June 13, 2021 – In Psyche and Matter, the Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz notes:

Like Wolfgang Paul’s ‘statistical laws with primary probabilities,’ archetypes are also ‘a list of expectation values or “primary probability” for certain psychological (including mental) reactions.’ Referring to physicist David Bohm’s grid, ‘the archetypes can be understood as dynamic, unobservable structures, specimens of the implicate order. If, on the other hand, an archetype manifests as an archetypal dream image, it has unfolded and become more “explicated”.’ (p. 252)

Jung spoke of synchronicity as an archetypal pattern. What allows an archetype to unfold, and a synchronous experience to be explicated as a synchronicity?

In the post-Cartesian era, tough-minded neuroscientists ignored the seemingly tenderminded themes of emotion and imagination. Since the 1990’s there has been  dedicated pursuit of the role of emotion in cognition and imagination, leading to an intersection with Carl Jung’s seminal concepts of the affective basis of the psyche, the psyche’s role in emotional equilibrium,  the notion of emotion as fuel for imagination, perceivable in archetypal images and narratives. We have moved from what one researcher describes as a movement from  ‘I think therefore I am,’ to ‘I feel, therefore I think, I think.’

This discussion engaged the intrinsic role  of emotion and the agency of imagination as catalysts of unfolding, as  intensities in the imprinting  of mind and psyche, body and  brain. The necessity of surprise as a basic survival emotion, and a crucial component of psychic process was highlighted.

We heard implicit and explicit resonances between Jung’s tenets and four contemporary theorists’ relevance to our understanding of  inter-relatedness, on the continuum of emotion, synchronicity and surprise.:

• Jaak Panskepp’s affective neuroscience’s observation that ‘the evolutionary layering of the brain, the raw affective substrates of mind have a more ancient evolutionary history than our sense of cognitive awareness’ (Panksepp, 1998).
• Joseph Le Doux’s The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
• Antonio Damasio’s model of convergence and divergence.
• Rodolo Llinas notions of endogenous images, and the human brain as akin to a musical instrument with sympathetic chords.

Length: 2 hours