Innate Releasing Mechanism

The Seba library treats Innate Releasing Mechanism in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Campbell, Joseph, Kalsched, Donald, Papadopoulos, Renos K.).

In the library 8 passages

Students of animal behavior have coined the term ‘innate releasing mechanism’ (IRM) to designate the inherited structure in the nervous system that enables an animal to respond thus to a circumstance never experienced before

Campbell introduces the IRM as the ethological concept that anchors his argument that pre-experiential, inherited neurological structures govern both animal behavior and, by extension, human mythological response.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis

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The elementary, or innate, ideas we must interpret, I believe, as a reference, in nineteenth-century terms, to what now would be called the innate neurological structures (CEMs and IRMs) of the biological species Homo sapiens

Campbell explicitly equates Bastian’s ‘elementary ideas’ with IRMs and CEMs, establishing the IRM as the modern scientific correlate of the universal, cross-cultural substrate of mythological symbolism.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis

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the so-called innate releasing mechanisms by which they are determined are for the most part stereotyped. From animal to animal, the responses are consistent within a species.

Campbell emphasizes the species-consistent stereotypy of IRMs as evidence that inherited nervous-system patterning — not learning — governs the most fundamental behavioral and, by implication, mythological responses.

Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By, 1972thesis

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‘The innate releasing mechanism,’ Tinbergen declares, ‘usually seems to correspond more or less with the properties of the environmental object or situation at which the reaction is aimed…. it is sometimes possible to offer stimulus situations that are even more effective than the natural situation.’

Campbell cites Tinbergen’s finding that supernormal stimuli exceed natural ones in releasing power, using this to argue that art, myth, and ritual function as culturally engineered supernormal sign stimuli that activate IRMs more potently than ordinary experience.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis

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The stereotyped response, as in the case of the hawk and the chickens, is a lock-key relationship, as though there were a precise image of that hawk etched into the brain of those chicks… The chicks’ reaction to a real or constructed hawk exemplifies what Jung calls an archetype: a symbol releasing energy in terms of a collective image.

Campbell here draws the explicit equivalence between the IRM’s lock-and-key mechanism and the Jungian archetype, presenting both as inherited psychic structures that release energy in response to specific environmental triggers.

Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004thesis

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Jung was to conceive of the archetype as no mere mental abstraction but as a dynamic entity, a living organism, endowed with generative force, existing as a ‘centre’ in the central nervous system and actively seeking its own expression in the psyche and in the world.

Papadopoulos’s account of the archetype as a neurologically grounded, dynamically generative centre in the central nervous system provides the Jungian theoretical backdrop against which Campbell’s IRM-archetype equivalence is intelligible.

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

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