Archetype Revisited

From Volume 30, #4, January, 2004

Archetype Revisited:

An Updated Natural History of the Self

Anthony Stevens, Inner City Books, 2003, 400 pps.

Perhaps this book should have a warning on the cover: THIS BOOK MAY BE HARMFUL TO YOUR POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.

Archetype Revisited is an updated edition of Anthony Stevens’ first book, Archetype: A Natural History of the Self, published in 1982. Some of the new material challenges fashionable ideology no less than some of what Stevens, now 71, a Jungian analyst and psychiatrist in England for over 30 years and now living on Corfu, Greece, wrote two decades ago.

The book sets out key Jungian concepts with a clarity and concreteness befitting someone trained, as C. G. Jung was, as a medical doctor.

More than that, Stevens draws on developments in such fields as ethology (the study of organisms in their habitats), sociobiology, genetics and neurology to make his case that Jung anticipated scientific developments that have taken place since his death in 1961 better than some later Jungian revisionists. Stevens goes so far as to suggest that Jung’s model of the “psychoid” archetype (on the borderline between the psychological and the biological) “offers a potential basis not only for the unification of the biological sciences but of science as a whole.”

Still further, Stevens demonstrates the deep opposition between what Jung has to say and a great deal of trendy neo-Marxism, feminism, liberalism and postmodernism. The book also argues that the latest evidence, much of it coming from researchers outside the Jungian fold and largely ignored by Jungians, frequently supports Jung’s original insights.

Further yet, this book illuminates relations between science and the spiritual. Stevens has what he says Jung had, a “Janus head” that enables him “to look at and comprehend both the imaginal life of the spirit and the organic processes of biology, and thus transcend the Cartesian divide.”

Above all, Archetype Revisited has a profound social vision, conservative in the best sense, while still committed to liberal-democratic values. The book contains an urgent and compelling plea for more attention to innate human archetypes. Stevens warns:

In the last few decades, we have turned our society into an anarchic laboratory, where the archetypal structures involved in pair-bonding, child-care and social regulation are being tested to breaking point. Our civilization is contravening archetypal imperatives on an unprecedented scale. To anyone who takes a long-term transpersonal view, the disturbing question arises as to how far we may continue on this course without incurring disastrous penalties at both the personal and collective levels.

In education and society in general, Stevens writes, innovations of various kinds have met with little success

because they are based on a shallow, one-sided and biologically ignorant view of human nature. Liberal, egalitarian values are the major contribution of our civilization to the ethical progress of mankind, but they cannot in themselves assure individual happiness or communal harmony if they fail to take into account those fundamental archetypal determinants which demand that religious forms of experience, family integrity, stability and continuity in relationships between the generations, social structures, gender differences, initiatory procedures and so on, be respected and allowed expression. This is not to argue that we should abandon Western civilization and revert to the life of the hunter-gatherer, but simply that our social and political policies, as well as our psychiatric interventions, should take due note of the intentions of the Self. The truth of this statement might seem glaringly obvious were we not so mesmerized by our own cultural illusions. In some ways it is as if Voltaire and the Enlightenment had never happened; for ours is an age when religious dogma has been replaced by political correctness.

Some of the most important changes since the 1982 edition have to do with the archetypal masculine and feminine. Here, the last two decades have seen new research findings and the thought of some feminist writers has evolved, Stevens writes. The notion that men and women are psychologically identical is still around, of course, but is much less influential today than it was in the 1980s.

Still, there is probably plenty in this book to raise the hackles of some feminists. “Feminism will fail as communism failed,” he warns, “if it persists in espousing patently false beliefs about human nature.” Stevens takes issue with some modern Jungians who, “wishing to carry Jungian psychology to the forefront of feminist thinking,” have called for a complete distinction between gender and sex and sought to endow everyone, man or woman, with both an animus and an anima. The intentions are praiseworthy, Stevens writes—to free people from outdated constraints that would prevent them from becoming whole—but the suggestions are based on dubious assumptions.

To separate gender from sex, it is necessary to assume that biology and psychology are entirely separate disciplines, and that our sex has no inherent influence on our personality or cast of mind. To make this assumption is to negate the advances made by neurophysiology in the last two hundred years, and to revert to the tabula rasa theory of human development that Jung rejected as taking no account of the fundamental importance of archetypes and the collective unconscious.

I found myself wondering what position Stevens would take in the debate about whether homosexual couples in Canada should be able to legally designate their unions as marriages. I don’t know the answer to that question but reading this book is helpful in thinking about the issue.

Sex is not the only topic on which Stevens may ruffle liberal feathers. While he can be sharply critical of Western political and military initiatives, some of his comments on the archetypal place of aggression, territory and hierarchy may provoke a reaction in some liberal readers reminiscent, in Stevens’ phrase, “of how a Victorian hostess might have behaved if had one dared to address her on the subjects of masturbation or oral sex.”

Archetype Revisited may be harmful to your political correctness, but it’s likely to be helpful to your grasp of Jung and the world.

—Harvey L. Shepherd