The Seba library treats Bastian in 7 passages, across 3 authors (including Campbell, Joseph, von Franz, Marie-Louise, Jung, Carl Gustav).
Bastian stressed the psychological, spontaneous aspect of culture as primary; and this approach has been the usual one of biologists, medical men, and psychologists, to the present day.
Campbell identifies Bastian as the founding theorist of psychological universalism in the study of culture, distinguishing his emphasis on spontaneous psychic uniformity from the rival diffusionist position.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
Adolf Bastian was a very great German medical man, traveler, and anthropologist back in the nineteenth century; in the 1860s, the University of Berlin created their chair of anthropology in his name.
Campbell provides a biographical and institutional account of Bastian, situating the coinage of Elementargedanke within Bastian’s career as the primary precursor to Jung’s archetype theory.
, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004thesis
Compare Adolf Bastian’s theory of the ethnic ‘Elementary Ideas,’ which, in their primal psychic character (corresponding to the Stoic Logoi spermatikoi), should be regarded as ‘the spiritual (or psychic) germinal dispositions out of which the whole social structure has been developed organically.’
Campbell explicitly aligns Bastian’s Elementargedanken with Stoic Logoi spermatikoi and Jungian archetypes, framing them as identical structural concepts across intellectual traditions.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis
Bastian, Adolf, 11, 13, 19, 31, 80, 99, 109
An index entry documenting the extensive recurrence of Bastian across Campbell’s later comparative mythology, confirming his sustained conceptual presence throughout the text.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986supporting
Another scholar, Adolf Bastian,
Von Franz positions Bastian alongside Laistner and von der Steinen as a nineteenth-century forerunner who pursued psychological and cross-cultural explanations of folklore motifs before Jung systematized the approach.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting
Bastian, Adolf, 91
Jung’s index citation places Bastian within the intellectual genealogy of analytical psychology’s key theoretical apparatus, acknowledging his anticipatory role in the development of the archetype concept.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting
‘First,’ wrote Bastian, ‘the idea as such must be studied…and as second factor, the influence of climatic-geological conditions.’
Campbell quotes Bastian’s own methodological sequence — idea first, then environmental influence, then historical diffusion — to demonstrate his prioritization of the psychic over the geographical and historical.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside