Editing Carl Jung (section)

===Evolutionary Thought===

Of his early years, Jung would write that "mentally my greatest adventure had been the study of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great news of the day was the work of
Charles Darwin."<ref>Jung, C.G. 2014b. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 18: The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings (Princeton University Press), p. 213</ref> While Jung’s conception of human psychology is grounded in Darwinian evolutionary theory it is important to note that his evolutionary thought had a distinctively German quality to it. This is because the idiosyncratic reception of Darwin in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany resulted in the integration of Darwin's ideas with German embryological and developmental traditions formulated by the [[Naturphilosophie|Naturphilosophen]] and theorists such as [[Ernst Haeckel]]. It was these traditions that formed the intellectual background of Jung’s evolutionary thought.<ref>Clark, G. 2023. "Rethinking Jung’s Reception of Kant and the Naturphilosophen: Archetypes,
Evolutionary Developmental Biology and the Future of Analytical Psychology", ''International Journal of Jungian Studies'', 1: 1–31.</ref>

The result was that Jung's evolutionary conception of mind focused on embryology and development. From this perspective, the emergence of consciousness both in ontogeny (development) and phylogeny (evolution) was built upon much more archaic, affect-based subcortical brain systems. It was this developmental approach to evolution that underpinned his "archaeological" conception of the human psyche consisting of different evolutionary layers, from the deeply archaic to the more evolutionarily recent. Those more archaic structures in the brain Jung believed to be the basis of the “collective unconscious” - an aspect of human psychology shared by all members of the species ''Homo sapiens''.<ref>Clark. G. 2024. "Fossils, Anthropology and Hominin Brain Phylogeny". Chapter 2, pp. 38-40. In Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences: A New Vision for Analytical Psychology, Routledge</ref>

In commenting on humanity's evolution from an ancient primate ancestor, Jung wrote: 'We keep forgetting that we are primates and that we have to make allowances for these primitive layers in our psyche.' <ref>Jung, C.G. 2020. C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Princeton University
Press).</ref> Jung also developed the notion of different evolutionary layers in the psyche in his discussion of fossil hominins such as ''Pithecanthropus'' (''Homo erectus''). As he writes:

For just as a man has a body that is no different in principle from that of an animal, so also his psychology has a whole series of lower {{sic|storeys}} in which the spectres from humanity’s past epochs still dwell, then the animal souls from the age of Pithecanthropus and the hominids, then the “psyche” of the cold-blooded saurian.<ref>Jung, C.G. 1970. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of
Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (Princeton University Press).pp. 212-3</ref>

Jung’s notion of different evolutionary layers in the human mind has been compared with the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, particularly as outlined in his book ''The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions''.<ref name="taylorfrancis.com"/> Of these affinities it has been suggested that ‘Jung and Panksepp have, independently it seems, developed similar metaphors of an archeologically layered psyche in which jewels and treasures are discoverable in the deepest phylogenetically ancient regions of the brain – for Jung they are archetypal structures for Panksepp cross-species homologies.' <ref name="taylorfrancis.com"/>

Significantly, in a 2017 article entitled "The Affective Core of the Self: A Neuro-Archetypical Perspective
on the Foundations of Human (and Animal) Subjectivity",
when noting Jung’s belief that archetypes may be related to evolutionarily ancient subcortical brain systems, [[Jaak Panksepp|Panksepp]] and colleagues wrote that "such assertions by Jung were not only quite farsighted, but they actually open ways to connect his theory of the psyche with the most advanced scientific theories and discoveries of our day." 
<ref>Alcaro, A., S. Carta, and J. Panksepp 2017. The Affective Core of the Self: A Neuro-Archetypical Perspective on the Foundations of Human (and Animal) Subjectivity, ''[[Frontiers in Psychology]]'', 8: 1–13.</ref>