I would suggest that it might be better if sociology and anthropology were to develop their accounts of gender separately, and leave bringing them together to the end (see Nanda and Warms 2004 ch 11 for a modern anthropological account). This does not mean that sociologists should ignore anthropology altogether, but they should not be intimidated by it or reliant on it. Weber’s sociology is a comparative historical sociology ranging through World history. He outlines the most basic conditions from which the various historical civilizations seem to have developed in the most general terms, so far as it can be

Jung and the sociology of gender

145

established (e.g. Weber 1981 ch 2); and then traces the various trajectories of development that have ensued. Where he considers the primitive, it is usually – religion excepted – to show that the “original” arrangements were historically contingent, and that other arrangements were possible. But he regards prehistory as irrecoverable. This creates a general, rather than a universal, sociology, but it is nonetheless one of the great classical sociologies. And a sociology of gender in these terms would surely be a worthwhile exercise. As to interpretivism, this is not simply a matter of reciprocally oriented and subjectively meaningful social action. It is action in a real material (and ideal) world. The various elements of that world – nature – as we are concerned with them become socially constructed: they acquire a cultural dimension. This includes our own bodies, our own biology, including sexual dimorphism, reproduction and so on. The argument here is for a moderate constructivism: that is, nature presents constraints as to what culture can make of it. I have argued elsewhere in these essays that this should be termed cultural constructivism, to distinguish it from the extreme or social constructivism argued in post-structuralist theory: the logic and the history are diferent.1 This raises questions, then, as to what nature in this regard is presenting. We encounter nature subject to our construction of it: our knowledge of nature is conditioned by cultural factors. How then are we to know what we are dealing with? One resource I would bring to bear on this is Lorenzian ethology. Since I discuss this at length elsewhere in these essays, I will only give bare indications here. Lorenz argues that our species is a specialist in non-specialization, that this entails a reduction in instinct, making room for a massive growth of insight-based learning. All this holds for both sexes alike: women are not more instinctive or closer to nature than men. They have a greater afnity for babies, but male parenting in our species has an ethological basis too. In fact, it is male aggression that Lorenz problematizes. It should be noted that this is not a determinist thesis: its logic is Kantian and explicitly allows for free will and consciousness. Jungian psychology is another resource. There is a basic methodological compatibility with Weber: their common ground in Kant and Schopenhauer, Jung’s acknowledgement of ideal and material realms, subject to a moderate constructivism. There is also their common view of the human existential situation and the limits of rationality, giving rise to quite similar accounts of cultural history. I have discussed all these things elsewhere (Walker 2012; above p72f). But for our purposes here, the main issue is the contrast with Freud. Jung rejects Freud’s sexual theory; rather he identifes sex and aggression as comprising the two main instinctive channels. Moreover, he treats both in quite commonsensical terms: he does not try to derive a theory of culture or society from them. Neither does he privilege childhood: he sees it basically as the unfolding of an innate process. The family is the typical environment for this, but it is not a location of crisis, and the movement out of the family too is natural (e.g. Jung 1960, 1964a).

146

Psyche, Science and Society

As to gender, Jung proposes an innate complementarity between the sexes in terms of certain archetypes; he also identifes a secondary complementarity in terms of the psychic functions which is contingent on culture – Jung is aware of a history of patriarchy. He does not hold that women are more instinctive or less rational than men, or identify men with culture and women with nature. Women have as a wide a range of personality types as men, and like men, go through the individuation process (Zabriskie 1990). Notably, Jung cautions against male interpretations, or constructions, of female psychology: “Woman always stands just where the man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two” (Jung 1964c: 113). I will return to consider Jung further in a later section: he has interesting proposals for cultural analysis. But these remarks are enough meantime. There are three sociocultural issues that might be considered as fundamental: the incest taboo, the sexual division of labour (or sex roles), and male dominance over women. I will ofer some considerations on these in a later chapter, but since they apparently originate in prehistory, a comparative historical sociology of gender must simply take them as given, and concern itself with how they develop or change.2 Even so, something further might be said about male dominance over women. This is of very widespread occurrence, though not universal, in the ethnographic record and also in history. That might suggest biological causation, though not necessarily an outright determinism: it could rather be a matter of loaded dice, with some human plasticity and even the possibility of conscious intervention. The arguments from Lorenzian ethology seem to me to incline towards this. As to sociological factors, one might seek to account for an apparent immunity to social change by locating causation in the processes of social change themselves: a recurrent rather than a persistent phenomenon. There is a basis for this in Weber’s notion of charisma, with its afnity for social change: crystallized patterns of social action and meaning dissolving and becoming fuid, and then crystallizing out in a diferent pattern. It would be at this stage that male dominance recurs. Weber points to an incompatibility between charisma and routine economic activity: relations with women and their dependent children is accordingly avoided. The original sexual division of labour is in line with this, giving routine economic activities to women and charismatic activities to men (Weber 1978: 244f, 1111– 20, 1981: 37f). This suggests that domination systems that focus on routine economic activity such as bureaucracy would favour women’s autonomy, while those with a marked charismatic element (e.g. feudalism) would favour male dominance. This is not suggested as a “theory” – it would be hard to test it directly. But it is a way of thinking about the problems of the feld, and it does serve to orient empirical enquiries. Jung and Lorenz both classify as evolutionary psychology, something that has a longer and more episodic history than is sometimes thought (Plotkin 2004). The arguments outlined here need not be taken as dogma: diferent arguments could be devised.

Jung and the sociology of gender

147

Granted the “natural” basis then – sexual dimorphism and the division of reproductive functions – I would, on the analogy of Weber’s strategy in economic and political sociology, identify two types of social action: social action which is directly concerned with these things (“sexual polarity”) and social action that is directed elsewhere but takes these things into account. These would give rise to what we may term respectively primary and secondary issues. The point is to give a central place in the sociology of gender to the primary issues; and equally, to integrate these with the major societal structures or conficts – not have them external, in a functional or “reproductive” relationship. This, after social constructivism, is the major impact of the interpretive approach. In interpretive sociology, the term “reproduction” may only rightly be used as an actor’s meaning, that is, where specifc social actors have the subjective intention in their actions of reproducing something. It might be a lineage or a status group, for example. But much of the relevant social action does not have such an intention. Men and women engage in sexual relations for all kinds of reasons – not least love and desire – accepting or disregarding the probable consequences in pregnancy and so forth or seeking to control or evade them. Marriage and legitimacy are defned by the contrast with extra-marital sex and non-legitimate procreation (Weber 1978: 356f). Again, the subjective intention to reproduce, say, a lineage gives no guarantee that it will in fact be reproduced; and conversely, where a social relationship is reproduced (e.g. a market), this does not imply that there was any subjective intention to reproduce it. It could be the unintended consequence of action directed elsewhere. And social reproduction may explicitly exclude biological recruitment, for example a bureaucracy. Setting this in the context of long-term history, it is difcult to see anything that has in fact been reproduced. Society is episodic at best, although culture has some long term continuities (the Judaeo-Christian religion, for example, or Roman law). Humankind does not reproduce, it procreates; society and culture do not reproduce, they change. To bring these things together needs not a concept of “reproduction” but an exercise in demographic sociology.

Substantive sociology The foregoing considerations need to be focused and developed through empirical enquiry. The feld for this is vast, and a fnite research task had to be defned. I  chose the ancient world. A  number of reasons dictated that choice. It ofers critical leverage on the conventional evolutionist strategy: the earliest civilizations do not evidence a change from kinship to class; indeed kinship theory itself seems to owe something to a misinterpretation of the institutional arrangements (phyla, phratry, genos) of the Graeco-Roman city state, itself quite a late arrival in Antiquity (Finley 1981; Roussel 1976). The ancient civilizations have had lasting cultural impact, for example in religion and mythology, law and philosophy. Ancient paganism may pose fewer problems for sociological analysis than the later religions of world-denying prophecy. And fnally, it can be simply organized around polar

148

Psyche, Science and Society

types of domination: city states and bureaucratic kingdoms (Weber 1976: 69f; cf. Roth 1978: L–LVII). This indeed was formative for Weber’s development of the sociology of power. The discussions that follow then, though they sometimes range more widely, are grounded in consideration of the ancient civilizations: Egypt, Athens, and Rome in the transition from city state to empire. It should be clear, however, that the purpose here is to show how the theoretical arguments work, not to present anything defnitive in comparative historical analysis. Far more empirical work would be needed for that.

Demographic sociology It is reckoned that at the time of the Neolithic Revolution, the human population worldwide was of the order of 5–20 million (Livi-Bacci [1997 ch1:7] has 6 million), with an imperceptibly slow rate of increase. It is now (2020) around eight billions, doubling roughly every 38 years. Most of this increase, and of the increase in rate of growth, has occurred in the past two to three centuries. Taken over the long term, however, there has not simply been a smooth graph, but rather a pattern of short-term (say, 100–150 years or so) surges and set-backs – the latter caused mainly by disease, famine and war. The three factors of demographics are fertility, mortality and migration. Focus in modern times tends to be on the frst two of these: on the “demographic transition” – the transition from a pattern of high fertility/high mortality, to one of low fertility/low mortality. The modern population explosion is due then to a time lag between the two: a period of high fertility/low mortality. The new regime became established in the developed world quite early in the 20th century; the presumption is that this will happen across the less developed world too – though some regions, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, seem slow to follow. But the conditions for the reduction in mortality were diferent. In the developed world, it was due to public engineering: clean water and sewerage, garbage collection and disposal, street paving, and so on. In the less developed world, it has been due rather to medical science: immunization, antibiotics and so forth. It has long been feared that this was more precarious. The emergence of new diseases and of antibiotic resistance, and the decay of western cities and their infrastructure too, are increasing concerns. My concern, however, in a comparative historical approach to gender, is with civilized societies prior to modernity. Here it is the third factor, migration, that comes into the foreground. There is no dramatic population increase, but the appearance of stability is deceptive. For one thing, there are short-term surges and set-backs, as already noted. But even more, city and countryside present contrasting situations. In the cities, mortality rates are high and fertility low, due especially to poverty, poor hygiene and disease. In the countryside, fertility rates are high and mortality (relatively) low. Countryside and city then are sources and sinks respectively for population, and rural-urban migration makes up the balance. There are

Jung and the sociology of gender

149

reversals, for example, the fight from the cities in late (western) Antiquity. There are also other types of migration – Völkerwanderungen, and the trade in slaves, for example. Though slavery can also have its roots in the rural-urban population dynamic, as will be seen. At any rate, I  take this dynamic as central generally for premodern civilized history. (The remarks that follow are slanted towards the ancient world, for reasons already stated.) It is best to take the countryside frst. Since fertility exceeds mortality here, we have to ask what is the impact of population increase? Does it mean more mouths to feed, or more hands to work? This invites the question; more hands to work what? What are the conditions of access to the means of production? This, in turn, is clearly a question of the class or stratifcatory system. Stratifcation goes with closure of economic resources, socially contrived scarcity. For the most privileged strata, land is of no use without a labour force. Accordingly, there will be a large stratum of servile labour, living at or near subsistence level. Indeed, there may actually be an imported slave work-force. Between these and the large landowners will be various strata of independent medium and small holders. For all these strata, it is not just a question of subsistence, but of a style of life. Legal and other privilege will depend on this. Often the privileged strata claim to be ethnically distinct from the “native” servile labouring strata, even where there is no history of immigration or conquest. Often too there is a military aspect: a requirement to equip oneself with arms – and the leisure to train in their use, which in turn demands some servile or dependent labour. But the required style of life cannot be maintained if the property is sub-divided on inheritance. If the inherited property is too small, the heirs risk being declassed. With stratifcation, then, there appears closure within the household: relations of marriage and legitimacy which defne who may and may not inherit, and exclude secondary wives (and others) and their children. This also defnes which daughters will be accepted as wives (rather than concubines) in other households – to be mothers of legitimate children. (It is better here to speak in terms of household and lineage, rather than of family.) All these things point beyond the household to the system of status stratifcation (Weber 1978: 357f). The situation is most acute for those at the lower levels of the privileged strata. They risk losing privilege altogether and being forced into the servile workforce. There is a commonly occurring pattern of usury and debt-slavery: the small holder takes out a loan at high interest to cover a bad year, cannot repay, and must sell members of his family or even himself into slavery. This was widespread in the ancient world and beyond (it can still be found in South-East Asia). The ideal then at this level is to have three children only: a son, a daughter to exchange with another household for the wife on one’s son, and a younger son in case some misfortune befalls the elder one. This still leaves a problem of superfuous younger sons, of course. Besides closure within the household, various other measures may be used to limit the numbers of children, such as infanticide or exposure – though these may rather be urban practices. But generally there will be an outfow, an expulsion,

150

Psyche, Science and Society

of unwanted persons, male and female, from the countryside to the city. (This of course may apply to the servile workforce too, though here it is subsistence rather than status considerations that hold.) Rural-urban migration is driven by push factors rather than pull factors. It is an oversimplifcation to say, status in the countryside, class in the city, but class goes with markets and markets are found in cities, so there is some truth in it. Migration from the countryside to the city is also in large part expulsion from status into class: indeed that is its basis. The state plays a role in these conficts, and may do so quite variously, either supporting the big landowners against the small, or the small landowners against the big, or protecting the servile workforce against either or both of them. In part, this is a question of who owns or controls the state. These matters will be taken up in the next section. Something should be said about religious institutions. Whether ancient temple or mediaeval monastery, the religious institution is basically a landed estate – often with its servile workforce – whose owner is immortal. Thus, there is no question of division on inheritance, and no need for internal closure. The resources then are used for the support of superfuous menfolk – and in less degree womenfolk – of the more privileged strata, in a not unsuitable style of life, on terms that exclude recruitment by internal fertility and indeed may exclude sexual relations altogether. (As to the religious aspect and relations to the surrounding populace, this might best be seen in terms of patron-client relations and periodic festivals, rather than congregation and worship.) This takes up some of the superfuous population. The privileged strata may augment the endowments, since it is in their interests to do so. But the religious personnel must be reckoned an independent factor in the political conficts. They do not simply align with any given stratum, or with the state. Other outlets for superfuous population include mercenary soldiers and prostitutes: more on the latter in the following. Turning now to the city, here mortality rates exceed fertility; life expectancies also are low. This is mainly due to poor hygiene and disease, and poverty. The city is a population sink: it recruits its population to signifcant degree by migration, rather than by internal fertility. Cities come in diferent kinds. They may relate diferently in political and economic terms to their wider setting. The city may be a regional or capital administrative centre for a kingdom or empire, or it may form an independent unit, a city state or city-kingdom; in the latter case it may dominate and exploit its hinterland, or ignore it, importing its foodstufs by maritime trade, or it may be a tolerated but powerless commercial enclave. Inland or maritime location is also an important factor. The city may be a centre for consumption based on incomes sourced elsewhere, a centre of production of goods for sale, or a middleman in long-range trade. Either way, the main economic resource will not be agricultural land (though there may be some agricultural production). Rather there will be built up property, including commercial/industrial facilities, which may be a source of rents, and a range

Jung and the sociology of gender

151

of crafts and trades; commerce and long-range trade, and fnance, including usury (especially signifcant for its relation to debt-slavery). Even ancient cities could have highly complex economies. Since the economy is not based on agricultural land, it may be more difcult to impose closure of economic opportunities, especially where long-range trade is concerned. But scarcity is socially constructed, and the arrangements may be paradoxical: the most privileged status groups may be banned from commercial activity, or from working with their hands, while the stratum that monopolizes the opportunities is excluded from status privileges. But this again is something to be discussed in the next section. Underlying all these matters, however, the city is initially based on two factors: a castle and a market. From these one may derive two elements – or poles – in the stratifcatory system: an order of privileged status groups and an array of market classes. The market classes of crafts and tradespeople, like the servile labouring class of the countryside (from which in large part it is recruited), will mostly be living at or below subsistence level. It will be difcult or impossible to maintain families at this level – and child mortality will be high. Slavery is a feature here: the practice of usury and debt slavery often provide the legal basis of slavery even when the actual source of slaves has changed, say to distant trade and war. But exposure of children, rather than simply being infanticide, may also be a route into slavery. Another and related feature is prostitution – men being unable to support enduring sexual relationships, and women lacking alternative occupations, or as slaves, not being free to choose. There may be more afuent members of these classes, but it is likely that these will seek to emulate the life-styles of the privileged strata – even if they are formally excluded from their privileges. The privileged status groups of the city are in similar case to the rural landowning status groups, though their wealth may lie in rents from urban property rather than agricultural land. Their position in the status order and their style of life are dependent on passing their property intact down the generations, and so here again status stratifcation is accompanied by internal closure within the household in terms of marriage and legitimacy, with the same implications for control over women’s lives and bodies. But the balance between fertility and mortality is still precarious at best, and other means are preferred for limiting the numbers of legitimate children. These might include exposure of female babies – possibly to be taken and raised as slaves. It also features extensive recourse to prostitutes, though of various kind – courtesans or mistresses perhaps: lasting liaisons with economic provision, though a general denial of reproductive consequences. A great part of the demand for prostitutes comes from this. As I indicated earlier, there is not just rural-urban migration: there is also “migration” from status to class – especially for women. In this section, I have argued that comparative historical sociology should treat rural-urban migration as the predominant demographic process. This from the

152

Psyche, Science and Society

origins of cities some 6,000 years or more ago, to the threshold of modernity some 300 or 400 years ago. There are (following Weber) broad divisions within this feld: West and East; ancient and mediaeval. “West” in the ancient period includes Western Asia and North Africa; it only comes to mean “Europe” in mediaeval times. In the West, there have been two eras at least where cities have become wholly or partly autonomous. That this did not happen in East or South Asia is due to the greater continuity of the patrimonial kingdoms; also to the persistence of clan membership with ritual mutual exclusions, inhibiting the development of a city commune with common cult. (Geographical factors favouring maritime trade also played a part, especially in Antiquity). The threshold between ancient and mediaeval is marked by the appearance of universalistic religions with an ethos of World-denial. These again took diferent forms (or followed diferent trajectories) in West and East: again, political and geographical factors were involved in this (Walker 2012: 61f). In the West, the more extreme practices I have outlined in the foregoing were taken up in class and status conficts in the autonomous cities, and elsewhere in religious prophecy and demands for reform. In the East, patrimonial rule may have provided some amelioration.

Domination systems and women As argued earlier, “women’s oppression” may be summed up as the subordination of women to male authority: the control of women’s lives, and bodies, by and for men is the core issue. This in turn must be underpinned by the systemic exclusion of women from power in society (not necessarily a total exclusion: there is room for exceptions and anomalies). Weber’s sociology of power, or domination, is the obvious resource for exploring these matters. Weber’s analyses power in society on analogy with Marxist argument on the means of production, identifying means of warfare and means of administration. These each attract social relations of appropriation and expropriation. What is meant by the means of warfare is obvious enough: weapons – though these might include horses (and perhaps chariots) or even ships – and the training in their use, and most likely in manoeuvre with other persons too. The peasant hoplite who owns his own arms, supports himself on his own farm with enough servile labour to give him leisure to train, is in a very diferent situation from the soldier who lives in the king’s barracks, gets his arms and clothing from the king’s armouries, and draws a salary for his support. The latter has to do what he is told; the former can give or withhold his obedience. What of the means of administration? This could mean, say, pens and paper and desks, or access to a mail service. But most to the point, it means a staf: one cannot administer a province single-handed. The bureaucratic ofcial is not merely appointed and salaried himself: his staf are appointed and salaried too, and he has no control over them except the authority delegated to him. They are all dependent on the king. This is a complete contrast to the feudal noble, who controls his domains through his household servants or other dependents, virtually at his own

Jung and the sociology of gender

153

will. He owes the king nothing save military support in time of war, and hospitality when he visits (the way the king generally uses to control his nobles). He has appropriated the means of administration: the bureaucratic ofcial, like the soldier in barracks, has been expropriated. (There are intermediate forms: the ofcial might provide his own staf, retaining a budget from the taxes he raises and sending on the excess only – or sending on an agreed sum while keeping the excess. This would be called patrimonial bureaucracy: there is a continuum from bureaucracy through patrimonialism to feudalism. But it is clearest simply to contrast the poles. Again, these forms of domination attract diferent principles of legitimation and obedience – rationallegal, traditional, charismatic – but this this not the most useful approach for our purposes here.) Feudalism and bureaucracy are not simply diferent types of society. They are also found in the same society. The king will always seek to reduce his nobles to the status of dependent ofcials, and where their lands lie close to his capital he may well succeed. The bureaucratic ofcial will always seek to escape the king’s control and make himself a quasi-independent feudal noble, and in a distant frontier province he may well succeed. Feudalism and bureaucracy are both ways of administering a territory. The functions can vary widely, though the administration of justice, maintaining the peace, and raising military levies are general. There might also be maintaining roads and bridges, organizing corvée, overseeing irrigation or food control and so forth – bureaucracy tends to go with a wide range of functions. From a certain point of view, though, bureaucratic ofcials are the same people as feudal nobles, appointed and salaried to administer their own – or rather each other’s – property. A feudal nobility is a typical case of a privileged rural status group as discussed in the previous section. To maintain their position and their style of life, they must keep their property intact down the generations; hence closure within the household in terms of marriage and legitimacy. This entails a strong control over women’s lives and bodies: arranged marriages, with no right of refusal or divorce, sexual access and childbearing at her husband’s behest, no inheritance or control over property, and no say in her daughters’ destiny. Often the wife would be much younger than her husband. Meantime, lesser wives or mistresses and their children, or younger brothers and sisters, are kept down. Her family of origin will protect her position, but she herself will have no say in it. There can be exceptions and anomalies: if there are only daughters and no sons, or if she is widowed or her husband is weak or disabled; but even here there may be arrangements of tutelage or control by male kinsfolk. All this will hold throughout the privileged strata of the status order – anything above the level of the servile workforce. These things are exactly what the king intent on reducing his nobles and imposing a bureaucracy can attack. He can enact or protect women’s rights to share in inheritance, to administer their own property, to marriage by free choice, to divorce; to control their sexual relations and childbearing; and importantly, to have direct access to the law. He can also protect the rights of lesser wives, illegitimate

154

Psyche, Science and Society

children, younger sons and daughters. All this is in keeping with a general ethos of protecting the common people from the privileged strata. And its purpose is precisely to ensure that property is fragmented on devolution: that ofcials are dependent on their salaries, and on the king who pays them. At the same time, eligibility for appointment is made dependent not upon property but upon a technical education. As to the unprivileged labouring strata, bureaucratic domination tends to break down all status privilege and to level out the population – to reduce, if you will, all strata to the (former) level of the unprivileged. Though there might remain a rough division between upper and lower orders (e.g. honestiores and humiliores in the later Roman world). Turning now to the city: cities as I have said come in various kinds, but here it is the autonomous city state that is to be considered. Paradoxically, Weber links the city-state with non-legitimate domination: that is, the question is less why authority is obeyed, than whether authority is obeyed. The city state is the arena of class and status conficts, of oligarchy, tyranny and democracy: it is the arena of usurped power. It has this character from the outset. City-states come in diferent kinds. The ancient city-state is a community of warriors: the commercial classes are non-citizens, resident foreigners and freed slaves. As the centre of military technology (the hoplite army and galley feet) it dominates the countryside. The north European mediaeval city is a tolerated commercial enclave, where the locus of military technology (armoured knights, longbowmen) is in the countryside. There is no guild-hall in the ancient city. The mediaeval Italian cities were intermediate between the two. In either case, the city begins with an act of usurpation (synoikism or conuiratio), a rejection of the authority of the patrimonial ruler by a patrician stratum. The patricians are an urban nobility: they own urban property, maybe including commercial property such as docks or warehouses, but do not engage directly in commercial activities. They may be usurped, in turn, by a wealthy commercial stratum of merchants or bankers; this is a typical mediaeval development. Either way, there can be a further usurpation from the lower strata. In a military city, this may come from the strata of small property owners who make up the hoplite infantry, or exceptionally (e.g. Athens) even the propertyless citizens who row the galleys. In a commercial city, it will come from the lesser trades and guild members. Thus, oligarchy can turn to democracy – a limited democracy, where power is not shared but is monopolized by the relevant strata. But again, the city may be paralysed by acute class and status conficts or by factional conficts between the great families, leading to a period of tyranny or the appointment of a law-maker. Tyranny does not have the negative connotations – or democracy the positive ones – that it acquires in modern times. On the face of it, the patricians are in the same case as the feudal nobility already discussed: they need to maintain their position and style of life where the chances to augment their wealth are limited. This again means closure within the household in terms of marriage and legitimacy of children, arranged marriages

Jung and the sociology of gender

155

with status equals, and so on. But there is a diference. Where the feudal nobility are confronted by a king, the patricians are confronted by each other. Feudal nobles can accept a status hierarchy among themselves, and jockey for advantage; favourable marriages will be a resource for this. But the patricians need to share power and maintain status equality. Typically, they will do this through a constitution, that provides for a senate and magistracies that are elected and held in turn and for a limited period. Any arrangements that make for internal closure within the patrician status group will be resisted. Marriage as alliance is a case in point. It will appear only as a dysfunctional element, as a factor of factional strife and a breakdown of the constitutional arrangement. (Even then it will probably not work: a marriage cannot lend stability to a political alliance if there is nothing to give the marriage stability.) Thus, in the Roman Republic, marriage transferred the girl outright from her father’s lineage to her husband’s: it did not constitute a link between the lineages. In mark of this, property exchange with the marriage was small, a dowry for the wife’s support only. With this, there will be the typical devices to prevent fragmentation of property on devolution, in terms of marriage and legitimacy; but divorce and remarriage are more commonplace – the children will stay with the father. Again, there will be a wider sphere of non-legitimate sexual relations, with mistresses or cultured courtesans. Patricians tend to relate to the lower orders through patron-client relations, whether formal or informal, while deprecating the claims of the plebeians to citizenship. This creates a kind of “demi-monde” in which women can fnd a kind of informal participation in public afairs. In the event of factional breakdown patrician women themselves may take part in this, as at the end of the Roman Republic. Citizenship in the ancient city as a military, political and legal afair is reserved to men. Women have no legal agency or personality: they are under “guardianship” – in efect children. Even so, they are not excluded from public spaces. Women in Rome could go to the baths, libraries, the games and chariot races, the theatre, temples and religious festivals – there were goddesses specifcally for women’s concerns. And there were priestesses. Again, Roman houses did not have separate public rooms and women’s quarters – unlike Athenian houses. Literacy also provides a kind of public space. The city-state conducts its afairs through the spoken not the written word. Writing then becomes a contested thing. The plebeians may demand that the patricians write down the laws; but after that, a literature of political philosophy and historiography emerges that is the patricians’ way of claiming a public space where they can mobilize against plebeian pretensions. Patrician and demi-monde women were not excluded from this. Against that, literacy in a bureaucratic state is simply a tool of administration, with application at all levels (and for both sexes). When the plebeians seize control of the city, there may be little overt structural change. It is still a matter of a constitution, though there may be a citizens’ assembly rather than a senate; still short-term magistracies held in rotation. But there is a change in ambience. The plebeians are dependent for their position on smaller property holdings: if these are divided by inheritance the heirs may

156

Psyche, Science and Society

become declassed, forfeit their citizen status. There is then a much tighter control of legitimate reproduction, and of sexual relations, and these are focused more on marriage. Factionalism is not a real risk since the plebeian group is large, but plebeians are jealous of their citizen status. They resent the patron-client relations of the patricians and the demi-monde that it creates. The plebeian city is more puritanical and less easy-going than the patrician city, and women’s lives are more controlled and restricted, and there may be overt misogyny in the culture. Contrast Athens with Rome. Commercial activities in the ancient city are mainly carried on by non-citizen strata: freed slaves and resident foreigners. Slaves too might live independently, paying body rent. Their situation is precarious, with families difcult to maintain and children difcult to raise (one might buy a slave to keep one in one’s old age). And the sexual division of labour did not favour women. In the mediaeval (demilitarized) commercial city, these strata would become the plebeians, exercising their citizenship through the guilds. The mediaeval guild economy was oriented to economic closure, and to securing a livelihood for all. It was not oriented to the market and proft as in modern capitalism. This was a more favourable environment for marriages and families. But it still put pressure on controlling reproduction (and sex), and the sexual division of labour still did not give women many chances for autonomy. But this requires empirical study. The impact of bureaucracy and empire on the ancient city was above all to dissolve citizenship, and all status pretensions. This has much the same impact as in feudalism – breaking the control over women to break the continuity of property it had sought to protect – but a very much readier uptake. Citizenship might lose its military and political dimensions, but legal citizenship remains, and women now acquire it. Guardianship ends; women are now legal agents and persons in their own right. This includes managing their own property and entering into business. It also includes much freer forms of marriage which can be made or broken at the woman’s will. Incidentally women will now take their children with them on divorce (it complicates the inheritance claims). Generally bureaucratic domination protects the lower orders and dismantles status privilege: in the Roman Empire a broad division emerged between honestiores and humiliores. Rome was never as extreme in controlling women as Athens, and never went as far in their autonomy as bureaucratic Egypt, but in the transition from Republic to Principate, one can see clear movement. The type-situations mentioned earlier are presented in terms of polar opposites for the sake of clarity. In fact, of course, there are intermediate positions. The nobility, or the patricians, may be side-lined and tolerated rather than actually eliminated for example, either by bureaucracy or by plebeian seizure of control. Again, the best-known cases (e.g. Athens and Rome) have their idiosyncratic features which cannot easily be accounted for. In this section, I have argued that the structures of power in society impact on the position of women in society: male monopoly of power in society underpinning men’s control over women’s bodies and lives. The empirical basis for this

Jung and the sociology of gender

157

centred on ancient cities and bureaucratic kingdoms, though the theoretical considerations range more widely. I will return to these in a later section.

Jungian psychology and the sociology of gender My initial concern with Jung (as with Lorenz) was as a resource, to help defne the biological and psychological “core”: the reality that Nature was presenting to us for our social (or cultural) construction – arguing a moderate constructivism in which Nature presents constraints to what culture can make of it. A number of points came from this. Sex and aggression comprise the two main channels of instinct. Both are to be understood in common-sense terms as driving a range of behaviour; there is no attempt to use them to raise a theory of culture as such. There is an innate diferentiation, a complementarity, between the sexes as regards some of the central archetypes; there is also a secondary diferentiation and complementarity in terms of the four psychic functions that is culturally specifc and is now changing. Jung does not hold that women are more instinctive or less rational than men, nor does he identify men with culture and women with nature – though he does indicate masculine and feminine sectors of Nature, and of society. Women have in principle as a wide a range of personality types as men, and they undergo the individuation process just as men do (Jung 1964a, 1964c, 1982; Zabriskie 1990; cf. Walker 2018: 70f). All this is of course variously debated within Jungian feminism (e.g. Douglas 1990; Rowland 2002; Wehr 1988). Here however it raises the reciprocal question, what is the impact for Jungian psychology of being put into this kind of sociological setting? The frst point, given the arguments I have just presented, is that it tends to vindicate Jung’s benign neglect of childhood. Jung sees childhood as the unfolding of an innate process – if it goes awry, it is the parents who should have psychotherapy. His focus is on adult lives: adults navigating their social and cultural environments. This is quite diferent from the Freudian focus on childhood as personality formation, and its assimilation in sociological theory to the socialization process. But a focus on the city and migration reveals that the locus of childhood and upbringing may be quite diferent from the locus of adult destiny; while interpretive theory proposes social interaction without presupposing prior socialization. Thus, the family does not require to be theorized in functionalist terms: it can be taken for what it is; while “society” will appropriate and utilize whatever human material comes to it (Walker 2012: 67f; also above p98f). The second point is that similar considerations hold in regard to the realm of ideal culture. The Durkheimian tradition of conscience collective and the Marxist tradition of ideology both tend to attribute coherence to this realm, and a functional relation to social structure. Weber by contrast rather sees this realm as a patchwork quilt, with afnities at best to the various social structural elements. There are episodes where the culture of a specifc group will sweep across the whole of society – for a time. For example, the paganism of the ancient world with its assortment of local and functional gods and goddesses was swept aside by Christianity with its

158

Psyche, Science and Society

Trinity – and duly fragmented again into an assortment of local and functional saints. Social actors interact with their cultural environments: they select and interpret. It is not a passive and deterministic one-way relation. Jung’s vision then of adults navigating their social and cultural environments is quite apposite, while the psychological apparatus he brings to it is a palpable contribution. Culture (e.g. myths and folk tales, used maybe as themes in literature and the arts) is highly transferrable between societies and eras, and interpretation that insists on the specifcs of the given sociological situation seems to me to be forced at best. Elsewhere in these essays, I have argued that Jung was too much prone to thinking in terms of the French sociological tradition and of primitive society in these matters above (p82f). A more sophisticated approach through Mary Douglas’ gridgroup theory of culture or Weberian stratifcation would give greater scope to the power of his thought. Jung’s notion of complementary archetypes in the male and female psyche has the interesting consequence, that men and women might, so to speak, differentially read and write the same cultural text. Thus in Christian terms, it is the woman’s relation to Mary that is equivalent to the man’s relation to Jesus. For a man, Mary would be an anima fgure, while a woman might relate to Jesus as a baby rather than as an adult. Jung also points to a specifcally female sector of culture, symbols that refect the female psyche and female issues (the Kore or maiden, for example, Artemis in Greek paganism: Jung 1970). Jung noted the absence – or suppression, rather – of this element in the patriarchal monotheistic religions, a crippling cultural environment for women. Though this was now beginning to change. As to cultural history, I  have discussed the similarities of Jung’s and Weber’s conceptions, and their common philosophical infuences and assumptions, elsewhere (Walker 2012: 61f; also above pp72f). This culminates in what seems to be a shared diagnosis of the modern condition in terms of rationalization and disenchantment; but Jung adds a gender twist. Weber’s prime concern is with endsrationality driving out value rationality. For example, the law courts, rather than orienting their decisions to a value of justice, will orient them to administrative or commercial expediency. It is also driving out tradition, but Weber does not value tradition (Jung is warier, but then his concern is with the psyche rather than with society). As to afectual action, action arising directly from the emotions, it is too easily assumed that this will be driven out too. But Weber does not in fact say that, and to me it seems more logical that ends-rationality would free afectual action from traditional and value-rational constraints. That is more in line with Jung’s thinking. He speaks of the new positive valuing of the body in sport, dancing and sex (Jung 1964b: 93f, 1964c: 130f). He also draws in women’s emancipation: women developing their Logos will force men to develop their Eros; and women’s greater access to their intuition may lead to them being the channels for new cultural values that will have weight against rationalization. This last I think is more of an intuitive possibility than a reasoned thesis; but then Jung did not try to link his ideas to Weber’s, even if he knew of them.

Jung and the sociology of gender

159

Implications for modernity and for general sociology The arguments presented in the foregoing sections were worked out in relation to a limited empirical feld, the ancient world. There is a far wider empirical feld to consider: I have made some remarks on it, but they must be regarded as provisional. For example, Imperial China does not conform to what I have said about bureaucracy being protective of women’s autonomy – though Weber has some observations on the Chinese case that may bear on this (Weber 1968 Part 1 passim, 1981: 338f). There will be other anomalies. But the purpose here is not to make a defnitive statement, but to illustrate a mode of argument. In the ancient world itself, there are cases that lie outside the main typology, bureaucratic kingdom and city state. Traditional patriarchal household domination appears to be an intermediate case which can develop either way, to greater control or to greater autonomy. Again, archaeology has confrmed contemporary reports of warrior women, for example among the pastoral semi-nomads of the steppes north of the Black Sea, though I am not sure that enough is known for secure interpretation. These things survived on the periphery of the ancient world, and the former at least relates to the conditions from which it originated. But the weight of analysis should lie where there is secure information to support it. As to any implications for modernity, these again must be provisional. The demographic regime is diferent. Even so, some comments may be made. First, then, I  would question how far the position of women in modernity should be explained in terms of the modern economy – capitalism, industrialism and market economy, as you please. Rather I would point to two other factors: bureaucracy and urbanization. Bureaucracy might best account for the modern emancipation (imperfect as it is) of women. This comes in the 20th century, not in the 18th or 19th century. Moreover, it comes in state socialist societies too, and elsewhere. And bureaucratization itself should not simply be attributed to the demands of the economy. It seems to have had more to do with war and its aftermath – especially the two World Wars. But in any perspective of historical depth, it is surely the night-watchman character of the state in classic (18th/19th century) capitalism, rather than the resurgence of the state in advanced (20th/21st century) capitalism, that calls for explanation. As to urbanization, the emergence of the modern economy is often confounded with the change from a rural-agrarian to an urban-industrial society. Now certainly the growth of cities in the modern age has been driven by the economic changes. But cities are far older than this, and the position of women in the city has always been diferent from that in the countryside. There is a public life from which women are excluded; the sexual division of labour is diferent, and generally to women’s disadvantage; and the situation of the family is precarious. Concerning women’s exclusion from public life, incidentally, this fts naturally with the language of status stratifcation (i.e. “man” and “woman” are statuses), though there is also an exportation of women from status to class, as I have shown.

160

Psyche, Science and Society

But while this factor may have changed with the modern emancipation, the other two factors surely persist. As to the family, it seems to make more sense to theorise this in terms of migration and confict than through a functionalist approach (including functionality for capitalism). The city, being dependent on migration, will make use of whatever human material is ofered to it; and while babies must have an adequate upbringing by humans if they are to become human themselves, this does not imply preparation for any specifc adult destiny. In short, the city does not presuppose socialization. And it is a hostile environment for families – for stable partnerships and young children – for reasons of poverty, lack of appropriate work, poor hygiene and environmental conditions, and so forth. Though some of these factors were ameliorated in the 20th century, others persist or have recurred. In some regards, modern society is the city writ large, as I have indicated elsewhere.3 (As for the city, so for capitalism. Capitalism must get a work-force from somewhere, but it may well mine out one source and move on the next: in fact this is mostly what it has done. The era in which an indigenous proletariat was supported to reproduce itself – have families – was again a state policy under the impact of war. That too was seen in cities before the modern era.) The critical point I seek to make by these remarks is not that the economy is not important. Certainly there has been a massive expansion in women’s chances for economic independence – though that also implies legal changes, and much of the employment has come with bureaucratization and the expansion of state functions. But my point is that gender theory needs more questions and fewer preconceived answers. In particular, the notion that capitalism must be the signifcant era for women, that women’s oppression culminates under capitalism or even only arises with it, is sociologically and historically untenable. We need an open-ended comparative historical enquiry. Secondly, I would point out that the position of women through civilized history has shown some variability, but this has rarely been in response to any demand by women. Rather it has been the unintended consequence of other changes. This I think applies in modernity too, up to a point: feminism has been pushing at an open door. Adverse changes could as easily ensue, as indeed has happened, for example the rise of trafcking and sexual slavery, or populist politics opposing abortion and family planning. Feminists do well to watch for this; and not only in contemporary afairs but also in utopian political programmes. I would point in particular to Green thought, with its demands for zero growth in the economy and – implicitly or explicitly – in population. I am sure that those (myself among them) who sympathize with Green politics would be appalled at the thought that they might inadvertently reinvent patriarchy. But society is the realm par excellence of unintended consequences: the precautionary principle is not just for technology.

Conclusion My concern in this chapter has been to fnd relations between Jungian psychology and the sociology of gender. I have done this in terms of an attempt to raise an approach to gender through the sociology of Max Weber: in fact it was that project

Jung and the sociology of gender

161

that frst led me to Jung. Jung then enters into it (together with Lorenz) initially as a resource for constituting the subject – the biological and psychological “core”. But the reciprocal impact is to vindicate Jung’s psychological approach, his focus on adult women navigating their social and cultural environments. His apparent neglect of reproduction and the socialization of children is not sociologically inept: the family does not have to be theorized under a functionalist strategy. At the same time, Jungian psychology has insights to ofer on gender in culture, and the analysis of culture and cultural history generally. As regards sociological theory, the main signifcance of the approach is that it marks a decisive break with functionalism. It also marks a break with duality of theory or the sociological secondariness of women, where the structures in which women’s lives are located are taken to lie outwith the main structures and conficts of society, serving only to reproduce them. This is a consequence of interpretivism, which leads to a critique of “social reproduction” and a neoMalthusian exercise with a focus on migration. It also permits acknowledgement of the material dimension (the “primary issues”), without biological or psychological determinism. These are desiderata of feminist theory, but they have proven difcult to secure. As to what feminists would make of it, the question is, which feminists? There have been divisions, even bitter conficts, among feminists – for example, the “feminist wars” over sexuality (Tong 2009; on sex wars see ch 2 esp. pp65f; cf. pp243f; Whelehan 1995 esp. chs 6 & 7). The advent of third-wave feminism might have done something to resolve this, with its turn rather to the diferences (even oppressions) among women in diferent locations (Tong 2009: 284f). But it also turned to poststructuralist modes of argument, and this led to ecofeminism becoming marginalized, accused of essentialism and of refecting white privilege (Thompson and MacGregor 2017). Again, feminism is a presence in a wide range of academic disciplines, and beyond academia. Even within sociology there is a range: there are women in felds such as education or health and sickness, using microsociologies such as symbolic interactionism, who account themselves feminists but are only onlookers to the debates on gender theory itself. It is not just Jungian feminism that lies outside the borders. Gender theory in modern sociology began with criticism and rejection of functionalism in favour of Marxist or Marxisant approaches, going on to an engagement with modern French social theory – post-structuralism, post-modernism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and so forth. Modern feminism early came to see itself as part of the radical or revolutionary left, where the preference has always lain with structuraldeterminist approaches. The strategy then is to diagnose a vicious determinism in human afairs, and through “critique” to fnd or devise a virtuous determinism that will expel it. This has its costs. The need to avoid biological determinism can lead to avoiding biology altogether – and thus a failure to explain why women’s oppression happens to women, to biologically female persons. This is compounded by Marxism’s reluctance to acknowledge anything other than the economy as material. It is abetted by epistemological arguments deriving partly from the later Durkheim and partly from Saussurean linguistics that make the natural world a blank screen onto which society may project whatever ideas arise within it -an extreme social constructivism, as against the moderate cultural constructivism argued here.

162

Psyche, Science and Society

(The argument can be paralleled in the Marxist notion of ideology.) All this touches a range of issues in sociology, as I discuss elsewhere in these essays.4 In regard to gender, it goes with duality of theory and a seemingly inevitable functionalism, as I have already remarked. As against this, the resources I have utilized take a Kantian philosophical position on the question of determinism and free will. This afords a balanced treatment of the material and ideal realms, of biology and its cultural construction within natural constraints, and an unhampered development of confict sociology. As sociology, it eschews epistemological claims, and does not seek to validate itself (and demolish its rivals) by “critique”. Possibly this entails political and ideological costs. But the alternative has costs too. In all, then, I think that some feminists would favour the approach I have outlined: not just Jungian feminists, but ecofeminists and diference (or gender) feminists generally. Not everyone fnds the radical left ideologically congenial, or its logic convincing (or its language comprehensible), and there are many who would want a positive engagement with science (and sociology), free from critique. On the other hand, there are certainly those who would reject what I have done, as being inimical to the revolutionary or critical tradition. In the face of such fundamental disagreement, I would advocate – here as elsewhere in these writings – not critique but refexive analysis, the attempt to identify and discount for one’s own subjective bias. Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory of culture is one model for this. But it is Jung who is the psychologist of the subjective equation, and it seems highly probable to me that in these matters there are diferences of temperament involved.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See Introduction, p2f; Chapter 7, pp183f. See Chapter 7, pp167f. See Chapter 3, pp76f; Chapter 4, pp98f, 103f. See Introduction, p2f; also Chapter 7, pp183f.

Bibliography Bologh, Rosslyn (1987) “Max Weber on Erotic Love: A Feminist Enquiry”, in Whimster, S. and Lash, S. (eds.) Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London, Boston and Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp242–58. (1990) Love or Greatness? London: Unwin Hyam. Collins, Randall (1975) “Stratifcation by Sex and Age”, in Confict Sociology. New York and London: Academic Press, (ch5), pp225–85. Douglas, Claire (1990) The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the Feminine. Boston: Sigo Press. Finley, Moses I. (1981) “The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond”, in Finley, M.I. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (ed. B.D. Shaw and R.P. Saller). London: Chatto & Windus, pp3–23.

Jung and the sociology of gender

163

Jung, Carl G. (1960) “The Stages of Life”, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp387–403. (Original 1930, revised 1931) (1964) Civilization in Transition (CW10). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1964a) “Mind and Earth”, pp29-49. (1964b) “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man”, pp74-94. (1964c) “Woman in Europe”, pp 113-133). (Also in Jung 1982: 55-75) (1970) “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore”, in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. (CW9i) (2nd ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp182–203. (Also in Jung 1982: 143–64) (1982) Aspects of the Feminine. London, Henley and Melbourne: Routledge  & Kegan Paul. Lengermann, Patricia, and Niebrugge, Gillian (2007) “Marianne Weber 1870–1954 – A Woman-Centred Sociology”, in Lengermann, Patricia, and Niebrugge, Gillian (eds.) The Women Founders – Sociology and Social Theory 1830–1930. Long Grove: Waveland Press, pp193–228. Lichtblau, Klaus (1989/90) “Eros and Culture. Gender Theory in Simmel, Tonnies and Weber”. Telos 82, pp89–110. Livi-Bacci, Massimo (1997) A Concise History of World Population (2nd ed.). Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. Lorber, Judith (2010) Gender Inequality: Feminist Theory and Politics (4th ed.). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Mead, Margaret (1935) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. London: Routledge. (1962) Male and Female. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nanda, Serena, and Warms, Richard L. (2004) Cultural Anthropology (8th ed.). Belmont, Singapore, Southbank, Toronto, London, Colonia Polanco, Mexico, and Madrid: Wadsworth (Thomson Learning). Plotkin, Henry (2004) Evolutionary Thought in Psychology: A Brief History. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell. Roth, Guenther (1978) “Introduction”, in Weber, Max Economy and Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, ppxxxiii–cx. Roussel, Denis (1976) Tribu et Cite. Paris: Université Paul Valéry de Montpellier. Rowland, Susan (2002) Jung: A Feminist Revision. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Thompson, Charis, and MacGregor, Sherilyn (2017) “The Death of Nature: Foundations of Ecological Feminist Thought”, in MacGregor, Sherilyn (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Gender and the Environment. London and New York: Routledge, pp43–53. Tong, Rosemarie (2009) Feminist Thought (3rd ed.). Boulder: Westview Press. Turner, Bryan (1996) “Family, Property and Ideology”, in Turner, Bryan (ed.) For Weber (2nd ed.). London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, pp289–317. Walker, Gavin (1990) The Sociology of Sexual Polarity. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh. Now available online through Edinburgh Research Archive: www.era.lib. ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/33077 (2012) “Sociological Theory and Jungian Psychology”, History of the Social Sciences 25:1, pp52–74. (2018) Jung and Sociological Theory: Readings and Appraisal. London and New York: Routledge. Weber, Max (1968) Religion of China. New York: Free Press. (1976) The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London: New Left Books.

164

Psyche, Science and Society

(1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. (1981) General Economic History. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Wehr, Demaris (1988) Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes. London: Routledge. Whelehan, Imelda (1995) Modern Feminist Thought. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Wobbe, Theresa (2004) “Elective Afnities: Georg Simmel and Marianne Weber on Gender and Modernity”, in Marshall, Barbara L. and Witz, Anne (eds.) Engendering the Social. Maidenhead: Open University Press, ch 3, pp54–68. Zabriskie, Beverley (1990) “The Feminine Pre- and Post-Jungian”, in Barnaby, Karin and D’Acierno, Pellegrino (eds.) C.G. Jung and the Humanities. London: Routledge, pp267– 78. Also in Walker (2018) pp149–58).

7 JUNG, ECOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Introduction: sociological theory and the Anthropocene In an earlier chapter, I suggested that sociology should ground itself on a scientifc as opposed to a philosophical conception of human nature.1 I argued this in terms of Lorenzian ethology and Jungian psychology, treating these ultimately as episodes in a rather discontinuous tradition of evolutionary psychology. Central to the argument was the proposition that, rather than being a social animal, humankind is better seen as a cultural animal. Indeed, the human attempt to build society on the basis of learned behaviour instead of innate behaviour has not been altogether successful. (There are instinctive continuities, some more helpful than others.) Or at least, there have been costs as well as benefts. Of course, from another point of view, these are both philosophical conceptions, as I conceded earlier, and there are philosophers (e.g. Bergson, Santayana, Gehlen) who have argued on these lines – though currently sociological theory does not take much account of them. Schopenhauer who is in a sense their predecessor has had real impact, of course. But I want to leave that for a future occasion, and to deal with it as a scientifc conception meantime. This, then, is the argument that I want to follow through here, at least in an exploratory sense. I want to explore the thesis that, in place of the philosophical truism “Man is a social animal”, defning humankind reciprocally in relation to a solipsistic conception of society, we might defne humankind reciprocally with the Anthropocene, that is, the era of our planet in which the human presence has become a defnitive factor. In pursuing this, I  am mainly concerned with how certain sociological and anthropological traditions, specifcally of neoKantian kind, might relate to it, rather than with the latest fndings of research. That is in keeping with my approach to environmental sociology, as I argued elsewhere (Walker 2005). However, I do DOI:10.4324/9780429456268-8

166

Psyche, Science and Society

consider the “out of Africa” thesis: the recent emergence of our species from Africa, and its replacement of earlier hominids. This was not known to the earlier theorists, and its impact seems to me to be fundamental.

The Anthropocene – origins and overview The Anthropocene is the era in Earth’s history that is dominated and defned by the human presence and activities. It has a long prehistory, but has a decisive threshold in the Neolithic Revolution, around 12,000 years BP (Mannion 1991). There are factors that bias our understanding here. Far more archaeological work has been done in Europe (and perhaps North America) than elsewhere, for example in Africa or Asia. Again, more work has been done on terrestrial than aquatic sites: at any rate early humans apparently had capabilities for crossing waters that we fnd hard to come to terms with. There is gender bias: a traditional assumption that it is men who did the evolving and women were just dragged along (Hager 1997). Finally, there has been the rise of molecular biology: this has tended to contradict the older fndings of archaeology as to continuities between earlier forms of hominids and the contemporary human species (Haviland 1997; Lewin 1993). At any rate, according to current understandings, our species homo sapiens sapiens frst emerged, amid other hominid species, in Africa around 250,000 years ago (Roberts 2009). It then spread throughout Africa. The other hominid species there in time became extinct, though exactly when or why is not known. Eventually, perhaps 60,000–80,000 years ago, our species spread out of Africa into Asia (not an Exodus: most remained in Africa). This may have happened more than once, and by more than one route: the Sinai peninsula or the narrows at the foot of the Red Sea. From there, they spread across Asia, into Europe, Australasia, and eventually the Americas. This was not the frst dispersal of hominids: at least two previous episodes are known. An earlier species homo erectus had spread out from Africa across Asia and Europe perhaps 1.8  million years ago. Another species homo heidelbergensis followed around a million years later: in Europe and Asia they would evolve into the Neanderthals. Homo heidelbergensis is also the progenitor of our own species, in Africa itself. Neanderthals survived in Europe beside our own species until around 40,000 years BP; also in Asia, though less is known there. It is not known why they eventually died out. Genetic evidence shows that there was a small amount of interbreeding, though nothing is known of the forms which this took. Our species was apparently the frst to reach Australasia or the Americas. The routes of migration seem to have followed coastlines and major rivers. It was not a steady advance: the far North was reached in both Asia and Europe, but had to be abandoned later due to the ice ages. Arrival in Australasia was probably at least 40,000 years ago but might have been much earlier. Arrival in America (from Siberia, over the Bering Strait) was perhaps 16,000 years ago, or maybe a little earlier. There are uncertainties in both cases: the difculties of sea passages, or coastal passages bypassing the ice barriers, contribute to these.

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

167

This marks the frst phase of the development of the Anthropocene, the spread of our species across the habitable world: the extensifcation phase. The second phase is the intensifcation phase (to use Boserup’s terms), marked by increased impact on the natural world, and especially on other species (Boserup 1965). The Neolithic Revolution is central to this: the domestication and exploitation of plants and animals, and the beginnings of the move from hunting and gathering to agriculture and pastoralism. This does not occur equally everywhere of course: it never happened in Australia; and there are still hunting and gathering peoples now. Its beginnings are apparently contingent on the ending of the ice ages – more accurately, the beginnings of the current interglacial. In time this would lead to large settlements, towns and cities, and the beginnings of civilization. This starts in the Northern hemisphere sub-tropical regions, especially Turkey and the Near East. Its demographic impact is ambiguous: settlement tends to go with poor hygiene and disease, shortened life-spans and higher child mortality (Livi-Bacci 1997 esp. ch2:2, ch3). Again there are biases here in our knowledge. Modern hunting and gathering peoples are mostly found in extreme environments that other peoples do not want, and their way of life is adapted to these extreme environments. It may give us some insight into Stone Age conditions, but it is not simply a survival. In the same way, the range of more advanced primitive societies in the ethnographic record may give us insight into the emergence of civilization(s), but it does not simply give us the (or an) evolutionary sequence through which this occurred. And our knowledge of early civilizations is similarly skewed, towards the Near East and Egypt. Population increase clearly plays a part in all this, and indeed is presumably the main forcing factor (pace climate change). (Sociologists are often reluctant to discuss population. But looking at it in the present context, one might ask whether our planet could support a population of eight billion chimpanzees, doubling every 40  years. It is not simply a question of culture.) Population growth leads in the frst instance to dispersal, but where this is not possible, it leads to diferentiation and specialization, to sharing the resources by using them in diferent ways. In sociology this is usually considered in terms of a social division of labour, leading to a functionalist/evolutionist view of society. But it can also be considered in social ecological terms, humans developing quasi-ecological relationships with each other, of competition, predation and symbiosis. These appear in terms of wars and conquests, exploitation of labour, trade and exchange and so forth. This view rather underpins a confict sociology, a prefguration of – or a diagnosis of the necessary preconditions for – stratifcation and the state, and the emergence of complex social organization and structure (Boserup 1965, 1981; cf. Park 1952 Part 2 passim). There is a question of how all this might bear on relations between the sexes. This can be taken under three heads: patriarchy; the sexual division of labour (more broadly, division of sex roles); and the incest taboo. But these things are only to be considered here in relation to the “out of Africa” thesis and its aftermath as outlined above.

168

Psyche, Science and Society

Patriarchy, then, appears to be a factor of the intensifcation phase, albeit in its earliest stages, long before the emergence of “civilization” – stratifcation and the state. It seems to be generally contra-indicated in hunting and gathering peoples (Nanda and Warms 2004 ch 11). But it does not follow that this is its frst occurrence. There are sociological traditions that link patriarchy, at least its more extreme expression, with migration and war (and perhaps pastoralism), and its absence or less extreme expression, with settled agriculture and women’s work in the felds (e.g. Weber 1981: 26, 41f, 44). But I would be wary of speculative theory in such matters: it does not explain much to explain the “origins” of things, when social arrangements and culture are so much given to change. How did they persist – or how were they recreated, again and again – these might be better questions. (It is tempting to try to locate the aetiology in the processes of social change, rather than in those of social continuity.) I have indicated elsewhere my view that there need to be separate sociological and anthropological enquiries into these matters.2 The division of sex roles is surely a precondition for patriarchy, though it can be egalitarian. So far as I know it is not clear when it originated (to my mind it is of greater moment than the incest taboo). If it has an ethological basis, the nature of our species as specialist in non-specialization would surely tend to erode it (Lorenz indeed attributes it, and the division of labour in general, to human self-domestication [Lorenz 1971b: 236]). The ethological basis of male parental behaviour in our species should also be taken into account (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 224–34). But although the division itself appears to be universal, the form in which it appears has a great range of variation. This raises questions as to whether it has a basis in the innate capacities and afnities of the two sexes, presumably in relation to the ecological setting, or whether its causes are purely social – Durkheimian functions of avoiding confict and creating interdependence. It might be suggested, then, that for a people in migration the social factors would predominate: the ecological context would lack continuity and would tend to be discounted. By contrast, for a settled people the ecological context would predominate, and it is in that light that the innate capacities and afnities of the two sexes would be seen. But there is a further question: are these are reactive or proactive processes – do we fnd meaning or project meaning? As to the incest taboo, I think that this has traditionally been oversold. EiblEibesfeldt fnds ethological vindication for Westermarck’s hypothesis, that children raised together do not develop sexual desire for each other (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 261f). Weber echoes Westermarck, though he does not cite him (Weber 1978: 364, 688). Jung does not refer to this, though I think his views are compatible with it. But his disagreements are with Freud, and his position is more complex (Jung 1966 passim esp. pp225f, 1967: 417–20, cf. 1964a: 33f). Incest attracts positive cultural evaluation as well as taboo, especially with regard to gods and fgures of legend: there is then a symbolic dimension to consider. What is at the bottom of this is relations between consciousness and the unconscious: these have been superimposed on relations between the sexes, so that each sex holds the unconscious for the other (anima/animus). Incest fantasies commonly refect regression in the face

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

169

of problems of adaptation to the phase of infantile dependence and protection, here in sexual metaphor. The normal progression of the life-cycle is to disengage from the parent-fgure and seek a mate outside the family: an exogamous instinct limiting the endogamous (family) instinct. But it is one’s own unconscious that one must eventually come to terms with in the individuation process, and incestuous unions may be used to symbolize this, as in alchemy. The dilemmas here appear in mythology and folk-lore, and initially even in social structure – this is typical of the progression from the material to the ideal in the evolution of thought. Thus, the earliest form of social structure is the division into matrilineal moieties, cross-cut by patrilineal moieties, to give four marriage classes and a practice of cross-cousin marriage. This may be refected in the physical structure of encampment, village or city, giving them a mandala-like character. Again, the basic division will eforesce into an array of conceptual divisions: male and female, right and left, day and night, sky and earth, and so forth (Jung 1966a: 225f). D’Aquili has suggested that LéviStrauss has unacknowledged debts to Jung (D’Aquili 1975; cf. Staude 1976: 338 n66). (Jung himself acknowledges his indebtedness to John Layard.) These are complicated matters, and a full treatment would have to wait for another occasion. But it may be noted that the conception, relating male and female to consciousness and the unconscious rather than, say, to culture and nature, is reciprocal and gender-fair (cf. Ortner 1974). Jung does not suggest that women are less conscious or closer to the unconscious than men; indeed he warns men against making such interpretations. I will return to these matters briefy later. Clearly Jung sees the incest taboo as driving the elaboration and development of culture rather than accounting for the origins of culture – I have commented elsewhere on the difculties of arguing the origins of culture in the frustrations of instinct due to living in society, whether in Freudian or other terms.3 In keeping with this, he denies that the incest taboo accounts for the origins of consciousness: that is simply a factor of human evolution. Incidentally, Jung’s treatment of the incest taboo does not imply male control over women, any more than does the Westermarck hypothesis. In any case, the origins of culture and of consciousness must lie at a far earlier time in human evolution.

Human–environment relations: the anthroposphere and the biosphere In an article some years ago, I sought to analyse the main outlines of the human– environment relationship (Walker 2005). The environment is conceptually anthropocentric, but not as a set of processes: the planet Earth would do very well without the human race on it. It is not just a set of sources and sinks for human afairs: it is also natural hazard. We must interact with the environment, and do so competently in order to survive. This interaction is two-sided: it interacts with us. Our impacts on the natural world only become environmental when the natural world’s dynamics return them to us, and this is of a piece with how they impact on us of themselves.

170

Psyche, Science and Society

We can then identify three types of environmental issues: simple problems of source and sink, for example resource depletion and pollution; simple natural hazards such as earthquakes or typhoons; and synergistic problems where human activities and natural processes interact, such as deforestation, soil erosion and fooding, or overgrazing and drought. More accurately, these form a continuum with the simple problems at the poles and the synergistic problems at the centre. It is these last that are of the greatest interest. There is also the question whether the environment is ever “natural”, free from human infuence or modifcation. It is best again to see this as a continuum, from high modifcation, for example in cities, to mainly cognitive uses, for example the stars. But the topography is complex: frontiers in remote regions as well as cities can be heavily built up, and mining and extraction may also be located in remote regions. The natural environment can be analysed in terms of four spheres: atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere. The frst three together may be termed the geosphere. It is arguable where the soil (pedosphere) should be placed: lithosphere or biosphere The other main element to consider is the solar energy cascade – though geothermal energy is also a factor. Landscape formation is largely a product of geological (geothermal) processes and of the weather, which is driven by the solar energy cascade. But the central issue is that in terms of both matter and energy, the biosphere is tiny compared to the geosphere, and yet has a remarkable capability to manage it – to tame its excesses and even to tailor it to its own needs. Human activity has to be seen in that context. As a relatively large organism at a high trophic level, the laws of thermodynamics set a limit to our “natural” population. At the time of the Neolithic Revolution, the world population was probably of the order 5–20 million (Livi-Bacci has 6 million [Livi-Bacci 1997 ch1:7]). Culture has let us transcend those limits in the medium term – but it has done so through encroachment on other species (present or past – fossil fuels), not through any increase in current primary production through photosynthesis. This gives us a basic parameter of the human–environment inter-relation: human activity compromises the biosphere’s capability to manage the geosphere, partly by modifcations to the geosphere itself, for example, quarrying, mining, damming rivers, partly by modifying or appropriating the biosphere. Human activity is puny on geosphere scale, but on biosphere scale, it is massive. This is to argue that the criterion for environmental crisis should be, not whether the environment can continue to support a certain level of cultural demand, but the biosphere’s capability to manage the geosphere. When that capability is compromised, the result is both reduced resource and increased hazard. That is on the environmental side. On the human side, I have argued that the criterion should not be in terms of societal or cultural change, for these can be evaluated in many ways. The criteria should rather be in terms of human biology: life span, disease, fertility and so forth. This surely must also have a psychological dimension, but again one would want a measure for this in terms of health or wholeness, not merely of social adjustment or happiness. These are questions of value-orientation:

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

171

is society our destiny, so that a good life is simply a life in a good society? Or is it merely one aspect of our existential situation? (cf. Walker 2018: 197f). The approach just outlined does suggest an intriguing line of thought: if the biosphere seeks to manage the geosphere, does it also seek to manage human society? Both are catastrophic in nature, that is, given to extreme events; and both work on principles which are alien to the biosphere’s “interests”. But if so, then what is the role of culture? How far does it mediate the biosphere’s management of human society, how far does it interfere with it? What is culture “about”? This line of thought carries the risk of getting lost in metaphor. Even so, it must be recognized that the biosphere is quasi-purposive. I  do not mean to go beyond “Darwinian” reasoning (broadly interpreted) in saying this. But it needs to be recognized that the biosphere is a doubly unique element in the natural environment (or planetary process). It plays a key role in managing the geosphere, and it is quasi-purposive. It is in this light that I want to focus here on the developing interactions between the biosphere and the sphere of human activity – the anthroposphere. Before going into this, something should be said about the basic ecological relationships: competition, predator-prey and symbiosis. These are the simplest pure types: there are intermediate and more complex cases. It is always worth bearing in mind the energy fows: who is producing, who is consuming; though there can be other considerations. Predation does not always mean macro-predation, as with a fox eating a rabbit. Parasites are predators too. Many disease pathogens are predators, though not all are. There is often co-evolution of predator and prey; for example, plants secreting silica in their leaves to wear down the teeth of the animals that eat them, while the animals develop teeth that replace themselves (Carwardine 2009: 48). Predatorprey relations tend to evolve into symbiotic relations in the long run: it is not to the survival-advantage of the predator species to make its prey extinct. It is in competition that the most acute conficts are found, not least in competition within the same species. Competition drives dispersal, and hence speciation due to adaption to new environments. Ultimately, it this process that provides the possibility of predator-prey relations. Competition is not always direct, the bigger rabbit pushing the smaller rabbit of the grass. It can take many indirect forms. For example, rhododendrons poison the soil so that other plants cannot grow there. Plants are the great experts in manipulating other species. They use animals to transfer their pollen or transport and fertilise their seeds; they use soil fungi to extend the range and efectiveness of their roots, for example. They use colours, scents, sweet or bitter favours, succulent fesh or thorns, to attract or repel or channel other species’ behaviour. They also secrete toxins and other drugs – they can suppress the fertility of the animals that prey on them (or tread on them). One should look at the pharmacology of this with a Darwinian eye, and not simply assume coincidence. Plants have a wide range of symbiotic relations, but they are sophisticated in competition and predator-prey relations too (there are predatory plants, incidentally).

172

Psyche, Science and Society

In this frame, I want now to look at human–environment relations as an interpenetration of the anthroposphere and the biosphere. On the one side, then, humans carry their activities into the natural environment. This takes forms such as construction works, mining and quarrying, damming rivers and so forth – geosphere impacts. There is also the impact of fre, and of pollution and waste (including human waste). These indirectly impact the biosphere, as altering the conditions for other species. But there are also direct impacts on the biosphere: from hunting and fshing, gathering roots, berries and nuts, gathering wood for fuel or tools or other purposes and so forth, on to horticulture and farming, raising livestock and so forth. This is an appropriation of the biosphere for human use. As such, it refects a typical development from predation to symbiosis. But there is also a strong element from the outset of competition for the use of resources, including an element of habitat destruction. And there is also resistance to predation by other species. All these activities together can be termed the anthroposphere. On the other side, the biosphere invades and colonizes the anthroposphere. That is, the anthroposphere afords a set of ecological niches to other species, again in terms of competition, predation and symbiosis. The focus here is not necessarily the human organism itself, though certainly we attract micro-predators (parasites). But so also do our pets and livestock, and our crops. Other species come to share our houses, and our granaries and barns, our felds and gardens, often as competitors or symbionts (e.g. predators on our competitors – cats eating our mice, say). The relations can be complicated. For example, there are fungi which live on our stored foodstufs – often those intended for our livestock – which secrete toxins (mycotoxins) that compromise their immune systems, leaving them open to attack by other organisms, that is, disease pathogens. These fungi are competing with us for control of a food resource (so also are the disease pathogens, of course). But it is the case of symbiosis that is most interesting, due to its mutualistic character. Our crops, livestock, pets and so forth are in symbiotic relationship with us. This should be seen from the point of view of the species rather than the individual (I leave aside the question of “the selfsh gene”). The formation of symbiotic relations is quasi-purposive. The underlying process is random variation and natural selection, of course. Even so, we can say, metaphorically, that human pressure has caused these species to adapt by seeking symbiotic relationships with us, that this is their survival strategy. Sociology and anthropology would approach this simply as culture, the human use of the environment. It would not necessarily argue that all culture is instrumental or rational in character: it can also be expressive. There is a range of argument over that: theories of primitive mentality; primitive rationality in the face of limited knowledge and understanding; the limits of human reason in a world not wholly amenable to reason; besides theses of symbolism variously supplying these defciencies or serving positive functions for social solidarity – possibly with a Freudian twist. There is perhaps a tendency to polarise the arguments in mutual critique, the

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

173

one side stressing rationality-if-you-look-at-it-in-the-right-way, the other stressing the non-rational functions of symbolism. But to view this in ecological terms brings out another aspect altogether: surely the natural world is in part setting the agenda? The formation of a symbiotic relationship is a mutual, reciprocal process, and that process cannot be cultural (for all that it may be quasi-purposive) on the side of the partner species. Symbiotic relations entail behaviour. At the plant level or below, this may be no more than a matter of simple tropisms, but where it involves even simple animals the behaviour can be quite complex (e.g. the yucca moth or the leaf-cutting ant that Jung cites [Jung 1960a: 132, 137, 1960b: 201]). Typically, this will be a matter of instinct, innate motor sequences and their releasers. Indeed, symbiosis in many ways resembles social behaviour, including its relative immunity to modifcation through learning, or through evolutionary adaptation (both species must adapt together). Plants as I have remarked before have a long history of manipulating the behaviour of animals, insects, birds and mammals, to aid in their reproduction and dispersal. This surely includes ourselves: we grow fowers in our gardens for their beauty, not for their use. But why do we fnd them beautiful? Did we decide this, or did they? Hemmer argues that in the breeding of domesticated animals, coloration is often a guide to temperament (Hemmer 1990 esp. chs 8 & 9). There are chemical pathways in the animal’s metabolism that lead to the syntheses of, on the one side, substances that control the colour and patterns of the pelt, on the other side, tranquilisers that calm its behaviour – including its fear-response to human contact. Domestication typically entails what may be termed a regressive evolution: reduction of brain size, reduced response to environmental stimuli, and disruption of innate behaviour patterns, as well as greater variation in size and appearance. The variations in coloration then can serve as a guide in breeding, to produce desirable physical and temperamental traits. This was also apparently a factor in the beginnings of domestication, the initial choice of animals for capture and taming, leading to domestication. Individuals of unusual appearance were chosen, and often for cultic or other symbolic rather than utilitarian purposes, at least initially. On the animal species’ side, we can surely see this as part of the species’ survival strategy in the face of increasing human pressure: individuals soliciting a symbiotic relationship with humankind. But what accounts for our response? We might be reluctant to look outside culture to explain these things, but there are problems with that. Symbiotic relationships need time for their development: does human culture have of itself enough stability, enough persistence over time to permit this? Or should we rather adduce an innate psychological – or ethological – basis? Lorenz points to a range of fragmentary instinctive responses that we still have towards other species, or even to landscape features and the like (Lorenz 1971a: 162f). He also stresses our “openness to the world” – I have discussed this in a previous chapter. Perhaps then we are “open” to have other species set up an ethological dialogue with us, possibly without our being aware of it, or at least without our questioning it. Indeed, this might be the secret – or a secret – of our

174

Psyche, Science and Society

species’ success as compared with other hominids – they did not domesticate other species, so far as is known. Incidentally this also implies that our species were superior hunters – and more difcult prey – insofar as predator-prey relations tend to evolve into (and so precede) symbiotic relations. Culture overlays its own meaning and adaptations onto these ethological meanings – fowers may “be” beautiful, but we decide that this fower symbolizes love, that fower symbolizes mourning. Again, besides such changes in meaning there is also physical manipulation, through selective breeding, cross-breeding, grafting, and most recently genetic engineering. You could say that we have a tendency to push symbiosis back towards predation. Generally these things are driven by societal imperatives or interests. The economy is the most obvious case, but there are others: medicine and hygiene, military afairs, transport and communication, and so on. But while these things might present the appearance of instrumentality or rationality, this still leaves questions. How is it decided what things are “economic”, or what things have medical value – or in what terms? How are these things defned or constructed? As Weber argues, rationality is good for telling us how to do things, but the choice what things to do may be made on other grounds. Moreover, rationality is always rationality from a particular point of view: what is economically rational may not be militarily or medically rational, and vice versa. There is ample room for the irrational in human afairs: indeed it may be needed to fll a vacuum. Though that does not mean that it is “functional”, or imply a stable state of afairs. Nor does it invite a solipsistic view of society/culture as only concerned with itself, immune to the natural world in which it is located. Rather it leaves room for environmental factors to penetrate human afairs – including the kind of quasi-purposive biological factors I have been pointing to. The interpenetration of the anthroposphere and the biosphere then takes place at a psychic level, as well as at a physical level. And it seems to me that here, Jungian psychology has obvious value. Jung’s notion of the archetypes and the collective unconscious is compatible with the ethological argument: indeed Jung refers to symbiotic relations as illustrations of the archetypes (Jung 1960a: 132, 137, 1960b: 201; Evans 1975: 57–9). This notion is the basis for a theory of psyche and culture that can work right across the various levels of irrationality and rationality in human afairs, in terms that are quite relatable to our major sociological traditions – especially in my view Weber: a critical conception of limited rationality and metastable symbol systems in dialogue with each other (Walker 2012; above pp68f esp. p69, 72f). This to my mind raises an interesting possibility. Earlier, I analysed the intensifcation phase of the Anthropocene in terms of two reciprocal processes: the domestication of plants and animals, and the emergence of quasi-ecological relationships within our own species in (or underlying) the development of complex social organizations and structures. Is it possible that something of the same reasoning might apply there as just described – that these are in some sense parallel processes? There are theses of Jung that might bear on this, as I will try to show.

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

175

Jungian environmental psychology: migration and the acquisition of environment Jung’s most basic statement on environmental psychology (or anthropology) is the essay “Mind and Earth” (Jung 1964a). Originally this was the second part of an essay written for a volume of essays edited by Count Hermann Keyserling, published in 1927. The two parts were then rewritten and published separately in 1931: the companion essay is “The Structure of the Psyche” (Jung 1960e). The two essays should really be read together. They (the former especially) should also be read with other essays in CW10 part 7 (Jung 1964); in some of these Jung comments on Keyserling’s ideas. They might also be read with other essays, such as “Woman in Europe”, “Spirit and Life” and “The Stages of Life” (Jung 1960c, 1960d, 1964e).4 I have discussed the issues in an earlier chapter, apropos Jung’s considerations on race.5 There my concern was whether this was racist science, and I left the question whether it was valid science to a later chapter, describing it as an ethological or ecological rather than a sociological or anthropological thesis. It is this question that is to be taken up now. Starting with the frst essay, Jung begins by describing the structure of consciousness at some length, then seeks to establish the unconscious, especially the collective unconscious, and to ask if it has a structure too. This leads to the archetypes; Jung discusses them in terms of mythology, which he describes as a projection of the collective unconscious onto the surrounding world: stars, sun and moon, day and night, storms, rivers and mountains and other features of weather and landscape, and so on. Myth does not simply explain these things: it is as much a question of afect, of the emotional reactions to them. Primitive peoples live in a participation mystique with their environment, projecting their psyches onto its features to create (as I would put it) a symbol-pregnant or dream-landscape. This extends to the body too: such impulses as sex or hunger; and to situations of danger and the like. Again, it extends to persons: a powerful or impressive individual; father, mother, child. These indeed are powerful archetypes, which come to play a key role in religion or politics. As conscious individuality emerges, the collective unconscious becomes, like the outer world, something we have to take into account and adapt to. But in itself it is rather a prefguration of consciousness, as a means (or system) of adaptation to the world. Jung takes this up (the second essay) with the remark that the psyche has, or can be viewed under, two aspects, a causeless creative principle or a product of cause and efect. (In other writings this is more simply an ideal and a material aspect.) It is the latter aspect that he now seeks to pursue: the psyche “as a system of adaptation determined by the conditions of an earthly environment” (Jung 1964a: 29). The archetypes of the collective unconscious are fundamental to that adaptation: The archetypes[,] are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk

176

Psyche, Science and Society

not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure – indeed, they are its psychic aspect. They represent, on the one hand, a very strong instinctive conservatism, while on the other hand they are the most efective means conceivable of instinctive adaptation. Thus they are essentially the chthonic portion of the psyche, if we may use such an expression – that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature, or in which its link with the earth and the world appears at its most tangible. The psychic infuence of the earth and its law is seen most clearly in these primordial images. (Jung 1964a: 31) Jung illustrates the continuing signifcance of the archetypes by comparing the psyche to a house, whose diferent storeys and cellars date from diferent eras (cf. Jung 1963: 155f). Our consciousness only accesses the topmost levels, but the deeper levels are not mere relics; they are still alive and active within us. A cave beneath the (Roman) cellar represents the prehistoric, the level that is here most to our purpose. Prehistoric humans were still in full possession of their animal instincts, archetypally oriented and relatively untrammelled by consciousness. But how are we to know which the most important (or most immediate) archetypes were? To answer this, Jung invokes the phylogenetic (biogenetic) law: in childhood, we recapitulate the prehistory of the race and of humankind in general. (Though Jung speaks of race, he does not expand on the term; moreover, it is not the “geology of the psyche” diagram discussed in another chapter that he invokes [Jung 1990 diagram 16: p133f].)6 As so often, he points to the psychological similarity between the primitive and the child. But uncharacteristically, it is in terms of the child that he proceeds to argue his thesis. More accurately, he traces it through the human life-cycle – with the implication that the life-cycle and human history alike follow a trajectory in psyche and culture from the material to the ideal. The child, then, starts out in a condition of participation mystique with its parents. Development to a continuous and separate consciousness is gradual, and only completed at puberty. The frst and most fundamental archetype then is the mother. She begins as an all-providing all-encompassing Mother-goddess; but as the child develops, this reduces to the actual personal mother, while the various aspects of Nature that were merged in her now emerge in their own right. The second archetype is the father; and similar considerations apply. Jung does not equate woman with Nature, man with culture: rather Nature has both female and male aspects (cf. Zabriskie 1990). The former are nourishing or protective: the land, quiescent and fruitful; the latter are rather dynamic: rivers, storms and lightning. As the child encounters the natural world for itself, so also it moves out into society as a person in his or her own right – primitives mark this with puberty rituals. Society too has its female and male sectors: the family and community; law and the state. But in the world of social relationships, there is much less scope for the unconscious.

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

177

In this phase, the participation mystique between child and parents recedes. The mother archetype transforms into the anima in men; the father archetype into the animus in women. With this, the psychic link with the parent is fnally broken, and a new psychic link is formed with the partner of the opposite sex. Jung incidentally sees all this as the unfolding of an innate process (or programme): he does not believe that there must be a “reproduction” of male or female sexuality as a cultural artefact, or draw on the incest taboo to explain it. Jung digresses here into a lengthy commentary on the anima and animus: he is drawn back to the opposite pole, the ideal aspect of the psyche (he hints at other archetypes too – presumably the shadow, wise man etc.). This relates to the problem of adapting to the collective unconscious, the psyche’s concern with itself. But he returns to the material pole, with a consideration of migration. America is the greatest modern example of migration: a predominantly Germanic European population transported en masse to another continent (Jung 1964a: 45f, 1964b). A new physical type quickly emerges (Jung cites Boas here), a Yankee type that appears more like the Native American than any of the parent nations (Jung 1964a: 45, 1964b: 503). But even more striking are the psychological changes. These seem in part to come from the Afro-American population: laughter, gait and posture in both men and women, music and dance, and so forth. But these things are superfcial, mere behaviour. Deeper and more subtle is the infuence of the Native American. This appears in hero myths and images, in the competitive and heroic ethos of sports, in initiations and secret societies, in spiritualism and possession in religion. The white American has an Indian soul. This illustrates a general principle, that one cannot conquer a foreign land without being conquered by it in turn. The children acquire the spirits of the conquered, rather than those of their own parent community. Jung has other, more piecemeal, remarks. The primordial unity of nature, biology, society and psyche can be disrupted in either of two ways. Migration is one; the other is the imposition of a more advanced culture, forcing an untimely development of consciousness, and creating a gulf between consciousness and the unconscious. This is happening now with European colonization in, for example, Africa or Polynesia. It also occurred in early mediaeval northern Europe, though in less drastic form, with Christianization (this thesis has been in play since mediaeval times; Jung did not originate it). This still has resonances now (Jung 1964c: 524). Jung also remarks on the gulf between consciousness and unconscious in Americans. The Jews were subject to the former process but not the latter; neither process has afected India or China. A point which should be brought out is that for Jung, if you lose the earth, you also lose the body (Jung 1964d: 485f). The psyche has two aspects, the ideal or spiritual, and the material: “the psyche as a system of adaptation determined by the conditions of an earthly environment” (Jung 1964a: 29). Migratory peoples, losing contact with the earth, become hyper-spiritual and contemptuous of the body. Jung often criticizes this tendency in Judeo-Christian religion.

178

Psyche, Science and Society

What then can we make of Jung’s ideas? Others have speculated on the infuence of the earth, including Marx (infuenced by Pierre Trémaux; Jung does not refer to him). Engels was scathing (Poliakov 1974: 244–6). The main question here, though, is, how do Jung’s ideas relate to the “out of Africa” thesis: the theory that our species only left Africa around 80,000 years ago, almost wholly displacing the hominids from earlier difusions, at least in Asia and Europe – ours was the frst hominid species to enter Australia or the Americas. A like process happened within Africa itself, though less is known of it. This might suggest that ours is an inherently migratory species. At least it requires us to look more carefully at the term “chthonic” that Jung uses: we may put our roots down into the earth, but we do not arise from the earth. We do not have a detailed history of the migrations, but apparently they tended to follow coastlines and major rivers. Presumably the main forcing factor was population increase, with climate change as a modifying factor, especially as the ice ages and interglacials opened up and closed of the northern regions (including briefy opening the entrance to the Americas from Siberia). Movement then would typically have been a series of pulses carried along the lines of migration. By analogy with contemporary nomadic hunters and gatherers, human groups would have wandered cyclically within a given territory. Presumably, then, it is the boundaries of that territory that would have progressively moved, maybe the group splitting in response to increased size; but we cannot say how quick or gradual that process would have been. Again, there must have been some substantial journeys: sea crossings or crossings of inhospitable icebound regions, mountains or deserts. If, say, they left Africa 80,000 years ago and arrived in Australia 40,000 years ago, that does not mean they headed straight for Australia and took 40,000 years to get there! There is also the question whether they thought of themselves as migratory, as travelling to new lands, rather than just wandering through a familiar territory. We cannot simply infer this from the objective fact, which were they doing. Migration can be a spiritual metaphor even among sedentary peoples. This also raises the question, would the whole group share a common mentality? Or would there rather be, in Radin’s terms, a division of mentalities, men of thought and men of action, religious and non-religious men? Radin 1953 chs 3 & 4). A small number of shamanistic men or women who thought deeply about such matters, and an unrefective majority who accepted what they said without giving it much thought while getting on with the practicalities of life? It is difcult to see how else, without such shamanistic inspiration, these groups could have brought themselves to undertake sea voyages and other long journeys into the unknown. Migration raises the ethological question: how does an animal “acquire” a new environment? Here we might initially turn to Lorenz. Species evolve in adaptation to their specifc environments: often they become increasingly narrowly adapted and infexible. Humans are specialists in non-specialization, and as such are comparable with rats and ravens. It is the specialists in non-specialization that can adapt to diferent environments; that is why we have spread across the world while the other apes have not. But we also have the apes’ strongly developed learning

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

179

capacity, especially in terms of Gestalt learning. Gestalt perception instantly grasps a complex pattern, though it is fallible. Trial-and-error learning is slower, and serves as a piecemeal corrective or refnement of Gestalt learning. But specialists in nonspecialization have great fexibility in their trial-and-error learning. Turning now to Jungian terms, this suggests that the acquisition of the new environment is initially a proactive process of intuition, and the promiscuous and wholesale projection of archetypes onto the surrounding world. (Lorenz comments on our tendency to project fragments of innate perception/recognition onto the natural world – landscape formations and the like as well as animal species [Lorenz 1971a: 162f].) This would then be gradually modifed in the light of the demands of actually living this environment, the resources and hazards as encountered day to day and season to season. Out of this would emerge a complex fabric of symbols, beliefs, ideas, rituals, techniques and so forth – not internally consistent, and not shared equally among all members. There is perhaps more similarity, or at least overlap, between Lévy-Bruhl’s prelogical mentality and Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage than is sometimes admitted (Lévi-Strauss 1972). (The metaphor from labour may make Lévi-Strauss’ conception more palatable to Marxists, but is it still a metaphor.) Though I  fnd Radin’s approach with its stress on diferences of temperament found even among primitives more convincing than either. It is worth pointing out that the processes adduced here (regardless of the pre-feminist language) involve women as much as men, and should refect the psychologies – and the activities – of both sexes. As to human groups in course of migration, it is basically the practical element of living the environment that is missing, or at least reduced in continuity and impact. The projection of archetypes then would be pulled towards the other, spiritual, pole, the shaman’s concern to understand and manage his or her own psyche. This would not be balanced by material concerns; and this would also condition the conceptions of human biology – including sex and reproduction. So also the conceptions of social relationships – especially as regards gender and age. Consequences might extend to a mutation of men’s hunting towards warfare, and of women’s work from foraging towards domestic functions – building shelters, fre-tending, cooking, childcare. (Weber speaks of a diference of this kind – not his own suggestion, but he thinks there is something in it [Weber 1981: 26, 41f, 44].) What then when the two types, migratory and settled, encounter each other? An ecologically grounded sociological approach that might bear on this is the immigrant-host theory of race relations, with its four stages of competition, confict, accommodation and assimilation (Park 1950 esp. chs 7, 9, 14, 26, 1952 esp. chs 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19). This is underpinned by a conception of human afairs as arrayed on four levels: the ecological, the economic, the political and the cultural. The frst stage, competition, is an ecological relationship, physical competition for resources such as soil and water. The “races” compete as would the various plant species in a wood or a meadow. The second stage, confict, is quasi-sociological: relations (perhaps including some trade), often violent, between diferent settled groups. The third stage, accommodation, sees the formation of exchange relationships – formally

180

Psyche, Science and Society

peaceful, though often inequitable, and with social order enforced by a coercive state. The fourth stage, assimilation, is one of consensual social relations governed non-coercively by shared norms and values. With this as background, the focus of concern is the interplay of two forms of sociation, the one based on competition, the other on consensus. These are termed respectively symbiosis and socialization (the terminology is distinctive). The city is above all the locus of symbiotic relationships – a complex division of labour and practical, unsentimental, exchange of services. People do not live in a city because they like each other, or because they are like each other, but because they fnd each other useful. Against this, the rural setting is the realm of solidaristic, sentimental, relations, based on shared norms and values. But this situation is neither primordial nor unitary. Rather it is a distribution (termed a community – on analogy with plant ecology) of small solidary groups in competition with each other. And generally there is a history behind this, of migration, war and conquest. The race relations cycle then refects the stages through which this develops. It will generally end up with some stable arrangement; but this can take diferent forms. Thus, in India a more advanced race conquered a less advanced one, sought to maintain its privileges and separateness, and imposed a caste system. In China, less advanced races conquered a more advanced one, and must perforce assimilate, learn their ways, in order to govern them. In Europe there emerged a patchwork of sub-races, with scattered enclaves or diasporas of smaller ethnicities (Park 1950b). But in all cases, it is the city that fnally prevails, draws everyone into its symbiotic relationships and dissolves their sentiments and particularisms – status conficts changing to class conficts.7 This happened frst in Europe, but European dominance has now imposed it on the whole world. Nationalism is a backlash against it. (This has some similarity to Gellner’s analysis of European nationalism, though Gellner, who terms himself a materialist functionalist, does not refer to this work [Gellner 1983: note esp. pp9–13; above p76].) Indeed, race problems generally are a reaction to the breakdown of previously stable inter-racial accommodations. Park holds that there was also a caste system in the American South – and, presciently, that the privileged caste following the Civil War will go to any lengths to defend it. Park barely defnes the term race or distinguishes it from ethnicity: rather these are whatever groups engage in these processes. He stresses the cultural and subjective aspect of race over the biological. The biological aspect of race is a consequence of isolation and inbreeding – but given endogamy and settlement patterns that refect ecological competition, isolation can be as much social as geographical. Race then is as much a product as a cause. Again, the city favours inter-breeding: an important part of how it breaks down race diferences. But an evident racial sign such as skin colour can impede this process. I have commented in a previous chapter that a difculty with relating the Chicago School to other sociological approaches is its failure to develop a macrosociology, especially as regards stratifcation and the state.8 Park makes almost no engagement with Marx, nor with Weber – surprising perhaps, given that he had studied in Germany with Simmel. Again, Park accepts conquest theories of the

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

181

state with little reservation (he cites Gumplowicz and Oppenheimer; also Ratzel). Weber was more sceptical (Weber 1976: 69). But there is a difculty of another order: Park is presenting a theory of societal process in a historical frame – as opposed to a quasi-organismic “society” subject to an “evolution” whose mechanisms are never specifed. In the heyday of functionalism intellectual fashion turned against such a conception; but that, in turn, has since been challenged (e.g. Mann 1986; Wallerstein 1991; cf. Frisby and Sayer 1986 ch 3). It should perhaps also be said that Park was largely infuenced by plant ecology – community, dominance and succession – and that he uses the term symbiosis in a wide sense to include predator-prey relations. The terminology I use in this chapter is more recent, taking account of energy fows through ecosystems and biogeochemical cycling. Incidentally, the cycle of competition, confict, accommodation and assimilation is by no means limited to race relations, but refers rather to general societal processes (Athens 2013). This includes how one becomes a part of society (acculturation is the preferred term here; socialization refers to something quite diferent). Indeed, the “person” is an accommodation, an internalization of social roles. It is a social mask, from which the individual within takes a certain critical distance. But it in the city that one learns to do this, that individuals are found; a factor of the complex of symbiotic relations. This is quite a Jungian view; but Park does not cite Jung, though he does cite Adler, Freud and Janet (Park 1950a). How then does Jung’s thesis look in the light of Park’s sociology? Both approaches are ecological; their focus is on environmental adaptation – taking the people already present as part of the environment. No weight is placed on inherited characteristics; rather this is contradicted. (In fact, “race” in this biological sense need never enter into it: immigrant-host relations would still arise in the case of successive waves of immigration from the same origin, or with colonists’ descendants returning to the parent country.) The notion of race here is cultural rather than biological; or perhaps better, its biological ground is biogeographical rather than evolutionary (and does not imply racial hierarchies). The diference is that Park’s sociological concern is with confict and consensus as principles of sociation, while Jung’s psychological concern is with consciousness and the unconscious. There is also a diference in values: Park is not a critic of modernity in the way that Jung is. For him, the city is the locus of individuality; Jung would incline to see it as a threat to individuality. He is protective of consciousness and fears it being swamped in the mass, though his views on this soften later. Even so, they are both interested in understanding the world as it is; they are neither of them simply prescriptive. That said, Jung’s archetypal thesis gives his approach an ethological dimension. That is its great interest here. At an earlier point in this chapter, discussing the domestication and exploitation of plants and animals, I argued that the interpenetration of the anthroposphere and the biosphere takes place at a psychic as well as at a physical level, and so raises ethological questions, questions of innate psychology. Symbiotic relations especially seem to entail the colonization of our archetypes by the partner species.

182 Psyche, Science and Society

And I raised the question whether similar reasoning might be applied as regards the reciprocal process, the emergence of quasi-ecological relations within our own species, leading to the emergence of complex social organizations and structures. This is what I now want to consider. There is a diference, of course. The former case is asymmetrical, in that the partner species do not have culture and are not capable of acting instrumentally – for all that evolution may present the appearance of purposive action. In the case of contact upon migration, however, both sides are human, have culture and are capable of instrumentality. The relationship can still be asymmetrical, as Park argues, and there can be diferent cases. But however that may be, the question remains: if the psychic apparatus exists, why would it not be operating? The in-migrating group must acquire the new environment in all its aspects, and that must include any pre-existing human presence. This does not mean just the people themselves, but also their use and impact on the environment, what marks they have left on it, how they have thought it, named it, and so forth. (Place-names and the native words for geographical features can be most persistent.) And this process of acquisition, as I have suggested earlier, would initially be a matter of a proactive process of intuition, and the promiscuous and wholesale projection of archetypes (with subsequent gradual modifcation in the light of the demands of actual experience). Jung argues that the incomers would be vulnerable here, since they lack any similar grounding while migrating – or have cut themselves of from their grounding in their place of origin. Conversely the native peoples would be relatively immune, being grounded in their own earth. Again, this makes the relation asymmetrical, for all that both sides are cultural species. Immigrant-host theory represents one case of the development of complex social structure through quasi-ecological processes; the cycle of competition-confictaccommodation-assimilation has more general application. Jung then would point to unconscious counter-currents, a reverse assimilation, perhaps even in advance of the conscious or overt processes, that favours the indigenous or subordinate elements. This most obviously in situations of colonization or colonial rule, or as in America, their aftermath. One can separate out three levels, then, in Jung’s America thesis. The frst is that the incomers and the natives must have a cultural and psychic impact on each other – with the impact stronger on the incomers. This might well penetrate into the unconscious, for example through folk tales and nursery stories; indeed native women might be raising incomer children as nannies, though in the American case it was African slaves not Native Americans who played that role. The second level is that of Jung’s comments on the Black infuence in America: gait and movement, laughter, and so forth. Jung designates this as “behaviour”, and it is surely ethological: it recalls Lorenz’s remarks on intention movements and their role in instinctive social behaviour. Lorenz indeed says that it is mostly here that instinctive behaviour still survives in our species (Lorenz 1971a: 162). But as regards the Indian infuence, Jung argues for another deeper, archetypal, level, in keeping with the acquisition of landscape, weather, fora and fauna – the

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

183

ethological processes of acquiring a new environment. At this (third) level, the incomers’ unconscious is pervaded – or “colonized” as I would say – by that of the natives. Thus, American culture has modelled the hero archetype after Indian types; and it is Indian cultural values that have pervaded its sports – and entered its religion. The frst of these three levels might seem to ft with sociological thinking in terms of conscience collective, socialization (acculturation) and personality formation, and so forth. But the other two arguments do not. The second is clearly ethological, invoking an animal level that sociologists would tend to discount (they would probably refer derisively to Le Bon, not to Lorenz [Brown 1965: 710f, 733–6]). The third is a distinctly Jungian conception, in terms of the archetypes and the collective unconscious – the interface, if you like, between ethology and culture. It is where Jung is most likely to be dismissed as a “mystic”. This thesis might seem fanciful or obscure, but as I have tried to show, there is an analogous process in our symbiotic relationships with plants and animals. What, fnally, are we to make of all this? Jung does have a talent for bringing out the latent positivist in his critics. But the arguments might best frst be viewed in the light of Lorenzian ethology. Do not social animals – for example migratory herd animals – live at one remove from their environment (there are costs as well as benefts to living in groups, and it can lead to sexual selection playing a greater role than natural selection)? How does an animal entering a new region “acquire” the strange environment, including potential competitors? These are ethological questions, though culture may make the human case more complicated. And Jung is not wrong to approach the matter in proactive rather than reactive terms. Equally, some of his notions do resonate with familiar conceptions in sociological – and anthropological – theory, as I have shown. Some of Jung’s considerations here lie towards the journalistic end of the spectrum of his writings – I have commented earlier on the infuence of Keyserling – and refect impressionistic observations. They are driven by curiosity; these matters are not central to his oeuvre in the way they are for Park. If he is giving his intuition free rein, I do not see the harm in it: he admits the insecurity of the procedure and the elusive nature of the phenomena. Science has to steer a course between speculation and dogma. Dogma may seem to be the safer option, but – safer from what?

Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to follow through on the idea that sociology should ground itself on a scientifc rather than a philosophical conception of humankind. More specifcally, I proposed that we should defne humankind reciprocally with the Anthropocene. I proposed this in preference to the conventional philosophical notion (or truism) that “Man is a social animal”. The obvious riposte to this is that there are many social animals, but only one cultural animal – as Kroeber argued (Kroeber 1952a: 162f, 1952b: 118f). Lorenz’s views accord with this: humankind is a

184

Psyche, Science and Society

specialist in non-specialization; our instinctive behaviour has fragmented and atrophied, permitting the hypertrophy of our learned behaviour; we have then rebuilt our former instinctive sociality on that basis. Lorenz argues that there is a degree of symmetry between learned and instinctive social behaviour and even some carryover from our fragmentary instinctive behaviour: this leads him towards a consensus sociology, on the lines of Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967). I would argue rather for a confict sociology, and a more problematic relation between instinct and culture: I would look to Jung with his metastable view of psyche and culture to bridge that gap. But Lorenz and Jung would both agree that humankind is the animal that knows many ways that it could live but does not know how it must live: that is the fundamental problem of culture. A number of objections may be raised to the notion of man (sic) as a social animal.9 But the point I want to pursue here is that an undue, not to say exclusive, focus on our social relationships and activities makes for what is efect a kind of solipsism, where the world is society’s dream: nature in all its aspects is merely a blank screen, onto which society projects whatever ideas arise within it according to its own dynamics or concerns. This may originate in the cognitive sociology of the later Durkheim, and be “confrmed” in the linguistics of de Saussure, but a similar argument can be derived from Marx’ notion of ideology, and the two have converged to create one of the orthodoxies of modern sociology, at least in the critical tradition and/or radical left: an extreme social constructivism that distances itself from “essentialism”. Sociology has a fundamental methodological problem in how to deal with the non-sociocultural levels of reality. This touches a wide range of issues, including race, gender, the life-cycle, the body, health and sickness, sanity and madness, the natural environment, natural disaster and science itself. The tendency of sociology – following Boas’ anthropology – has been to take race as providing the paradigm case: race is not biology, race is culture. But can this be generalized? Granted, race is biologically trivial, and its afrmation is politically noxious: we do well to take a critical distance. But the natural environment lies at the other end of the spectrum: environmental processes are of real weight and moment, and it is denial of environmental crisis that is politically noxious. Sociology then needs a methodology that can work fexibly across the whole range, and make a balanced assessment of the various felds each on its merits. I would argue that it is the neoKantian tradition that can provide this, with its moderate constructivism that allows Nature to constrain what we ideas of it we can maintain. Again, it seems to me that the solipsistic position of the critical/radical left that I have criticized arises from their commitment to determinism: all this is structural-determinist sociology. They consider it their task to diagnose a vicious determinism in human afairs, and to formulate a virtuous determinism that will drive it out. This must be at the societal level: any determinisms from the other levels, for example biological determinism in race or gender, must be excluded or “critiqued”. The neoKantian tradition rather attacks the logic of determinism itself, fnding a place for free will and consciousness in human afairs while locating

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

185

those afairs in a deterministic natural world. It should go without saying that this by no means excludes raising a confict sociology that can identify exploitation or oppression (though the value judgements must be raised in a separate exercise outside the science). In the light of this, I would propose that we should view humankind on four levels or strata: 1

2

3

4

Animal. This includes behaviour as well as anatomy and physiology, and it should be noted that there are ethological grounds for our individuality as well as for our sociality – we are not ants or termites. We should recall Lorenz’s contrast of the sociality of rats and that of greylag geese. Environment. We live in a material environment – or rather, environments: humankind as a specialist in non-specialization can adapt and fnd diferent ways of life in a wide range of environments, even with a Palaeolithic technology. The environment presents resources, hazards, conditioning factors (e.g. weather, night and day) and neutral factors. Psyche. The human psyche is proactive: it projects meaning; it does not merely fnd or refect meaning. It also has concerns with its own management. There is a complex interface between psyche and ethology: Jung’s archetype theory seeks to address this (cf. archetype and Gestalt). Social interaction. Our interactions with each other create (and depend on) a shared world of meaning.

The notion that Man is a social animal grounds a claim that the human mentality is a collective mentality. How do the previous points bear on this? All social animals have a collective mentality, regardless whether it is grounded in instinctive or learned behaviour. Indeed, this also holds to a degree for nonsocial animals, and indeed may extend across the range of ecological relations too (especially symbiosis). It is more a question of common life-worlds (in the von Uexküll sense; the world the animal’s sensory apparatus reveals to it) than of common species or sociality. Moreover, intraspecifc aggression drives dispersion: animals live in populations, not in species. Humankind is no exception to this: we live in societies, not in society; we have cultures not culture; we have languages not language. Moreover, as population density increases, the whole array of ecological relations appears: competition, predator-prey, symbiosis. In-group and out-group moralities pervade our complex social structures, as well as operating across societal boundaries. And fnally, “society” itself is something of a fction – often a metaphor for polity (Walker 2001; cf. Frisby and Sayer 1986 esp. ch 3; Mann 1986: 1f, 14–17; Wallerstein 1991). Diferent types of social relationships, for example economic and political, form overlapping networks: they do not coincide. Nor do they coincide with cultural or linguistic boundaries. It may well be, then, that so far as any human collective mentality is grounded in social interaction, this is its most parochial element, while the more cosmopolitan elements come rather from our shared animality, environment, or – as Jung

186

Psyche, Science and Society

maintains – from the interface between our animal behavioural endowment and our psyche. Indeed, one might compare the collective mentality that emerges with social interaction to the ego in psychodynamic theory, and the fallacy of identifying all our collective mentality with social interaction to the fallacy of thinking that our ego and consciousness (“Mind”) comprise our whole psyche. It may also be that intellectuals, and city dwellers generally, tend to overestimate the signifcance of the social interaction stratum, and underestimate the signifcance of environment and perhaps also of the animal strata. There is a subjective equation to be taken into account. An objection to my thesis might be made by citing language: does not the very fact of language prove that we are “social animals”? As a sociologist I have always regarded linguistic science as lying outside my competence. Even so, I am aware that there are diferent approaches in linguistic theory (Botha 1992; Lyons 1991). Sociology, following Levi-Strauss, has generally oriented itself to the functional linguistics of de Saussure: that is, language is to be understood by its social function. The danger of this is that we will “discover” just what we assumed in the frst place, and mistake it for proof. Chomsky’s formal linguistics, by contrast, rather maintains that language initially serves the purposes of cognition, and only secondarily those of communication – a view Lorenz also holds (he notes Chomsky’s concurrence) (Lorenz 1977: 129). Language certainly introduces a new element in that it permits that cognition be communicated and shared – even (or especially) where the referent is not present. But language also permits misinformation and deceit. Moreover, language as languages sets limits to communication – though there may still be shared cognition where the referent is present. Again, language does not annul differences in experience or temperament – the individual “point of view”. To my mind, sociological theory would do best to treat language as sui generis: it should not simply try to appropriate it. I have argued here for a scientifc view of humankind specifcally in terms of a reciprocal relation with the Anthropocene, the era in which human activity has become the major factor in environmental change, and in which humankind has developed its greatest environmental exposure and dependency. The obvious reason for urging this is the contemporary environmental crisis, but there are reasons enough on general grounds for reckoning in our environmental relationships in sociological theory. Some anthropological traditions always had a human ecology dimension (Walker 2005: 79f). As to the specifc factors, I pointed to three processes: migration and settlement across the world; the domestication and exploitation of plants and animals; and the emergence of quasi-ecological relations among humans with the development of complex social structural arrangements. The frst factor may feed into this last as a factor of contact between in-migrants and those already in occupation. I have suggested in all cases that there is a psychic dimension to these processes: that they have a basis in human ethology that enters into culture in terms of Jungian archetypes. This must be obvious in regard to the domestication of plants and animals, and indeed this surely should be diagnostic for our species: other hominids

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

187

never seem to have done this, and it indicates a distinctive psychic capacity that is surely critical to our success as a species. As to the other factors, the “out of Africa” thesis is still new; Lorenz and Jung (and the sociological and anthropological theorists that I have cited) did not know of it. It does put a greater weight on the processes of environmental acquisition, in migration and in settlement. It also puts weight on the fact that in the Old World at least migration must have entailed contact with earlier hominid species. (It might be as well to repeat here a comment from an earlier chapter, that “human” is an ethical not a biological category.)10 Jung’s thesis, that in the encounter between in-migrants and natives a reverse assimilation at the archetypal level precedes any conscious assimilation of cultures, perhaps looks less wayward when viewed in this light. A conventional sociological view of “race relations” might well dismiss it as merely an unwelcome outthrow of what is centrally a medical psychology. That is altogether too hasty a judgement. Incidentally, it is a curiosity that following Jung’s views, an idealist solipsistic sociology might ft with the character of a people in migration, while a settled people might favour a materialist approach, albeit in terms of human ecology rather than economics. In this chapter (as elsewhere in my writings), I  have argued for science and against philosophy. That is rather a heterodox position for a sociologist to take. Even so, the neoKantian tradition from which I have argued it is not philosophically naïve, and it certainly is not “positivist”. Moreover, philosophy no less than science is socially produced knowledge. As such it is vulnerable to the same questions in the sociology of knowledge: whether either activity is privileged due to its disciplined relationship to a real subject matter, or whether – or to what degree – it may be queried as an artefact of its sociological setting. Rather than rehearse familiar arguments, I would suggest turning once again to Mary Douglas’ thesis, that sociology should undertake refexive analysis in terms of a grid-group theory of culture, to identify and discount for cultural bias. The question here would be, how far is science anchored to the Nature it claims to describe or explain, how far does it rather refect the sociological conditions within which it operates? On analogy with Douglas’ analysis of cultural bias in environmental sociology, the biosphere and environmental crisis, we might identify four sectoral positions (Douglas 1992 esp. pp262–5; see also Figure 3.1, p62 in this volume). In the strong grid strong group (hierarchist) quadrant, the model is a ball-bearing in a saucer: science may be pushed away from Nature but within limits it tends to return; however it may be pushed too far and go over the edge. In the weak grid weak group (market individualist) quadrant, the model is a ball-bearing in a U-shaped tube: science is strongly anchored to Nature and will always return to it. In the strong group weak grid (enclavist) quadrant, the model is a ball-bearing balanced precariously on an upturned U: science is always at risk of falling away from Nature to one side or another. Lastly, in the strong grid weak group (isolationist) quadrant, the model is a ball-bearing on a fat table: it may move unpredictably in any direction, Nature has no hold on science.

188

Psyche, Science and Society

In these terms, I would say that the enclavist and isolationist positions are prominent in the contemporary sociology of science, the former in the critical tradition, the latter in the so-called Sociology of Scientifc Knowledge (SSK). Discounting for my own general bias-tendency (to the isolationist quadrant), I consider the hierarchist position – science is anchored to Nature within limits – the most realistic, especially given a fairly widespread awareness of the dangers of religious or political or commercial interference. From this point of view, the critical tradition’s demands for a political supervision of science – which it will not entrust to anyone else – is typical of the problem, and no solution to anything. One major reason I take this view is that it was the natural sciences that took the lead in identifying environmental crisis, while the social sciences were not quick to follow. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring passed unnoticed; the Meadow’s Limits to Growth was initially refuted, and Catton and Dunlap’s attempts to argue a new ecological paradigm were ignored (Carson 1963; Meadows et al. 1972; Catton and Dunlap 1978, 1980). (That my own biography includes a postgraduate course in environmental science is also a factor, of course.) To my mind, one of the most pervasive “methodological” problems facing sociology is that no-one is listening to us. Maybe this has always been so. Political science goes back to the ancient world, but economics was the Enlightenment’s discovery and break-through: with it, our afairs seemed fnally to be put on a rational and scientifc basis. The sociologists were the ones who were unconvinced. A typical argument was that these economic relationships (property, contract etc.) were also legal relationships: this opened up questions of the place of law in society, and the possibilities of subjecting that to empirical enquiry: comparative, historical, ethnological. The sociologies that emerged were various, but they never appealed to the intellectual mainstream, or perhaps they made too many enemies. (This account seems to me to come closer to the truth than indicting some alleged “positivism” within sociology itself.) However that may be, it is difcult to be consistently ignored and excluded from the conversation without reacting – whether in terms of an ironic absurdity or of a portentous opacity. Both these things are amply evident in modern – or postmodern – sociology, including the sociological views of science just diagnosed. In my view, however, the temptation must be resisted. We have to keep the doors open.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

See Chapter 5, esp. pp112f. See Chapter 6, p144. See Chapter 5, pp132f. In a diferent regard, Jung (1978) is also of interest. See Chapter 4, p102. See Chapter 1, pp19f. Figure 1.1. in this volume (p15). There is more to be said about the city, of course. And nothing is fnal: there can be exodus from the cities to racially segregated suburbs, a reversion to the accommodation or confict stages. America is a case in point. 8 See Chapter 4, pp104f.

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

189

9 See Chapter 5, p113. 10 Chapter 1, p33.

Bibliography Athens, Lonnie (2013) “Park’s Theory of Confict and His Fall from Grace in Sociology”, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 13:2, pp75–87. Berger, Peter, and Luckmann, Thomas (1967) The Social Construction of Reality. London: Allen Lane (Penguin). Boserup, Ester (1965) The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. London: George Allen & Unwin (New York: Aldine Publishing Company). (1981) Population and Technology. Oxford: Blackwell. Botha, Rudolf P. (1992) Twentieth Century Conceptions of Language. London and Cambridge: Blackwell. Brown, Roger (1965) Social Psychology. New York: The Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan. Carson, Rachel (1963) Silent Spring. London: Hamish Hamilton. Carwardine, Mark (2009) Last Chance to See. London: HarperCollins. Catton, Will, and Dunlap, Riley (1978) “Environmental Sociology: A  New Paradigm”, American Sociologist 13, pp41–9. (1980) “A  New Ecological Paradigm for Post-exuberant Sociology”, American Behavioural Scientist 24, pp15–47. D’Aquili, Eugene (1975) “The Infuence of Jung on the Work of Claude Levi-Strauss”, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 11:1, pp41–8. Douglas, Mary (1992) “A Credible Biosphere”, in Douglas, Mary Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London and New York: Routledge, pp255–70. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaus (1989) Human Ecology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Evans, Richard (1975) Konrad Lorenz, the Man and His Ideas. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. Frisby, David, and Sayer, Derek (1986) Society. Chichester and London: Ellis Horwood and Tavistock. Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hager, Lori D. (ed.) (1997) Women in Human Evolution. London: Routledge. Haviland, William (1997) Human Evolution and Prehistory (4th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace. Hemmer, Helmut (1990) Domestication: The Decline of Environmental Appreciation (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jung, Carl G. (1960) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1960a) “Instinct and the Unconscious”, pp129-38. (1960b) “On the Nature of the Psyche”, pp159-234. (1960c) “Spirit and Life”, pp319-37. (1960d) “The Stages of Life”, pp387-403. (1960e) “The Structure of the Psyche”, pp139-58. (1963) Memories, Dreams, Refections. London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1964) Civilization in Transition (CW10). London:: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1964a) “Mind and Earth”, pp29-49. (1964b) “The Complications of American Psychology”, pp502-14. (1964c) “The Dreamlike World of India”, pp515-24. (1964d) “The Swiss Line in the European Spectrum”, pp479-88. (1964e) “Woman in Europe”, pp113-33.

190

Psyche, Science and Society

(1966) The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16) 2nd ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1966a) “The Psychology of the Transference”, pp163-338. (1967) Symbols of Transformation (2nd ed.) (CW5). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1978) “On Man and His Environment” (interview with Hans Carol, 8/2/50), in C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (ed. William McGuire and R.F. Hull). London: Thames & Hudson, pp201–4. (1990) The Seminars Vol 3: Analytical Psychology (ed. William McGuire). London: Routledge. Kroeber, Alfred (1952) The Nature of Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. (1952a) “Reality Culture and Value Culture”, in Kroeber (1952), pp. 152-66. (1952b) “The Concept of Culture in Science”, in Kroeber (1952), pp118-35. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1972) The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lewin, Roger (1993) The Origin of Modern Humans. New York: Scientifc American Library. Livi-Bacci, Massimo (1997) A Concise History of World Population (2nd ed.). Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. Lorenz, Konrad (1970/71) Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour (2 vols). London: Methuen. (1971a) “Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies: A Methodological Discussion”, vol 2, pp115–95. (1971b) “Psychology and Phylogeny”, vol 2, pp196–245. (1977) Behind the Mirror. London: Methuen. Lyons, John (1991) Chomsky (3rd ed.). London: Fontana. Mann, Michael (1986) The Sources of Social Power (vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mannion, Antoinette M. (1991) Global Environmental Change: A Natural and Cultural Environmental History. Harlow: Longman. Meadows, D., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J., and Behrens, W. (1972) The Limits to Growth. London: Potomac Associates. Nanda, Serena, and Warms, Richard L. (2004) Cultural Anthropology (8th ed.). Belmont and London: Wadsworth (Thomson Learning). Ortner, Sherry B. (1974) “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Rosaldo, M. and Lamphere, L. (eds.) Women, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp67–87. Park, Robert (1950) Race and Culture. Glencoe Ill.: Free Press. (1950a) “Personality and Culture Confict”, pp357-71. (1950b) “The Race Relations Cycle in Hawaii”, pp189-95. (1952) Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology. New York: Free Press. Poliakov, Leon (1974) The Aryan Myth. London: Chatto Heinemann for Sussex University Press. Radin, Paul (1953) The World of Primitive Man. London, New York and Toronto: Abelard-Schuman. Roberts, Alice (2009) The Incredible Human Journey (DVD). BBC Worldwide Ltd. Staude, John (1976) “From Depth Psychology to Depth Sociology: Freud, Jung and LéviStrauss”, Theory and Society 3:3, pp303–38. Walker, Gavin (2001) “Society and Culture in Sociological and Anthropological Tradition”, History of the Human Sciences 14:3, pp30–55. (2005) “Sociological Theory and the Natural Environment”, History of the Human Sciences 18:1, pp77–106.

Jung, ecology and sociological theory

191

(2012) “Sociological Theory and Jungian Psychology”, History of the Social Sciences 25:1, pp52–74. (2018) Jung and Sociological Theory: Readings and Appraisal. London and New York: Routledge. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991) “Societal Development, or Development of the WorldSystem?”, in Wallerstein, Immanuel Unthinking the Social Sciences: The Limits of Nineteenth Century Paradigms. Cambridge: Polity, pp64–79. Weber, Max (1976) The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London: New Left Books. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. (1981) General Economic History. New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Zabriskie, Beverley (1990) “The Feminine Pre- and Post-Jungian”, in Barnaby, Karen and D’Acierno, Pellegrisno (eds.) C.G. Jung and the Humanities. London: Routledge, pp267–78.

INDEX

abnormal psychology 63, 70; see also madness; mental illness acculturation 99, 181, 183; see also socialization Adler, Alfred 2, 4, 10, 26, 28, 30, 32, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 64, 181 Adlerian, Adlerian psychology 46, 48, 49, 50, 123, 128 Africa 103, 148, 152, 166, 178; Jung and 17, 18, 23, 47, 177; “out of Africa” thesis (q.v.?) 166, 178, 187 aggression 30, 185; Jung on 131, 137, 145, 157; Lorenz on 117, 131, 137, 145 America 166; Chicago School and 87, 90, 104; feminism in 80; Jung on (America thesis) 17, 20, 177; race in 10, 12, 13, 180; religion in 58, 74; rural sociology in 90 ancient (civilization, world) see Antiquity anomie 60, 96 Anthropocene 165, 166, 167, 174, 183, 186 anthropology 2, 10, 13, 123, 125; “armchair” vs. feldwork 20, 58; cognitive 6, 184; cultural 2, 21, 64, 68, 81; and gender theory 144; physical 10; social 2, 64, 68; and sociology 2, 5, 57, 70, 71, 103, 122, 137, 144, 184, 186; see also ethnology anthroposphere 169, 181; see also biosphere Antiquity 43, 72, 77, 88, 93, 100, 103, 104, 147–57 passim, 159, 188; cities in

88, 91, 92–4, 100, 104, 147–57 passim; Jews in 43; as maritime civilization (Weber) 103; Weber on; women in 97, 147–57 passim, 159; see also Athens; Egypt (ancient); Rome anti-Semitism 9, 13, 26–31, 32, 38, 42–7, 51, 52 archetypes 7, 17, 19, 25, 70, 127, 128, 131, 133, 136, 137, 146, 157, 158, 174, 175, 177, 179; as adaptation to material existence 19, 175, 179; archetypal forms 25; archetypal images 25; biological or cultural transmission 25, 70, 136, 137; and gender 146, 157, 158; Gestalt and 128, 133, 185; and psychic assimilation 21, 181, 186 (see also “going black inside”); spiritual (ideal) pole 175, 177; and symbiosis 7, 174, 181, 186 Asiatic civilizations (Weber on) 93, 103; see also China; India Athens 76; women in 97, 98, 147–57 passim Authoritarian Personality 50 Axial Age 102 Baldwin, James Mark 17, 25, 26, 32, 135, 136 Bastian, Adolf 13, 17, 18, 31 Benedict, Ruth 61; and abnormal psychology 63, 70, 81 Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas see The Social Construction of Reality

Index

biogenetic law (ontogeny repeats phylogeny) 16, 19, 20, 176 biogeography 12, 17, 25, 32, 181 biosphere 171, 181, 187; see also anthroposphere Boas, Franz 3, 13, 17, 20, 32, 144, 184 Boasian anthropology 2, 64, 68, 122 Bologh, Rosslyn 142 Boserup, Ester 167 bourgeois, bourgeoisie 42, 68, 69; diferent senses of 68, 101, 103 Britain 4, 59, 136; race in 10, 13; religion in 63, 67, 74, 76; see also England; Ireland; Scotland; Wales bureaucratic kingdoms 93, 102, 103, 148, 148–57 passim, 159, 160; and women 152–7 passim, 159 capitalism 5, 27, 42, 58, 67, 68, 69, 73, 75, 79, 89, 91, 95, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105; and women 144, 159 Carson, Rachel see Silent Spring caste 180; in American South 180; in India 43, 72, 93, 180 Castells, Manuel 88, 98, 99, 105 Catholic 32, 67, 68, 74, 76, 82; Church 22, 64, 67, 74, 75, 76, 80, 82; and education 67; and Latin 67; and vernacular languages 67; see also Protestant; Reformation Catton, Will, and Dunlap, Riley 90, 188 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 13 Chicago School 1, 5, 87, 90, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104, 180; see also social ecology, the city child, children, childhood 79, 80, 94, 97, 98, 118, 123, 131, 143, 146, 148–57 passim, 160, 167, 168, 182; Jung on 19, 24, 70, 98, 133, 175, 177; and Jungian psychology 98, 142, 145, 157, 161; see also family China 103; Jung on 9, 46, 177; race in 180; women in 139 Chomsky, Noam 117, 121, 186 Christianity 46, 79, 94, 147, 158; displaces Graeco-Roman paganism 73, 102, 157; imposed on Germans 28, 30, 177; see also specifc denominations chthonic, chthonic peoples 22, 30, 176, 178; see also migratory peoples; settled (sedentary) peoples city, cities Ch. 4; i). themes: ambivalent attitude to 87; and environmental issues 87, 105; and the family 99, 157, 160;

193

(modern) growth of 87, 91; Jews in mediaeval 42; maritime 92, 93, 103, 150, 152; and mass society (q.v.) 6, 88, 97, 99, 104; metropolitan 87, 88, 92, 95, 102, 104, 105; and modernity 87, 89, 94–7, 104; organic life, separation or remoteness from 94, 100, 102; population and 87, 92, 95, 96, 106; as population sink 148, 150–2; premodern (in history) 89, 91, 92, 100, 101, 103, 148–57 passim; public health issues in 87; religion and 94, 100–2 passim; as semi-periphery 105; and social problems 87, 88, 97, 104, 105; as theme in sociology 5, 87, 89–91, 102; urban mentality 5, 91, 94, 95–7, 100, 102, 104; women in 97, 150–2, 159; ii). theorists: Chicago School (q.v.) on 88, 90, 91, 104; Darke on 97–8; Durkheim on 88, 89; Jung on 98–102; Marx on 88, 91; Marxism and 88, 91, 98; Park on 180, 181, 188n7; Simmel on 5, 88, 91, 95; Weber on 88, 89, 91, 92–4, 101, 103; Wirth on 91, 94–7, 99, 104 (see also city-state) city and rural society (town and country) 89, 102; (historical) division 88, 100; division dissolved 77, 93; see also rural society city-state 76, 88, 92–4, 100, 154–7; ancient 89, 93, 154–7; class and status struggles in 89, 93, 154–7; commercial character (mediaeval) 93, 94, 101, 154; guilds in 89, 156; kinship in 89, 147; loss of autonomy 77, 93; maritime 93; mediaeval 42, 89, 93, 94, 156; military character (ancient) 89, 93, 154; political structures (oligarchy, democracy, tyranny) 77, 89, 93, 154; signifcance of in Western history 77, 94, 103–4; women in 97, 98, 154–7 Civilization and Its Discontents (Sigmund Freud) 123, 132 class: 32, 33, 58, 66, 69, 77, 89, 93, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 143, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 180; see also stratifcation classical thought vs. romanticism 51, 80, 101; see also Enlightenment Cocks, Geofrey 39, 40, 48, 52 collective consciousness (conscience collective) 57, 60, 70, 82, 157, 183 collective representations (représentations collectives) 57, 70, 82

194

Index

collective unconscious: Jung and 17, 50, 70, 127, 131, 174, 175, 183; Simmel and 1, 92 community 45, 76, 77, 89, 95, 119, 122, 154, 176, 177; social ecology usage 90, 95, 104, 180 conquest 14, 149, 167, 180; conquest theories of the state 14, 18, 21, 180; see also migration constructivism (constructionism) 16, 21, 144, 145, 146, 157, 174, 184; moderate vs. extreme 2, 72, 145, 161, 184; social vs. cultural 3, 145, 161, 184; see also essentialism critical tradition 2, 3, 4, 80, 162, 184, 184, 188; see also radical or revolutionary left critique 2, 3, 4, 32, 38, 52, 80, 99, 101, 112, 161, 184 cultural anthropology see anthropology cultural theory see grid-group theory culture vs. society (perspectives) 2, 113, 125, 165, 183 D’Aquili, Eugene 169 Darke, Jane 97 Darwin, Charles 11, 12, 16, 134–7 passim Darwinian (thought, tradition etc.) 13, 16, 25, 115, 125, 134 demographics 96, 147, 159, 167; see also population; overpopulation de Saussure, Ferdinand 184, 186; see also Saussurean linguistics determinism 6, 49, 63, 64, 71, 80, 82, 105, 112, 121, 122, 126, 132, 146, 158, 161, 184; virtuous vs. vicious 112, 161, 184 difusionism 17; see also evolutionism (ethnology) domestication 7, 118, 128, 173 domestication and exploitation of plants and animals 128, 167, 173, 186; see also Neolithic Revolution Douglas, Mary 4, 59–66 passim, 77, 187; see also grid-group theory dreams 7, 24, 127, 131 Durkheim, Émile 1, 4, 24, 51, 57, 58, 59, 64, 70, 72, 78, 112, 125, 132, 137, 138, 157, 168; on cities 88, 89; and cognitive anthropology/sociology of knowledge 2, 6, 71, 184; idealism and lack of interest in material matters 72, 105, 157, 184; on religion 58; Suicide 60, 83; on women 71 Durkheimian-Jungian 4, 6, 70 ecological relationships (competition, predator-prey, symbiosis) 171, 181

ecology 6, 181; new ecological (environmental) paradigm (Catton and Dunlap q.v.) 90, 188; see also environment; Green politics education 29, 67, 74, 75, 76, 78, 96, 99, 101, 154, 161 Egypt (ancient) 17, 18, 147–57 passim; women in 147–57 passim Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Iraneus 116, 123, 168 Ellenberger, Henri 39, 52 empire 10, 76, 148, 150, 156; Continental 14, 76; Habsburg (q.v.) 29; see also Rome Engels, Friedrich 178 England, English 14, 27, 67, 68, 74, 82, 89 Enlightenment 10, 28, 51, 66, 81, 103, 132, 188; Scottish vs. English 67; see also classical thought vs. romanticism; rationalism environment: acquisition of 178; environmental crisis (concerns, issues) 51, 79, 80, 105, 128; environmental psychology 19, 113, 175; humanenvironment relationship 169–75; and sociology 2, 4, 6, 184; see also ecology; Green politics essentialism 3, 80, 161, 184 ethnicity 14, 44, 58, 95, 180; ascribed vs. asserted 14, 32–33; see also race ethnology 13, 17, 25, 31, 188; see also anthropology ethology 7, 21, 100, Ch.5 passim, 145, 146, 165, 168, 173, 178, 181, 185, 186; human ethology 116, 122, 186 eugenics (in Nazi era) 50, 51, 52 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 58 evolution: biological 11, 16, Ch. 5 passim esp. 113–16, 134–7; cultural 13, 16, 17; Jung and 16, 17, 25, 32, 134–7; women and 166 evolutionism (ethnology) 17; see also difusionism evolutionism (sociological) 58, 71, 103, 137, 147, 167, 181; vs. evolutionary psychology 20, 71, 132 family 60, 97, 99, 142, 148–57 passim, 159, 160, 161; and functionalism 99, 157, 160, 161; and Jungian psychology 19, 99, 145, 157, 161, 169, 176; and marriage/legitimacy 147–56 passim; and migration/confict; Weber on 142, 149; see also household fantasy literature see Lord of the Rings feminism 2, 79, 142, 161; and the city 97; conficts within 79, 161; ecofeminism

Index

80, 161; Jungian 22, 80, 142, 157; second wave 97, 142; and sociological theory 142, 161; third wave 80, 161; see also gender theory; women Frazer, Sir James 58 free will 64, 79, 112, 122, 132, 145, 162, 184; biological basis of 116, 128; see also “intentionality” Freud, Sigmund 24, 29, 30, 33, 44, 48, 49, 52, 58, 64, 122, 123, 132, 142, 145, 157, 168, 169; Jung’s break or split with 10, 28, 30, 38, 41 Freudo-Marxism 1 Fromm, Erich 2 functionalism 57, 68, 91, 94, 112, 115, 137, 142, 161, 167, 181; and the family 97, 99, 157, 160 Fustel de Coulange, Denis 88, 89 Gehlen, Arnold 112, 117, 125, 126, 165 Gellner, Ernest 68, 76, 77, 180 gender theory Ch. 6 passim; and anthropology (reliance on) 144; and constructionism (q.v.) 2, 145, 184; and Lorenz 122; radical/revolutionary left 79, 161, 184; and sociology (gender sociology) 142, 161; and structural determinism 6, 112, 122, 161, 084; see also feminism, women General Medical Society for Psychotherapy 39, 40, 47, 53 German: cultural history and mentality 27, 30, 31, 32, 43, 45, 49; culture disrupted 22, 28; language 28, 29; see also German psyche German psyche 26–31 passim; mediaeval disruption of (or lesion in) 22, 28, 31, 32, 44; see also Jewish psyche Gestalt: archetype and 128; Jung and 128, 185; Lorenz and 113, 115, 120, 122, 179 Giner, Salvador 5, 6, 88, 99, 104 “going black inside” 23; see also archetypes, and psychic assimilation Göring, M.H. 40, 48, 49, 50 Gray, Richard 125 Green politics 2, 51, 80, 102, 122, 160; and Marxism 80; see also ecology; environment grid-group theory 4, 6, 41, 58–66, 62, 68, 73, 74, 77, 80, 82, 100, 158, 162, 187 Grossman, Stanley 51 gypsies see Roma Hawley, Amos 87, 91, 95 Heidegger, Martin 13

195

Hemmer, Helmut 173 Hitler, Adolf 49, 53; Mein Kampf 40 Homans, Peter 6, 38, 88, 99 Horney, Karen 100 household 98, 148–57 passim, 159; see also family human existential condition (or situation) 69, 72, 81, 100, 127, 133, 137, 145; see also natural theology humankind: (animal) origins 11, 16, 134, 166; and the Anthropocene 165, 166–9, 186; biological uniqueness 112; out of Africa thesis (q.v.) 166, 167, 178, 187; paradox of human individuality and human sociality 132, 185; psychic unity of 13, 17, 18, 24; scientifc vs. philosophical conception 112–13, 183; self-domestication 122, 124; as social animal 71, 113, 183; specialist in nonspecialization 117, 122, 145, 168, 178, 183, 185 hunter, hunting (and gathering) 167, 168, 178; see also primitive (society) idealism 6, 105 immigrant-host theory of race relations 21, 179, 182; see also social ecology incest 4, 146; Jung on 168, 177; see also Westermarck hypothesis India 103; caste system 43, 72, 93, 180; Jung on 19, 22, 26, 46, 177 Indian see Native American individual, individuality 48, 89, 181; consciousness and, loss of (Jung) 18, 24, 70, 132, 175; and division of labour (Berger and Luckmann) 126, 132, 180; origins of (Lorenz, Jung) 132; paradox of human individuality and human sociality 132, 185; see also grid-group theory; psyche industrialization 28, 68, 87, 89, 95, 102, 104, 159 “intentionality” 64, 82, 83n2 Ireland 67, 76 Jacobi, Jolande 15 Jacobs, Jane 87, 97 Jaensch, Ernst (S type and J type) 50 Janet, Pierre 4, 129, 130, 133, 181 Jewish psyche 26–31 passim, 44; see also German psyche Jews 27, 67, 74, 76; in Habsburg Empire 29; Jung on 21, 22, 26–31 passim, 32, 42–7 esp. 44; in Nazi era 13, Ch. 2 passim; post-Enlightenment

196

Index

emancipation 28; Sombart on 27, 42; Weber on 21, 27, 43, 103 Jung, C.G.: i). biography (interest in) anthropology 3, 15, 20, 57, 82; Freudian critiques of 38; (meeting with) Lorenz 111; medical studies 14, 127; (activities) in Nazi era 26–31 passim, Ch 2; (ventures in) New Mexico and East Africa 18, 24; as romantic 51; spectrum of writings 9, 26, 183; values and attitudes 9, 23, 32, 62, 126; ii). thought on Adler and Freud 30, 32, 49; on cities 101; on culture contact and race mixture (America thesis) 20, 22–5, 177; on the environment 102; on European colonization 23, 46; and evolutionary theory 16, 25, 32, 136; on fantasy and realism in literature 79, 101; on the human life-cycle and culture 19, 99, 145, 157, 175; on incest 168, 177; on India 19, 22, 23, 26, 46, 177; on Jewish vs. German psychology 10, 22, 28, 30, 32, 44, 45; and LévyBruhl 18, 57, 70, 132; and Lorenzian ethology 126–38, 145, 179, 182, 183, 184, 185; and Marxism 1, 69, 102; and “mass society” 6, 88, 99; on modern (Western) civilization 25, 73, 74, 79, 101, 102, 126, 137, 158, 181; on “primitive” (archaic) mentality 18, 25, 70, 132, 175; the personal (subjective) equation (q.v.) 4, 10, 30, 44, 136; on race Ch 1 esp. 14; on religion 2, 20, 57, 64, 68–74, 79, 81–3, 101, 102, 177; and Sombart, Weber (on the Jews) 27, 42–4; on symbiosis 128, 129; symbols, their functions and fate 70, 131; on women 19, 24, 30, 46, 102, 146, 157, 169, 176 Jungian psychology: and the anthroposphere (symbiotic relationships) 172, 181; archetypes 25; and family and childhood 99, 145, 160, 161; and gender 145, 157; and mass society 99 Kant, Immanuel: categorical imperative 41; categories 3, 71 Kantian 41, 120, 122, 133, 137, 145, 162; neoKantian 21, 72, 122, 144, 184, 187; revival 2; and Schopenhaeur (orientation to) 19, 65, 72, 132, 134, 145; universe 112 Keyserling, Hermann von 26, 175, 183 Köhler, Wolfgang 115, 129

Kretschmer, Ernst 39, 48 Kroeber, Alfred 125, 137, 183 Lamarckian (inheritance) 11, 13, 16, 134; Jung as 16, 25, 136 language 10, 12, 76, 185, 186; Celtic 67; English 67; German 28, 29; Latin 28, 67; minority 76; vernacular 67; see also Lorenz, Konrad, on language and cognition; literacy; linguistics Latin: language of liturgy 28, 67; of education 67 Layard, John 18, 169 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 6, 58, 68, 169, 179, 186 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 18, 57, 70, 72, 132, 179; see also participation mystique; prelogical mentality Leyhausen, Paul 128 The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al) 188 linguistics 186; formal vs. functional 186; and race 10, 13, 17, 18, 185; Saussurean 2, 6, 161, 184; see also Chomsky, Noam literacy 89, 155 The Lonely Crowd (Reisman et al.) 88 Lord of the Rings 79, 80 Lorenz, Konrad Ch 5; on aggression 111, 117, 118, 123, 131, 137, 145; animal/ human vs. physiology/phenomenology divisions 121, 130; and archetypes 128, 131, 137, 173, 179, 185; and Berger and Luckmann (q.v.) 121, 125, 131, 138, 184; biological basis of free will 116, 128; character and temperament of 111, 126, 133; on contemporary human afairs 100, 116, 122, 124, 131; and environmental issues 122, 128; ethological preconditions for human evolution 116; on ethology and sociology 118, 138; and Gestalt psychology 115, 120, 122, 128, 130, 179; and humankind 116–22; human self-domestication 117, 122, 124, 126, 168; on human society 111, 120; instinctive and purposive behaviour in animals 113–16; intention movements (“rituals”) 111, 114, 119, 120, 121, 123, 137, 182; and Jung (biog.) 111, 126; and Jungian psychology 126–38; Kantianism of 120, 133, 137; on language and cognition 117, 120, 121, 125, 130, 132, 186; on language and culture 120; on love 119, 124; and natural theology 133; origins of consciousness 120;

Index

origins of individuality 132; releasers (IRMs) in humans 117, 124; releasers and social behaviour 114, 117, 118, 118, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 173; on sex and reproduction 118, 124, 131; on the sexual division of labour 122, 168; sociological theory and 122–6, 133, 138; types of (animal) sociality 119; and women 117, 122, 145, 168 Lorenzian ethology 100; see also EiblEibesfeldt, Iraneus; Hemmer, Helmut; Leyhausen, Paul Lowie, Robert 2, 59, 81 madness 4, 70, 81, 184; see also abnormal psychology; mental illness Malinowski, Bronislaw 58 Marx, Karl 1, 21, 27, 33, 42, 51, 64, 75, 102, 126, 176, 180; and cities (separation of town and country) 88, 89, 91; and infuence of the earth 176; on Jews 27, 42; and religion 58, 69; and speciesbeing 2, 21 Marxism 1, 42, 66, 67, 69, 79, 80, 112, 123, 179; and the city (urban sociology) 88, 91, 101, 105; and feminism 80, 142, 143, 161; Frankfurt School 88; and Green thought 80; ideology 3, 58, 67, 69, 97, 157, 162, 184; philosophical 2; see also Freudo-Marxism mass society 5, 6, 88, 94, 97, 99, 101, 104 material, materialism 3, 64, 180; Durkheim’s lack of interest 105, 161; Marxism’s limitation to economy 105, 161 McDougall, William 114, 116, 127, 128, 136 McKenzie, Roderick 91, 95 Mead, Margaret 144 Mendelian genetics 11, 24, 134, 135 mental illness 33, 100; see also abnormal psychology; madness metropolis 87, 88, 102, 104, 105 The Metropolis and Mental Life (Georg Simmel q.v.)” 5, 88, 91, 95 migration 10, 17, 18, 21, 76, 92, 95, 96, 98, 157, 160, 166, 168, 178, 180, 181, 186; and conquest theories of the state 21, 180; rural-urban 148–52 passim migratory peoples 22, 30; and Jung’s America thesis 17, 20, 177; see also chthonic, chthonic peoples; settled (sedentary) peoples misogyny 38, 51, 156

197

Morgan, Conway Lloyd 17, 25, 32, 113, 127, 135 Mountain Lake (Ochwiay Biano, also “Red Indian Friend”) 23, 46 Mumford, Lewis 87 Nadel, S.F. 4, 133 nations 66, 76; Atlantic seaboard 76; “nation states” 67, 75, 77, 93; territorial (or civic) vs. ethnic 76 Native American (“Indian”) 20, 23, 120, 177, 182 natural theology 65, 133; see also human existential condition Nazi era Ch. 2 passim; ideology 13, 49, 50; Jung’s activities in Ch. 2; Lorenz and 126; psychotherapy in 47; state 49, 53 Neanderthal 33, 166 neo-Kantian see Kantian Neolithic Revolution 128, 148, 166, 167, 170; see also domestication and exploitation of plants and animals neurosis 26, 30, 46, 49 origins of culture: co-evolution of psyche and culture 18; instinct transforms into 132; Jung on 18, 133, 169; in language (Lorenz) 120; see also Civilization and Its Discontents; incest Out of Africa thesis 166, 167, 178, 187 overpopulation 80, 126 parapsychology 129 Park, Robert 90, 180; see also Chicago School; immigrant-host theory; social ecology participation mystique 18, 24, 70, 132, 175; see also prelogical mentality patriarchy, patriarchal household domination 21, 78, 97, 98, 99, 102, 146, 158, 159, 160; origins of 123, 167; see also women, male dominance over personal equation 4, 10, 30, 44, 82, 136, 162, 186 phenomenology 121, 127, 128, 130, 133, 136; of the psyche 70, 79, 128 philosophy 19, 75, 94, 155, 187; moral (consequentialist vs. deontological) 41; science and (philosophical, scientifc) 187; sociology and 3, 112, 165, 187 Piaget, Jean 20 Plotkin, Henry 136 Poliakov, Leon 39, 52

198

Index

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Thomas and Znaniecki) 91, 97 population 21, 87, 118, 123, 148–52 passim, 160, 167, 178, 185; and cities 87, 92, 95; growth and culture change/ evolution of society (Boserup) 167; growth - fgures (Neolithic Revolution q.v.) 148, 170; overpopulation (q.v.) 80, 126; see also demographics positivism 19, 112, 183, 187, 188; critique of 112 post-modernism 6, 78, 142, 161, 188 post-secularization 6, 58, 74–81 passim; see also secularization prelogical mentality 18, 70, 132, 179 primitive (society) 3, 5, 58, 70, 72, 82, 89, 103, 123, 126, 135, 144, 145, 167; see also hunter, hunting (and gathering) primitive mentality 70, 81, 172, 179; Jung on 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 30, 57, 70, 132, 175; Lévy-Bruhl on 18, 23, 70 Progof, Ira 4, 59, 70, 71, 132 Protestant 64, 67, 76, 82, 94; Protestant Ethic thesis 27, 43, 58, 94, 101; see also Catholic; Reformation psyche 7, 70, 92, 129, 135, 136, 185; dissociability of 128; dual orientation of (spirit, material existence) 18, 19, 21, 177; energetics and 132; evolution of (co-evolution with culture) 18, 21, 25, 70, 81, 174, 175, 184; geology of 15, 15; German vs. Jewish (q.v.) 26–31 passim, 44; “house” dream/comparison 16, 176; interpersonal vs. intra-psychic approaches 100, 126, 131, 132; phenomenology of 70, 79, 128, 130, 179; as system of adaptation 19, 175; topography of (Lorenz, Jung) 127; see also human existential condition psychiatry 47–50; see also psychotherapy psychoanalysis 21, 30; Freudian 47, 48, 123; “Jewish science 48; Lacanian 142, 161 psychopathology 127, 131, 133, 136, 138 psychosis 26, 32, 49; see also schizophrenia psychotherapy 30, 32, 38, 39, 47–50, 53, 75, 157 quasi-ecological relationships (among humans) 167, 185 race Ch. 1; i). historical usage in America, in Britain and France, in Central Europe 10; as commonsense (undefned) term

10, 14; ii). theoretical and biogeography 12, 17, 25, 32, 181; and culture 10, 13, 180; Darwin vs. Wallace on 11, 16, 135; and ethnicity (q.v.) 14, 44, 180; and evolution 12, 17; Jung and Ch. 1 esp. 14–31; and language (philology) 12, 17; as methodological paradigm 144, 184; Park and 179; race relations cycle (q.v.) 21, 179; and status stratifcation 14, 32; see also ethnicity; race theories race relations cycle see immigrant-host theory race theories 10–14, 17, 18, 23, 24, 28, 31, 33, 38, 44, 51 radical or revolutionary left 3, 79, 161, 162, 184; see also critical tradition Radin, Paul 2, 18, 20, 21, 59, 70, 72, 81, 178, 179 rationalism 6, 51, 52, 103 reductionism 112, 118 refexive analysis 3, 4, 41, 58, 59, 80, 82, 101, 106, 187; grid-group theory (cultural theory) (q.v.) 4, 59, 80, 82; Jung and personal equation (subjective equation) (q.v.) 4, 82, 162; nations, territorial (or civic) vs. ethnic 66 Reformation 27, 32, 44, 67, 73; see also Catholic; Protestant religion Ch. 3; i. themes anthropology and 57, 64, 68, 70, 71, 81, 82; and dual origins of modernity (Renaissance and Enlightenment) 66–8; and grid-group theory (q.v.) 6, 63–6, 74, 77, 80, 82; post-secularization 75–81; secularization 74; sociology and 2, 57, 66–8, 81–3; sociological perspectives on (structure vs. action, consensus vs. confict) 64, 66–8, 68, 81–2; and women 158; ii. theorists Durkheim on 58, 70–72; Jung on 69–74 passim, 102, 158; Marx on 58, 80; Weber on 58, 66, 72–4, 94, 152; see also rationalism Renaissance 66, 82, 94 représentations collectives see collective representations republic: modern polity as 77, 93 Roma 13, 27, 29, 42, 76 romanticism 51; vs. classical thought (q.v.) 51, 80, 101 Rome, Roman Empire 24, 28, 90, 93, 102, 103, 104, 147–57 passim; religion in 73, 101, 102, 104; women in 98, 147–57 passim

Index

rural society 77, 88, 89, 95, 101, 105, 159, 180 Russia 14, 29, 52 Saussurean linguistics 2, 6, 161 schizophrenia 26, 38, 40, 50, 74 Schopenhauer, Arthur 19, 65, 72, 112, 132, 134, 145, 165 Scotland 67, 74 secularization 6, 74–81 passim, 82 settled (sedentary) peoples 168, 178, 179, 187; see also chthonic, chthonic peoples sexual division of labour (sex/gender roles) 98, 122, 143, 146, 156, 159, 168; Lorenz on origins of 122, 168 shaman 20, 131, 178, 179 Silent Spring (Rachel Carson) 128, 188 Simmel, Georg 1, 3, 5, 64, 88, 92, 97, 180; and the collective unconscious 1, 92; see also “The Metropolis and Mental Life (Georg Simmel q.v.)” slaves, slavery 10, 24, 60, 76, 93, 149, 151, 156, 160, 182 Smith, Anthony D. 66, 68, 76 Smith, W. Robertson 58 social construction see constructivism (constructionism) The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann) 121, 126, 126, 131, 132, 138, 184 social ecology 5.91, 94, 96, 105; four levels/stages in human afairs 104, 179; see also quasi-ecological relationships socialization i). conventional usage 98, 126, 157, 160, 161, 183; ii). in social ecology 180; see also acculturation; symbiosis sociological theory (social theory): agency/ action vs. structure 60, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 73, 81, 112, 117, 122, 126, 145, 146, 161, 184; classical 1, 3, 4, 6, 57, 58, 68–74, 88, 142, 143, 144, 145; confict vs. consensus 6, 66, 68, 69, 78, 82, 105, 123, 125, 138, 147, 160, 161, 162, 167, 168, 179, 181, 184, 185; “contemporary” (zeitgeist) 5, 6; and culture-nature question 2; modern 3, 4, 6; modern French (structuralism, poststructuralism, modernism) 5, 142, 161; see also specifc theorists sociology: and anthropology 2, 5, 57, 70, 71, 103, 122, 137, 144, 184, 186; and the city (q.v.) 5, 87, 89–91, 102; environmental (ecological) 6, 81, 90, 105, 165, 184, 187; of the family (q.v.)

199

97, 99, 157, 160; of gender (q.v.) 97, 142, 160; importance of 1950s in Britain 4; of knowledge 2, 6, 187; and Lorenz (q.v.) 112, 122–6, 133, 138; “malestream” 97, 142; methodological heterogeneity of 4, 112, 122; neoKantian approaches 21, 112, 122, 144, 165, 184, 187; and non-sociological (nonsociocultural) levels of reality 2, 184, 187; post-Parsonian “crisis” 57, 142; and race (q.v.) 10, 14, 144, 179, 184; of religion (q.v.) 2, 57, 66–8, 81–3; rural 89; of science 187; traditions in - French vs. German 66–8; urban Ch. 4 passim esp. 87, 94–101, 102–6 solipsism (in sociological theory) 184 Sombart, Werner 13, 27, 42, 52 species being 2, 21 Spencer, Herbert 113 state 5, 61, 63, 68, 74, 75, 78, 81, 90, 93, 104, 150, 155, 159, 167, 168; conquest theories 14, 18, 180; nation-state 67, 75, 77, 93; sovereign state 67, 75; state building 76; see also city-state; empire; nation status stratifcation see stratifcation stratifcation 14, 66, 83, 90, 97, 149–52 passim, 158, 159, 167, 168, 180; and caste (q.v.) 180; and marriage/legitimacy 14, 142, 149–57 passim; and race/ ethnicity 14, 28, 32, 180; see also class subjective equation see personal equation Sullivan, Harry Stack 100 Switzerland, Swiss 40, 102; Nazi plans for partition 42; Jung on 22, 26, 102 symbiosis i). ecology 128, 129, 171, 172, 185; and the anthroposphere (culture and nature in -crops, livestock, pets etc.) 172 (see also ecological relationships); ii). in social ecology 180; see also socialization symbols 158, 179; their life-cycle 70, 131; symbol-pregnant or dream landscape 19, 175 Third Reich see Nazi Era Thirty Years War 42, 67, 75 Tönnies, Ferdinand 89, 95 “Urbanism As a Way of Life” (Louis Wirth q.v.) 5, 88, 91, 94–7, 98, 104; criticisms of 94, 97, 100, 104; Jung and 88, 99, 100, 102; and mass society (q.v.) 88, 100, 104 urban mentality 5, 91, 94, 95–7, 100, 102, 104 urban sociology see sociology, the city

200

Index

Virchow, Rudolf 13, 17, 31 von Uexküll, Jakob 115, 185 Wales 67 Wallace, Alfred Russel 11, 12, 16, 25, 32, 134–7 passim Wallerstein, Immanuel 2, 181, 185; events of 1968/rainbow coalition 2, 79; on semi-periphery 105; see also world system theory Wars of the Three Kingdoms 67 Weber, Marianne 142 Weber, Max: i. methodology: comparative historical method 144; interpretivism, 145, 147; as neoKantian 3, 64, 105, 122; social construction 3, 145, 174; and natural theology 65; ii. substantive: the ancient world/Antiquity 103, 147–57; bureaucracy/bureaucratic kingdoms 152–4, 159; cities/city-states (q.v.) 88, 89, 91, 92–4, 101, 103, 150; conquest and migration theories 14, 21, 179; economic sociology 144; ethnicity and stratifcation 14; family and household 142, 149; feudalism 152; on the Jews 27, 43; and Jung 6, 65, 72, 81, 101, 134, 138, 158, 174; on mediaeval Europe 90, 93, 103; political sociology 75, 93; origins of modernity 27, 43, 103; rational capitalism 43; rationalization and disenchantment 65, 73, 158; on religion (q.v.) 58, 66, 72–4, 75, 81, 157; as rural sociologist 90; sociology of power 143; status stratifcation 14, 32, 83, 149, 151, 158, 159; typology of domination 144, 152; urban mentality 94, 101; and women 21, Ch. 5 passim, 179

Westermarck hypothesis 168, 169; see also incest Wirth, Louis 5, Ch. 4 passim esp. 94–7, 104; and mass society (q.v.) 88, 99; and Tönnies (q.v.) 90, 95; see also “Urbanism As a Way of Life” women: in ancient world 147–57 passim, 159; in Athens 97, 98, 148, 156; in bureaucratic kingdoms 153, 156, 159; and capitalism 143, 160; in China 159; in cities 97; in city-states 150, 156; and domination systems 152–7; Durkheim on 71; in Egypt 148, 156; in evolution 122, 166; in feudalism 146, 153; Jung on 19, 24, 30, 46, 102, 126, 146, 157, 161, 169, 176; Lorenz on 117, 122, 126, 145; male dominance over 146; and migration (conquest) 21, 166, 178; and migration (rural-urban) 148–52; in modernity (bureaucracy, capitalism, urbanization) 159; in modernity (rationalization and disenchantment) 158; oppression of 33, 51, 78, 143, 152, 161; primary and secondary issues 147; and power (exclusion, subordination to male authority) 143; in Rome 148, 155, 156; and slavery/prostitution 149, 160; as social animal/and nature vs. culture 19, 113, 146, 176; and stratifcation 148–57 passim, 159; Weber on 21, 179; see also feminism; gender theory; incest; patriarchy; sexual division of labour (sex/gender roles) world system theory 2 Zionism 28