Reply to Maloney

In his response, Alan Maloney clarifies several of my queries. Most welcome of all, he reveals plans to expand the 1999 study - a study he describes as preliminary. Maloney is too modest, for to my knowledge the study, ‘low key’ as it may be, is the first of its kind, thus blazing a trail from Jungian to scientific - psychological language games. Despite our differences of opinion, and my scepticism regarding the quantification of ‘archetypal’ responses (which future studies might well dispel), I do regard his endeavour an important step. Once we speak the same language, we may make our differences of opinion intelligible to each other - and either agree to differ or (my preferred scenario) find our thinking evolving as a result of the dialogue.

At this impasse, the source of most dissonance between Maloney's and my own approach to the empirical proof of archetypes seems to be our respective vision of the state of the art in psychology. Our divergent epistemological and methodological preferences follow as much from what we each perceive is the timely opening for archetypes research in mainstream psychology as from our (presumably) different readings of Jung. As Maloney notes, paradigm shifts in psychology over the past decades have posed serious critiques of the tabula rasa notion. However, this is only half the story, and does not mean that scientifically oriented psychologists are ipso facto more open to the idea of archetypes than their counterparts in the past. Notably in social and developmental psychology, the cognitive and discursive revolutions (e.g. Gergen 1994) have not endorsed notions of innate patterns of behaviour/ideation in replacement of the tabula rasa. Rather, typical theory building in those contexts describes (albeit with radically different emphases) the construction of concepts and attitudes in lived experience. Although controversies abound, these rarely take the ‘either/or’ form of the old (or popularized) Nature/ Nurture debate. Most seriou