The Unscientific Nature of Jung’s Theory of Archetypes

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung is well known for developing his concept of the archetype. This refers to a primordial pattern existing in the collective unconscious, or humanity’s shared, inherited mental contents, which we are unaware of. Jung previously conceptualised archetypes (e.g. the Mother, the Trickster, the Shadow, the Child) as purely mental phenomena or patterns that we inherit. He later revised the concept to stand for psycho-physical patterns in the universe. Yet both his original and later formulations of archetypes have come under scrutiny; they have been criticised for lacking evidence to support them.

The existence of archetypes and the collective unconscious can be taken as unequivocally real; and indeed, these concepts do match a certain kind of reality. But the way that Jung formulated them has been seen as unscientific, or lacking empirical evidence.

Can Archetypes Be Inherited?

First, it is questionable whether archetypal patterns – the idea or image of a Trickster, for instance – can be inherited. This of course gets us into the debate of whether humans are brought into the world as ‘blank slates’ (the tabula rasa theory) or with mental contents already formed. Scientific studies have since come to challenge the former theory – famously presented by the philosopher John Locke in the 17th century – with evidence against it including genetic influences on traits such as IQ. In support of a collective unconscious, we could also point to the inheritance of fears of snakes and spiders. The idea of shared, inherited mental contents is, therefore, not necessarily unscientific.

However, arguments against the tabula rasa theory of the mind – as well as deeply embedded fears against certain creatures – do not mean we can uncritically accept Jung’s theory of archetypes. Perhaps the Jungian archetype of the Mother is justified if it is seen as rooted in the evolution of the infant-mother attachment. This is a genetically influenced bond. Yet we can question whether universal patterns like the Trickster and the Hero can be inherited. What is the evolutionary basis, or the genes, that make these mental contents inheritable? Are ancestral memories and experiences really imprinted on our DNA? Some studies appear to point to this fact, yet other scientists have challenged such a conclusion.

Nonetheless, since Jung’s time, certain scientific ideas have come to lend some credibility to his theory of archetypes. As the psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon states in an article for The Guardian:

[S]triking parallels to archetypes have emerged across a number of fields since Jung’s own formulation. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote of “unconscious infrastructures” that shape common customs and institutions. Noam Chomsky calls the basic forms of language “deep structures”. Sociobiology has the notion of “epigenetic rules”, laws of behaviour that have evolved over time.

In fact, the possibility that Jungian archetypes might be commensurate with biology was implied by EO Wilson in his book Consilience. He raised the possibility that science might make them “more concrete and verifiable”. Following Wilson’s lead, the psychiatrist Anthony Stevens sees archetypes at work in ethology, the study of animal behaviour in natural habitats. Animals have sets of stock behaviours, ethologists note, apparently activated by environmental stimuli. That activation is dependent upon what are known as “innate releasing mechanisms”. The fungus cultivated by the leafcutter ant ensures the ant only collects the kind of leaf that the fungus requires. The emerald head of the mallard drake causes the mallard duck to become amorous. Other characteristics from maternal bonding to male rivalry might be called archetypal too.

Scientists also sometimes sound like Jungians. For example, the biologist Jacques Monod said, “Everything comes from experience, yet not from actual experience… but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.”

A Lack of Empirical Support

Jung offered case studies, personal experiences, anecdotes, and examples from culture and mythology to support the notion of universal patterns that are inherited. Nevertheless, while all these sources of information can help support the notion of perennial ideas and images, they do not prove that such ideas and images are inherited. It could be that the commonalities of human nature and experience lead to similar stories (and characters in stories) being taught and passed down. What I have in mind here are common human experiences or emotions (e.g. fear, evil, courage, cooperation, humour, romantic attraction, etc.) that lead to similar stories and characters, rather than the inheritance of archetypal images.

To provide empirical support for Jungian archetypes and the collective unconscious would require systematic empirical research and scientific rigour. One way of doing this could be to provide neural correlates of archetypes. For example, are archetypes like the Child, the Mother, the Anima, and the Animus correlated with distinct brain activity? Jung described these archetypes as distinct, but they have often been criticised as being ambiguous and highly subjective, which makes it hard to objectively test and validate them. In fact, the archetypes often bleed into one another. In addition, Jung was not consistent about what an ‘archetype’ is, precisely. If an idea is imprecise, then it eludes scientific study (of course, many ideas that are scientifically studied could be accused of being prone to ambiguity and subjectivity).

Archetypes as Mystical or Supernatural Phenomena

Jung developed the concept of the ‘psychoid’ in relation to archetypes. He proposed that archetypes had a dual nature: they exist in both an individual’s psyche (not so controversial but perhaps lacking strong evidential support) and the world at large (a more radical claim). The non-psychic (or psychoid) element is a synthesis of matter and psyche; it is the deepest layer of the collective unconscious. He incorporated this notion into his theory of archetypes in a 1946 lecture, which later became his essay ‘On the Nature of the Psyche’, found in his Collected Works 8. Jung’s psychoid theory of archetypes was also his attempt to solve the philosophical problem of how mind relates to matter.

Jung saw the psychoid realm as inaccessible to consciousness (thus it is unknowable). The archetypes that structure our perceptions and ideas are part of an objective reality that transcends both the psyche and the physical world. The Jungian psychologist Mark Saban notes, “located in the meeting place between the psychological and the physiological, [the psychoid] combines or transcends both.” We can also say that it is neither psychological nor physiological, but it is involved in both. Jung also postulated the psychoid realm as a way to explain synchronicity, or what he saw as coinciding events that are meaningfully related. (Jung’s belief in synchronicity, and the concept in general, has been widely challenged; the propensity to believe in meaningfully – but acausally – connected events has been explained by the probability of coincidences and the human cognitive bias to seek out patterns in unrelated things.)

Leaving criticisms of synchronicity aside, placing archetypes beyond human minds – in a mystical or possibly supernatural realm – is another way in which Jung’s theory of archetypes could be classed as unscientific. If the psychoid realm is inaccessible or supernatural, this arguably makes his theory of archetypes untestable and unfalsifiable. In the philosophy of science, unfalsifiability refers to the inability of a hypothesis to be proven wrong or refuted, such as through experimentation. The philosopher Karl Popper argued that for a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.

Jung’s claim that archetypes exist not only in people’s minds but ‘out there’ (in some other realm) invites scepticism and doubt. This later conception of archetypes resembles Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. This theory proposes invisible realms that contain collective memories, which enable organisms to telepathically communicate with each other. Sheldrake’s morphic resonance hypothesis has been criticised on various grounds: it has been seen as pseudoscience, magical thinking, non-evidential, inconsistent with science, vague, and unfalsifiable. Sheldrake has continually pushed back against these charges. 

Jung’s Theory Might Not Be Parsimonious

The principle of parsimony, or Occam’s razor (which seeks the simplest explanation, or the one with the fewest assumptions), is seen as a guiding principle in both science and philosophy. This rule of thumb says that the theory most likely to be true is the simplest one (out of competing theories) that is consistent with the data. It could be argued that Jung’s theory of archetypes violates the principle of parsimony. As Vernon writes, “Archetypes have also variously been accused of being Lamarckian and superfluous, on the grounds that cultural transmission provides an adequate explanation for the phenomena that Jung would put down to psychic universals.” Psychic universals may be an unnecessary and overcomplicating way to account for phenomena that can be explained by cultural transmission.

‘Unscientific’ Does Not Necessarily Mean ‘Untrue’

Calling an idea or theory ‘unscientific’ does not necessarily mean the idea in question is untrue, as is commonly assumed when the label ‘unscientific’ is applied. The ideology of scientism encourages people to hold an excessive belief in the power of scientific techniques; scientism is the view that science and the scientific method are the best (or only) way to uncover truth.

However, many kinds of ‘truth’ are unscientific. Many things can be known without recourse to science. The scientific method is not the only way to understand phenomena, and often it is an irrelevant or inferior method to apply to investigating some phenomenon. The assumption of the superiority of science, or scientism, can also be seen as Eurocentric and a form of epistemic colonialism or epistemic injustice (which involves the denigration of other ways of knowing in the non-Western world).

Perhaps Jung’s ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious can be seen as another way of knowing, which is legitimate, despite not being strictly ‘scientific’. Nonetheless, Jung did state that archetypes are not directly accessible. If that’s the case, then on what rational basis can we believe in them? Metaphysics, like science, is concerned with what exists in reality, but it does not try to arrive at answers in the way that scientists do – that is, through observation, experiment, measurement, and calculation. Instead, metaphysicians philosophise: they might try to arrive at truth through arguments that are parsimonious, consistent, and well-reasoned.

Metaphysical questions might concern aspects of reality that transcend experience. On the one hand, this can be seen as a pointless exercise since we cannot make sense of anything beyond experience. On the other hand, something can be true yet still be beyond our experiential reach. Vernon writes:

A related feature of archetypes is that, while they shape our perceptions and behaviour, we only become conscious of them indirectly, as they are manifest in particular instances. It is rather like Schopenhauer and Kant’s notion of the inaccessibility of the “thing-in-itself”, upon which Jung drew: you can’t experience archetypes directly but only when they are incarnated. This would explain why, for example, Buddhists tend not to have visions of Jesus, and Christians tend not to have visions of Siddhartha Gautama. Instead, religious believers relate to the archetype of the wise man via the images available to them in their culture (given, for the sake of argument, that wisdom is what Jesus or the Buddha represent).

It is not entirely clear if, and to what extent, archetypes and the collective unconscious are ‘unscientific’. Moreover, even if these concepts are unscientific, it is debatable whether this is, in fact, a drawback. Not every aspect of reality is amendable to the scientific method. Yet regardless of whether Jung’s theory of archetypes and the collective is evidence-based, these ideas can still help us to clarify and make sense of human experiences and behaviours. Certain experiences are universal and shared – and usefully thought about in terms of ‘archetypes’ and a ‘collective psyche’ – even if we do not literally inherit the kinds of mental contents that Jung had in mind.