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Anthony Stevens provides a clear, concise reading of the evolutionary perspective in Jungian psychology. It is virtually the ‘lost’ perspective in Jungian studies, the perspective that many of us are happy to forget or overlook. Stevens puts the evolutionary challenge at the beginning of his book (p. 3):
At the heart of Jungian psychology is the idea that beneath our conscious intelligence a deeper intelligence is at work - the evolved intelligence of humankind. By personifying this phylogenetic component of the psyche as an archaic being, or ‘the two million-year-old man that is in us all’, Jung lay himself at the mercy of any beady logician wishing to accuse him of falling into a homuncular fallacy - namely, that he believed he had a little old man in there sitting at the controls.
Jung's biological argument was attacked by scientists as a Lamarckian fantasy in Jung's lifetime. They saw it as bad science, based on guesswork, conjecture or false reasoning. Social scientists saw Jung's theory of mind as politically dangerous, a first cousin of Social Darwinism. The idea of an ‘evolved intelligence of humankind’ had already been fused with the notion of genetic superiority and used to justify such gross injustices as eugenics, world conquest, fascism and genocide. Jung was seen as having Nazi leanings by daring to use these discredited ideas. In our time many Jungians have backed away from Jung's biological arguments, politely or impolitely side-stepping his biology in favour of his psychology. Those who have stood up for Jung's theory of the evolved intelligence of humankind, such as von Franz and Erich Neumann, have been roundly attacked by fellow Jungians such as James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich.
After reading Giegerich's attack on Neumann and the ‘biological’ Jung, ‘Ontogeny = Phylogeny? A fundamental critique of Erich Neumann's Analytical Psychology’ (1975), I thought the evolutionary perspective had been laid to rest. As a non-scientist, I was happy to defer t