You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Do not be deceived: this fine book is about far more than Jungian psychology. Knox, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, has taken as her thesis an integration of leading results from psychology and neuroscience to prune and vitalize not only aspects of Jungian theory, particularly the archetype, but also key concepts in psychoanalysis as a whole - the role of the death instinct, the origin of internal objects, the origin of unconscious phantasy. In addition, and more importantly, her project serves as a model for what we all should be doing in the interests of the development of psychoanalysis as a discipline: pruning, revising, and revitalizing the theoretical frameworks of our respective theoretical orientations in the interest of further healthy growth.
Knox's thesis, supervised by Peter Fonagy and John Morton, two of our strongest stalwarts, long experienced at fighting their corners in psychoanalysis and psychology respectively for forward-looking, inclusive and accurate understandings of human psychology, is a careful, considered journey through the relevant literature in the interests of contributing to our understanding of how human subjectivity (the emergent mind) is formed developmentally.
As her book makes clear, the evidence is now overwhelming that the human infant is not born with encoded meanings of experience. Among other things, there is no room on a genome of only 30,000 genes for innate ideas or any structure such as an archetype that has the capacity to give prior meaning to experience. Such structures are learned, that is to say, are acquired developmentally, rather than inherited genetically. Thus neonatal research shows that the human infant probably has an inherited capacity to orient towards the human face. But the infant must learn the meaning and significance to it of the mothering person's face. Mother as archetype is (a) not inherited genetically, nor (b) are there inherited brain structures that order the infant's experience into a univer