Me as a Leader

Jungian Analysis and Biology

A version of this article was originally published in Quadrant: Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Vol. 29, 1. Copyright: C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Inc., 1999. All rights reserved.

What is analysis?

How can it help?

Why Jungian analysis?

How does it relate to biology?

I address all these questions in the article that follows.

(Matisse: Casbah Gate)

In a previous career I was an experimental scientist in molecular biology; now I am a Jungian analyst. As an analyst I sense that there are non-rational forces at work. I encounter numinous images and I find that the psyche has its own goals which are independent of mine. But as a biologist I seek rational explanations. My two points of view, that of a biologist and that of an analyst, are in conflict. The conflict has led to this paper. (Medieval, Catalan: "Nativity")

I argue that relatedness is a central goal of individuation. In brief, to relate is to engage consciously with the other. The other is found both in the outer world and in the inner world of the psyche. To relate in depth we must be open to that part of the other which is mysterious.

Archetypes and Inheritance

A dream sometimes alludes to a story that is also told in mythology. When my patient "Ruth" dreamt that she was abducted to a basement by a dark man, her dream seemed to allude to the myth of Persephone:

Persephone was a young woman. While she was picking flowers in a field, she was seized by Hades and taken to the underworld. Her mother, Demeter, was grief-stricken and enraged. She made the land barren. A deal was struck amongst the gods. For six months of the year Persephone was Hades' bride, Queen of the Underworld. For the other six months she was allowed to rejoin her mother. Whenever Persephone was with her, Demeter made the land fertile again. This is why we have summer and winter. (Gaugin: "Breton Landscape")

Ruth's dream only hinted at a story, while the myth elaborates the story and suggests a resolution.

Ruth's dream and the myth are somehow related. Moreover similar myths have arisen independently in other cultures. For example there is a Polynesian myth that retells the story of Persephone:

On a coral island, a young woman, Hina-moe-atu (Hina-sleeping-with-a-god) was bathing in a fresh-water pool beneath a cliff. A huge eel came to her from beneath the rocks, went sliding under her vulva, and gave her pleasure with its tail. The same thing happened many times. Then, while Hina was gazing at it, the eel became a handsome young island man. Many times he came with her to her house and they made love. Then he told her he would have to leave her forever and instructed her what to do. There were torrential rains and the water rose to the threshold of her house. The eel came and laid its head in her doorway. She cut of its head with the sacred adze of her ancestor and buried it behind her house. Then she visited that place every day to see what would happen. In time a firm green shoot appeared, and from it grew two coconut palms. The coconut palm provides food and many raw materials for the economy of the island, and this is how it was created.

There is no summer and winter on a coral island.

The myths of Persephone and Hina-moe-atu seem to describe a process of maturation. A woman is drawn into her instinctual life by a phallic power. Then she sacrifices and thereby transforms some of her instinctuality. The result is new psychological growth. This is represented in the myths as the renewed fertility of the land.

Over the centuries the myth of Persephone has been worked out to completion and stripped of extraneous detail. The narrative has been tested and found "true" by many tellers and many listeners. But Ruth is an individual. An amplification or an interpretation may be "true" in general, but "wrong" for her. Perhaps the timing is wrong, or the emphasis, or perhaps she and I have misunderstood the dream altogether. We consider our interpretation of her dream "true" only if she feels the truth of it, or if it is confirmed by some spontaneous visceral reaction in her, like a flush, or tears, or a sudden release of tension.

It seems that Ruth's dream and the two myths must each have arisen independently from the same source. Jung called that source an archetype, a psychological invariant common to each of us because it is inherited rather than learned. By analogy there are behavioral invariants, like blushing, or smiling, or crying, which are common to each of us because they are inherited rather than learned. (We modify them by learning.)

The pantheon of Gods in a religion represents, in psychological terms, a series of archetypes. Demeter, Persephone and Hades are examples. Jung said that archetypes make up a great part of the unconscious. This he called the collective unconscious, to distinguish it from the personal unconscious (Jung 1921). My personal unconscious is made up of contents which might well be conscious, but which I have forgotten or repressed in my individual life. Thus my repressed envy of my friend lies in my personal unconscious, while the archetype behind Persephone lies in the collective unconscious. Jung argued that each archetype gives rise to characteristic images and myths.

It seems difficult to account for the inheritance of archetypes in rational terms. To explain what I mean I must digress into biology. Although inheritance is based upon genes, the total number of different genes in my chromosomes is limited. Recent research has shown that a person has only about twenty times as many genes as a bacterium: I have less than 100,000 and a bacterium has between 3,000 and 5,000 (Alberts et. al., 1994). But my structure is astronomically more complex (Tresan, 1996b). The small number of my genes must mean that genetic information cannot function as a blueprint. While the structure of a building is specified in detail in its blueprint, I do not have enough genes to specify my structure in this manner. In fact most genes specify processes rather than structures; most genes code for enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions within the cell. It follows that these chemical reactions, which