Psyche's archetypes: A response to Pietikainen, Stevens, Hogenson and Solomon

Petteri Pietikainen's article, ‘Archetypes as symbolic forms’ (1998a, pp. 325-43), together with the responses of Anthony Stevens (1998, pp. 345-55), George Hogenson (1998, pp. 357-72) and Hester McFarland Solomon (1998, pp. 373-7), afford a glimpse of how Jung's concept of the archetype is being debated within contemporary critical discourse. On one side of this debate, the provocateur, Pietikainen, argues that the archetypes, like Cassirer's symbolic forms, are thoroughly cultural products-not ‘the biologically inherited, supra-individual predispositions of the collective unconscious’ which Jung believed them to be. On the other side of the debate, Anthony Stevens’, drawing on his own work in the area of evolutionary psychology, vigorously defends the biological basis of archetypes and states that Pietikainen's dismissal of this in favour of the concept of symbolic forms constitutes a critical attack on the epistemology of analytical psychology. In his response, George Hogenson, after giving Pietikainen a remedial lesson on Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, seconds Stevens in this view, though not without raising qualms of his own about Stevens's approach. Hester McFarland Solomon, for her part, argues that Jung's notion of the archetype is an important attempt to bridge matter and spirit and that Pietikainen's efforts to discard their biological aspect are hardly the step forward he mistakenly believes it to be.

Of course, it goes without saying that such an interchange of contending voices is healthy. Pietikainen notes as much in the last sentence of his reply to his respondents when he dryly observes that this may be an indication that ‘even if Jungian psychology is not a science, it is not a religion either …’ (1998b, p. 388). Reading between the lines of these intelligently argued viewpoints, however, analytical psychology appears in grotesque caricature. To the eye of my imagination, this caricature looks something like this. In basing the theory of ar