Adolf Portmann & Carl Gustav Jung at Eranos

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On the Brink of the Expressible: Adolf Portmann Meets Carl Gustav Jung on Eranos Ground by Ivana Ryška Vajdová.

Abstract

 This chapter focuses on Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) and Adolf Portmann (1897–1982), two prominent figures in the intellectual discussion club called Eranos. I will outline how the nature of the Eranos platform broadened from the humanistic and religious studies introduced by its “spitirus rector,” Jung, to incorporate natural sciences and adopted a more scientific approach in the process.

This historical shift began with the arrival of Portmann in 1946 and resulted in his appointment as chairman of the group (1962–1977). Portmann and Jung were prominent figures in their respective disciplines, and their theories became the subject of      a mutual critique on Eranos ground. The aim of this chapter is to describe the relation between Jung and Portmann from different perspectives, mainly through their discussion about the subject of archetypes and their relation to instinct. The chapter also indicates how the Eranos spirit shifted under the influence of Portmann.

Introduction

 In the Swiss border with Italy, along Lake Maggiore, the Via Moscia runs from the town of Ascona. Right before one of its bends, where nobody expects anything but palms and pine trees between the road and the river, a deep stone stairway descends to Casa Gabriella. This three-storey villa belongs to Eranos, an organization that became a meeting point of some of the world’s most prominent thinkers.

In this chapter we give a brief overview of the history of Eranos and demonstrate how its peculiar spirit was reflected in the work of Adolf Portmann. We will see how Portmann’s appreciation of a larger context when studying the animal and the human led to discussions with another notable Eranos member, Carl

Gustav Jung. The subject that became the center of their intellectual exchange was archetypes and instincts, and we show how both scholars clashed in their approach. We also show how despite the confrontation, both thinkers shared fundamental similarities; in placing particular knowledge into a more general, humanized context, they reached the very limits of their respective disciplines, and even language itself, in the process.

The Evolution of Eranos

 From its very beginning, the Eranos gathering was conceived by its founders as a forum for the interchange between Eastern and Western religion and spirituality. Its general idea was to bridge cultures, epochs and disciplines not only by an intellectual understanding but also, as one of its participants puts it, “a knowing through direct experience […]

the continuing juxtaposition of the primordial and the modern, the individual and the universal, the scientific and the mythological” (Progoff 1966: 312). Carl Gustav Jung, who shaped early Eranos dramatically, described it as “the only place in Europe where scholars and interested lay participants could come together and exchange ideas, unrestricted by academic boundaries” (Hakl 2013: 7). It was also the place where Jung and Adolf Portmann engaged in an intense intellectual exchange.

The idea of Eranos was originated in the German city of Marburg in 1932 by patron, scholar and esotericist Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn¹⁶² (1881–1962) and Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), the

161 Although Portmann and Jung met for the first time on Eranos ground, as young men they both studied under professor Friedrich Zschokke (1860–1936) at the University of Basel. Both witnessed during the lectures very convincing demonstrations about the layers of an organism’s evolution, which inevitably influenced Jung’s own thoughts about the possible nature of the collective unconscious as a layered experience of the human species “with remnants of phylogenetic functions of perception and adaptation”(Jung 1916, appendix). Portmann recalled later in an article that he was convinced that these images of hidden reality in the context of the human species must have fascinated Jung (Portmann 1976).

162  Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962) was born in London of Dutch parents. Her father, Albert Kapteyn, was        a photographer, and her mother was a philosophical anarchist, a writer on social questions, and a friend of playwright George Bernard Shaw and anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn studied applied art in Zurich, but her great interest was spiritual research. She had a lively interest in searching for and collecting artefacts which she used to illustrate the topics of each year’s Eranos meetings. In 1935, she systematically began

theologian, philosopher, and comparative religionist. It was Otto who gave Eranos its name, the Greek ἔρανος meaning “a shared feast” to which every attendant brings a small gift (Kerenyi 1955). For the Eranos gatherings, this gift took the shape of a lecture, the main goal of which was to bring together intellectuals from various areas contemplating the importance of spirituality in human culture and to establish a common ground on which the religious philosophies of the Orient and Western civilization could meet (Progoff 1966).

The very first symposium took place in 1933, a year after Fröbe-Kapteyn and Otto met, under the title “Yoga and Meditation in East and West.” Lectures included “Meditation and Contemplation in the Roman Catholic Church” by Ernesto Buonaiuti, “On the Meaning of Indian Tantra Yoga” by Heinrich Zimmer, “Contemplation in Christian Mysticism” by Friedrich Heiler, and “A Study in the Process of Individuation” by Carl Gustav Jung.

This annual lecture program, called “Eranos Meetings” (Eranos Tagungen), continued with a few breaks until today. Jung himself gave 14 lectures between 1933 and 1951 (Vitolo 2015). Every conference usually lasted for a week, during which an open discussion between participants took place. Lectures were later published in the Eranos Yearbook (Eranos Jahrbuch), published by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn from 1933 to 1961 – the year before her death. Six volumes of selected Eranos lectures, translated into English and edited by Joseph Campbell, were published between 1954 and 1968 as part of the Bollingen Series (Gronning et al. 2007: 248).

Jung and Portmann were not the only notable names among Eranos members. The circle was also joined by Gershom Scholem (Jewish mysticism), Gilles Quispel (Gnostic studies), Henry Corbin (Islamic religion), Mircea Eliade (history of religion), Erwin Schrödinger to collect pictures that exemplified archetypal themes. She traveled around Europe trying to find and purchase photographs of ancient frescoes, paintings, sculptures, manuscript illustrations and primitive folk art.

She then classified them according archetypal themes in what became known as the “Eranos Archive.” After the war, in 1946, she started to send her photographs to London, and in 1956 the Warburg Institute accepted her entire collection. In 1960, the archive was renamed the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS), consisting of more than 25,000 representations (Gronning et al. 2007).

(physics), Heinrich Zimmer (Indian philology and art), Max Knoll (physics), Herbert Read (art history), Joseph Campbell (comparative mythology) and Erich Neumann (analytical psychology), to name a few.

But despite the abundant presence of prominent intellectuals, Eranos never gained wider recognition. As Thomas Hakl argued, the esoteric themes discussed during these symposia and their pronounced sympathy to esotericism and mysticism led the outside intellectual community to accuse the meetings of irrationalism (Wasserstrom 1999; Noll 1994). Indeed, it is hard to position Eranos on an intellectual map, as it found itself in a certain border zone between esotericism and science (Miller 2006). Many of its participants were adventurous in their respective disciplines and were even labeled as “an avant-garde in the field” (Hillman & Shamdasani 2013: 146), but one facet of the Eranos spirit is particularity interesting to this day.

This is the joint effort of different personalities to reach the limits of scientific knowledge and to respect the fact that what lies beyond our capacity of articulation is equally as real as any scientifically accessible actuality. Portmann expressed this in his speech dedicated to the 80th birthday of Fröbe-Kapteyn in October 1961:

Our thoughts aim to explore the hidden origins from which all greatness arises. All origins are hidden in obscurity. To conceive a mystery of living spirit with a vigilant mind, to express what is expressible and at the same time an awareness of the inexpressible is always present in the work of Eranos. (Portmann 1974: 226)

And it was in this spirit, through Eranos, that Portmann and Jung tried to formulate their complex biological and psychological theories with respect to the inscrutable background transcending any discipline.

The Change of the Guard

 For two decades after its foundation, Jung had a major impact on the Eranos spirit. Jung’s approach was adopted by Fröbe-Kapteyn herself (Portmann 1974: 224). Jung was considered a “spiritus rector”, as denoted by Eliade, and a “volcano which brings to light a mysterious rock from the core of the Earth, an exceptional material that can be treated only by a volcanologist” (Portmann 1974: 226–227). And although the symposia were not “Jungian,” their core subjects were archetypes, the collective unconscious and its subsequent topics treated from various pespectives (Gronning et al. 2007: 248; Franz 1972: 156; Progoff 1966: 310).

For Jung, the Eranos meetings were a testing ground for his individual thought processes, offering an opportunity for discussions with other creative thinkers. He presented his concept of individuation at Eranos in 1933, and at the next Eranos symposium he outlined his concept of archetype.¹⁶³

In 1946, 13 years after C. G. Jung’s first Eranos appearance, the Eranos circle was joined by a Swiss biologist, Adolf Portmann, who greatly influenced the future direction of the meetings. Not only was Portmann an academic but he was also known as a public intellectual. He gained notoriety with his radio shows, newspaper articles and public lectures, which he used as tools to introduce science to the general public. It was for him also an opportunity to agitate against political materialism and social Darwinism (Rieppel 2016: 100).

Adolf Portmann was also occupied by the idea of the unity of living organisms in both a psycho-biological sense and in relation to environment. His lectures caught Fröbe- Kapteyn’s attention (Ritsema 1982), and she encouraged him to visit the Eranos meetings. On the one hand, Portmann perceived the invitation as an opportunity to enrich discussion

163 Jung’s last lecture at Eranos (at the 1951 session on “Man and Time”) was another example of his use of the meetings to test ideas. He called his lecture “On Synchronicity” (Über Synchronizität), and it dealt with a frontier subject between psychology and physics. Jung was indecisive whether to present it at all and had to be encouraged by Wolfgang Pauli, who studied the phenomenon from the perspective of quantum mechanics (Gieser 2005).

and perception of complex topics, appreciating the Eranos ethos of not being limited to         a particular scientific discipline, but on the other hand he also saw a need to introduce modern scientific approaches into the Eranos debates. That is why his introduction in 1946 signified  a major turnaround in the spirit and content of Eranos. The title of Portmann’s first Eranos meeting was “Spirit and Nature” (Geist und Natur) and it was the first time that natural scientists were also invited.

The aim of the first Eranos symposium which Portmann attended was to inspect the boundaries between the natural sciences and humanities. Jung spoke about “The Spirit of Psychology,” while Nobel Prize holder Erwin Schrödinger spoke about “The Spirit of Science.” The field of biology was represented by Portmann, whose first Eranos lecture held the title “Biology and the Phenomenon of the Spiritual” (Die Biologie und das Phänomen des Geistigen, 1946).

From that moment, Portmann never missed a single meeting and gave more than 30 lectures – more than any other speaker before him. His lectures are available in Eranos journals, and most of them were also published in his books Biology and Spirit (Biologie und Geist, 1956) and Awakening of Life Science (Aufbruch der Lebensforschung, 1965)

Portmann’s friendship with Fröbe-Kapteyn deepened, and eventually she entrusted him with the Eranos chairmanship. Portmann maintained this role for 15 years (1962–1977), partially with the help of Dutch sinologist Rudolf Ritsema and his wife, Catherine. Ritsema also chaired Eranos after Portmann’s death (Ritsema 1982).

“The Original World Experience”

 With the accord of Fröbe-Kapteyn, Portmann and other scientists eventually shifted the original Eranos spirit established by Jung. The thread of East-West spirituality¹⁶⁴ which ran through Eranos meetings for more than a decade was replaced by particular subjects of

164 As Portmann’s biographer once wrote ironically: “Portmann and Eastern mysticism, that is not a rational connection, that is at most karmic sympathy!” (Illies 1981: 232).

natural science, cultural criticism, sociology and theology. However, Portmann did not just negate the original conception of the symposium but displayed a candid interest in it. His aim, similarly to Jung and other Eranos members, was to place empirical knowledge into a wider frame. As he drew from a tradition of idealist morphology, he transcended the boundaries of his discipline for the sake of multidisciplinary dialogue. He opposed the instrumentalization of science in the attempt to dominate nature and to engineer life.

His deep appreciation for art infused his approach to biology (Rieppel 2016), which understood biology as the research of life, which he argued is ungraspable by purely scientific methods, not only because of the obscurity of the concept of life and the currently insufficient level of knowledge, but also by  its complexity:

Life is more complex than the science devoted to its exploration. The reality which encompasses us and which we are part of is greater than what is possible to discover with the methods of research of a specific time. The boundaries which are set by these actualities are not marked by barbed wire or less treacherous obstacles, but the researcher indicates them.

And wherever he senses the boundary, he will try to determine what is scientifically expressible with greater vigilance – but he will also understand that man, with the power of his mind, strives for a bigger picture of his being in the world. He who stands at          a frontier is also looking across barriers to a different land. (Portmann1969: 60)

For Portmann, strict analytical reason should be enriched by other modes of thinking, thus making a researcher better suited to perceive highly complex subjects. He explained that Eranos was a place where he could experience this way of thinking:

My biological work has given me a strong sense of our original world experience. The Eranos meetings made the confrontation with archaic thinking particularly impressive; it was truly the central point of our work. (Portmann 1974: 225)

To grasp the atmosphere built around Eranos by its “spiritus rector,” Carl Gustav Jung — something that Portmann explicitly appreciated — we might consider Jung’s Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934/1959), where he analyzes the difference between the mind of primitive and modern man. The former has an “irresistible urge” to assimilate outer experiences into  inner  psychic  events,  hence  conceiving  of  any  natural  happening  as  a mythological story, while the latter is able to detach himself to some extent from outer objects (Jung 1934: 6).

According to Jung, what really changed in human history was not the nature of the unconscious — that would contradict Jung’s definition — but the rise of the conscious. The unconscious will always require us to assimilate oncoming experiences, and by doing so we gradually discover our position in the world and establish a relative balance between our psychological components.

This is the cornerstone of the individuation process, the ultimate goal of Jungian psychoanalysis. In his Symbols of Transformation (1952), Jung equates “the original state of unconsciousness” to “containment in the primal mother,” a containment which has been sacrificed (Jung’s own term) by becoming conscious (Jung CW 5: §652). From this perspective we can better understand Jung’s most general statement: “the collective unconscious is an image of the world,”¹⁶⁵ or, as I would rather reformulate it for the purposes of this chapter, “a totality of our connections to the world” – a definition which, to my best knowledge, would “survive” all of Jung’s variations in his Collected Works.

165 The passage continutes: “the collective unconscious is an image of the world that has taken aeons to form. In this image certain features, the archetypes or dominants, have crystallized out in the course of time. They are the ruling powers” (Jung CW 7: § 151).

Awareness of our connection to a larger whole that is continuous, potentially infinite and only very marginally illuminated by consciousness — this is the archaic mode of thinking rediscovered by modern humans and promoted by Jung in Eranos lectures. And although Portmann was critical of some aspects of Jung’s thought, as we will see later, he himself recognized a role for archaic thinking in the work of a scientist:

In the moment when our dreaming overcomes all possibility of reason, the imagination assumes its original role which is to integrate us into a larger whole, something larger than a world of elementary functions of survival. And in those moments the imagination prompts the thinker to write big words like élan vital and allows him to realize his deeds and creations […] When reason is not fruitful anymore, where rational theories cannot illuminate anything, in a dreaming we glimpse great images of “Nature,”“Mother The Creator,” “Magna Mater,” the eternal myth of the maternal foundation, the uterus and origin of all things. (Portmann 1950b: 202)

Portmann’s description of an integration into a larger whole was not just a momentary poetic vision but a serious philosophical question linked to various aspects of his biological work, most notably to his inquiry into biological epistemology and his concept of living forms. We encounter them across his rich lectures and publications, in his Eranos lectures, and, most densely formulated, in his New Paths in Biology (1964).

There he claims that all fundamental biological questions lead us beyond the limits of scientific statements. Life always means something more than what a given era with its scientific methods can testify, and if we want to explain the most characteristic processes of life, we reach the paradox that “Life is older than living beings”¹⁶⁶ (Portmann 1964: 6).

166 Portmann refers here to John Desmond Bernal, a pioneer in molecular biology who studied the formation of organic compounds from inorganic matter, concluding that life appeared earlier than living organisms. The idea is formulated in his The Origin of Life (1967).

If we move our attention from the general notion of life to concrete living beings, we encounter the problem of wholeness again. An individual, whether animal or human, is indivisible and non-reducible to its parts.¹⁶⁷ It relates itself to the world and creates and preserves its own inner world. It is only in these ways that it is genuine and complete (Portmann 1964: 10). For Portmann, every life form is an immense reality which does not contradict a rational analysis, though it is not embraced by it (Portmann 1949). This leads him to the expression of the “unsolvable unity of the organism” (Portmann 2000: 126).¹⁶⁸

The term which Portmann propagated and which was supposed to denote the complex connection between an organism and the environment was “inwardness” (Innerlichkeit). Portmann established the notion of inwardness as a heuristic instrument and at the same time as a task for future researchers to formalize:

We have penetrated into two invisible zones – into the darkness which begins below the threshold of our optical instruments, and into the other darkness which hides our subjective experience […]. Nature comprises every aspect of life – subjective experience no less than structure. Biologists ignore this fact at their peril. (Portmann 1964: 34–37)

According to Portmann, if we want to perceive a living organism adequately, it is necessary to enrich the intellect by imaginative thinking. Both capacities are “important elements of the totality of a human.” Only when employed together can we understand not only the diversity of living things, but also the “kind of experience that integrates them into     a new world of meanings” (Portmann 2000: 93–94).

167 In the English preface of the book Animal Forms and Patterns (1967), the translator Hella Czech explains that the wholeness of an organism is better denoted by the German term “Gestalt” than the English “form”: “The word Gestaltung implies both the process by which such forms have been produced and its result; organic form production, production of animal form, have seemed to be the most suitable equivalents” (Czech 1967: 7).

168 Portmann does not imply here any vitalistic principle. He himself was an opponent of vitalism; as he wrote in the foreword to Jakob von Uexküll’s Bedeutungslehre, we cannot suppose any secret agent of life which can enter as an all-explaining factor (Portmann 1956: 7).

The experiencing of fullness, appreciation of greatness, and the encompassing of wholeness that Jung strived to cultivate during Eranos symposia can be appreciated by        a scientist but do not suffice when it comes to solving practical problems. Portmann touched on this subject in his Eranos lecture “Mythology in Natural Research” (Mythisches in Naturforschung), the first of two Eranos lectures dedicated to reflection on Jungian subjects.

Portmann made a kind of personal confession about the role of imaginative thinking in his biological work but also denoted its limits. When it comes to technical progress, the task of a scientist is opposite to what the archaic mind does. Science “disenchants the world,” as Portmann demonstrates with the example of the human desire to fly. Only after we got rid of the mythological images of flying souls and Icarus’ wings and started to construct unsightly but functional assemblages of wooden planes were we able to actually soar into the air. On the other hand, it was imaginative thinking that produced the desire to fly in the first place.

The imagination is for Portmann a source of inspiration but not the solution. And yet it was the imagination that gave shape to many biological theories. According to Portmann it was especially the period between the 17^th and 19^th century when imagination and symbolic thinking obstructed a factually eager mind. Portmann was very well aware that it was during the period in question that theories of the human uncounscious and animal instincts started to develop, and that philosophers like Kant, Schopenhauer, Carus and Hartmann created the bedrock for Jung’s theories.

Also, in the 19^th century a theory of organic memory as a possible technical explanation for how instincts are transmitted between generations was born, and Portmann knew that Jung’s thoughts about the nature of the unconscious were strongly influenced by it.¹⁶⁹

169 Theories of organic memory promoted by Butler, Hering, Semon, Ribot, Lazarus, Steinhal and Wundt were based on two basic conceptions: Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and Haeckel’s biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (Otis 1994).

Instincts and Archetypes

 Questions about the nature of instincts and archetypes and their mutual relation were crucial for Jung’s inquiries about the human psyche and inevitably caught the attention of biologists.¹⁷⁰

Jung himself did not elaborate on instinct as an isolated phenomenon, mainly using it as a border notion whose main purpose was to define the psyche. According to him, the psyche is delimited “from the bottom” by instincts and “from above” by spirit. The psyche is an emancipation from the compulsiveness of instinct. Human consciousness and will function in the zone between the instinctive and spiritual spheres.

This liberation from biological determinism makes the development of psychic quality possible. Jung occasionally names the supposed characteristics of instinct as contrasting with the psychic sphere, mainly its compulsiveness and rigidity. When touching the necessity of defining instinct itself, he claims that “it is uncommonly difficult not only to define the instincts conceptually, but even to establish their number and their limitations” (Jung 1947: §374).

As well as instinct setting bounds for our minds “from the bottom,” Jung describes archetypes as taking effect “from above,” existing beyond the reach of our intellect. Although these two directions are in an apparent clash, somehow biological dynamism correlates with the spiritual. Jung even states that “psychologically […] the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives” and that, “the archetype is a formative principle of instinctual power” (Jung 1947: §84). When Jung continues in this

170 In an article from 1937 called “The Effectiveness of Archetypes in the Instinctive Actions of Animals” (Die Wirksamkeit von Archetypen in den Instinkthandlungen der Tiere), Friedrich Alverdes described a biology without psychology as incomplete. He also pointed to Jung’s psychology as helpful in the research of animal minds. Alverdes adopted Jung’s concept of collective unconscious in the sense of a latent disposition to certain identical reactions and behavior. According him, not only humans but also animals have an unconscious. Adolf Portmann even uses the term “psyche” while describing the navigation ability of migratory birds (Portmann 1964: 28–29).

direction of thought, he quickly encounters the question of whether archetypes are not simply the instincts of the human species:

To the extent that the archetypes intervene in the shaping of conscious contents by regulating, modifying, and motivating them, they act like the instincts. It is therefore very natural to suppose that these factors are connected with the instincts and to inquire whether the typical situational patterns which these collective form-principles apparently represent are not in the end identical with the instinctual patterns, namely, with the patterns of behaviour. I must admit that up to the present I have not laid hold of any argument that would finally refute this possibility. (Jung 1947: §404)

Jung indeed tried to contextualize archetypes biologically. In his Psychological Types (1921) he identifies the collective unconscious with Semon’s phylogenetic mneme:¹⁷¹

The psychic structure is the same as what Semon calls “mneme” and what I call the “collective unconscious.” The individual self is a portion or segment or representative of something present in all living creatures, an exponent of the specific mode of psychological behaviour, which varies from species to species and is inborn in each of its members. The inborn mode of acting has long been known as instinct, and for the inborn mode of psychic apprehension I have proposed the term archetype. I may assume that what is understood by instinct is familiar to everyone. It is another matter with the archetype. (Jung 1921: 376)

171 In his fundamental paper “Mneme” (Die Mneme) (1904), Richard Wolfgang Semon (1859–1918) came up with a mnemic principle. It is based on the presupposition that agitation leaves traces. Repetition of the same stimuli leads to renewal of those traces, and the process becomes hereditary. All the organized matter has the ability to retain the traces so they can be evoked later. Semon called this ability “mneme” and the trace “engram.” Among his notable friends was psychiatrist Auguste Forel (1848–1931), a leading figure of the Burghölzli Asylum and Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939), whose student was C.G. Jung (Schacter 2001).

It must be said, though, that Jung found Semon’s theory insufficient. ¹⁷² Even in his time, Semon’s theory was criticized as being based on Lamarck’s theories of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.¹⁷³ Jung distanced himself from the Lamarckian position already in 1918 when he claimed that there cannot be anything like inherited ideas, but that we could think about inherited possibilities of ideas, “apriori conditions for fantasy-production” which are in a way similar to Kantian categories (Jung 1918: §14). Nevertheless, the fact that Jung tried to look for parallels between the unconscious and mneme encouraged criticism from Portmann, who considered it a central point of outdated thinking and pure speculation.

Jung was curious about Portmann’s view on this matter and asked him to present it  at Eranos. The resulting lecture, “The Problem of the Primordial Image in Biological Perspective” (Das Problem der Urbilder in biologisher Sicht) in 1950, was not only Portmann’s reflection of instincts and archetypes from a biological perspective but also played a part in the Eranos commemoration of Jung’s 75^th birthday.

Early in the lecture, Portmann joked a little when he said that biologists reached for the term instinct instinctively. For Portmann, the manner in which biology explained patterns of unconscious behaviors was unsatisfactory. While trying to find the relation between archetypes and instincts, states Portmann, Jung worked on biological presumptions from the 19^th century, when Jean-Henri Fabre established a concept of instinct as a rigid set of inborn, automatically triggered reactions. That, according Portmann, cannot fully explain the connection which animals and humans have with their environment and suggested that such biological phenomena are more akin to taxis or tropism. ¹⁷⁴

172 “We are forced to assume that the given structure of the brain does not owe its peculiar nature merely to the influence of surrounding conditions, but also and just as much to the peculiar and autonomous quality of living matter, i.e. to a law inherent in life itself” (Jung 1921: §748).

173 Theodule Ribot considered Semon’s book a metaphysical work (Ribot 1912: 267); it was also criticized by Hans Driesch (1908: 218–219) and August Weismann, whose 27-page critique of Die Mneme appeared as the lead paper in the 1906 volume of the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Schacter 2001: 130).

174 Fabre considered instinct to be any behavior which did not require cognition or consciousness to perform (Portmann 1961: 98–119).

After Fabre, the concept of instinct underwent dramatic changes, namely through the work of scientists such as the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) and Dutch biologist and ornithologist Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988), both Nobel Prize holders for physiology and medicine. Lorenz found middle ground between the early 20th century behaviorist conception of instincts as mechanical, inborn reactions to specific stimuli (reflex theories) and a vitalist conception of instinct as an irreducible purpose which guides mental activity (Lorenz 1950: 232; Brigandt 2005).

Of course, not everything is inherited, stated Lorenz. Some behavior is learned, and some is the product of insight (Lorenz 1970: 116). In the middle of the century, this was already perceived by many as a central theory of the new ethology, also thanks to the popularizing activities of Lorenz.

Adolf Portmann absorbed all these new impulses from ethology. In Animals as Social Beings (Das Tier als soziales Wesen), Portmann builds on the research on bees by Frisch, Roesch, Lindauer and others, which indicated that even in the behavior of such relatively “lower” creatures, we can trace phenomena like invention, nonconformity, and work towards a purpose, but also indolence (Portmann 1961: 99–104). For these inner states that we can only guess from the outside, Portmann chose the name “tuning” (Stimmung), taking from the musical sense, but in contrast with the physically clear basis of musical tones, the biological structures that underlie these affective-cognitive states are largely uknown (Portmann 1960: 58).

During his own research, Portmann witnessed an animal’s ability to orient itself in such complicated and variable situations that instead of naming this capacity “instinct,” he inclined to Wolfgang Köhler’s term “isomorphy,” which denotes a correlation between a structure of the world and a structure of an animal and which does not suggest a strictly mechanical connection between inborn structure and behavior. Where in Portmann’s debate about instincts is there a place for Jung’s archetypes? Are archetypes a typical human feature or are they just instincts typical for the human species? The archetype, in the context of various Jungian descriptions of it, could be interpreted as a process of achieving a human meaning

in accordance with biological processes¹⁷⁵ and with the world in general or, translated into Portmann’s terms, as a human isomorphy, the specific human experience of the world.

Although it is a hidden structure, for Portmann the human unconscious can be studied by means of biology. It is not a chaos inaccessible by reason. Compared to an animal’s mind, it might even be more accessible, as Portmann suggests, because with higher organizations of life the amount of hereditary structures grows. It is very probable that there are more such structures in humans than in any other species, and so we must presuppose an “enormous pool of preexisting forms of experience” (Portmann 2000: 113).

This biological fundament, says Portmann, should be a starting point for complex psychology in its study of the structure of archetypes. It is also a task of biology to substantiate the phenomena which Jung called archetypal.

Rather than “archetype,” Portmann chose in his lecture the term “archetypal structure” as more suitable for a biologist, presumably avoiding possible ontological connotations. He suggested three types or groups of these structures specific to humankind. The first type is essentially hereditary. Such structures have a fixed character from the beginning and correspond to the “triggers” found in animals. An example might be therecognition of a human face by a baby. At the same time, Portmann expresses his uncertainty as to what extent the archetypes of “woman”, “man” or “father and mother” are hereditary.

The second archetypal group includes such structures in which heredity takes part only in a vague and open way. These structures allow our individual formation. Here Portmann places sexual preference but also the subjective experience of “home” and the resulting special relation to this place as examples.

The third group is formed by the practice and adoption of customs, traditions and goods. Everything that Gaston Bachelard marked as complexes de culture belongs here

175 Jung also wrote: “We may say that the image represents the meaning of the instinct ˮ (Jung 1947: §398).

according to Portmann. In this case, Portmann concedes a possible merit of the Lamarckian conception of heredity, but only on a cultural level.¹⁷⁶

Jung himself was very dissatisfied with the outcomes of Portmann’s Eranos lectures, and ever since, his animosity towards Portmann grew. According to Jung it is hopeless to explain the nature of archetypes to people who do not have direct experience with psychology. He wished that natural scientists would not enter a field they knew nothing about (Shamdasani 2003). According to Jung, only representations of archetypes in the form of symbols and myths, and not the archetypes themselves, could be empirically studied because by becoming conscious an archetype is always altered.

For the same reason, Jung would also object to Portmann’s notion of “archetypal structure” as a clear reference to the physiological structure of the brain and the senses. Jungian archetypes do not describe        a structure of our mind, but the fact that the mind is capable of representing them: “‘Archetype’  is  an  explanatory  paraphrase  of  the  Platonic  εἶδος”  (Jung  1934:  4–5).This emphasis on the psychological and philosophical aspects of the archetype is probably the main reason for discord between the two scholars. Nevertheless, Portmann remained diplomatic and evaluated the whole situation as a partial success. After many years he wrote in a letter to Zwi Werblowsky:

My treatment (of Jung’s archetypes) was a part of C. G. Jung’s birthday party and so naturally a polemic moment has dissolved and my respect for Jung’s endeavour prevailed in my study. My opinion today is after all the same as before, that Jung’s research contributed to the broadening of the discussion about the archetype.

176 Bachelard established the notion of cultural complex as a part of his literary theory. He defines it as an unreflected attitude which affects the very process of reflection and imagination. While we believe that we are individually evolving, in fact we just cultivate a cultural complex. According Bachelard, a “realist” just chooses his reality the same as a historian chooses his version of history. Both are connecting to a certain tradition. Bachelard’s cultural complexes are dependent on historical, cultural, literary and personal contingencies but at the same time have an inherent and shared foundation (Bachelard 1999).

I discussed with Jung several times how his presentation implies a cultural meaning of the archetype stressed by Bachelard and not the inherited one.¹⁷⁷

It must be said that in their studies of archetypes, Portmann and Jung did not share the same terminology. Portmann dedicated his Eranos lectures almost exclusively to examples of animal behavior and animal morphology. When he decided to proceed to the question of archetypes as a human feature, he limited his inquiry to early stages of human life (up to 4–5 years), thus the period of apparent cultural formation of an individual but still very rudimentary in comparison with the fully developed adult human,¹⁷⁸ and he very briefly mentioned Bachelard’s culture complexes.

Portmann was looking at human behavior and its unconscious patterns in a similar fashion as an ethologist studies the behavior of animals, i.e. as processes significant in themselves, without apparent transcendence to broader meaning, ethical dimension or personal development — topics that came together in Jung’s notion of individuation, the lifelong path of a human along which archetypes serve as signposts. Compared to this Jungian picture of humans’ life drama, Portmann’s ambition in the archetype department was relatively modest. He wanted to demonstrate how biology can contribute to the discussion, mostly in a critical way, as the biological findings prove many hereditary speculations unfounded (particularly Lamarckianism), and that caution is needed when we try to link archetypes with instincts.

177 July 11, 1973, Portmann archive.

178 Portmann refers to the research of E. Kaila (1932) R. A. Spitz, and K. M. Wolf (1946) on smiling as one of the earliest emotional and social patterns of infant behavior. Kaila observed three-month-old children reacting to other people’s faces. Children’s reaction or smiling response was reduced and their anxiety increased when exposed to a motionless face compared to a vivid one (Kaila 1932). Spitz (1887–1974) discovered during his observations of children from three- to six-months-old that it is not a certain expression of the face that triggers the smile of the child, but the general shape of the face: domed forehead, two symmetrical eyes, nose.

Various experiments with defigurations of the face presented to a child proved the effect of this specific configuration (Spitz 1946). Here, claims Portmann, we clearly encounter the phenomenon described by C.G. Jung as the archetype, a reflection of a hidden psychic structure, an inborn readiness for action which is triggered when an appropriate configuration is reached.

Conclusion

 Portmann was the most notable biologist of the 20^th century to have evaluated Jung’s study of archetype. It was Eranos that made this intellectual exchange possible. While having a great respect for Jung, Portmann found it necessary to critically evaluate Jung’s conception of archetypes and instincts, seeing both subjects as apparently related to each other. But similar to Jung, when he stepped to the edge of the obscure world where instincts and archetypes resided, Portmann refrained from making definitive statements:

“We are reaching the edge of the zone where any certainty of scientific claims exists.” The proper research of this field, according Portmann, belonged to natural scientists who are able to perceive the human dimension to a much greater extent and can appreciate the richness of human experience. It belonged also to the researchers of the psyche who would inquire into biological structures more than before, with emphasis on the early stages of human development (Portmann 1950).

Portmann’s effort to conceptualize archetypes as a biological structure clearly irritated

Jung, but despite all their differences we find fundamental similarities in both thinkers. Both  of them reached the very limits of what is expressible not only by means of their disciplines but by human language itself. Both of them tried to formulate the most complex notions, be   it the unconscious or life itself, and to place the knowledge of their respective disciplines into a more general, humanized context.

From a values perspective, Portmann and Jung were humanists who stood on the same ground against reductionist and mechanistic tendencies in science. Instead of an approach that saw every being as rigidly formed by the pressure of its surroundings or innate drives, both conceived as something foreign to its own nature, they perceived the environment or the world in general as an opportunity for development. To them, a being is not just formed by its surroundings, but forms itself and expresses itself.

This revelation of possibilities is also one of the effects of the Jungian unconscious. More than anything, Jung’s archetypes are a source of possibility and meaning. Similarly, Portmann conceives of an organism as a peculiar opportunity of expression and experience of the world. It was only through interdisciplinary meetings such as Eranos that such an exchange could have taken place. In Portmann’s words:

Collaboration in the circle of Eranos had an immense influence on the widening of my spiritual world. Above all it provided nutrition for my deep desire to cross the borders of my specialization and to put together results of my own work with results of other fields of knowledge – and at the same time to present those parts of biological research where I found deeper meaning to a wider circle of participants […]. Eranos symposia also allowed me to grasp more clearly many questions which a lay person would like to address to a biologist. (in Ritsema 1982: 12)

Jung and Portmann met on Eranos ground and did their best as psychologist and biologist to show a better approach to humans and the world. Although they collided in their opinions on the specific subject of archetypes, the encounter itself became a valuable contribution to discussion about life and the unconscious. The fact that both of these great minds of the 20th century struggled to answer the most fundamental questions of their respective disciplines and to translate them into the framework of others only proves how complex and inexhaustible the topics are.

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