CARL JUNG, DARWIN OF THE MIND

By Thomas T. Lawson

Publisher, Karnac Books, London, http://www.karnacbooks.com
U. S. distributor, Stylus Publishing LLC, Sterling, Virginia, http://styluspub.com

Please visit my other website, jungdarwinbook.com, devoted exclusively to Carl Jung, Darwin of the Mind and other Jungian writings, where you will find expanded materials on that subject.

Available at online bookstores such as:
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Jung and Psychology generally.
For all of the advance of science in modern times, it tells us virtually nothing about the human psyche, upon which that advance has entirely depended. Yet there is a great deal that can be known. Carl Jung spent years in depth psychology, delving into peoples’ psyches, including his own, and he schooled himself in the realms of myths, fairy tales, Gnosticism, Mithraism, alchemy, and Eastern mysticism. Out of that work came a wide span of writings that, taken together, develop a coherent theory.

It is difficult for the layman to obtain a reliable perspective of psychology in the broad sense. A review of the whole of Jung’s corpus affords such a perspective from one point of view, and a point of view that, when combined with evolutionary theory, is consonant with the findings of modern science.

Jung and Evolutionary Theory.
My book is addressed, accordingly, to the sort of general intellectual reader who is either skeptical of or ignorant of Carl Jung’s psychology, and I hope it might persuade such readers, as well as psychologists and philosophers, to take Jung’s work seriously -- not in the woolly way one often finds in pop-psychological treatments of Jung, but philosophically, and particularly with respect to the plausibility of the idea that evolutionary theory supports the notion of a collective unconscious.

The Evolution of Consciousness.
But what about consciousness? According to Jung it developed out of the collective unconscious; yet, unlike the collective unconscious, it is too late an arrival upon the scene to have a genetic base grounded in natural selection. However, as with everything else, consciousness must have a history. Jung’s brilliant successor, Erich Neumann, was able to trace the advance of consciousness through successive expressions of Jungian archetypes, as recorded in the myth and ritual of culture, through history. Pursuing these findings, I propose that consciousness evolved non-genetically through natural selection among cultural styles.

Jung and the Spiritual Void.
Finally, in this book I attempt to provide an intellectual platform upon which a person sensible of a spiritual void in the modern world might build. Science is not intended to, nor will it in its present form, afford a predicate for spiritual fulfillment, and the present state of the church leaves hungry many educated, reflective people. This is to say that the encounter between the power to convince of secular science and the literalism of religious doctrine has left the spirit in an uncertain place in the modern world. In consequence there appears widely to be a desire, and indeed a need, for a spiritual element, a sense of meaning, presently missing in many peoples’ lives. Anyone sensible of this need might be warranted in looking to psychology -- as such a need is a psychological fact -- both to probe the ground of the contemporary malaise and, perhaps, as I argue, to come upon a meaningful cosmology.

Back cover endorsements:

‘Thomas Lawson offers Jung for the thinking and acting man and woman. Lucidly and humanely explicating Jung’s deepest insights, he also shows how they make sense in daily life as in a court trial or when a dog is run over or a bird 'spooked' by a vehicle, and he eschews vague mystique inviting us to think through Jung’s perspective in clear, mature language. He also develops a suggestive argument about the evolution of consciousness, drawing on contexts ranging from contemporary physics and genetics to philosophy. The argument will inform Jungians and others in the mental health field, but this work is helpful to anyone pondering and living in the world. I am grateful for this work!’
– James Peacock, Chapel Hill, past president of the American Anthropological Association, author of Consciousness and Change.

‘As a follower for many years of the great Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, I have enjoyed Mr. Lawson’s book very much indeed. It is gratifying that its principal effect can only be to widen and popularize Jung’s ideas. While I have always found Sigmund Freud a bit difficult, I cannot speak too highly of a book that explains to ordinary readers like myself Jung’s readily comprehensible work. I hope that it will be widely read by lay followers of Jung, both in the United States and the United Kingdom.’
– Richard Adams, Whitchurch, U. K., novelist, author of Watership Down and numerous other books.

‘Publication of Tom Lawson’s Carl Jung, Darwin of the Mind can only be described as synchronistic when seen in the light of today’s awareness of the pertinence of the neurosciences to psychoanalysis and depth psychology. In developing his thesis of the evolution of consciousness through culture rather than through genetic selection, Lawson draws an original parallel between the theories of Jung and those of Darwin. With a minimum of jargon and a deep understanding of analytical psychology, the author reaffirms Jung’s own thesis that although archetype and instinct are the most polar opposites imaginable, they belong together as correspondences and must be regarded from a scientific standpoint. Along the way, the reader may acquaint or re-acquaint himself - perhaps from a new perspective - with Jungian thought. The Jung that emerges from this reading is the one he himself always claimed to be: a man of science for whom psyche and soma, the mind and the body, are of a whole.’
- Leslie deGalbert, Paris, Jungian analyst.

Contents:

About the Author
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 The evolution of consciousness
3 Archetypes and the collective unconscious
4 Individuation
5 Synchronicity
6 Conclusion
References
Index

The cover painting is one of my own.