Reply to François Martin-Vallas

Frankly, I find it very difficult to take Martin-Vallas's critique seriously since it is based on a fundamental misreading of my article. I admit that the title is misleading and appears to open up an opposition between culture and biology, but by following my line of argumentation it should have become clear that I am rather tearing this opposition down. My original intention was to give the paper the title: ‘Culture is part of Man's Nature’, the comment with which the paper ends. Martin-Vallas accuses me of restricting the debate to an opposition between biology and culture, while himself entirely missing the main topic of my article: the question of how we can, taking the insights of modern sciences into account, give an explanation for how universal archetypes are transmitted from one generation to another so that we can count on their existence in every human being-which is the definition Jung gives and on which the actual practice of Jungian therapy is based.

I also find it difficult to understand the critique that I assume the above opposition to be Jung's only approach to the topic when, on pages 227-29, I give a detailed description of four different conceptualizations of archetypes to be found in Jung's work. One part of my article is indeed restrictive in that I try to point out that the proposal that archetypes might be transmitted by genes has now to be dismissed. Since analytical psychology sees itself as a scientific theory it should be possible to confront it with the insights of modern sciences. So I highlighted this line of argumentation and tested it against recent scientific results. One may call this restrictive. There is no doubt that, in many places, Jung made claims for this way of transmission: there are numerous quotes where Jung calls the archetypes innate (e.g. Jung 1949, para. 1228; 1919, para. 270); in one place he even says explicitly that archetypes are ‘probably transmitted by Mendel's particles’ (a synonym of his time for what today