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.
I greatly appreciate Dr Henry's comments, and fully recognize the value of his effort to supplement my presentation by calling attention to the role of ‘subcortical brain systems in (the) discussion of archetype, symbol and the collective unconscious’. He outlines cogent research supporting the view that subcortical mechanisms such as the limbic system and the hippocampal
formation are involved in motivational systems ‘attaching emotional values to stimuli’ associated with archetypal patterns of behaviour.
As far as I can understand the matter, however, such subcortical systems appear to function primarily as energy systems and mediating stations that can integrate stimuli and supply positive and negative reinforcement to images or perceptual patterns that are organized and finally recognized on a cortical level. And, as Dr Henry himself indicates, it is the ‘right as opposed to left hemispheric to subcortical communications (that) may be especially important in eliciting emotional responses’ associated with archetypal experience. This clearly implies that there is something about the right hemisphere that is more closely associated with archetypal experience than is the left hemisphere.
We can both fully agree with Jung's statement that the ‘autonomy of the unconscious begins where emotions are generated’ in subcortical processes. I believe the research generated by Sperry may some day add that such autonomy may end somewhere in the right cortical hemisphere, where emotions are expressed and experienced in those particular visuospatial forms that sound so much like the image that Jung described as the patterned expression of archetype, symbol and collective unconscious.
But this is as far as we can go with our current level of understanding. Future research will have to determine the extent to which lesions of the right hemisphere and experimental means of altering or blocking its function do in fact result in recognizable deficits and/or changes in the role of arche