Also… whereabouts in the human body they might be hiding.
Last time, I covered where the idea of archetypes came from, which was in the ancient Greek philosophical world before Carl Jung developed the theory to apply to psychology and the general unconscious ideas that humankind seem to be born already knowing.
Similar unconscious (or subconscious?) patterns were discovered about the human mind, including:
The structure of myth
A fellow named Claude Levi-Strauss, like Carl Jung, was trying to understand something collective to humanity, but instead of the psyche, he was studying the structure and meanings of myths. He was an anthropologist.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Claude wrote a study in four books, Mythologiques, where he travelled from the tip of South America, all the way up through Central then North America until he reached the Arctic Circle, chasing a myth and its cultural evolution from one end of the western world to the other. He used elements of the myth to examine the structure of human relationships.
Claude saw myths as a kind of speech that could be used to develop an unconscious “language” common to humanity. He wanted to find out how such unpredictable things as myths could be similar across cultures, and tried to find a fundamental myth-unit he named the “mytheme.” He did that by breaking down all versions of a myth into a bunch of sentences where there was a relation between a function and a subject. He bundled sentences with the same function together and issued them a number.
Examining the mythemes, Claude realised that myths were made of contrasted binary opposites, (which was a similar observation to that which Carl Jung made about archetypes being in contrasting pairs.) For example, the story of Oedipus contrasts the over-rating of blood relatives with the under-rating of blood relatives.
Claude Levi-Strauss went on to think that basically the human mind thought in binary oppositions and their unification, and that this was what made meaning exist. He said that myths consist of elements that contradict or oppose one another, and an element that mediates between them and resolves the opposition, e.g. the character of the Trickster.
In Native American myths, the Trickster is often a raven or a coyote and has a contradictory, unpredictable personality. This is because the raven and the coyote occupy a role between life and death, or agriculture and hunting (agriculture = producing life, herbivorous animals, hunting = bringing death, carnivorous animals). Ravens and coyotes do not eat plants or usually hunt – they prefer to eat carrion, so they are seen as mediating between herbivores and predators, or between life and death.
(Although this doesn’t explain why other cultures’ Trickster characters are different creatures such as a spider or a preying mantis.)
“The trickster is a mediator. Since his mediating function occupies a position halfway between two polar terms, he must retain something of that duality—namely an ambiguous and equivocal character.”
(Structural Anthropology, (1958), transl. by C Jacobson and B G Schoepf)
Claude came to the conclusion that myth-structures which exist today are transformations of earlier myth-structures. He even went on to say that “the structure of primitive thoughts is present in our minds.”
Language-learning
The psychologist Noam Chomsky found that there was a basic pattern of language-learning in children, a type of unconscious collective grammar.
It begins with the pre-linguistic stage (cooing and odd sounds), which then moves on to babbling using the repetition of certain syllables / mixes of vowels and consonants (e.g. “ayayaya”) (sometimes also repeating short sounds that an adult makes to the infant), then the holophrastic stage, where single words are spoken and used to convey the meaning of whole objects or sentences.
After that comes the two-word stage where the child strings words together in short phrases.
The telegraphic stage follows, where the child constructs longer sentences using some main words but often leaves out verbs, prepositions and/or articles.
Then the child arrives at the multi-word stage, where vocabulary expands and they start to use more words in their sentences, using verbs and plurals.
The later multi-word stage concerns mastering more grammar and sentence structures, along with improvement of the rhythm and emphasis of words.
Lastly is the mature stage, where grammar gets even better, vocabulary expands again, and confidence in speaking increases. The child can communicate fluently and clearly with small mistakes every so often.
Children who are born deaf or lose their hearing before the prelingual stage acquire sign language in exactly the same way, only instead of babbling with their voice, they do “manual babbling” with their hands!
The acquisition of knowledge
Jean Piaget (a Swiss psychologist who studied child development) came up with the notion of “schemata” – innate patterns of knowledge-learning. Like archetypes, we seem to be born with them pre-installed in our brains and they require interaction with the environment to be activated.
Sensorimotor stage – The infant is completely egocentric and begins with:
- only simple reflexes (e.g. rooting and sucking), then develops:
- first habits and primary circular reactions (e.g. trying to recreate something like thumb-sucking that happened by accident), then:
- secondary circular reactions (becoming aware of objects beyond the body, able to do things like shake a rattle)
- Coordination of secondary circular reactions (doing things on purpose like using a stick to reach something). They begin to understand object permanence (that things still exist even when they can’t see them).
- Tertiary circular reactions (infants develop curiosity and experiment with objects).
- Internalisation of these schemata.
The preoperational stage (ages 2 to 7):
- Symbolic function stage (using things to represent other things, e.g. playing pretend, using a box as a table, etc. Drawings are inaccurate and not to scale)
- Intuitive Thought stage (increase of curiosity and asking loads more questions, beginning primitive reasoning. Wanting to know everything. The child is aware they know a great deal already but doesn’t know how they know what they already know. Stable concepts and magical beliefs.
Concrete Operational Stage:
- Child can now converse and think using logic but is limited to what they can do with physical objects. Improvement of classification skills, no longer egocentric.
Formal Operational Stage: (age 11 and over)
- Develops abstract thought and abstract reasoning. More problem-solving skills, solving problems that have multiple steps. Uses metacognition (they can think about the way they think and understand the pattern behind their own thought processes).
Social Instinct, Faculties, and Isomorphs
Charles Darwin’s social instincts, Henri Bergson’s faculties, and Wolfgang Kohler’s isomorphs could also be related to archetypes, according to Anthony Stevens.
Henri Bergson’s faculties are:
- intelligence (used to study and understand the material world)
- instinct (innate, skilled interactions with the environment that are present in all animals)
- intuition (something that evolved from instinct but is specific to humans. Allows for a direct experience of reality, consciousness, and time/duration. More to do with the inner life and spirit.)
As for Wolfgang Kohler’s isomorphs, isomorph comes from the Greek words meaning “equal shape.” Wolfgang believed that perception and the physiological representation of perception happening in the brain would look the same or have a similar structure.
For example, if a row of lights was flashing in a sequence that created the illusion of movement, the brain state in response to this would be the same brain state created by a patch of light moving from one point to another. The flashing-light sequence would be perceived as movement because the subjective perception of spatial structure would be correlated to electrical fields inside the brain, whose pattern reflects the spatial structure in the outside world.
So where in the body might archetypes be found?
The psychiatrist Ernest Rossi suggested that the differences between the left and right halves of the brain could hint that archetypes reside in the right side of the brain.
The left half mostly controls verbal reasoning/ speech and associations, and the right side is visuospatial. The left brain hemisphere is critical, analytical, and processes information while the right hemisphere operates in a more “big picture” mode – it’s good at inferring a whole thing from a fragment, is better at working with confusing things, is more “irrational” and more in tune with the body’s physical processes.
Once they are expressed as words, ideas and language in the left side of the brain, archetypes may become mere representations of themselves that are superficially altered by the individual’s consciousness.
However, J. P. Henry suggested in 1977 that the primordial reptilian brain – an older part of the brain – may contain not only basic drives but the archetypes as well. Perhaps there was a time when emotions and cognition were less present and the “older brain” was more dominant. This echoed with Jung’s concept of archetypes evolving a more intricate structure over the course of time.
The Jungian analyst Murray Stein said that all things that have a messaging function – templates, genes, enzymes, hormones, catalysts, pheromones, and social hormones – are things very similar to archetypes. There are archetypal figures who are messengers (e.g. Hermes and Prometheus).
It has been suggested by Anthony Stevens (a Jungian analyst and psychiatrist) that Jung’s archetypes may be somehow inside our DNA.
As they exist along with natural life, they will be wherever the source of life is found, and DNA is basically the archetype of us.
Next time I will be wrapping this up and tying it into the practice of story-writing, including in literature and marketing.
Sources:
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Levi-Strauss
- https://www.simplypsychology.org/language.html
- https://davincicollaborative.com/the-7-stages-of-language-acquisition-in-children/
- https://www.webmd.com/children/piaget-stages-of-development
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00309066
- https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-archetypal-psychology-of-anthony-stevens-synthesizing-evolutionary-science-and-depth-psychology/
- Wikipedia
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