Response to Petteri Pietikainen's ‘Archetypes as symbolic forms’

Ernst Cassirer was a philosopher and polymath, but he was not a clinician. Both Jung and Freud, who shared Cassirer's cultural background, were above all clinicians who invested all of their working lives, as well as their own personal interiorities, to charting the unknown territories of the dynamic and often terrifying reaches of the unconscious psyche.

Given the general cultural climate and the attitudes of the professionals who propounded the prevailing psychiatric ethos and who deeply resisted the revolutionary findings and implications of the new depth psychological enquiry, it is certainly not surprising that Freud and Jung would have sought professional acceptance and status by positioning their theories within the current scientifically accepted biological discourse with which they were familiar and identified through their own medical and psychiatric trainings. It is also not surprising that Cassirer should have laboured under no similar pressure as he evolved his philosophy of symbolic forms.

Amongst many other factors, the early and mutually valued collaboration between the two men was nurtured and consolidated by the important contribution made by Jung when he devised the elegant and now classic Word Association Test, which offered the first scientific validation of basic psychoanalytic concepts such as the existence of the unconscious and the defence of repression. It is interesting to note that this was done via physiological measures and differences in reaction times of subjects offered stimulus words to which they were asked to give their associations - an early and elegant example of the quantification of subjective data, in this case to demonstrate the existence and dynamics of unconscious meaning as manifested by the physiological correlates of what Jung termed the feeling-toned complexes. These findings constituted the basis of the later theory of archetypes, thus locating it clearly within the biological realm.

Of course, a socioprofessional imper