23/10/2011 IAJS Discussion Seminar with George Hogenson – Introduction by Warren Colman NB: To access and download two papers by George Hogenson which will form the basis for the discussion, please go to the following links: ‘What are symbols symbols of’: http://bit.ly/gxKn6T ‘The self, the symbolic and synchronicity’ http://bit.ly/gj13OQ It’s a great pleasure for me to introduce George Hogenson who will be leading a seminar for the IAJS list on the theme of ‘emergence’. He has been well known in the Jungian world long before he became an analyst as the author of Jung’s Struggle with Freud (1983), an impressive and scholarly work that analysed Jung’s break from Freud in terms of the creation of a different mythological understanding of time, death and authority. At that time, George was a philosophy PhD and a teacher of political philosophy, specialising in the field of international peace and security. From this strong academic background, George became interested in pursuing the practice of psychotherapy as well as its theory and qualified as a Jungian analyst in Chicago in 1998. In 2001, George gave a plenary presentation at the IAAP Congress in Cambridge, England, debating with Anthony Stevens on the nature and origins of archetypes. This was my first introduction both to George and to the dynamic systems theory he proposed as a way of reconceptualising archetypal theory and challenging Stevens’ use of evolutionary psychology as a way of bolstering the classical ‘blueprint’ model of archetypes as a priori structures. George’s presentation of a short video from the field of robotics, illustrating the principles of self-organisation was a revelation to me: I well remember the feeling that I was seeing a vision of the future, an entirely new way of thinking that had the potential to revision and revitalise analytical psychology. In the decade since then, George has amply fulfilled that initial promise with a series of ground-breaking, seminal papers, most of which have been published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology. The field that has come to be known as ‘emergence theory’ has grown and developed and is represented in the work of many other Jungian writers, such as Joe Cambray, Jean Knox, John Merchant, Patricia Skar, Hester Solomon, Margaret Wilkinson, Beverley Zabriskie – and myself. These new ideas are not easily grasped and challenge some of the shibboleths of Jungian thought, notably the idea of innate a priori eternal structures that are the universal basis of psychic life. Like all new ideas, some people find them a threat: the JAP has provided a forum for robust debates with defenders of evolutionary psychology such as Alan Maloney 1 (2003) and more recently, Erik Goodwyn (2010). These critics seem to feel that the idea that archetypes are emergent properties of developmental processes challenges the existence of archetypes per se whereas what is primarily at issue is not the existence of archetypes but how they come into being and how the idea of archetypes can be aligned with advances in scientific thinking in the half a century since Jung’s original work. Furthermore, while the mainly British writers such as Knox are primarily interested in the influence of early emotional development on adult psychopathology, writers such as Hogenson and Cambray have a much broader and more traditionally ‘Jungian’ canvass, especially involving a reconceptualising of synchronicity, one of Jung’s most radical and inspiring ideas. For this seminar, the Journal of Analytical Psychology’s publisher Wiley-Blackwell has agreed to make two of George’s papers available on-line as a basis for the discussion. These are What are symbols symbols of? Situated action, mythological bootstrapping and the emergence of the Self (JAP, 2004, Vol. 49:1, 67-81) The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity: virtual realities and the emergence of the psyche (JAP 2005, Vol. 50:3, 271-284). To access these papers for free download (available only for the duration of the seminar), please go to http://bit.ly/gxKn6T and http://bit.ly/gj13OQ From: George Hogenson, 24/1/11 Greetings to all the participants-- Leslie advises me that I have to get this seminar started. I am afraid that I have not done this sort of on-line seminar before, so I may need a little practice to get the process to work to everyone's satisfaction. To begin then, in addition to the two papers that Warren has linked to in his introduction I have copied below some further introductory thoughts that will give a little more context to the discussion. These comments are very elementary, and we will see if we can get further with the really critical elements. I was tempted to continue with a longish riff on Chomsky and the problems of language and symbolism, but much of that is in the posted papers so I left it out here. Warren mentions the short video of robots that I showed at the Cambridge Congress in 2001in his introduction, and I take it up again below. To view this video you can go to the web site of Ronald Kube, 2 http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~kube/ scroll down to the link to "collective robots:" and then click on "collective box-pushing demonstration." Robotics has moved a considerable distance since Kube did this little demonstration, but the value of this video is precisely its simplicity. I hope you will enjoy it. What follows is a rather too long introduction. I hope we can move on from here. Emergence in analytical psychology George B. Hogenson, Ph.D. Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts The question at hand concerns the development, significance and nature of the discussion of emergent phenomena in analytical psychology. In large measure this discussion has taken place within the pages of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, but it is not exclusive to that venue (see for example (Cambray, 2002; Hogenson, 2004, 2007; Knox, 2003). Also in large measure the discussion has focused on the question of how we should understand and talk about archetypes although synchronicity has also come into the conversation. I suspect that when the overall discussion is assessed, one of the consequences will be to see both how central to Jung’s theory the hypothesis of archetypes is, and also how complicated and even tenuous the hypothesis proves to be. I do want to note at the outset that in his more careful comments on archetypes Jung does use the term “hypothesis,” and it behooves us to approach the question of archetypes with all the implications of hypothetical constructs in mind. As Jean Knox has outlined Jung’s positions—plural—on archetypes in her book, Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind (Knox, 2003), Jung took a variety of positions and drew a variety of analogies to other systems of thought—for example Plato or Kant, but also Darwin and eventually quantum mechanics—to try and pin down what he was referencing when he talked about archetypes. What Jung did not seem to grasp in his appeal to these quite varied analogies or, in the case of his biological comments, direct appeals to empirical sciences, was the degree to which many of his constructs were manifestly incompatible with one another. You really cannot combine the realm of Platonic ideas with the notion of genetic determinism. To do so is to make a rather glaring category mistake, but this problem seems to have been lost on Jung, most likely because he really did not have a good sense of what exactly he wanted a theory of archetypes to do. I imagine that this last comment somewhat tips my hand insofar as I have always been a bit sceptical about the whole idea of archetypes, although I do consider it an area worthy of further consideration. To that end, let me propose a gross generalization regarding what Jung is looking for in his discussion of archetypes: A theory of archetypes will propose and describe a mechanism by which human ideation and behaviour displays patterns of species typical regularity, in both time and space. Further, this theory will, at a minimum, shed significant light on the workings of a set of identifiable psychological and cultural phenomena, including, but not limited to rituals, myths, religious 3 beliefs, and some elements of dreams and the products of directed fantasy or active imagination. A little personal background Jung remarks somewhere that psychological theories represent a moment of personal confession on the part of the theorist. I do think it is worthwhile, for understanding the discussion of emergence, to have a little sense of the starting positions of some of the participants. I do not want to overdo this, as the arguments marshalled on all sides ultimately have to stand on their own, but then I am an analyst so the personal does matter in some sense. Thus, Anthony Stevens, who was my interlocutor in the 2001 debate at the Cambridge International Congress that in some ways set the emergence discussion in motion (Stevens, Hogenson, & Ramos, 2003), is very clear in the introduction to his book, Archetype: A Natural History of the Self (Stevens, 1982) that his work with children in a Greek orphanage was deeply influential in his quest for an explanation of human behaviour. Stevens, of course, then discovered E. O. Wilson’s socio-biology, which was at it apogee at the time, and used the socio-biological model as the key to an explanation of archetypes. I will return to Stevens’ work below. Jean Knox, on the other hand, worked closely with Peter Fonagy on attachment theory, which figures prominently in her work on emergence.