Seven People Who Have Influenced Me

The following seven individuals played a major role in my own intellectual development. Without them, I might not have become an “archetypologist.” Two, Freud and Jung, are world renowned; others are known only to a relatively small group of anthropologists, sociologists, and analysts. Because of their formative influence, I have highlighted their relevant contributions.

1: Alexis De Tocqueville (1800-1875)

The ancestor of them all was a 26-year-old French aristocrat who came to America in 1831 to study penal conditions here and wrote about America so perceptively that his Democracy in America remains a relevant, luminous classic over 170 years later. As Daniel Boorstin wrote, “de Tocqueville has the ring of prophecy.”

I find him an extraordinary precursor for another reason: His methods, analysis, and powers of deduction are extraordinarily in advance of his time. Nowhere in de Tocqueville’s work is there any reference to “archetypes,” “imprints,” or any of the glib sociological jargon that makes so much social analysis literature unreadable today. But take the following passage:

To understand a man, we must watch the infant in his mother’s arms; we must see the first images which the external world casts upon the mirror of his mind, the first occurrences that he witnesses; we must hear the first words that awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts if we could understand the prejudices, habits, and passions that will rule his life. The entire man is to be seen in the cradle of the child. The growth of nations presents something analogous to this: they all bear some marks of their origins. If we were able to go back to the elements of states and to examine the oldest monuments of their history, I doubt not that we should discover in them the primal cause of the prejudices, habits, passions, and all that constitutes what is called the national character.

Democracy in America abounds in such prophetic anticipation of imprints and archetypes, whether de Tocqueville is toying with the science of linguistics: “The tie of language is, perhaps, the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind,” or simply stating basic truths that later sociologists only “discovered” a century later: “The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.”

De Tocqueville was perhaps the first contemporary historian of his day who also functioned as social anthropologist, sociologist and cultural analyst as well as historian. He was among the first to realize the importance of bringing together these different strands of knowledge into a coherent whole. He intuitively anticipated Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: he was probably the first “relativist” ever. He was one of the first to draw from different sciences to explain the true nature of America in 1831.

This is why his observations, deductions, and comments are so illuminating -- they remain extraordinarily pertinent today. Here are few examples:

• On the press: “The influence of the liberty of the press in America does not affect political opinions alone, but extends to all opinions of men and modifies customs as well as laws”
   
• On equality and class relations: “There exists in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality in freedom.”
   
• On money: “Nearly all Americans have to take a profession . . . In America most of the rich men were formerly poor.”
   
• On conformity and uniform patterns: “I do not believe there is a country in the world where, in proportion to its population, there are so few ignorant and at the same time so few learned individuals.”
   
• On the distrust of intellectuals: “There is no class in America, in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted by heredity, fortune and leisure. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application of these subjects.”
   
• On the “can do” approach to problems: “The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it.”
   
• On the nature of political leadership: “In the United States, I was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the citizens and so little among the heads of government. At the present day the ablest men in the United States are rarely placed at the head of affairs.”

No one reading de Tocqueville today can fail to be amazed by the current relevance of almost all his generalizations about America, culled from acute observation, an insatiable curiosity and the fact that he looked at America in a quite unprecedented way.

There is another reason why I regard de Tocqueville as both a precursor and role-model: he came from a long line of French aristocrats and was profoundly disillusioned by the current state of affairs in his own country, wracked first by the French revolution of 1789, then by Napoleon’s insatiable ambition to dominate the whole of Europe, leading to disaster, economic ruin and the restoration of the modified, mocked, “bourgeois” Louis-Philippe monarchy -- a lame-duck regime which de Tocqueville knew would not last. The culture he came from was completely unlike the American culture he set out to study -- and he did so by seeing himself as a “professional stranger,” someone from another planet.

His observations were so acute, and his conclusions so original, precisely because he understood that it was not merely the Atlantic Ocean that separated the American and French cultures: he realized very quickly that although some aspects of the American way of life -- aspects that were completely familiar to them and which they took for granted -- came as a huge shock to him, Americans were equally baffled by some of de Tocqueville’s own instinctive reactions, arising out of his own French culture, which he took for granted. It was largely thanks to de Tocqueville that I would start using the “professional stranger” approach, in group sessions with students, and, later clients -- not just to shock, but because this enabled me, and those I was working with, to start looking a at problems in a completely different way.

But my greatest debt to de Tocqueville lies in the very evidence he left behind -- in those monumental two volumes on the nature of American culture, as he was the first to perceive it in 1831. Almost everything he wrote holds true, and has been tested by time. Using a classic literary style which may seem to us elaborate, but was current then, throughout Democracy in America de Tocqueville is writing about American imprints and cultural archetypes.

When I am asked: do cultural archetypes really exist? my reply is: read de Tocqueville and see for yourself. And when I am asked, If archetypes exist, how durable are they? My answer is: “If some of the American cultural archetypes de Tocqueville described 170 years ago are still going strong today, we can assume they have a long life.”

2: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Freud introduced so much into our daily vocabulary. We talk about Freudian lapses and Oedipus complexes without being aware that we owe these very concepts to a Viennese professor. I mention Freud here because of his impact on me, even though Freud would almost certainly have rejected the notion of “cultural archetypes.” I well recall the moment he first left his mark on me. I was struck by his compelling analogy of the individual unconscious: two people are in a room, trying to communicate with each other. Suddenly there is an incredible noise on the other side of the door, and all chances of a meaningful conversation cease. The noise is incredible, not necessarily threatening but ongoing and all-pervasive, rendering all communication impossible. The noise is not recognizable -- the people in the room have no idea whether it is made by a human, an animal, machine, or natural calamity. There is no sense of danger, but there is this incredible presence on the other side of the door. To find out more, and put a stop to it, the only thing to do is open the door and ask: What’s the problem?

The noise, according to Freud, is our unconscious, “opening the door.” Freud is saying that when the unconscious becomes that disturbing it is impossible for a human being to function.

To me, this was a far more compelling illustration than Freud’s explanation of what actually lay on the other side of the door. For Freud, the unconscious was something shameful and frightening: everything sexual that we dare not refer to consciously, all our taboos and unmentionable, socially unacceptable thoughts and desires end up there.

As a student, I underwent Freudian analysis myself, but I never accepted this view: was the unconscious no more than this “basement of the soul,” this grim, murky repository of the unspeakable? His doctrine seemed both too dogmatic and too restrictive, especially in the light of my field experiences among the Indians in Nicaragua and Brazil. I was, however, compelled to recognize that Freudian psychoanalysis was certainly effective: my own case was a dramatic illustration. As a very young man, I was burdened with an inexplicable, visible affliction: though I was already doing some lecturing and public speaking, such activity was agonizingly painful. Before I was due to speak, I would blush, tremble, break out into a cold sweat and, sometimes, find it impossible to express myself at all. This condition vanished after my analysis -- yet another example of the mysterious power of the unconsciousness.

Another element in the body of Freud’s work remains the bedrock of most practicing psychoanalysts: his theories on the interpretation of dreams. In Freud’s view, no one dreams at random; the content of the dream consists of two elements. The first is based on real-life elements in the dreamer’s life over the past few days. So if you dream about a large shaggy dog, it is likely that you saw or heard about one in real life shortly before you dreamt about it. But the dog does not really matter: what happens to the dog, in your dream. is really “you.” In other words, the pattern is what matters: the dog itself may be irrelevant.

To me, the power and originality of Freud’s approach to some of the problems he dealt with were far more important than his theories. But after his death, increasingly dogmatic, intolerant followers began treating every scrap of his writings with biblical reverence. Freudian doctrine became a “revealed truth,” a religion even mild critics attacked at their peril. Such questioning of Freudian orthodoxy has, of course, become routine: his “Oedipus complex” theories have been challenged by anthropologists who showed that in some tribes the notion of the “father” was unknown (the role assumed instead by the mother’s brother); and the fact that his findings were based on a small, narrow class of patients, overwhelmingly middleclass and female, in the city of Vienna, have been the subject of countless critical books and endless debate.

But for me, Freud remains a “guru,” if only for his momentous discovery of the importance of the individual unconscious and his early work on the interpretation of dreams, even though I cannot help asking myself whether, in different surroundings, Freud’s teachings might not have taken a completely different course.

3: Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Early in life, as a brilliant clinical practitioner in Zurich, Jung became famous for devising word-association tests. He would rattle off a list of specially chosen words at his patients, demanding an instant, unthinking response. They had to utter the first thing that immediately came to mind. It was a simple, effective way at delving into someone’s unconscious, and is still used today, though now mostly as a party game.

Jung is often associated with the concept of “archetype,” but what does the word “archetype” mean? Jung himself provided the answer, in an early essay that underlined his break with Freud -- and requires a brief , historical overview of their chequered relationship.

At first Freud and Jung were quite close. When they began working together, Freud regarded Jung not just as the most gifted of pupils (almost an adopted son) but as a very special asset: from the outset, Freud’s psychoanalytical theories had come under bitter, and often anti-semitic, attack, and Jung, who came from a long line of Swiss protestant theologians, provided Freud with badly needed credibility. As Freud wrote, in 1908: “It is only his arrival on the scene that has removed the danger of psychoanalysis becoming a Jewish national affair.”

But to Freud’s chagrin, the two very soon went their very different ways. Jung’s interests soon focused on things Freud regarded as irrelevant: on recurring myths and patterns in religions and literature of all kinds, old and new, Western and Eastern, including fairy-tales, the folklore of “primitive cultures” as observed by leading anthropologists. Above all, Jung and Freud parted company because Jung, early on in his clinical experience, came to believe that Freud’s insistence on the all-importance of the individual unconscious, and his conviction that it contained all our repressed, socially unacceptable emotional fears and longings, were wrong.

Jung believed that the “collective unconscious” was just as important as the “individual unconscious.” Moreover, in Jung’s view, there was nothing somber or shameful about it. On the contrary. The hypothesis of a “collective unconscious” was not an easy concept to grasp. It belonged “to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions.” As he wrote in a now-famous article, “I have chosen the term ‘collective unconscious’ because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals -- the contents of the ‘collective unconscious’ are known as archetypes.”

For Freud, it was a given that since each individual’s unconscious was uniquely distinct, all people are infinitely different. Jung passionately wanted to prove that all people were, at heart, psychologically similar. He tried to prove this through the study of “universal archetypes,” though even Jung, for all the intensity of his convictions, was aware, in the 1930s, that it would meet considerable resistance -- not least from those who argued that since he was dealing with the unconscious, how could he refer to what was, by very definition, “unknowable?” Jung’s early answer: “The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its color from the individual unconscious in which it happens to appear.”

Years later, he wrote: “No archetype can be reduced to a simple formula. It is a vessel we can never empty and never fill. It has a potential existence only, and when it takes shape in matter it is no longer what it was. It persists throughout the ages and requires interpreting ever anew. The archetypes change their shape continually.”

An “archetypal content,” he added, expressed itself “first and foremost in metaphors.” The obsessive question at the back of Jung’s mind was: “What are the archetypal features of human nature?”

Jung asserts that all the essential psychic characteristics that distinguish us as human beings are determined by genetics and are with us from birth. These typically human attributes Jung called archetypes. He regarded archetypes as basic to all the usual phenomena of human life. While he shared Freud’s view that personal experience was of critical significance for the development of each individual, for Jung the essential role of personal experience was to develop what was already there -- to activate what is latent or dormant in the very substance of the personality, to develop what is encoded in the genetic makeup of the individual, in a manner similar to that by which a photographer, through the addition of chemicals and the use of skill, brings out the image impregnated in a photographic plate.

Jung drew up a list of “universal archetypes” which, he claimed, were common to all humankind: The “Mother,” the “Father,” the “Hetaira” or “Love Goddess,” the “Amazon,” the “Medium,” the “Wise Man,” what he called the “Trickster” (perhaps more accurately rendered as the “court jester” or “fool” in the Shakespearian sense of the term),” the “Son,” and the “Hero,” to name the essential ones. He believed that some archetypes were not confined to humans, for even some birds and beasts, he argued, could be said to have fathers and mothers.

Jung owed his discovery, in part, to his voracious reading habits and limitless intellectual curiosity: everything was grist to his mill, but especially all that could not be explained rationally -- and this included not only myths and religions, but also tantric philosophy, yoga, and even tarot cards. He did, however, also draw extensively on his own clinical experience, discovering, for instance, that not only did many of his patients have similar dreams, but that these very same dream patterns occurred, according to anthropologists, among Kenyan tribes and in other “primitive” communities.

The same could be said of constantly recurring patterns in different religions, myths, folk-tales, pictorial art -- even psychoanalysis itself. “Water,” he wrote, “is the common symbol of the unconscious.” His Swiss patients dreamed of familiar Swiss lakes, but in African and Asian tribes water could be the “valley spirit,” in China water became the “water dragon” embracing both yin and yang, the ever-recurring opposites in Taoist philosophy. Recurring “universal archetypes, “ he claimed, could be found in the most unexpected places. He cited the case of one of his patients, a relatively uneducated, profoundly disturbed man, whom, he found one day standing at the window, wagging his head and blinking into the sun. “He told me to do the same, for then I would see something very interesting. When I asked him what he saw, he was astonished that I could see nothing, and said: ‘Surely you see the sun’s penis -- when I move my head to and fro, it moves too, and that is where the wind comes from.’”

At the time, Jung dismissed it all as part of the patient’s schizophrenia. It was only many years later that he happened to discover that a “Mithraic ritual” unearthed by a philologist in a Greek manuscript over 2,000 years old, contained exactly the same explanation of the origin of the wind, and that the relevant passage began with: “You will see hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube.” There were other surprising, discoveries. He found, for example, that deeply embedded in most myths and religions, there was a recurring notion involving space, or rather, “extremes” or “opposites.” As an example, “spirit’ always seems to come from above, while from below comes everything that is sordid and worthless.”

In fact all archetypes, he came to believe, “have a positive and negative aspect.” In time, he would parley this into his theory of “axis” and “quaternities” ties”—by which he meant a form of metaphysical “compass-points,” a vertical and horizontal “grid” by which archetypes could be measured and evaluated. As a student and aspiring psychoanalyst, I included Jung on my curriculum although I was never an expert, still less an orthodox “Jungian.” But it was impossible not to be intrigued by Jung’s thesis that, regardless of racial, ethnic, national, linguistic or intellectual differences, differing environments and levels of cultural sophistication—in other words regardless of whether those under scrutiny were Eskimos, New Yorkers or New Guinea aboriginals—certain common patterns could be discerned in all of them, in all of us.

What was more fascinating still was his even bolder conviction that we were all genetically programmed, practically from the origins of the human species, to harbor in our unconscious a certain number of universal archetypes.

What I discovered, when I started undergoing Jungian analysis as a budding psychoanalyst was exhilaration: it was so different from the joyless, passive Freudian process. The unconscious, I realized, need not just be Freud’s grim, scary “basement of the soul.” There was no need to be afraid of it. On the contrary, it was full of possibilities, a treasure trove replete with all the myths of humanity and the accumulated wisdom of centuries; in other words, exposure to it could be, and indeed should be, a joyful, enriching experience.

There was something else: in Jungian analysis, you don’t lie down on a sofa; you’re face to face with the analyst. The process is far more in the nature of a dialogue: you are trying to understand what part of your unconscious is you and what part of it derives from the archetypal “collective unconscious,” how the two relate, and how to establish some kind of communication between the different levels of your own unconscious. It was far more stimulating, intellectually, than the routine Freudian, stream-of consciousness psychoanalytical process.

Jung’s work influenced me in several ways. First of all, I was fascinated by the very duality of the man: on the one hand, he was the somewhat “square,” Protestant descendant who looked like a banker and came from a long line of theologians, very Swiss, very formal, very conscientious towards his patients, leading a blameless, somewhat austere life. But within this strict moralist lurked a bold, somewhat crazy adventurer, someone playing with fire, willing to experiment with ideas, hidden forces, inexplicable phenomena that others shied away from—like extra-sensory perception and Zen Buddhism. In later life, his mysticism increased, and he showed increasing—even obsessive—interest in those phenomena that defied all rational and conventional psychoanalytical explanations: alchemy, extra-sensory perceptions, levitation claims by mystics. In his last years, he even became interested in UFOs.

Whereas others were content to isolate problems under scrutiny and deal with them in a coldly scientific, clinical way, he was constantly looking for universal meanings and patterns, and this in turn compelled him to look beyond the conventional body of knowledge of medicine and psychoanalysis. It was this lifelong interest in other cultures that I was drawn to.

What I also liked was a trait most uncommon among original thinkers who end up heading schools of thought. He never said: You must believe in me and no-one else, to become a true Jungian you have to discard everything that does not fit in with my own theories, there is no room for the slightest dissent. Unlike Freud, he had no sycophantic courtiers around him, always on the lookout for Freudian heresies. On the contrary, he was something of a loner, constantly expanding, amending and altering his own body of work. His definitions of archetypes kept changing.

From my own, very limited experience, I also realized that for all the incongruity of many of Jung’s theories, there was a great deal of truth in his assumption that dreams were not only the emanation of the individual unconscious, but could also be shown to contain the proof of the existence of universal archetypes. I, too, began spotting recurring dream patterns in patients of different origins and language.

I began asking myself whether these common dream patterns, which Jung ascribed to all the inhabitants of the planet, might not be common to the people of the same culture, for in my own clinical experience—dealing in Switzerland with children brought up in its three different languages, Italian, French, and German—I began finding evidence of this. Their dreams differed, but recurring patterns occurred within the same language. Toward the end of his life, Jung said as much: He implied that his “universal” archetypes might not be so universal after all. They might, he wrote, “differ from one culture to another.” My own interest, soon growing into an obsessive quest for cultural archetypes, was simply taking what I had learned a little further.

Both Freud and Jung had discovered a fascinating aspect of reality—Freud the “Individual Unconscious” and Jung the “Collective Unconscious.” But both seemed restrictive in their approach. What intrigued me was the promise “universal archetypes” held for something else, although I had no clear notion of what this might be. Soon, however, I started believing that Cultural archetypes might be the missing link to even greater awareness, providing an even greater understanding of reality than these two giants had enabled us to perceive.

4: Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990)

For three years, Bruno Bettelheim was a guest lecturer at seminars I ran in France shortly after beginning my clinical practice. He fascinated me for several reasons: he was an authority in the field of autistic children, which also became my chosen field, but he was also a Nazi concentration camp survivor, and this implied an extraordinary mental and physical resilience against almost impossible odds; above all, his methods, in the treatment of autism, appeared to point the way to possible, highly original solutions to this terrible, still misunderstood affliction.

Bettelheim’s controversial but highly original approach to autism—and mentally or emotionally disturbed children in general—undoubtedly stemmed from his personal experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938-39. At the time of his arrest (for being both a Jew and a vocal anti-Nazi) he was already well known in psychoanalytical circles, as one of Freud’s most promising pupils and practitioners. What was most remarkable, in Bettelheim, was his recognition of the limits of conventional analysis: as he wrote, many years later, of his concentration camp days, “What struck me most was the realization that those persons who, according to psychoanalytic theory as I understood it then, should have stood up best under the rigor of the camp experience, were often very poor examples of human behavior under extreme stress.”

He also admitted that “the impact of the concentration camp did for me, within a few weeks, what years of a useful and quite successful term as head of the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School for disturbed children analysis had not done.” I found this recognition of the limits of “classical” psychoanalysis refreshing, and the tough lessons he learned from his ordeal well worth studying.

In 1938-39 Dachau and Auschwitz had not yet become systematic extermination camps, but the conditions Bettelheim described were just as appalling as they later became in the 40s—the main difference being that killings by SS guards took place at random, as part of the routine terror, and extermination chambers had not yet been institutionalized. Starved, physically and mentally broken, set to work 18 hours a day in brutalizing conditions, Bettelheim believed he owed his survival to his decision, shortly after his arrival in Dachau, to study his fellow-inmates, to try to understand what was going on psychologically as “an example of a spontaneous defense against the impact of an extreme situation. Although at first I was only dimly aware of this, it was meant to protect me from a disintegration of personality I dreaded.”

Himself half-dead after an appalling journey resulting in the deaths of several fellow-inmates through starvation and repeated beatings, he realized that his chances of surviving the first three months in Dachau were slim. His reaction was: “how can I protect myself from becoming as the others are?” In time, his concentration camp experience helped him a great deal in his later work with children, for, as he put it, “Inmates were depersonalized, and this meant being treated like helpless children. Like children, prisoners lived in the immediate present. They lost their feeling for the sequence of time, they became unable to plan for the future or to give up tiny immediate satisfactions to gain greater ones in the near future. They were unable to establish durable relationships. Friendships developed as quickly as they broke up. Prisoners would fight one another tooth and nail and declare they would never look at one another or speak to one another, only to become fast friends within minutes. They were boastful. Like children, they felt not at all set back or ashamed when it became known that they had lied about their prowess.”

Also like children, the camp inmates were in the situation of “knowing only what those in authority allowed them to know.” Even the rules concerning trips to the toilets (prisoners had to ask special permission during working hours, and report back after visiting the latrine trenches) was a form of “education in cleanliness” that recalled the earliest days of childhood.

In Dachau and Buchenwald, many prisoners regressed fast into childhood: “Non-political middle-class prisoners, as a group, fared worst: what upset them most was being treated like ordinary criminals. Their self-esteem had rested on a status and respect that came from their positions, their jobs, being heads of families. Then all of a sudden everything that had made them feel good was knocked out from under them.”

Bettelheim noted that the political prisoners were better armed, that the “common criminals” in the camps were protected to some extent by their ability to lord over the “respectable” inmates—and that the Jehovah’s Witnesses fared best of all: their convictions helped them from regressing into childhood, or into complete fatalism. The “fatalists” simply “gave up all action as pointless because all feeling was merely painful or dangerous, they inhibited it all. Eventually this extended backward to blocking off the stimulation itself.”

Bettelheim’s concentration camp experience also helped him understand amnesia and other disorders among prisoners, including emotional ones: “Anything that had to do with the present hardships was so distressing that one wished to repress it, to forget it. Only what was unrelated to the present suffering was emotionally neutral and could hence be remembered.” Bettelheim became, after his release from Dachau and his escape to America, one of the world’s leading experts on autistic children, as head of the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School for disturbed children. His interests, though very diversified, were mainly clinical—unlike my own—but my debt to him is considerable.

It was not simply that he related concentration camp violence to the world of the emotionally disturbed child, and drew a parallel between the totalitarianism that bred places like Dachau and Buchenwald and the totalitarian violence to which children were submitted, usually unconsciously. Bettelheim’s brutal analysis of concentration camp behavior provided me with badly needed evidence: In extreme situations, not just concentration camp “inmates” but individuals of differing social, cultural and ethnic categories reverted to childhood. What Bettelheim proved was that in extreme crisis, people reverted to basic survival principles—they went back to their archetypes.

As Bettelheim explained, “It is not so much the actual power of the parent that makes him seem omnipotent to the child. In the beginning, the infant feels free to be a non-conformist, to take candy out the jar or money out of his mother’s purse. The parent may inhibit these things, but the child will still try to do it surreptitiously. But one day the child suddenly wakes up to find that the parents, without being present, have created a painful conflict in his mind—the conflict between his own desires and their past prohibitions. And at this point, the parent begins to seem godlike, all-powerful, to be feared as potentially inimical.”

This power for creating unmanageable inner conflicts in the child must be compared with the power of the total state to create similar conflicts in the minds of its subjects. The child, like the nonconformist, originally resented the power that controlled him. But any power that is strong also exerts tremendous appeal. After all, nothing succeeds like success. And successful power over the child has such great appeal that it becomes internalized as his standards and values.”

As he was to point out, from his coldly dispassionate study of fellow-inmates in both Dachau and Buchenwald, “nearly all the non-Jewish prisoners (in Dachau and Buchenwald) believed in the superiority of the German race.”

Bettelheim, in the tradition of Freud, Jung and many other analysts, stressed the biological importance of a child’s first years—and their impact on the rest of his life. What happened, he wrote, was that “the parent seems omnipotent because he has the power to withhold the substance of life—food. Under Hitler, the State had exactly the same power. Living in such a society, all citizens were as dependent as children for the substance of life.”

The small child, Bettelheim wrote, “fears his parents displeasure, lest they withhold what he needs for his very existence; for the infant, this is symbolized by food. That fear is much more basic than his later fear of losing the love and respect of his parents. The S.S. reactivated this same basic fear by starving prisoners “to such a degree that they lived in continuous anxiety about what food, and how much, they would get. The results were very similar to those one can observe in the infant who is afraid his parents will stop feeding him.”

Conversely, Bettelheim added, “it is difficult to deeply terrorize a people that is well fed and well housed.” He also showed me that some of my intuitive convictions—the importance of emotion as a lightning rod, without which there could be no imprinting—were also backed by his own personal experience, and his emphasis on the biological importance of the first few years of a child’s life confirmed my belief that the most important imprints were those that occurred in those early years.

I was also influenced by the theories that underlay his work with autistic children. These children, he claimed, under stresses, had become fatalists—like the “Moslems” in concentration camps, they had simply “given up,” and no longer reacted to anything. To bring about a change for the better, it was essential to bring about a change in their behavioral patterns. No matter how small the change, or how apparently insignificant, anything new in their behavior—a new way of handling a pencil, of tracing an apparently meaningless line on a piece of paper, any new gesture or even the minutest change of expression—might trigger a change for the better.

Bettelheim was convinced that even the most “hopelessly“ passive, apparently mentally handicapped, or violent autistic children (for such a condition often included moments of intense, unprovoked, frightening violence) had their own, private “language”—their code. An autistic child did not speak the language of other children but, in his own tormented way, he spoke; Bettelheim was convinced that autistic children, whether through their catatonic behavior, compulsive repetition of certain self-destructive gestures or acts, or outbreaks of violence, are trying to tell us something. If only we could enter into the autistic child’s private world and “break the code,” we would then understand their language.

This prompted Bettelheim to reflect that for very disturbed persons the impact of conventional psychoanalysis was not sufficiently strong to promote the necessary personality changes: “The impact of psychoanalysis itself, or of a life organized on its basis, had to be in effect all the time, not just one hour a day,” leading him to believe that what autistic children needed most “was to live in a human environment that was not yet existent, and which had therefore to be specially designed for the purpose.”

There was much, in Bettelhein’s theories, that remains controversial: for instance, he believed that the mother’s attitude towards her child was a key element—that the child’s utter dependence on its mother was such that autism could occur if she failed to meet her baby’s craving for love and security. But at the same time in Love Is Not Enough, he insisted that a mother’s intelligence was just as important as love—perhaps even more so. He attributed a large number of cases to emotionally disturbed parents and homes, but was unable to explain why, in so many cases involving neurotic mothers, emotionally deprived children, and broken homes, autism failed to occur.

Despite these loopholes, I was impressed by Bettelheim’s theory that autistic children had chosen a kind of “inner death” to stay “biologically” alive. He never referred directly either to “archetypes” or imprints but provided me with precious support in workshops, endorsing my “logic of emotion” theory. He wrote: “What reinforces self-esteem and true independence is not fixed and unchanging, but depends on the vagaries of the environment. Each environment requires different mechanisms for safeguarding autonomy, those that are germane to success in living according to our values in a particular environment.” If, for “environment,” we substitute the word “culture,” here was a clear indication that we were thinking along the same lines.

5: Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989)

Farmers had been aware of it for generations: when recently hatched birds like ducklings or goslings are hand-reared, they strongly prefer the company of their human keeper to that of their own species. If the tiny fledgling birds’ “natural“ mothers are not around, they will develop an equally strong attachment to whatever animal they encounter—a hen or sheep—and such dependency lasts until the birds become adult.

Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel prize-winning animal behaviorist, studied this phenomenon under laboratory conditions. He called it “imprinting.” It was irreversible, but only if the “foster-parent” intervened within the first 24 hours of the bird being hatched. There were other, less dramatic examples of imprinting in other animals (jackdaws, wasps, even ants) but this was by far the most spectacular: Lorenz, a born showman, illustrated this by striding into lecture-rooms followed by several ducklings or goslings he had “imprinted”—visual proof that invariably delighted his students and ensured considerable media attention.

Needless to say, I found Lorenz’s work on imprinting fascinating. My concern, however, was with humans. And Lorenz was extremely wary about drawing conclusions about human behavior. As a scientist, he felt this could only remain an unverifiable conjecture. He said as much to one of his admirers, Richard I. Evans, who asked him what the possible human implications were. Lorenz’s answer: “That is a big leap. I think this is an unverifiable statement, but if you regard the work of a very old and almost forgotten psychiatrist, Krafft-Ebing, on fetichisms, you get the impression that some of his patients’ behaviors were analogous to imprinting. You can’t validate such observations, of course.”

The closest he ever got to relating animal imprinting with human behavior was in his somewhat pessimistic overview of young people and their tendency to systematically reject and attack their elders. In the early 1970s, when such conflict between generations was at its height, he said: “I think the closest you get to human imprinting is that critical phase when the adolescent gets skeptical about the parental culture and casts around for new causes to embrace. He attaches himself to some ideal cause, but his ideal cause leads him to disappointment. Such frustration affects this young person to the extent that he never again attaches himself to another ideal with the same emotional strength which he exhibited towards his first love.”

I felt intuitively that imprinting must relate in some way to the human species, but at the time Lorenz was right: This was scientifically unverifiable.

There was another field where I valued Lorenz as a guru: his brief comments on a form of imprinting that was prevalent among newly born babies, and was related to my own treatment of autistic children. As Lorenz pointed out, highlighting the work of another, less-well known scientist, Rend Spitz, “If an infant is deprived of a personal bond with the mother, which is established a few months after birth, the child will resent strangers. If, in an orphanage, where nurses serve as mother figures, this bond is broken in the course of the routine change of duty, the child will try to form a new bond with the second nurse. Then the second mother figure is rotated, and the infant tries to establish the bond a third time. When it loses its third mother figure, the child withdraws and loses the faculty to form further social contacts. This is certainly on the precultural level, and may result in the development of autistic children.

Spitz’s contribution to the treatment of such children was to insist that they not be looked after by a variety of nurses chosen simply by the vagaries of work rosters, but that each child be assigned a “permanent” surrogate mother-figure. In all cases where this practice was followed, the “withdrawal symptoms” were attenuated, and in some cases they disappeared completely.

Lorenz pointed out that geese could be similarly deprived of foster-parents, and this resulted in identical “social isolation:” if two “autistic” geese were put in a pen together, “they sit in opposite corners, back-to-back, ignoring each other.”

What intrigued me about Lorenz’s “imprinting” experiments was that he was convinced that the imprinting in animals like ducklings and geese was genetically programmed, that the answer lay in biology.

At this stage, I was intuitively convinced that imprinting must occur in humans as well as in the animal world, but was also aware that until this could be scientifically proved, few people would take me seriously. Such proof, however, was soon forthcoming. An internationally known British psychiatrist, Dr. John Bowlby, concluded that “attachment behavior in infants, though slower, is of a piece with that seen in mammals.” The way attachment behavior (in infants) develops, he wrote, “can be included legitimately under the heading of imprinting.”

Although Lorenz’s theories triggered new interest and research into the role of neuro-processors and the different functions of the brain, the breakthrough came from Henri Laborit who was not only a biologist, sociologist, and expert on modern psychoanalytic and sociological theory but also a prominent neuro-surgeon. He was able to prove scientifically what I had only perceived intuitively.

6: Henri Laborit (1914-1995)

Surprisingly, in America at least, Henri Laborit is still known only to a small circle of specialists. In an age of increasingly narrow specialization, he is an anachronism: a renowned neuro-surgeon (and head of research of a major department at the Hospital Boucicault in Paris) who has applied his scientific knowledge—including his impressive array of laboratory tests on the workings of the nervous system—to problems that go far beyond the conventional range of scientific problems.

His breadth of intellect and exceptional knowledge not only of biology but of anthropology, sociology, and psychology are on a scale with the earlier “giants.” Laborit’s experiments have made scientific history, but what sets him apart from most of his peers is his ability to apply his scientific and intellectual curiosity to fundamental questions: What is memory? Is our nervous system an infinitely complex amalgam of energetic impulses? If so, how do these impulses relate to what we commonly refer to as “imagination” and “creativity?” To what extent are they genetically inherited, “programmed,” and related to the biological need of survival? How do biological patterns, or “structures,” relate to the environment? Are they related to the evolution of the universe? His prodigious curiosity focuses on questions whose answers will continue to elude us. Such questions include: How and why do human beings use their brain as they do? How do biology, anthropology, and what we know of the evolution of the universe affect our knowledge of the human condition? How do human beings relate not only to biology, but to the evolution of the cosmos as a whole?

Until recently, the scientific community prided itself on its oddly “unemotional” concern with scientifically provable facts, relating cause and effect. “Emotion” could not be scientifically evaluated and was not supposed to impinge on rational thought; therefore, it was ignored. Like mechanical engineers, scientists were expected to break everything down into separate elements, the better to analyze them.

This rigor was certainly responsible, in the 19th and early 20th century, for many major scientific discoveries. But it left untouched those areas—the Unconscious was one of them—that could not be directly “tested” under laboratory conditions in the way that microbes could be observed, viruses cultivated, or atoms artificially created.

Using high-tech brain scanners, cell “staining,” computers, and animal experiments, a new breed of scientists, Laborit among them, have since mapped “the highways and traffic patterns of the emotional brain.” In a series of laboratory tests, for instance, Laborit was able to relate the transmission of “emotions” to different areas of the “biological” brain. He showed how drugs used to paralyze neuro-transmitters could “block” long-term memory in the brain; above all, Laborit was instrumental in redrawing our own mental map—altering the way we perceive memory.

Based on our accumulated intellectual and literary inheritance, from Plato to Descartes and all the way to Proust’s “madeleine, “ instilled in our minds is the notion of memory as a series of “stored” images, a series of self-contained, finite, box-like entities labeled “childhood,” “mother,” “sex” and so on. Thanks in part to Laborit, memory is now perceived as something completely different. As he and others have shown, using scientific tests, we do not “store” images, feelings, and emotions. The past does not exist, at any rate in this convenient “attic” form. We don’t “store it away” or “reactivate” it, as novelists as different as Balzac and James Joyce would have us believe. What are stored are processes, an infinite number of connections between different neurones.

At the risk of over-simplification, my analogy of memory is that within each of us there is the equivalent of a series of “telephone exchanges,” operating simultaneously. These exchanges have infinitely complex, infinitely numerous potential connections. By pushing the right button, we are able to “make a connection,” activate a series of sequences, involving taste, smell, love, hate, nostalgia, whatever: these activated “circuits” can be our evocation of an incident in our past, something that happened once, brought to consciousness, thanks to the existence of the complex circuitry within the human body.’

We all experience the irritating quest for the name of an author or title of a book or film. The name is on the tip of our tongues. We may even “see” the person in our mind’s eye, without being able to record his or her name. Almost invariably, without any conscious “thought,” the elusive title or name pops up: the circuitry has been triggered; the connection has been made. We begin losing our memory when these connections become faulty. Laborit stressed that such connections do not last—they have to be maintained. Memory, he wrote, is like a muscle. If not exercised, it atrophies.

Laborit proved that emotion was transmitted to the brain through the nervous system. He and other scientists were able to identify those parts of the brain that responded to different kinds of emotion. Laboratory experiments and tests on accidentally brain-damaged humans have shown, for instance, that the “limbic” or “visceral” part of the brain deals with basic, instinctive phenomena, that emotions are transmitted to the amygdalian part of the brain, and that one of the functions of that part of the brain known as the “cortex” is to act as a constant rational monitor of our emotions, organizing, evaluating, and relating them in their proper perspective. We also know that in humans the “limbic” brain is practically all that babies use for the first 18 months of their lives, that the amygdalian functions develop later, the cortex later still.

This, too, was the subject of experiments the Swiss biologist Jean Piaget conducted on his own three children to determine the different stages of growth in a child’s emotional and intellectual life. Both Laborit, Piaget, and the French analyst Jacques Lacan, who highlighted the importance of language (his pet theory being that each individual unconscious harbored its own private language, and until this language was understood no analytical breakthrough could take place) were among those whose findings enabled me to “break the code” to understand the logic of different cultures—a crucial step in my own exploration of cultural archetypes.

7: Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)

I regard Ruth Benedict, the pioneering, innovative social anthropologist and Columbia University professor, as a pioneer who dealt with cultural archetypes without being consciously aware of the fact. In her early work, Patterns of Culture, written as a philosophical commentary on her earlier fieldwork, she wrote: “No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part.”

Benedict was writing at a time when Hitlerism was starting to cast its shadow over the world, and one of her concerns, in Patterns of Culture, was with the growth of racial and ethnic prejudice (reflected in her later Race: Science and Politics) and ways of preventing the spread of racist dogma. But her main fascination was with the transmission and perpetuation of patterns of culture. She wrote: “An Oriental child adopted by an occidental family learns English, shows toward its foster parents the attitudes current among the children he plays with, and grows up to the same professions that they elect. He learns the entire set of the cultural traits of the adopted society, and the set of his real parents’ group plays no part. Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior. Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.”

What bound men and women together, Benedict insisted, was their culture—the ideas and the standards they had in common. “If instead of selecting a symbol like common blood heredity and making a slogan of it, the nation turned its attention rather to the culture that unites its people, emphasizing its major merits and recognizing the different values that may develop in a different culture, it would substitute realistic thinking for a kind of symbolism which is dangerous because it is misleading.”

In many ways, Benedict was a precursor of the so-called “structuralists,” epitomized later by France’s Claude Levi-Strauss, an anthropologist-philosopher somewhat mistrusted in America because of his intellectual arrogance and haughtily asserted theories even in the face of practical anthropological fieldwork that failed to bear them out. Levi-Strauss, a brilliant literary stylist who for all his iconoclastic writings, delighted in his election to the elite “Academie Francaise,” with all its attendant intronization rituals (newly elected members wear elaborate court uniforms including ceremonial swords) was, by his own account, far less interested in people than in structures common to different cultures and societies, whether “primitive” or “advanced,” beginning his first major work, Tristes Tropiques, an account of his one and only field trip, with the words: “I hate all voyages and explorers”—an unexpected admission for an anthropologist to make.

Benedict, had she lived, would almost certainly have been attracted to Levi-Strauss’ “structuralist” theories, for she was drawn to the work of the gestalt (configuration) psychologists who “have shown . . . that it is not enough to divide perceptions into objective fragments. The subjective framework, the forms provided by past experience, are crucial and cannot be omitted.” And she was to become world-famous for applying these same gestalt theories to an analysis of the Japanese character, at the close of World War II, at the request of the U.S. State Department, which became an immediate post-war bestseller, The Crysanthemum and the Sword.

In 1945, Roosevelt’s Cabinet was obsessed with the problem of a defeated, crushed, humiliated Japan. Long before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs that actually ended the war, it was clear that Japan had lost its gamble and would be militarily occupied. Should Emperor Hirohito be made to abdicate and stand trial for war crimes? Should the Imperial System be allowed to remain in place? What would be the reaction of the Japanese to military occupation? Would there be kamikaze acts of violence against the occupiers? With unusual acumen, the U.S. State Department commissioned an anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, to answer these and other related questions. Her findings proved highly accurate, and this was all the more surprise in that Benedict was not a Japanese specialist, had never been to Japan in her life, and with the war still going on had to base her research on those Japanese she was able to debrief in America.

Even more surprising, in retrospect, was that the State Department, despite the contrary advice of other specialists, followed Benedict’s recommendations. The Emperor was neither compelled to resign nor brought to justice, and the local Japanese administrative structures were allowed to continue to function without overmuch American interference: the only major breach with the past, apart, of course, from the introduction of democratic principles in the Japanese constitution, was the breaking-up of the “deibatsu,” the huge Japanese conglomerates that had, in many respects, ruled Japan. Their disappearance only reinforced their theory of the permanence of archetypes, for new “deibatsu” quickly came into being—and these immensely powerful conglomerates quickly regained the importance of the old ones. Today, they virtually control Japan.

Benedict’s Crysanthemum and the Sword was epoch-making not only because, for the first time in history, an anthropologist was being asked to apply her skills to forecasting the future rather than record the present, but because of the way she set about her task. She studied Japanese films, literature, and legends as well as the pattern of the Japanese language itself—applying the lesson she had earlier referred to in Patterns of Culture, paying particular attention to “the subjective framework, the forms provided by past experience”—in other words, the gestalt. To understand Japan, she wrote, “we had to understand Japanese habits of thought and emotion and the patterns into which these habits fell. As a cultural anthropologist, I started from the premise that the most isolated bits of behavior have some systematic relationship to each other. I took seriously the way hundreds of details fall into overall patterns.”

The Crysanthemum and the Sword was, and remains, a brilliant piece of detective work: using her skills as a trained anthropologist, what Benedict actually achieved was an evocation, through stream-of-consciousness interviews with Japanese residents in America through her studies of literary, religious, and historical myths, movie plots, family reminiscences, of the Japanese archetype—and hypothetical Japanese archetypal reactions in the event of defeat and American occupation. Her predictions turned out to be almost 100 percent accurate.

Part of the originality of her study was that it broke with current conventions—the view of the Japanese as predatory, inexplicably cruel, irrational monsters—and showed how Japanese and American cultural archetypes differed so strikingly that the collision course between them had been practically inevitable. The American “live and let live” philosophy, she wrote, was in complete contrast with the Japanese view that it was Japan’s inherent right to rid Asia of anarchy and establish a hierarchy where everyone “knew their proper place,” for “inequality has been for centuries the rule of their life at just those points where it is most predictable and most accepted. Behavior that recognizes hierarchy is as natural (to the Japanese) as breathing.”

But for me there were two lessons in The Crysanthemum and the Sword that I regarded as even more crucial, and would be of enormous importance to me as a future archetypologist. First, she proved that the baffling “opposites” in the Japanese character (rudeness versus politeness, violence versus aestheticism, a passion for things Western versus extreme conservatism and xenophobia, etc) were not contradictions at all but part of a whole—an “axis” whose extreme opposites were, in fact, two sides of the same coin, and that the Japanese character could not be understood without taking these two, cohabiting extremes into consideration. As Benedict put it, “I began to see how the Japanese saw certain violent swings of behavior as integral parts of a system consistent with itself.”

The second lesson had to do with language: Benedict was one of the first to realize the importance of going behind commonly used words to illustrate what lay behind them. Japanese word usage and grammatical patterns vary enormously according to whether the person addressed is a woman, a social superior, or a social inferior. Even common responses like “thank you” do not have the same meaning they do in English, but reflect Japanese unease at repayment of favors or kindnesses even of the most trivial. She showed that language was crucial to the understanding of any cultural pattern.