Response to P. Pietikainen

Although it is not, I believe, his primary intention, Petteri Pietikainen's thesis amounts to an attack on the epistemological foundations of analytical psychology. He wishes to persuade us to cease seeing archetypes as ‘biologically inherited supra-individual predispositions of the collective unconscious’ and instead to conceive them as ‘culturally determined functionary forms’. By this revision, Pietikainen suggests, archetypal theory can be removed from ‘the rather unfruitful discourse’ on genetic inheritance. This, he argues, is desirable because no branch of science ‘based on biological premises’ has provided evidence to support the idea that archetypes are inherited. To reject the biological basis for archetypes and replace it with a purely cultural basis, Pietikainen maintains, will ‘make a contribution to hermeneutical studies’. I contend that these arguments are misguided: Pietikainen does analytical psychology no service by attacking the biological implications of archetypal theory and he seriously misunderstands the significance of Jung's contribution to the psychology of symbolism.

Pietikainen's view of symbolism would seem compatible with that adopted by most anthropologists throughout the present century, namely, that all symbolic meanings are culturally relative, in that they are to be understood as wholly derived from the social context in which they arise, and have nothing to do with human biology or genetics. This stands in sharp contrast to the idea first mooted by Jung in the first decade of the century that we possess an innate symbol-forming propensity which exists as an integral part of our total psychic equipment. Although possessing a flexible capacity for local cultural variations, this symbolizing ability proceeds on an archetypal basis which gives rise to characteristic symbolic manifestations (Jung & von Franz 1964; Kast 1992).

Important works on symbolism such as Cassirer's (1953-57) Philosophy of Symboli