I mentioned in Sue’s blog a while ago that I tended to
subscribe to Jungian psychology as it had equivalences in ecology (my
profession). I wrote I may write something on that in my blog … so here goes! I apologise in advance if some of it seems unwieldy ... but that's the way psychology is!
First things first, ‘though: I have no training in psychology and while counting daisies has been part of my ecological background,
the ecology that informs my thinking is behavioural and evolutionary ecology.
I use the following terms solely for this piece of writing:
transvestite, a term used by Freud; and ♀ and ♂, to avoid
the use of ‘male and female,’ terms that may carry social baggage.
Dumping Freud
I was raised at a time when Freudian psychology was
mainstream (if any stream of psychology could be called that). As it affected
me, his work seemed to suggest that anything that was not boringly dull was some
sort of psychopathological state and for me, a ‘transvestite’ in his terms, he could
provide a lifetime of analysis! I found that if I subscribed to the
basis of his thinking, there was some contorted logic to his approach, but as
with Blanchard et al. much later, that basis made no sense to me – it was anthropocentric
with overtones of moral certitude.
What I’m Not Writing About Here
To explore (even superficially) how the basics of Jungian
psychology relate to ecology is an enormous task. Rather than to try and write
about everything, I’m going to take topics individually. For
the sake of space I've avoided some good examples of behaviours, but am
willing to add some in, if it helps interpretation. Depending on whether I
get any feedback and, more generally, how much time I have, I’ll explore more.
For now, it’s time for the collective unconscious.
THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
So, what is the collective unconscious and how does
it relate to us via ecology (in its broadest sense).
And how could that help an understanding of transgendering as a behaviour?
Initially, it is wise to demystify the term ‘behaviour.’ Anthropocentric
concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour are irrelevant here. A quick look
at dictionary definitions supports that, in that ‘behaviour’ relates to how an organism
responds to something in its environment. The following extract from Journal Psyche
expounds on that:
‘The theory of the collective unconscious is one of Jung’s
more unique theories; Jung believed, unlike many of his contemporaries, that
all the elements of an individual’s nature are present from birth, and that the
environment of the person brings them out (rather than the environment creating
them). Jung felt that people are born with a “blueprint” already in them that
will determine the course of their lives, something which, while controversial
at the time, is fairly widely supported to today owing to the amount of
evidence there is in the animal kingdom for various species being born with a
repertoire of behaviours uniquely adapted to their environments. It has been
observed that these behaviours in animals are activated by environmental
stimuli in the same manner that Jung felt human behaviours are brought to the
fore.’
(Increasingly, ‘behaviour’ is nowadays also being applied to
non-animal organisms, e.g., the turning of sunflowers to follow the course of
the sun.)
The last sentence in the Journal Psyche piece is significant
– an environmental stimulus triggers a behaviour for which the organism has an
innate ability to express. With knowledge about how genetics act (both directly
and indirectly), the “blueprint” mentioned above could be replaced by “framework
within which they can behave.”
In the simplest of models of binary sex (i.e., ♀
and
♂) reproduction is the
goal, but with increasing sophistication, especially amongst social animals,
sex, its display, and act, may have many different meanings,
depending on the species. Whilst animals cannot change clothes, some do portray
attributes of the sex they are not (and, of course, some do even change sex). These
abilities, whether expressed in life, or not, are innate. Since transgender and
transsexual behaviour occurs across races in human species, it is reasonable to
assume that the ability to express these phenomena is also innate – part of that
“framework” of the collective unconscious.
Jung No More! Introducing Archetypes
Jung suggests that within us we possess archetypes. ‘These are described
as a kind of innate unspecific knowledge, derived from the sum total of human
history, which prefigures and directs conscious behaviour.’ (Wikipedia).
This is an aspect of Jung’s work that can be troublesome, as
he moves into the realm of spirituality and beyond. An example of how Jung
thought of archetypes is to imagine a snowflake. The archetype
is not the snowflake, and it is not the water that forms the snowflake. The archetype has
no form of its own, but it directs how the snowflake and all snowflakes form. Of course, such an
analogy has limitations, although in later work Jung considered archetypes to
include psycho-physical patterns existing in the universe.
These archetypes can be simply considered as sub-sets of the
collective unconscious that act together to create a pattern of behaviour
within the framework, providing part of the route to the conscious
mind. Of particular interest are the contra-sexual archetypes – the anima in a
male, and the animus in a female.
But that’s for later.
.jpg)
