Responses to Erik Goodwyn's ‘Approaching Archetypes: Reconsidering Innateness’

Goodwyn's paper is written to support Jung's view that archetypes are innate organizing structures in the collective human psyche, based on an implicit assumption that there is a ground plan or blueprint of the human psyche inherited in our genes and that this blueprint contains the potential for specific types of imagery, such as the archetypes of the collective unconscious. In this response, I shall explore the evidence that suggests that Goodwyn's polarization between a ‘tabula rasa’ view of the mind and a view that the mind contains inherited packages or modules of conceptual information (algorithms) does not accurately reflect the current evidence for the complexity and interdependence of biological and psychological developmental processes.

A point to be made in passing is that behaviourism is not the same as a ‘tabula rasa’ view of the mind, and both of these also differ in significant respects from Piaget's view of the mind. A detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between them would be a diversion from addressing Goodwyn's main arguments, but to lump them together under the umbrella of the ‘blank slate’ (page 503) and then suggest we have to choose either that view or the evolutionary psychologists’ model of domain-specific inherited algorithms is an oversimplification that does not serve his argument well. To give one simple example, Piaget did accept that there are domains (specific areas of knowledge, such as language or numeracy), but he thought that the learning processes of accommodation, assimilation and equilibration, were domain general, not domain specific.

On page 504, Goodwyn then goes on to make three assumptions that are inaccurate:

1. that ‘domain-specificity must by necessity be pre-existent’;

2. that domain-specific learning requires an algorithm, a pre-existent program to tell the organism what to learn about;

3. that the alternative to domain specific learning is domain general learning.