CARL JUNG, DARWIN OF THE MIND

By Thomas T. Lawson

The essential idea behind my book, Carl Jung, Darwin of the Mind, is 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 a spiritual void has been opened by the encounter between the literalism of religious doctrine and the power to convince of secular science. It seems, therefore, that there is a general desire, and indeed a need, for a spiritual element, a sense of meaning, in 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.

Psychology, however, basing itself on science, has been in recent times loath to advance the sort of encompassing theory for which the lay inquirer might be looking. It might be suggested that there is a good reason for this, inasmuch as broad theories given in response to a psychological need are quite likely to be wrong. Jung, however, is a special case. His theories hold up to scrutiny in terms of their compatibility with current science, as I try to demonstrate, and in their internal coherence, their economy, and their explanatory power. It is difficult for the layman to obtain a scientifically grounded psychological perspective 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.

My book is addressed, therefore, to the sort of general intellectual reader who is either skeptical 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.

For all of the advance of science in modern times, we know 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. Out of that work came a wide span of writings that, taken together, develop a coherent theory of how the psyche is “constructed,” including an idea of how consciousness emerged as a part of it.