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A revolution of the mind: some implications of George Hogenson's ‘The Baldwin Effect: a neglected influence on C.G. Jung's evolutionary thinking’ (2001)
Author(s) -
Colman Warren
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of analytical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.285
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1468-5922
pISSN - 0021-8774
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5922.12168
Subject(s) - psyche , archetype , george (robot) , epistemology , context (archaeology) , argument (complex analysis) , philosophy , psychoanalysis , cognitive science , sociology , psychology , art history , theology , art , paleontology , biochemistry , biology , chemistry
George Hogenson's 2001 paper ‘The Baldwin Effect: a neglected influence on C.G. Jung's evolutionary thinking’ developed the radical argument that, if archetypes are emergent, they ‘ do not exist in the sense that there is no place that the archetypes can be said to be’. In this paper, I show how Hogenson's thinking has been seminal to my own: it is not just archetypes but the mind itself that has no ‘place’. The mind is a dynamic system, emergent from the cultural environment of symbolic meanings to which humans are evolutionarily adapted. Drawing on the work of philosopher John Searle, I argue that symbols constitute the realities that they bring forth, including the imaginal realities of the psyche. The implications for clinical work include a rejection of structural models of the psyche in favour of the emergence of symbolic realities in the context of psychoanalysis as a distributed system of cognition.