Neuropsychoanalysis and jung

Neuropsychoanalysis is the project of grounding depth-psychological claims — about unconscious process, affect, the self, the complex — in the findings of contemporary neuroscience. It is not a single school so much as a convergence zone: a place where Freudian and Jungian concepts meet brain imaging, affective neuroscience, and predictive processing research, and where the question is asked whether the old clinical observations can be given a biological substrate without being reduced to it.

Jung's own intuitions about the brain were remarkably specific. He wrote that the organizing system of the psyche must lie subcortically, in the brain stem, and that the archetype's "uniting properties are predominantly affective" — which is why he suspected a subcortical localization for the Self's physiological basis. McGovern et al. (2025) take this conjecture seriously and find it substantially confirmed:

Jung suggested archetypes likely emerge from subcortical regions, particularly the brain stem, and are likely characterized by an affective core. The evidence above points to an organizing and central role of subcortical systems in subserving subjectivity and projecting predictions — including predictions of precision — to a hierarchically higher cortex.

The framework McGovern uses is predictive processing: the brain as a hierarchy of prediction systems, with subcortical and limbic regions projecting affective "priors" upward into cortical structures that integrate them into perception and imagery. Archetypes as such — the formal, structural tendency — are instantiated in subcortical systems; archetypal images emerge when those affective predictions reach cortical representation. This maps cleanly onto Jung's own distinction between the archetype as formal pattern and the archetypal image as its culturally clothed appearance.

Panksepp's affective neuroscience supplies the most important bridge concept here. His SELF — the Simple Ego-type Life Form — is a primordial motor representation in the brain stem, the periaqueductal gray and superior colliculi, that provides the affective scaffolding for all higher consciousness:

Basic affective states, which initially arise from the changing neurodynamics of a SELF-representation mechanism, may provide an essential psychic scaffolding for all other forms of consciousness. Thus, a primitive affective awareness may have been an evolutionary prerequisite for the emergence of perceptual-cognitive awareness. If so, computational and sensory-perceptual approaches to consciousness must take affective bodily representations into account if their higher extrapolations are to be correct. From such a vantage, Descartes' faith in his assertion "I think, therefore I am" may be superseded by a more primitive affirmation that is part of the genetic makeup of all mammals: "I feel, therefore I am."

This is not merely a parallel to Jung — it is a neurobiological argument for the priority of affect over cognition that Jung's complex theory had already implied. The feeling-toned complex, as Neumann (2019) observed, has its organic roots in the medullary region and the thalamus, the same subcortical structures Panksepp identifies as the affective core. The word-association experiments that founded analytical psychology were, at bottom, experiments in detecting the affective disruption of rational processing — which is exactly what predictive processing models now describe as precision-weighted prediction error.

Samuels (1985) noted the parallel between Jung's archetype-as-such and structural concepts in Chomsky, Piaget, and Lévi-Strauss — all pointing to innate, content-free organizing structures that require environmental activation to produce specific images. The neuropsychoanalytic move is to locate these structures not in a vague "collective unconscious" but in specific subcortical circuits conserved across mammalian evolution. The limbic system and brain stem, taken together, may constitute the biological substrate of what Jung called the collective unconscious.

Where the convergence gets complicated is at the level of the image. Psychedelics, which disrupt the hierarchical differentiation of high-level cortex, reliably produce encounters with what subjects describe as archetypal figures — feminine archetypes, divine beings, primordial patterns. Jung himself noted that mescaline "lays bare a level of the unconscious that is otherwise accessible only under peculiar psychic conditions." McGovern's model accounts for this: when top-down cortical predictions are loosened, ascending affective signals from subcortical systems break through with unusual vividness, producing the imagery that Jung associated with the collective layer. The archetype's affective core becomes visible when the cortical filter is temporarily removed.

What neuropsychoanalysis cannot do — and this is the fault-line worth naming — is account for the meaning of the image. Panksepp can explain why the fear circuit produces a certain phenomenology; he cannot explain why that phenomenology takes the form of a devouring mother rather than a collapsing building. The image is not reducible to its neural substrate, any more than a poem is reducible to the neuroscience of language processing. Hillman (1975) would press this point hard: the soul is not in the brain, and the brain is not the soul's address. The neuropsychoanalytic project is most valuable when it confirms the reality of what depth psychology describes — the autonomy of affect, the subcortical roots of the complex, the priority of feeling over cognition — without claiming to have explained it.

James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology, whose insistence on the image's irreducibility sets the limit of any neurological reduction
The feeling-toned complex — Jung's foundational clinical concept, now supported by affective neuroscience
Archetypes and the collective unconscious — the theoretical core that neuropsychoanalysis attempts to ground biologically
Erich Neumann — whose developmental account of consciousness emerging from subcortical affect anticipates the neuropsychoanalytic argument

Sources Cited

McGovern, Hugh, 2025, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience
Panksepp, Jaak, 1998, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
Neumann, Erich, 2019, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
Hillman, James, 1975, Re-Visioning Psychology