Responses

In his reply to Maloney's (2003) commentary on Hogenson (2001), Hogenson (2003) defends his opposition to attributing archetypes to innate mental structures against Maloney's innatist position. I shall not reiterate their specific arguments, but comment on the general debate from a somewhat different angle. Post-Jungian ‘deep’ innatism (henceforth innatism) is problematic for several reasons, only one of which is the problem singled out by Hogenson and other critics, namely that support for the innatist claim has not been forthcoming in the behavioural and brain sciences. Other reasons concern the way that the argument is constructed.

In the absence of direct evidence for biological substrata of the production of archetypal contents, both sides in the debate often cite instances of animal behaviour that are believed to be either innate or not (depending on which position is argued for). However, the fact that certain animal behaviours are innate does not mean that all ‘spontaneous’ behaviours are; and, conversely, just because some unlearned animal behaviour turns out to be emergent (see Hogenson 2003) does not mean that none is innate. The simplistic analogy of archetypes with instinctive animal behaviour is traceable to Jung, who regarded archetypes as latent in all humans, though manifesting only under some salient circumstances. The archetype is ‘not only the form of the activity taking place, but the typical situation in which the activity is released’ (Jung 1954, para. 152). He likened the activation of archetypes to fixed action patterns in animals: archetypes ‘are, indeed, an instinctive trend, as marked as the impulse of birds to build nests, or ants to form organized colonies’ (Jung 1964, p. 58). Jung did not consider the ways in which those ‘instinctive trends’ might be like and unlike the ‘impulses’ of birds, ants, etc. He may be forgiven for giving more thought to the functional significance of archetypes, but the compl