Another Voice

25 April 2009

Ruby Wax has me thinking about the link between genetics and Jungian psychology

Two small professional duties, and as much pleasures as duties, have recently overlapped in an unexpected way. I’ve read a colleague’s book on genetics; and I’ve recorded a BBC programme on the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. I know of no evidence that Jung took a close interest in genetics; and I imagine a typical modern geneticist would regard Carl Jung’s work as mystical mumbo-jumbo and a branch more of literature than of science; but in the overlap there may be something of interest to both disciplines.

Jung was the choice of my guest Ruby Wax for a programme we were recording for future broadcast in my BBC Radio 4 Great Lives series. The writer, broadcaster, interviewer and comedienne has lurched, mid-life, into a serious interest in the study of psychotherapy, and Jung was her choice of a great life.

Ruby is one of those deeply serious people who just cannot help distracting her audience and herself by her talent to amuse, and I must allow her to speak for herself (our transmission date is Tuesday 28 April); but I think it’s fair to say that central to what has drawn her to Jung’s work was Freud’s great disciple’s fascination with the individual’s reconciling himself to — meshing himself harmoniously with — the underlying human being that he is but may not know much about.

Jung, who called this process ‘individuation’, coined the term ‘collective unconscious’, but its popular use, to mean the things that everybody in a group knows without necessarily being conscious of knowing, rather distorts what he meant. He meant that all human beings, and all cultures, think and feel in certain shared ways and through certain universal channels, just by virtue of being human animals. It is as though our lives, though lived individually and variously, are all heavenly bodies in a common cosmos where forces seen and unseen, gravitational fields, black holes and dark stars exert their push and pull on everybody. As a planet’s trajectory cannot be understood except by reference to the sun around which it is orbiting, so we cannot understand ourselves until we understand the collective unconscious we share as humans, and with which our individual life is a constant interaction.

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Al Mirmelstein

February 6th, 2011 3:47pm Report this comment

I've studied Jung for many years, and I think the genetic influence on predisposition to behaviors is apt. Jung seemed to know just enough about genetics to posit that unconscious material is transmitted via the genes. Unfortunately he also got tripped up by the Lamarkian notion that what happens to us after birth is tramsittable. This misunderstanding should not, in my view undermine the notion that instinctual templates are precisely what predisposes us toward ways of behaving. There are likely thousands of examples in the animal world, the duck who is predisposed to follow it's mother, the bird who builds a nest, etc. And we are, after all animals, too. The most complicated ones, at that.

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