Jung, a little bit Psychoid
Author: Christopher Chayban
One of Jung’s best qualities is that he seems to cover all the bases and leave no stone unturned. For every subject or topic we encounter, we are able to relate it to a Jungian term. This time, we can reach into the Jungian goodie bag of words and pull out the term “psychoid,” which I feel is an apt word for describing how analytical psychology relates to contemporary evolutionary psychology. The reason being is that Jung’s analytical psychology is much like another term of his “The Transcendent Function,” and a third thing that serves as a bridge between the river gaps in different schools of thought.
Anyway, the term psychoid means something that is “like psyche or psyche-like” much in the same way that the term humanoid means “human-like. “ So, psychoid contains the biological approach that evolutionary psychology purports because it is part-psyche and part-matter. Matter, of course, related to our bodies, where we experience things. it is obviously abundant in our physical environments, to which it is one of many psychological determinants in relation to the fulfillment or frustration of our archetypal needs (The Talking Cure pg.82).
The archetype itself is psychoid because archetypes are innate primordial patterns. There are innate primordial patterns in nature/matter, as well as the psyche, which is sometimes seen as this kind of immaterial vapor. Therefore, it is a two-way street because the environment may activate the archetype but also, it seems that when a new archetypal situation occurs in the psyche, we change our environment. This is evident in the field of technology, as our desires, wants and needs for pleasure and problem-solving in the psyche are increasingly refined, we seek to produce the corresponding and matching environment that helps to fulfill those needs.
If these needs do not get met, psychopathology results and we become either alienated from the archetypes or identified and inflated. Stevens says that the West has done a poor job of satisfying archetypal needs and as a result has created indigestible stress (The Talking Cure pg.83). We look for it in movies, sports games, and new festivities. Steven’s says that “evolutionary psychotherapy has greatly extended the heuristic and empirical implications of archetypal theory, conceiving archetypes as ‘innate algorithms’ responsible for processing emotional, non-verbal information at a largely unconscious level of experience in accordance with certain specific biosocial goals’.”(The Talking Cure pg.90).This is where Jung’s analytical psychology can step in with contemporary evolutionary psychology is not only without biosocial goals, but with our psychoid social goals, where myth and meaning enter and connect the archetypal pole to our evolutionary instinct pole. Because the archetypes appear to evolve (perhaps along parallel lines) with our instincts.
Furthermore, Jung’s approach offers the possibility of the empirical manifestations of the unconscious to be scientifically studied (The Talking Cure pg.94) and to show how individuals in their “psychophysically structured organism can grow beyond the defective “(The Talking Cure pg.96). Which is to say, to choose not to live their tragic myth pattern, if they don’t want to. There is always an archetypal potential (The Talking Cure pg.96) that the striving Adlerian self (i.e. Jung’s Self) is doing for the benefit of the whole, by constantly updating the program (i.e the species) through the consciousness of individuation. Which as we know, occurs through the process of differentiation and diversification in nature that you see with flowers or even with one group of animals that are domesticated (cats and dogs) and others that remain wild (lions and wolves). Each is appropriate archetypally for its environmental need and archetypal potential to be fulfilled.
Resources:
Stevens, Anthony (2013). The Talking Cure Psychotherapy Past, Present and Future. Inner City Books: Toronto
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