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Jung, science, and his legacy

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Jung, science, and his legacy

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 International Journal of Jungian Studies
Vol. 3, No. 2, September 2011, 110
124

Jung, science, and his legacy

Joe Cambray*

The International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), Providence, RI, USA
(Final version received 19 May 2011)

C.G. Jung’s choice of a science-based career in medicine is examined beginning

with his dreams at age 19. His first Zofinga lecture gives perspective on his views
on the science of the time and helps clarify aspects of his education. The influence
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of Ernst Haeckel, the German scientist and artist, are drawn out in the context of
images from Jung’s Red book. After stopping work on the Red book, Jung again
embraced aspects of science but these were now more directly put to use to
support his own theoretical frame, which could be read as a visionary science or a
science of the visionary. This has led to a legacy of ambivalence regarding science,
but in this article some areas of mutual interest with contemporary neuroscience
are noted.
Keywords: Jung; Zofinga; Red book; visionary science; legacy

Introduction
I wish to thank Luke Hockley and Lucy Huskinson for inviting me to contribute to
this landmark issue of the IJJS (the International Journal of Jungian Studies); it is an
honor and privilege to be included in this project. The idea of assessing Jung’s
intellectual legacy 50 years after his death is not only timely but also, I believe,
correctly points to a widening of interest in the field of analytical psychology within
the larger scholarly community. The topic I will endeavor to address here cannot be
exhaustively explored in a brief essay, but I hope the reader will find some points of
orientation.
To begin, there is the difficulty of defining ‘science’, a very broad and dynamic
term, i.e., what is considered scientific is not a fixed static collection of subjects
(consider the rise of computers and information sciences in the past 50 years) or even
methods, but depends in part on the perspective of the person seeking to define its
boundaries within the consensus of others in the scientific community. The place of
the human sciences, especially psychology, is essential to Jung’s vision of himself as a
scientist but is of so vast a scope as to be well beyond even introductory comments
here. Readers are encouraged to consult Sonu Shamdasani’s book on Jung and the
making of modern psychology for an in-depth examination of Jung’s ideas in the
history of psychology (2003). My approach will be to look at Jung’s use of, and
relation to, the disciplines of the ‘natural sciences’ particularly physics, chemistry and
biology, including their applications in medicine.
Throughout his long life Jung had an ambivalent admiration for the natural
sciences as forms of human endeavor. He frequently identified himself as a scientist

*Email: cambrayj@earthlink.net

ISSN 1940-9052 print/ISSN 1940-9060 online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2011.592718
http://www.tandfonline.com
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 111

and his work as scientific but what exactly he meant by these appellations is not easy
to discern as he is not consistent in his use of the concept over the course of his
career. On the surface the latter should not be surprising in itself as it is common for
anyone who has had a long, illustrious career to evolve and refine their under-
standing of a chosen field of interest. However, I will argue that for Jung both his
attitude toward science and what he was trying to do with it were a part of his search
for transformative means for living life to the fullest expression of the self. To further
contextualize this, it should be noted that a number of areas of science which he drew
upon, most notably physics, but also biology, underwent profound, radical
transformations during the time when Jung’s own views were evolving. To start I
will review Jung’s decision to pursue a scientific career.

Jung’s choice of science

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From Memories, dreams, and reflections (MDR) (1963) we know that as

an adolescent Jung had two dreams which he felt were crucial in deciding on a
career
at the time he was struggling with whether to pursue the sciences or the
humanities. In the first:

I was in a dark wood that stretched along the Rhine. I came to a little hill, a burial
mound, and began to dig. After a while I turned up, to my astonishment, some bones of
prehistoric animals. This interested me enormously, and at that moment I knew: I must
get to know nature, the world in which we live, and the things around us. (1963, p. 85)

This was followed by a second dream:

. . . I was in a wood; it was threaded with watercourses, and in the darkest place I saw a
circular pool, surrounded by dense undergrowth. Half immersed in the water lay the
strangest and most wonderful creature: a round animal, shimmering in opalescent hues,
and consisting of innumerable little cells, or of organs shaped like tentacles. It was a giant
radiolarian, measuring about three feet across. It seemed to me indescribably wonderful
that this magnificent creature should be lying there undisturbed, in the hidden place, in
the clear, deep water. It aroused in me an intense desire for knowledge, so that I awoke
with a beating heart. (ibid., emphasis added)

Jung goes on to say: ‘These two dreams decided me overwhelmingly in favor of

science, and removed all my doubts’ (ibid.). The lure of archeology, paleontology,
zoology and biology is evident in his framing of the dreams. As a young man he was
reading these fields as potential career choices rather than as explicit metaphors for
exploration of psychological depth; later they would become significant expressions
for archaic and core aspects of the psyche. Nevertheless, the pursuit of science seems
directly linked to dreams and the inner world for the 19-year-old Jung. The visionary
and the scientific are already intertwined and mutually interacting.
Fortunately, with the publication of the The red book (2009), we have been given a
little more historical detail regarding the recording of these dreams. Hence, in Liber
primus, in the section titled ‘On the Service of the Soul,’ in response to a command
from the spirit of the depths, Jung writes down all the dreams he can recall (2009,
p. 234). Sonu Shamdasani informs us, in a footnote (n. 64) to this passage, that Jung
wrote down these two pivotal dreams in his black book #2 (the black books
contained the original manuscript texts from which The red book was constructed).
 112 J. Cambray

He identifies that these dreams date from the time Jung was 19 years old in 1894 but
apparently were being recollected and transcribed in November 1913
it is not clear
whether Jung actually made any record of the dreams at age 19. Thus we are left
uncertain as to the accuracy of the images of these dreams and given the highly
charged emotional state Jung was in at the start of The red book, there may be
nuances that the 38-year-old Jung includes which add retrospectively to his sense of
certainty stated in MDR.
In reviewing the dream imagery what strikes me as most curious is for a medical
man, well trained in biology, his conflation of species, in particular radiolarians and
medusae (jellyfish). Radiolarians are single cell creatures (plankton) with elaborate,
even fantastic exoskeletons; they don’t have ‘tentacles’ but multicelluar medusae do
and they can easily reach three feet in diameter, as in the dream. However, there were
some remarkable images of exotic marine creatures rendered in a highly artistic
fashion available in popular culture at the time Jung had these dreams but the most
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striking of these came a few years after the dreams. The primary source of the images
was the German scientist Ernst Haeckel.
As I have discussed elsewhere (Cambray, in press), Haeckel had begun publishing
remarkable renditions of radiolarians from microscopic identifications as early as
1862 as part of his work as a marine biologist. He went on to draft highly aesthetic
images of a broad variety of life forms, but especially marine species such as sponges,
medusae and sea squirts, in addition to the radiolarians. His most famous artistic
works were a set of ten folios published between 1899 and 1904 culminating in a
beautifully illustrated book, Kunstformen der Natur/Art forms in nature (1904/1998).
This volume contains pages of images of both radiolarians and medusae. The
mandala-like qualities of Haeckel’s drawings associated with oceanic depths are
unmistakable, as is his personal and libidinal investment in the images (for example,
his passion for his first wife Anna Sethe, who tragically died early and left Haeckel
bereft for many years, can be seen in his rendering of the medusa which he named
after her with its tentacles portrayed alluringly as if curly blonde tresses
see http://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haeckel_Discomedusae_8.jpg).
Further, the impact of Haeckel’s ‘scientific art’ on the culture of the times is well
known. Haeckel’s imagery had a marked impact on the Jugendstil (youth style)
movement in German-speaking cultures as well as its better-known international
counterpart, Art Nouveau, which held sway from about 1890 to 1914. A well-known
example was the architect René Binet’s entrance to the Paris World Exposition of
1900, directly modeled on Haeckel’s drawings of radiolarians. Fifty million people
visited the exposition (by the time Jung arrived in Paris a year later it was over and
we do not know what he may have thought about it). More recently studies have
documented Haeckel’s influence on Obrist, Mucha, Munch, Marc, as well as Klee,
Kandinsky, Gauguin, Matisse, and Berlin Dada (e.g., see Marsha Morton [2009]).
There is no doubt that Jung would have been impacted by Haeckel’s images, not
only in medical school but in various places throughout culture. His psyche, both at
age 19 and more fully in 1913 at age 38, had certainly incorporated these images into
his dreams and fantasies. In another publication I examine parallels between certain
of Haeckel’s images and a series of Jung’s paintings in The red book (in press).
Haeckel’s importation of Darwin’s theory of evolution into the German-speaking
cultures as well as his own biological theories influenced Jung’s archetypal theory
together with the notion of a collective unconscious (Cambray, in press).
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 113

From the Zofinga lectures to research at the Burghölzli

Following quickly upon his career choice dreams, Jung entered the medical school of
Basel University in April 1895. Almost immediately he joined the Basel section of the
Swiss student fraternity, Zofingiaverein, of which his father had also been a member
during his student days. Jung gave his first lecture to this group in November 1896; it
was entitled ‘The border zones of exact science’ (Jung, 1983). As von Franz notes in
her introduction to the lectures:

He begins with a vehement attack on the inertia, stupidity, and conventionality of most
scientists and exposes contemporary materialistic society as a giant with feet of clay.
Although the views of physics that he criticizes are naturally outdated, it is fascinating
to see how Jung attacks just the weak points. (1983, p. xvii)

Reading the lecture for its scientific content quickly reveals its student qualities as
many of the exciting developments of the previous several decades are not included.
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For example, he attacks belief in the theory of the ether without mention of the
groundbreaking 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, which was the first major
demonstration against this theory and was recognized as such at the time. Yet his
intuitions are strong; he is searching for important questions and revealing the limits
of the science he has been taught.
Jung’s eclectic tendencies are already in evidence in this first lecture as he ranges
over topics in physics (gravitation, ether, conservation of energy, the newly discovered
X-rays), chemistry (atomic and molecular theory), biology (Darwinism, mechanistic
versus vitalistic theories, origin of life) and even a dash of psychology by the end (the
entry of hypnotism into German science). His final plea is ‘to allow the immaterial to
retain its immaterial properties’ (1983, p. 19).
By the time of his second lecture six months later, Jung was rapidly moving more
deeply into philosophy and metaphysics. He also had begun attending séances during
this time (Bair, 2003, p. 52). The topic of this lecture ‘Some thoughts on psychology’
is mainly concerned with issues of the immaterial realm, especially spiritualistic
phenomena. It can be seen as a precursor to his medical dissertation ‘On the
psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena’ (1902) and even to his
lifelong passion for the reality of the psyche. The remaining lectures continue in this
vein including questions and dilemmas associated with the nature of causality and
with religious phenomena and belief. Thus even before he has completed medical
school Jung is using science as a starting point, not something to rest upon. He is
more interested in what lies beyond or outside the boundaries of the science of his
day and how the questions associated with these realms may impact scientific
thinking, than he is in establishing himself as a scientist as such.
Upon completion of his medical studies, Jung secured a position at the
Psychiatric University Hospital and Clinic of Zürich, the Burghölzli Hospital, under
its director, Dr. Med. Eugen Bleuler. The hospital at this time was focused on
humane patient care, likely the first milieu model in-patient psychiatric facility in the
world. Occupational therapy and hypnosis were in regular use at the time Jung
arrived, and the Burghölzli also was the first university clinic to employ Freud’s
analytic theories. In contradistinction to Emil Kraeplin’s strictly biological view of
‘dementia praecox’ (the dominant paradigm at the time), Bleuler already held to
a combination of biological and hermeneutic elements in the etiology of these
conditions, at the time the only major European psychiatrist to do so (Hoff, 2011).
 114 J. Cambray

By 1908 Bleuler coined the term ‘schizophrenia’ and then proceeded to expand
Kraeplin’s dementia praecox into a class of illnesses, ‘the group of schizophrenias’
(1911).
Writing his doctoral dissertation under Bleuler, Jung was influenced by his
dialectical thinking and moved towards a more overtly psychological understanding
of the enigmatic phenomena such as he’d observed at home and at the séances. As
Bair notes, in the original German version of the dissertation a paragraph is cut from
the English version in which:

he hoped to demonstrate the ‘manifold connections’ between ‘so-called occult

phenomena’ and the subjects usually considered appropriate for research and debate
by the medical and psychological professions . . . that it would be a ‘rich harvest for
experiential psychology’ and hoped it would lead toward ‘the progressive elucidation
and assimilation of the as yet extremely controversial psychology of the unconscious.’
(2003, p. 63)
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Thus we can see that the notion of science that Jung was developing necessarily
included consideration of unconscious elements. Subjective aspects of experience
were to be integrated as an essential part of his scientific worldview putting him at
odds with the more mainstream objectivist, mechanistic, and reductionist views.
This tendency towards inclusion of subjectivity led Jung to his well-known,
masterful breakthroughs in the use of the word association experiments. This
research was again conducted at the Burghölzli under Bleuler and Jung’s
psychophysical measurements made in concert with the associational studies lent
them a more rigorous, scientific aura. His detection of unconscious interferences in
the process of forming associations, linked with measures of anxiety, provided an
observable and measurable bridge between subjective and objective (unconscious
mental and somatic) elements in the study, in addition to leading him to complex
theory. It is this conjunction of subjectivity with objectivity that forms the core of
Jung’s radically subversive approach to the science of the day. While this also served
as a ‘proof’ of some of Freud’s conjectures and helped to inaugurate their
relationship, I suggest it is the transformative potential of the conjunction that
supplied the initial Eros of their engagement.
During the time Jung was working at the Burghölzli he was also a Privatdozent in
psychiatry at the University of Zürich. This brought him into contact with colleagues
from various other disciplines at the university including Albert Einstein who was a
house guest of Jung’s on several occasions (McGuire, 1974, letter to Freud, 230J). In
writing to Carl Seelig (a biographer of Einstein) Jung commented:

It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as
well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later this stimulus
led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic
synchronicity (Jung, 1975, letter 25 February 1953).

The meeting of these radical visionaries at similar points in their careers, when their
stars were in ascendance was a difficult (they seem to have found the other’s
discipline nearly incomprehensible) yet fructifying experience for Jung and helped to
shape his views on how science could be conceived. It also seems to have activated
the temptation to treat scientific ideas as potential metaphors for psychology, a
slippery slope that some of Jung’s New Age followers have fallen down.
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 115

The period of The red book

By the end of 1913, Jung was in a state of psychological distress. Beginning in 1909 he
progressively divested himself of many activities and ties that previously had sustained
him. He left the Burghölzli, he broke off relations with Freud, and by 1914 resigned
from the psychoanalytic movement, as well as from his lectureship at the University of
Zürich, while increasingly pursuing an inner compulsion for self analysis and subjects
such as mythology. As captured in his Black Books and transcribed into the now
published The red book, Jung underwent a profound exploratory period in response to
a series of terrifying visions and dreams that caused him to fear for his sanity.1 From
this he emerged with a new methodology for engaging unconscious processes (active
imagination) and the need to rework his theories of mind and soul.
As I have discussed elsewhere (in press), Jung concluded his work on The red book
at the same time that he began to articulate his theory of synchronicity. Taking a
longitudinal view Jung seems to have shifted from a fear of psychosis (around visions
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of Europe filling with blood, etc.) to a troubling sense of personal prophetic abilities
(with the outbreak of World War I) during the course of his inner engagement.
However, as he writes in The red book Epilogue: ‘My acquaintance with alchemy in
1930 took me away from it. The beginning of the end came in 1928, when Wilhelm
sent me the text of the ‘Golden flower’, a Chinese alchemical treatise. There the
contents of this book found their way into actuality and I could no longer continue
working on it’ (p. 360). Jung felt the receipt of this text from Wilhelm was itself a
synchronistic event. He further contextualized his shift by referring to his prodromal
Liverpool dream (of 1927) in which he makes his way to a place where:

. . . [t]he various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the
center was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round
about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed
with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It
was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of light.
My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the
tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise
that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the flowering tree
and the sunlit island, and thought, ‘I know very well why he has settled here.’ Then I
awoke. (1963, p. 198)

In Jung’s comments on the dream he recognizes ‘Liverpool’, as the pool of life. With
this dream he felt ‘the goal had been revealed. . . that the self is the principle and
archetype of orientation and meaning’ (ibid., pp. 198
199). The image of the
mandala-like center within the round pool offers a fascinating echo to the dreams of
his 19-year-old self with the giant radiolarian (medusa) in the forest pool, now more
fully articulated and realized.
From the perspective of his ‘career’, this enhanced realization would indicate that
he was now much more ready and able to ‘settle here’ and find his true life’s work. In
fact Jung notes:

After this dream I gave up drawing or painting mandalas [i.e., he stopped work on The
red book] . . . It has taken me virtually 45 years to distill within the vessel of my scientific
work the things I experienced and wrote down at that time . . . my works are a more or
less successful endeavor to incorporate this incandescent matter into the contemporary
picture of the world. (ibid., p. 199)
 116 J. Cambray

Similarly, Shamdasani notes: ‘In retrospect he described The red book as an attempt
to formulate things in terms of revelation. He had hope that this would free him, but
found that it didn’t. He then realized that he had to return to the human side and to
science. He had to draw conclusions from the insights’ (Jung, 2009, p. 219).
Although Shamdasani does make a passing link to synchronicity, it is only in
terms of the significance of the visions of 1913 and 1914. This risks overlooking the
moment of Jung’s actual, original formulation of the concept of synchronicity. As
discussed in my book on synchronicity, Jung first used the term in his dream
seminars in 1928. It was in one of these seminars where spontaneous clustering of
dreams and images were being discussed that he first ventured the concept. Then in
1930 for the first time Jung used the term ‘synchronicity’ publically at Richard
Wilhelm memorial service (Cambray, 2009, pp. 7
9). From these events I have
argued that it was precisely Jung’s ability to formulate this new thesis, to offer a
genuinely new, scientific principle that was crucial in moving him beyond the
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confines of personal prophecy (in press). Synchronicity, as an attempt to render

prophetic visions amenable to scientific reflection, albeit a radically re-visioned
science, is for me the reason Jung was able to leave the world of The red book
transforming his experiences into his confrontation with the world. Not only was
Jung attempting a transformation in culture from a theological to a psychological
ground, I believe he was also trying to offer a visionary science.
Returning to the imagery which Jung rendered in drawings and painting2
throughout the period of The red book, I would like to consider one of his scientific
sources and what his incorporation of this material might have meant. As previously
mentioned in investigating some of the sources for these images, I have found parallels
with the scientific artwork of Ernst Haeckel to be especially striking
one example
can be found by comparing the image on p. 125 of The red book, especially the upper
portion of the red cross inside a circle with wavy rays emanating from it (which can
be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2009/oct/16/1 and http://back
story.latimesmagazine.com/2010/04/jungs-little-red-book-on-display-in-la.html) with
Haeckel’s rendering of sea squirt images (1904, p. 84; see Figure 1). Jung made no

Figure 1.
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 117

direct reference to this body of work and so we are left with how to best consider such
correspondences. I suggest that Jung was incorporating just these images which blend
art and science into a visual articulation of his active imaginations, his visions, as a
way of joining artistic and scientific thought to his visionary experiences.3 It is
reasonable to assume that some aspects of Haeckel’s scientific theories are implicitly
being imported along with his images.4 In fact I have discussed both Freud and Jung’s
use of Haeckel’s biogenetic ‘law’ in a previous publication (in press). Thus Jung was
developing what might now be seen as a new kind of visual literacy, one that is
radically transgressive of classical disciplines and he is beginning to construct a
psychological approach that includes a psychologizing of science, looking at the
fantasies and visions from which it emerges as well as the ones it forms through its
researches and theories
this was a project he only touched upon overtly but is left to
those who would continue to explore the uses of his methods.
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Visions, art, science and the self

As Jung exited from his work on The red book and took up the task of re-entering the
world of science, it is instructive to look at some of his interests and ideas emerging at
that time. His intense focus on alchemy, of course, dates to this era. This immersion
in alchemy served in part as a ‘historical regression’, returning to one of the roots of
modern science while also opening up a world of visionary images that he attempted
to read using the lens of symbolism. In turn this required him to develop a lexicon of
terms to slowly make his way through the texts and served as the first layer in his
psychological reading of alchemy.
That the first major application of Jung’s new understanding from these studies
was to the dreams of Wolfgang Pauli (1953/1968, Collected works [CW] 12, part II) is
now common knowledge. Less often discussed is the significance of this choice in the
overall thrust of Jung’s opus. By the time of these dreams Pauli himself was already a
figure who had played a major role in the breakdown of the classical view of physics.
The choice of Pauli as the ill dreamer to introduce the psychological value for the
study of alchemy had many dimensions. Among these I think is Jung’s bold step
towards a radical re-visioning of the notion of science, including even the new
quantum physics. He is deconstructing the then prevalent reductive, materialistic
stance, implying its illness required a new vision, i.e., as an extension of his own
recent experiences. Pauli’s recovery then would be linked with his capacity to enter
into and be transformed through engaging his own unconscious processes. The
paradigm shift of quantum physics alone was insufficient; the personality of the
scientist had to be expanded, to become rooted in the self.
Further, in 1929 for the first time Jung turns to the science of crystallography for
a simile; in ‘The significance of constitution and heredity in psychology’, he writes:

. . . ideal types, of course, never occur in reality in their pure form, but only as individual
variations of the principle underlying them, just as crystals are usually individual
variations of the same isometric system. (1947/1954/1969, CW 8, para. 221)

Over the next several decades he continued to draw on his understanding of

chemistry and crystallography. He increasingly employed the process of crystal-
lization, expanding his use of it into a metaphoric means of grasping the notion of
the archetype in itself, e.g., in ‘Psychological aspects of the mother archetype’ (1939):
 118 J. Cambray

Its form, however, as I have explained elsewhere, might perhaps be compared to the
axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, performs the crystalline structure in the
mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears
according to the specific way in which the ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype
in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of
representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited,
only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which
are also determined in form only . . . With regard to the definiteness of the form, our
comparison with the crystal is illuminating inasmuch as the axial system determines
only the stereometric structure but not the concrete form of the individual crystal. This
may be either large or small, and it may vary endlessly by reason of the different size of
its planes or by growing together of two crystals. The only thing that remains constant is
the axial system, or rather, the invariable geometric proportions underlying it. The same
is true of the archetype. In principle, it can be named and has an invariable nucleus of
meaning
but always only in principle, never as regards its concrete manifestation. In
the same way, the specific appearance of the mother-image at any given time cannot be
deduced from the mother archetype alone, but depends on innumerable other factors.
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(1959/1969, CW 9i para. 155)

Here, the metaphor seems to be implicitly gaining bidirectionality. Not only is

archetypal patterning being linked with scientific discourse to give it a grounding
image but the nature of scientific thought is also being archetypalized.
The intertwining of the two fields in Jung’s writings is further elaborated with his
1946 concept of the ‘psychoid’ and the psychoid nature of the archetype (1947/1954/
1969, CW 8, para. 419)
see Addison (2009) for a discussion of these concepts within
the tradition of vitalism; also note, Haeckel’s last book was entitled ‘Crystal souls’
(1917) stemming from his fascination with the recently discovered liquid crystals with
their self-organizing properties, where he sought a similar realm. However, at the
deepest level Jung’s view of the psychoid implies the symmetry-breaking patterning
that is postulated as allowing our universe to come into being; this is also the
patterning that leads to the psyche and ultimately that these realms are inseparable, a
truly radical hypothesis (for further discussion see Cambray, 2009).
Although there is no documentary evidence of any communications between
them, Jung likely knew of the work of his contemporary Paul Niggli (1888
1953), a
well-known Swiss crystallographer at the University of Zürich and the ETH. In 1919
Niggli brought mathematical ideas on space-filling symmetry groups to the study of
crystals and introduced the lattice complex concept to indicate a set of crystal-
lographically equivalent atoms in crystal polyhedra (Lima-de-Faria, 1990, pp. 12 and
51), like the carbon atoms in diamond. Such ideas, especially the four-fold symmetry
as associated with elemental carbon would have been an idea replete with
psychological and alchemical notions for Jung, as when he was discussing centers
and symmetry in mandalas:

Now it is
as I can hardly refrain from remarking
a curious ‘sport of nature’ that the
chief chemical constituent of the physical organism is carbon, which is characterized by
four valencies; also it is well known that the diamond is a carbon crystal. Carbon is
black
coal, graphite
but the diamond is ‘purest water.’ To draw such an analogy
would be a lamentable piece of intellectual bad taste were the phenomenon of four
merely a poetic conceit on the part of the conscious mind and not a spontaneous
product of the objective psyche. (1953/1968, CW 12, para. 327)

My point here is not about any direct influence between these men but to suggest the
intellectual climate in which Jung was formulating his ideas was deeply influenced by
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 119

contemporary scientific discoveries from a variety of field. My extension is that in

various ways he wished to enter the discourse employing his psychological ideas on
science, though not always in a clear manner, nor successfully in terms of scientists’
views of their fields or themselves. It is his attempt to engage and incorporate the
world of contemporary science of his day that I will discuss shortly in terms of his
legacy to analytical psychology.
Combining crystallographic ideas with studies on alchemy, Jung saw the
organizing capacity of crystal lattices with the regular geometric forms that emerge
as an image of the lapis, as symbols of the self. For example, in Aion he writes:

From the circle and quaternity motif is derived the symbol of the geometrically formed
crystal and the wonder-working stone. From here analogy formation leads on to the
city, castle, church, house, and vessel. Another variant is the wheel (rota). (1951/1959,
CW 9ii, para. 352)
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Thus Jung seems to be finding ultimate value hidden in the background of scientific
research, though in order to do so, he relocates it in alchemical symbolism.
This visionary approach was naturally extended to Jung’s interest in and conflict
with the arts. During this same period, in 1930, he wrote the first version of what became
a problematic essay ‘Psychology and literature’, in which he articulates two modes of
artistic creation, the psychological and the visionary (1966, paras. 133
162).5 As
mentioned earlier, this also coincides in time with Jung’s first public use of the term
‘synchronicity’, as well as when he began his study of alchemy in earnest. The connection
between a broader view on visionary states and synchronicity is, for me, a sign of Jung’s
struggle to relinquish ‘prophecy’ as a personal calling (to retain his sanity in light of his
visions just before the outbreak of WWI) as he began to turn towards a science of the
objective psyche, where the psychological and visionary remained in tension for him.

Jung’s scientific legacy for contemporary analytical psychology

In the previous sections I have indicated some of the immediate scientific source
material Jung may have drawn upon for his theorizing about the human psyche.
More broadly, his writings drew upon a number of traditions, most notably German
Romanticism. The scientific models associated with this view generally trace to
Goethe and to Fredrick Schiller with his Naturphilosophie, but there is not space here
to delve into this. A key aspect of this approach was to look holistically at any system
under investigation. Some of the political dilemmas and misappropriations of this
model have been discussed by Anne Harrington (1996) and can serve as a cautionary
note about the misuse of the idealizations that can arise from indiscriminate
application of this perspective.
Nevertheless, there has been a lively reemergence of holistic views in science over
the past several decades, especially coming from General Systems Theory.6 Related
studies in complexity theory and findings on complex adaptive systems have been
shown to have broad application to numerous fields, including psychology and
formulations about how the mind emerges from the body/brain system. Some of
these ideas have been examined by Jungian-oriented scholars and analysts, leading
to some valuable reassessments of key Jungian concepts such as archetypes
(Knox, 2003; Hogenson, 2001; McDowell, 2001), complexes (Saunders & Skar,
2001), synchronicity (Cambray, 2002; Hogenson, 2005), as well as numerous clinical
 120 J. Cambray

applications by various authors. I will not go over this ground here but turn to
several other areas of science which might be fruitfully engaged for new visions. What
I present here is from my own idiosyncratic list of topics.
In addition to the general holistic approach to consciousness and the mind, I
suggest a further topic that may be worth tracking for Jungians is memory. The
subject of human memory has held the attention of communities of thinkers for
millennia. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, following Darwin’s theory of
evolution together with the advances in scientific technologies which allowed more
detailed examination of the human brain, a host of theories of memory flourished.
Jung and Freud were influenced by theories of ‘organic memory’ which included
consideration of phylogenetic dimensions. Sonu Shamdasani has carefully contex-
tualized Jung’s ideas in this regard (2003, ch. 3).
The idea of ‘organic memory’ as so formulated including Haeckel’s ‘biogenetic
law’ had been consigned to the dustbin of history, until very recently. Barely ten years
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ago in the wake of genome sequencing, a new area of biological research and
theorizing appeared, at times called ‘Evo-Devo’ (Evolutionary Development).
Scientists in this field have felt the need to reexamine the relationship between
ontogeny and phylogeny; and Haeckel’s ideas are seen as precursors. This
reevaluation has been particularly spurred by developments in what is termed
epigenesis, a theory postulating that complex organisms, including humans, develop
by successive differentiation of an unstructured egg rather than by a simple enlarging
of a preformed entity
see American Heritage Stedman’s medical dictionary, at:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epigenesis)
no homunculi here! While
studies in epigenetics have been around for a much longer time, the new genomic
research has demonstrated new ways to bridge genotype and phenotype. According
to Goldberg and colleagues: ‘epigenetics may be defined as the study of any
potentially stable and, ideally, heritable change in gene expression or cellular
phenotype that occurs without changes in Watson-Crick base-pairing of DNA’
(Goldberg et al., 2007, p. 635). Here, what goes beyond the previous thinking of
molecular biologists is that epigenetic mechanisms can regulate gene expression yet
do not involve alterations in the genetic code itself. Similarly, epigenetic
modifications can abolish gene function, explicitly without any DNA sequence
change. This newly discovered capacity for modification extends the field of
behavioral genetics so that aspects of experience can be imagined as influencing
biological inheritance, a neo-Lamarckian vision that has experimental substantiation
(see Gilbert & Epel, 2009, pp. 447
459).
Consideration of the impact of epigenetics on archetypal theory has begun; for
example, as part of the recent debate in the Journal of Analytical Psychology between
Goodwyn (2010a and 2010b), versus Knox, Merchant, and Hogenson (2010).
However, this is a rich, complex area of scientific research that is expanding at a
rapid rate. Understanding and integrating the findings, as well as exploring the limits
of utility of this approach to Jungian theory will require ongoing careful study of this
field. The potential here to develop a scientifically grounded theory of a collective
unconscious is quite enticing, though this is also likely to require significant
modification of Jung’s formulations to be consistent with the scientific data. Vision
and experiment would need to come into fuller dialogue.
Another approach to memory that could have salience for the Jungian
community can be found in neuroscientific studies. For example, memory researcher
Daniel Schacter and colleagues have been investigating regions of the brain which
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 121

appear activated when subjects remember past events as compared with their
imagining future events. The data has led the researchers to conclude that: ‘All
regions active during the construction and elaboration of past events were also active
during future event construction and elaboration’ (Addis et al., 2007, p. 1375).
Further they note, ‘future events recruited a number of additional regions thought to
be involved in prospective thinking and generation’ (ibid.), though I would note with
differing intensities depending on what is being evoked.
Based on their results, this group has made the radical, but reasonable
suggestion that the episodic memory system may actually have as its primary role
‘not reminiscence but rather future thinking’ (ibid., p. 1374). In presenting a
‘constructive episodic simulation’ hypothesis, in which ‘episodic memory supports
the construction of future events by extracting and recombining stored information
into a simulation of a novel event’ (Schacter & Addis, 2009, p. 1246), they are
further demonstrating an anticipatory function associated with memory. Applied to
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dreams, the memory content might then be seen as directly importing prospective
qualities in line with Jung’s view of dreams
an idea untested by the scientists to
date.
Obviously the selection offered here is quite limited and many other areas of
scientific investigation could easily be included. This is only meant to suggest fields
of research that might not ordinarily fall within the purview of Jungian oriented
theorists and practitioners and to encourage readers of this journal to consider
exporting Jung’s visionary approach to a variety of disciplines.

Conclusion
In this short piece I have tried to indicate Jung’s early and lifelong engagement with
science, starting with his dreams when he was 19 years old. While Jung had formal
basic training in the sciences typical for a medical doctor of his day, he also went
further borrowing from the emerging scientific paradigms of the early twentieth
century in the service of his vision of psychology. I have attempted here to show several
lines of such involvements. However, I have not included Jung’s use of nineteenth-
century thermodynamics in his formulations of psychic energy and synchronicity
(I have already commented on the later in my 2002 paper on the topic). Furthermore,
Jung’s use of field theory, derived from nineteenth century theories of electromagnet-
ism, as imported into psychology by William James have been explored in a chapter of
my 2009 book. The development of quantum and relativity theories, which so attracted
Jung, brought radically new ideas to field theories but Jung struggled to fully
comprehend these ideas as is apparent from his correspondence with Pauli. Never-
theless, the inclusion of subjectivity in these theories captivated Jung’s imagination and
was a major spur for his own psychological theories. Incorporating his understanding
of these ideas into his theory of human interaction, Jung found a way to include what
would be taken as anomalous phenomena from a classical perspective.
It seems Jung did not keep up with developments in modern biology in his
later years as is evidenced in his letter to Michael Fordham of 14 June 1958 (1975, pp.
450
451). There he states:

It is true that I have set aside hitherto general biology. This is for good reasons! We still
know far too little about the human psychology to be able to establish a biological basis
for our views. . . .
 122 J. Cambray

This opinion could still be said to hold, though certainly not as strongly, for
example, the field of consciousness studies has made many strides in the last
several decades. However, rather than just viewing this as a problem of psychology
having to ground itself in biology, an approach from the other direction is
emerging. As these disciplines have drawn closer through developments in
(neuro)biological understanding, especially due to the study of complex systems,
new views of the mind are being constructed. The ideas put forward here which
come from epigenetics and the contemporary neuroscience of memory are, I
believe, part of a new paradigm in science that with its emergentist feature would
have caught Jung’s imagination, at least in my vision of Jung as psychological
theorist.

Notes
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1. See Shamdasani’s introduction to The red book (Jung, 1983, pp. 198
202) for a discussion
of this period and Jung’s fears.
2. His production of paintings, however, was not restricted to this period. At the recent show
on C.G. Jung and The red book at the Rietberg Musuem in Zürich (December 18, 2010 to
March 20, 2011), a series of his paintings starting in 1901 were on display and showed
features that would later appear in the artwork of The red book.
3. Frank Sulloway pointed out that in the mid-1860s Aleksandr Kovalesky (a leading
Russian embryologist) discovered that ‘the larval form of the ascidian . . . possesses a
rudimentary notochord’ making it appear as ‘a ‘missing link’ between invertebrates and
the lowest true vertebrates’ (1979, p. 153). Both Darwin and Haeckel picked up this idea
and incorporated into their writings. By extension Jung’s integration of this marine form
into the image on p. 125 of The red book might be interpreted as his positing a psychic
link on a vertical axis between the human and the divine carried by a symbolic form of a
similar nature.
4. Richard Noll has a useful chapter on Freud, Haeckel, and Jung (1994), though it also
contains a mix of facts and speculations that are not always clearly differentiated. Further,
its intent is to undermine Jung’s reputation through association, whereas recent scholarship
on Haeckel has been reconsidering the man and his theories challenging the previous views
on his place in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century German culture (see Richards,
2008).
5. In para. 152 of this essay he makes direct use of Haeckel’s ‘biogenetic law’, without
explicitly naming it: ‘. . . what appears in the vision is the imagery of the collective
unconscious. This is the matrix of consciousness and has its own inborn structure.
According to phylogenetic law, the psychic structure must, like the anatomical, show
traces of the earlier stages of evolution it has passed through’. This furthers the
argument of a link between Haeckel’s concepts, as well as his art, and Jung’s visionary
world.
6. Jung was drawn to some of the pioneering effort in this area in the late 1940s, especially
cybernetics with its self-regulating systems, which he applied to the psyche (Cambray,
2006).

Notes on contributor
Joe Cambray, PhD, is President of the IAAP and past US Editor of the Journal of Analytical
Psychology, of which he is now on the Advisory Board. He is past president of the C.G. Jung
Institute of Boston and a faculty member of the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at Harvard
University. His recent published works are as co-editor with Linda Carter of Contemporary
perspectives in Jungian analysis, published by Routledge in 2006, and Synchronicity: Nature
and psyche in an interconnected universe, published by Texas A&M University Press in 2009.
He is in private practice in Boston, MA, and Providence, RI, USA.
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 123

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