Baldwin Effect

This paper considers the claim that C. G. Jung used a Lamarckian model of evolution to underwrite his theory of archetypes. This claim is challenged on the basis of Jung's familiarity with and use of the writings of James Mark Baldwin and Conway Lloyd Morgan

Hogenson's foundational argument that Jung's evolutionary thinking is better understood through the Baldwin Effect than through Lamarckism, positioning Baldwinian evolution as the neglected key to Jung's theory of archetypes.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001thesis

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one can interpret Jung's ideas about the collective unconscious and the archetypes in terms derived from later developments in evolutionary theory and comparative psychology, to make sense out of Jung in more contemporary terms

Hogenson establishes that the question of what evolutionary model Jung actually held remains open and consequential for contemporary Jungian theory, setting up the Baldwinian re-reading as the paper's central contribution.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001thesis

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Baldwin and Morgan took seriously Romanes' questions regarding the influence of learning and habit on the inheritability of behaviour. Evolution under natural selection is a slow process, Romanes argued, but some environmental demands require quite rapid adaptation

This passage explicates the core problem the Baldwin Effect was designed to solve — the gap between the speed of natural selection and the speed of adaptive behavioral response — establishing the theoretical context for Baldwinian evolution.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001thesis

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this paper may be read as an introduction to a Baldwinian understanding of Jung that seeks to make use of his familiarity with Baldwin and Lloyd Morgan as a point of departure for further developments in theory and practice

Hogenson explicitly frames his paper as the opening of a sustained Baldwinian re-reading of Jungian theory, with implications extending beyond historical interpretation into contemporary clinical and theoretical practice.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001thesis

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once you have culture, no matter how simple, evolution under natural selection no longer takes place in relation to the natural environment alone, but also in relation to the artefactual environment

Drawing on Hutchins and Hazlehurst, Hogenson extends the Baldwin Effect to cultural evolution, arguing that myths, rituals, and artefacts constitute selective environments — a move directly relevant to Jungian accounts of symbolic systems.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001supporting

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the most fundamental elements of language, insofar as they are actual aspects of the environment and not linguistic abstractions, do not meet this criterion, and it is therefore impossible for evolution to assimilate fundamental syntactic structures as traits coded in the genome

Via Deacon's critique of Chomskian innatism, Hogenson deploys Baldwinian logic to argue that language structures cannot be genetically encoded, with direct implications for how archetypes as symbolic structures must be theorized.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001supporting

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he was familiar with the work of both Baldwin and Morgan, and this familiarity appears to have helped form the basis for what he does have to say about evolution. He cites Baldwin in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido

Hogenson establishes the documentary basis for Jung's Baldwinian influences, showing that Jung cited Baldwin and Morgan in key texts, lending historical credibility to the Baldwinian re-reading of archetype theory.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001supporting

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'Archetypes are typical modes of apprehension, and wherever we meet with uniform and regularly recurring modes of apprehension we are dealing with an archetype'

Hogenson uses Jung's own definition of archetypes as recurrent modes of apprehension to show their compatibility with Baldwinian models, in which regularities in adaptive behavior become stabilized through natural selection.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001supporting

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Recapitulationism is unquestionably an important issue in understanding Jung's thinking — and even more so that of some of his close followers such as Erich Neumann — but requires its own detailed examination

Hogenson briefly acknowledges recapitulationism as a related but distinct problem in Jung's evolutionary thinking, explicitly setting it aside to maintain focus on the Lamarckism/Baldwinism question.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001aside

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