Correspondence

Sir,

I should like to offer the following comments as a critical response to June Singer's ‘The use and misuse of the archetype’, which appeared in the January 1979 issue.

In her advocacy of a holistic approach, modelled on theoretical physics, there is a danger that ‘psyche’ will become confused with ‘cosmos’ and so lost. As the title of one of her own books suggests, the psyche has boundaries—boundaries of the soul. Alchemy informs us that the psyche has need of limits and confinements; these it phantasies as alembics, vessels and similar paraphernalia of incubation and containment. In conforming with these alchemical images, her concern with physics and psyche is perhaps a restatement of the theme of the soul's relationship with matter. But when she speaks of a universe with neither ‘beginning nor end’ then our psychological vessels, our theories, can no longer hold psyche. Rather psyche leaks away into the vast interstellar spaces of curved universes, to be sucked into its mind-boggling black holes. Thus we lose that realm of experience we call psychological. The obverse side is that psychology itself becomes inflated to cosmological proportions, as infinite as the cosmos itself. Holistic theories may reflect archetypal motifs—the all-embracing great mother, or the synthesising, and wholeness, of the self.

Her enthusiasm to overthrow Cartesian dualism and replace it with a holistic psychosomatic unity can lead to another confusion: that between psyche and mind. Modern rationalism has forgotten, or repressed, the ancient triad of spirit, soul and body. So June Singer tends to absorb images and symbols into concepts. Once a symbol is considered as translatable into a concept, metaphor is then treated as allegory. Thus when she refers to archetypal images ‘as the humanly imagined images of those great and small interlocking systems which compose the universe’, her images have become allegories of ‘interlocking systems’, seemingly a kind of ‘primitive’ science, fancifu