Archetypal Causality

Archetypal Causality names the theoretical problem of how archetypes produce, order, or co-incide with events in both psyche and world — a problem that cuts across virtually every major voice in the depth-psychology corpus. The field is divided between those who retain a modified causal language (Jung’s fourfold Aristotelian causality distinguishing causa efficiens from causa finalis, appropriated by Jungian clinicians such as Papadopoulos and Wiener to privilege purposive over reductive explanation) and those who abandon linear causality altogether in favour of acausal orderedness, synchronicity, or archetypal field theory. Jung himself held both positions in productive tension: the archetype is a ‘preexistent pattern of causality’ innate to the psyche (Edinger), yet synchronistic phenomena cluster into meaning ‘without recourse to the normal pushes and pulls of causality’ (Conforti, citing Jung). Tarnas pushes furthest toward a cosmological reformulation, proposing that planetary archetypes operate through formal and final causation rather than mechanical efficient causation, effectively rehabilitating Aristotle’s fuller causal vocabulary against the impoverished modern mechanistic model. Von Franz anchors the discussion in synchronicity and the unus mundus, treating the archetype as the ‘recognizable form of an a priori psychic orderedness’ that underlies acausal equivalences between psychic and physical events. What unites these positions is the conviction that standard linear-mechanistic causality is insufficient to account for the patterned, meaningful, and teleologically inflected regularities that depth psychology persistently observes.

In the library 20 passages

meaning and purpose — represent straightforward expressions of what Aristotle called formal and final causes, respectively. Compared with the simpler (or simplistic) modern view of causality, which is entirely linear-mechanistic in nature, Aristotle’s more nuanced and capacious formulation

Tarnas argues that synchronistic and astrological phenomena require a rehabilitation of Aristotle’s formal and final causation against the reductive modern model, positioning archetypal meaning and teleological purpose as the true explanatory principles.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis

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No matter the stage of psychological development humanity may be in, the innate, preexistent archetypal pattern of causality by necessity manifests itself in the human’s attempt to understand his surroundings.

Edinger identifies the archetypal pattern of causality as a constitutive, a priori structure of human cognition that compels every culture — primitive, ancient, or modern — to seek causal explanation.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996thesis

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it seems to me highly unlikely that the planets send out physical emanations, like electromagnetic radiation, that causally influence events in human life in a mechanistic way so as to produce the observed correlations.

Tarnas explicitly rejects mechanistic efficient causation as the medium of astrological correlation, preparing the ground for a non-material, archetypal-causal account of planetary-human correspondence.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis

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The meaningful coincidence or equivalence of a psychic and a physical state that have no causal relationship to one another means, in general terms, that it is a modality without a cause, an ‘acausal orderedness.’

Jung defines synchronicity as an acausal orderedness — a structuring principle that connects psychic and physical events through meaning rather than efficient causation, which becomes the foundation for all subsequent archetypal-causal theorising.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis

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certain events in the universe cluster together into meaningful patterns without recourse to the normal pushes and pulls of causality.

Conforti, citing Jung, argues that archetypal fields generate patterned clustering of events through a non-mechanistic causality grounded in the informational structure of the field itself.

Conforti, Michael, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999thesis

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all three positions… are also affected by the activation of archetypal constellations (again, as always with the archetypes, in a teleological rather than causal-reductive way).

Papadopoulos contrasts archetypal teleological influence with causal-reductive explanation, arguing that archetypal constellations pattern experience through purposive rather than mechanical causation.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis

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Jung made a helpful distinction between two kinds of causality, what he called causa efficiens and causa finalis… Causa efficiens seeks reasons for happenings, whereas causa finalis asks ‘to what purpose is it happening?’

Wiener documents Jung’s appropriation of Aristotelian causal categories to subordinate efficient causation to purposive final causation in the clinical understanding of the psyche.

Wiener, Jan, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting

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These ‘acts of creation in time,’ however, are not total ‘leaps’ of nature… these new creations take place in each case only as a special instance within a ‘general acausal orderedness,’ that is, as a case of formal equivalence of psychic and physical processes. The recognizable form of an a priori psychic orderedness is the archetype.

Von Franz identifies the archetype as the detectable form of the general acausal orderedness underlying synchronistic events, grounding archetypal causality in the creatio continua of nature.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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the fate of one individual invariably fits the fate of the other, and each is the hero of his own drama while simultaneously figuring in a drama foreign to him — this is something that surpasses our powers of comprehension, and can only be conceived as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre-established harmony.

Jung invokes Schopenhauer’s pre-established harmony to articulate how simultaneous causal chains can be meaningfully co-ordered without direct efficient causation, a precursor to his own acausal principle.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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external events and interior attitudes tend to mirror each other. This mirroring of inner and outer, observed repeatedly by all of us in the course of life, seems to reflect their underlying coherence as two mutually implicated manifestations of a larger reality.

Tarnas describes the mutual mirroring of inner and outer events as evidence for an underlying archetypal coherence that operates beyond standard efficient causation.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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The primitive as well as the classical and medieval views of nature postulate the existence of some such principle alongside causality. Even in Leibniz, causality is neither the only view nor the predominant one.

Jung situates his acausal synchronicity principle within a long intellectual history in which causality was always supplemented by a correspondence or participation principle, delegitimising the modern monopoly of efficient causation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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I use the word finality intentionally, in order to avoid confusion with the concept of teleology. By finality, I mean merely the immanent psychological striving for a goal.

Papadopoulos documents Jung’s careful terminological distinction between crude teleology and ‘finality’ as the preferred descriptor for archetypal purposive causation in psychological epistemology.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting

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he tried… to fit them into his deterministic view of the world. In so doing, he forced concepts like prefiguration, correspondence, and pre-established harmony, which as a universal order coexisting with the causal one have always underlain man’s explanations of nature, into the causal scheme.

Jung diagnoses Schopenhauer’s attempt to assimilate correspondence and pre-established harmony into deterministic causality as a category error, implicitly vindicating a separate non-mechanistic explanatory order.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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With this notion of order, we move into the confusing realm of deterministic, goal oriented processes. The crux of Jung’s work rests on the premise that the psyche is essentially a self-organizing entity stirring to continually unfold some innate destiny factor.

Conforti characterises the archetypal order as a form of deterministic yet teleological causation grounded in the self-organising dynamics of the psyche.

Conforti, Michael, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999supporting

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Western religious and cultural history over the past two thousand years can be seen as a pattern of unfolding consciousness about an underlying archetypal structure. There are no accidents in the meandering and vicissitudes of historical process.

Stein extends archetypal causality to collective history, arguing that cultural unfolding is governed by an underlying archetypal structure that renders historical process non-accidental.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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The material world arises according to the Chinese in the following way: First there is a preexistent image (trigram); then a copy of this takes shape in corporeal form.

Von Franz draws on Chinese cosmology to illustrate the cross-cultural intelligibility of formal archetypal causation — the preexistent image as the generative prior to material instantiation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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What Jung proposes as the counterweight to such subjective fantasizing is a technique of ‘disciplined imagination’ or ‘necessary statements,’ which he has discovered in connection with mythological, that is, archetypal images.

Von Franz addresses the epistemological problem of verifying archetypal meaning objectively, a methodological constraint on any claim to archetypal causal explanation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside

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The view that all things are arranged according to God’s will is one that leaves little room for causality. Just as in a living body the different parts work in harmony and are meaningfully adjusted to one another.

Jung surveys Pico della Mirandola’s organic world-unity as a historical precursor to the idea that a higher ordering principle displaces mechanistic causality.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside

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