Response to Robert A. Segal's ‘Jung and Lévy-Bruhl’

It is a great privilege to be asked to respond to Robert Segal's excellent essay on Jung's reading of Lévy-Bruhl. After an illuminating introduction to the anthropologist, Segal gives a perceptive analysis of Jung's indebtedness, concentrating on, although not exclusively drawing from, the text, ‘Archaic man’ (Jung 1931/1933). Segal makes the very important point that it is often in the valuation of so-called primitive psychological traits that Jung differs from figures such as Lévy-Bruhl and Sigmund Freud. Indeed Segal draws on Jung's formulation of two kinds of thinking, ‘directed’ and ‘fantasy’, to show what was significant for him in ‘primitive’ peoples. Consequently Segal's scholarship is an important addition to understanding Jung in the history of ideas, and even in tracing the development of western constructs of indigenous peoples. He begins to show just how much psychology has been influenced by the physical encounter with ‘other’ cultures.

Segal's conclusion (a triumph of directed thinking!) appears to be the following:

For both Jung and Lévy-Bruhl, intellectual progress comes from exposing ‘primitive’ mischaracterizations of the external world… Science properly replaces myth and religion as the explanation of the world. There is no turning back.

And:

For Jung … [m]odernity is better than primitivism, but it is not the ideal state. It is a stage along the way.

I'd like to take these ideas as a starting point for my response. First, let me say that I am not going to disagree with Segal's analysis; I am going to supplement it, to add another view. For my argument is that Segal has admirably analysed the ‘directed thinking’ of ‘Archaic man’. However, this logical edifice is far from the total matter of the text. An analysis of the rationality of ‘Archaic man’, in