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Warren Colman has written a highly thoughtful and stimulating book not only about C.G. Jung's views and those of his followers on the meaning and function of archetypes, but more generally on the longstanding anthropological question of how shared meaning emerges, sustains itself, and is transformed over time. The book, therefore, is not only a deep dive into what may drive primordial imagery to transcend local values and cultural practices, but also an anthropological inquiry into what sustains those images locally in the psychological lives of individuals who invariably shape symbols to make meaning.
The level of erudition required to address such key issues in the history of social theory and analytical psychology is potentially overwhelming. But in this volume Colman does a remarkable job of reviewing the relevant arguments on collective meaning that emerge from quite diverse fields of research and practice. These include not only the central places of analytical psychology and social anthropology in this study, but also history, linguistics, philosophy, ethology, paleontology, and neuroscience, to name a few.
What is at stake in this book is enormous. But to sense its scope is not only to understand key problems in the history of analytical psychology. It also means understanding key problems in the history of social theory, and especially the impact of French social theory on Jung's early, and still nascent, views. For a battle was also raging in the social sciences during the early twentieth century over Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's concept of participation mystique and the degree to which one could ever understand the diverse forms of awareness and systems of value evidenced in other societies, and especially those forms of embodied engagement that were not merely conscious or psychologically malleable in the analytical sense.
In fact, Lévy-Bruhl's ideas about social participation had, as Robert Segal has shown, a significant impact on Jung's views of shared meaning and