G.A. LENHART'S DISSERTATION: A DEVELOPMENTAL HYPOTHESIS BASED ON THE ORDER OF JUNG'S PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS

A DEVELOPMENTAL HYPOTHESIS BASED ON THE ORDER OF JUNG'S PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS:

THE GENESIS MODEL.

A dissertation submitted

GERRY ANNE LENHART

PACIFICA GRADUATE INSTITUTE

in partial fulfillment of

the requirement for the

degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY

This dissertation has been

accepted for the faculty of

Pacifica Graduate Institute by:

_____________________________________

Barbara Lipinski, Ph.D.

Chair

_____________________________________

Robert Romanyshyn, Ph.D.

Advisor

_____________________________________

John Beebe, M.D.

External Reader

May 1, 1996

ABSTRACT

A DEVELOPMENTAL HYPOTHESIS BASED ON JUNG'S FOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS: THE GENESIS MODEL

GERRY ANNE LENHART

This research attempts to establish the possibility of a developmental process that begins in the womb, based on the four psychological functions of intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking as described by Carl G. Jung. Primary questions are the following: Do the four psychological functions occur in the individual human psyche in a given order? If an order exists, what would it be? What are the implications inherent in the possibility that an order can be said to exist? Mythology, religion, and various archetypes are utilized and interpreted to establish the hypothesis that an order exists, with intuition being the first psychological function in the human psyche occurring in the womb, followed by the functions of sensation, feeling, and thinking, which appear, in this order, at birth. Aspects of the transcendent function, or the union of opposites as described by Jung, are considered essential to the developmental process. The transcendent function is assumed to be linked to the four functions from the beginning of life. All four functions and their possible relationships to each other are discussed, but a special emphasis is placed on the function of intuition as the first (and last) psychological function and as the basis of the soul complex. The function of sensation is seen as the basis of the ego complex. This initial ordering of the functions, intuition as the beginning of consciousness in the unconscious, sensation as the beginning of consciousness in the ego-complex, is seen as universal, just as the myths which illustrate this process are universal in their distribution and in their application regardless of the local type emphases of particular cultures and the individual type preferences of the individuals in those cultures. To support this theory, myths that describe the interactions of these two archetypes leading to the coniunctio, as an expression of the Self, will be discussed. It is also postulated that the experience of being in the womb can be interpreted as the foundation for the paradise mythology of Genesis. Genesis can be seen as a metaphor for the womb experience and the Fall can be seen as a metaphor for the experience of birth. The motif of returning to the womb, or returning to Paradise, describes the experience of returning to the psychological state first experienced in the womb. Intuition leads to the original state of oneness, with this important difference: The ego or ego consciousness is aware of its awareness, whereas in the original womb experience, it was not. It is suggested that this research contributes to the literature of Jungian developmental psychology by linking elemental processes with the existing concepts of Carl Jung and those of the child analyst Michael Fordham. A connection can also be seen to exist with the work of Jean Piaget concerning the genesis of structures.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to offer my thanks and appreciation for their help and support in the writing of my dissertation to Dr. Robert Romanyshyn, Dr. Barbara Lipinski, and Dr. John Beebe, my dissertation committee; to Dr. Lawrence Lenhart, my husband; and to our children, Scott, Laura, Colette, Mark, and Jennifer. Special thanks to Dr. Jean Kirsch, to Georgia Jackman, and to my son, Mark Lenhart, whose technical help with the computer was immeasurable.

FOR THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

Frances West Brown Aeh

Beauty knows itself by mirrored grace

If Love and Death are the twin wings

That take a good Soul to Heaven

She sleeps and wakes

Tonight

In the company

Of Angels

and

THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

Clyde Lowell Brown

Hermes personified

Peter Pan

And the Pied Piper

Rolled into One

A Trinity

Whose gift

Was divine laughter

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures - x, xi, xii

CHAPTER 1. Introduction

Jung and the Four Psychological Functions - 1

The Genesis Model - 6

The Irrational Functions of Intuition and Sensation - 30

The Rational Functions of Feeling and Thinking - 41

Aspects of Jung's Four Psychological Functions and their Relationship to One Another before and after Birth - 46

The Womb Archetype and the Psychology of the Child in the Womb as Metaphors - 59

Eros, Thanatos and the Desire for Paradise - 64

CHAPTER 2. Review of the Literature

Piaget and Genetic Epistemology - 70

Erich Neumann and the Primary Relationship - 96

Neumann, the Circle (Mandala), the Uroboros, and the Self-Ego Axis - 101

Frances G. Wickes, Participation Mystique, and the Inner World of Childhood - 126

Frances G. Wickes, David L. Kay and Foetal Psychology - 142

Alessandra Piontelli and Observations of the Child in Utero - 151

CHAPTER 3. Michael Fordham

Michael Fordham and Jungian Developmental Psychology - 155

Fordham on the Child in the Womb - 156

Fordham on Cosmogonic Myths and the Womb as Paradise - 164

Archetypes, the Unconscious, and Mandalas - 175

Related questions are:

b. What is the order?

c. If an order exists, at what point in human development does each function appear?

d. What is the relationship of the irrational functions of intuition and sensation to one another and why are they opposed?

e. What is the relationship of the rational functions of feeling and thinking to one another and why are they opposed?

f. Which function or functions address(es) the soul complex?

g. How are all functions related to the ego complex?

h. How do the four functions work together to produce psychological wholeness?

i. How are they related to the transcendent function?

j. If an order to the psychological functions does exist, what would the implications inherent in this order suggest?

It is the objective of this research to postulate the following hypothesis: There is an implicit order in the development of the four psychological functions, as described by Carl Jung. The order in which they occur in individual human development is the following: intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking.

This model can be best viewed as a spiral or circular image. In the essay "Father: Saturn and Senex" (included in A Blue Fire, 1991) Hillman describes quite well the idea that I wish to pursue, namely, that two kinds of consciousness exist after birth and continue throughout life. Hillman (1991), in a description of creation myths, discusses a process that is quite similar to the model that I propose. He states:

mythical description of the two levels on which we live

First

half

second half

Jung maintained that one type of consciousness (soul) was put aside for the development of the other (ego) and later (midlife) needed to be resumed, facilitating the individuation process. I agree with Hillman that two "levels of being and two structures of consciousness" can be lived simultaneously by many people. However, one type of consciousness can be forsaken for the growth of the other, which is Jung's usual description. It is, of course, the later type that one might find in therapy or analysis; sometimes it is not the reclaiming of soul that is necessary, but a higher development of ego consciousness. The psyche could be said to be out of balance in either case. Jung was not necessarily wrong in his concept of "progressive time"; what he perhaps failed to realize was the important interplay between these two types of consciousness from the beginning of life.

Despite these differences, I think Hillman's statement concerning two kinds of consciousness is important and applicable to the model that I propose. The two types of consciousness that he describes are what I would call two major archetypes: soul and ego. I believe that the unity of soul and ego is what Jung called the Self. Cosmological myths are particularly well suited to describe the relationship between these complexes because they purport to describe the beginning of life and the universe.

Jung (1971/1921) says that "the four functions therefore form, when arranged diagrammatically, a cross with a rational axis at right angles to an irrational axis" (p. 554). I have used various diagrams to describe the process of individuation. One model employs the cross (at right angles) symbolism; others include the circle or mandala symbol (see Figures 11 and 13). I have also used numerous diagrams to describe the splitting and uniting of opposites, utilizing the wheel or cross diagram, or both, with the functions not at right angles, but in clock formation, indicating the symbolism of movement and time. The symbol of a circle, divided into four equal parts, with the irrational functions on the right of the page, the rational functions on the left, and intuition at the top right side, as the beginning place, adequately depicts this wheel or clock model (see Figures 2 and 3).

I have also indicated a beginning place, which was a possibility not addressed by Jung. It is suggested that the beginning place occurs in the psychological function of intuition. But intuition is also the ending place that is represented in mythological literature as the return to Paradise. In psychology, this has often been described as the desire to return to the womb, the mother, or the feminine.

A developmental model that begins not only at birth, but with conception and the experience of the child in the womb, can be constructed that reflects and extends the psychological concepts of Carl Jung, based on his theories of the four psychological functions and on his theory of the transcendent function. This model would include not only the beginning of ego development, but the development of the soul complex and its origin in human consciousness.

Jung did not construct a developmental model defining the origins of human consciousness. A model that defines and reflects his concepts in a developmental theory that begins with the beginning of life would contribute to the understanding of the Self. There is presently no developmental psychology that provides a model based on Jung's description of psychological functions that begin in the womb. The Jungian analyst Michael Fordham does discuss issues relating to the child in the womb, and early ego development. His model uses Jungian concepts that describe the process of individuation in childhood. A review of Fordham's work comprises Chapter 3 of this research.

Chapter 2 discusses other models, including Piaget (1947/1950, 1928/1964, 1964/1967, and 1966/1969, Piaget and Inhelder), Neumann (1949/1954, 1952/1965, 1966, 1973/1976), Wickes (1988), as well as more recent research concerning early development in cognitive behavior. Research that is specifically concerned with the development of the fetus in the womb (Piontelli, 1988, 1992) will also be discussed, including Kay's (1984) research concerning the child in utero.

Chapter 4, "First Prelude to Genesis," will be an interpretation and comparison of the Divine Child archetype and the myth of the Fallen Angel, Lucifer. Both archetypes will be compared with the ancient Sumerian symbolism of "Twin Serpent Gods," and "Twin Lion-birds," as well as the fourfold structure of the Sumerian creation myth. I will also discuss Moses as the Divine Child archetype, author of Genesis and Hero archetype. The Hero represents the human child who has been divided in his superconsciousness by the act of birth and knowledge of the opposites of consciousness and unconsciousness or the Self divided into the soul and ego complexes. All archetypes will be compared with Jung's four psychological functions.

Chapter 5, "The Four Archangels: Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel," will be interpreted and compared with Jung's four psychological functions. The Archangels are seen as personifications of psychic energy that is neutral or undifferentiated. Neutral energy is described as a coniunctio that occurs within each function, leading back to a state of undifferentiation and the Self. The Archangels are described in the literature as the beings closest to God, making them likely candidates for representations of the four functions in an idealized state of unity.

Chapter 6, "The Myth of Genesis as a Metaphor for the Divine Child, the Psychological Child and the Biological Child: Mythological Origins of Consciousness," will interpret and discuss the archetypes and symbols in the first two chapters of Genesis. The archetypes and symbols in Genesis will be compared with various divergent mythologies that may express a similar meaning. The myth will be seen as containing four layers of meaning: (1.) The Divine Child, (2.) The Psychological Child, (3.) The Biological Child, and (4.) The synthesis of the three levels (see Figures 9, 10, 11, and 12). The four major archetypes in Genesis, the Father God, the Serpent, Eve and Adam, are seen as personifications of the four psychological functions in their introverted form: intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking.

Chapter 7 will contain concluding remarks concerning the research topic.

Campbell (1973) states the following:

The lapse of superconsciousness into the state of unconsciousness is precisely the meaning of the Biblical image of the Fall.

I will return to this important quotation by Campbell throughout this work and in detail in the chapter on the Genesis myth. Here it suffices to state the following: The Genesis model that I propose assumes that a superconsciousness in the same sense that Campbell describes and which I equate with the unity of soul, spirit, and body (Self) begins in the womb and is associated with the psychological function of intuition. It also assumes an ego/body consciousness that begins at birth, when the functions of sensation and feeling become conscious in that order, negating intuition to a separate, unconscious (soul) function, while thinking begins on an unconscious (soul) level. I suggest that this is the split of the original unity of the Self and what is often called the split in human consciousness. It is my belief that this is so not only in persons who become sensation types in the course of their psychological development, but also in the so-called intuitive types. In other words, I feel this initial ordering of functions-- intuition as the beginning of consciousness in the unconscious, and sensation as the beginning of consciousness in the ego-complex--is universal, just as the myths which illustrate this process are universal in their distribution and in their application regardless of the local type emphases of particular cultures and the individual type preferences of the individuals in those cultures.

I am defining soul consciousness as closely related, but not identical, to the Self archetype or any archetype that represents God. Since the soul archetype contains everything in the beginning, it is seen as a symbolic reflection of the Self, or the first differentiation of the functions that flow out of the Self. When the functions become differentiated, intuition can be seen as the function that represents the soul complex, (at the moment of birth) and any time thereafter when conscious sensation predominates. This is because it then becomes the other side of the sensation function or unconscious sensation, which is a mirror image of conscious intuition. Both are connected to the body, intuition as unconscious body perception and sensation as conscious body sensation. This is why, as Jung described, the two functions do not work at the same time, although it might be more accurate to say that they are working together at all times; the absence of one is essential for the presence of the other. In other words, unconsciousness is a primary necessity for the presence of ego consciousness. The differentiation of the first two functions establishes the ego complex and consciousness and at the same time, the soul complex and unconsciousness. One is a mirror image of the other. It is the pouring out of what appears to be a division of the undifferentiated Self that creates two kinds of consciousness, that of soul and that of ego, leaving the Self unaltered, constant, as the core of being and the source for both modes of consciousness.

The Self is present in the child in the womb, existing as what Jung called the objective psyche, which in mythology is often called Paradise. The Self archetype includes God, mother, father and child, and all things in the universe existing as one. Intuition is seen as the psychological function that contains the four functions in undifferentiated form. Intuition is because the functions of sensation, feeling and thinking are unconscious, undifferentiated, psychic potentials. In other words, intuition is sensation, feeling, and thinking that are unconscious, and these three merged functions are the soul complex, which contains consciousness and unconsciousness in undifferentiated form. This concept appears to be comparable with the idea of the Holy Trinity or any three-in-one symbolism and therefore difficult to grasp in a logical or rational manner. It is possible that any "truth" contained in what appears to be irrational can only be known by experience. Jung (1971/1921) said the following concerning the subject of rationality:

What is rationally correct is too narrow a concept to grasp life in its totality and give it permanent expression. The divine birth is an event altogether outside the bounds of rationality. Psychologically, it proclaims the fact that a new symbol, a new expression of life at its most intense, is being created. Every Epimethean man, and everything Epimethean in man, prove incapable of comprehending this event. (p. 189)

Difficult as a rational explication may appear to be, I do not believe it is entirely impossible. It may be that in the past mythology and religion have been the primary expressions for psychological contents that have always been there. Giving them psychological names, however, does not change the nature of the contents, but may allow us to gain additional insight into human nature. If the psychological process was self-evident and clear from the beginning, what would be the need for mythology or religion to express such things by symbols or by metaphor?

It appears to me that the emergence at birth of the three functions, beginning with sensation, which is the opposite of intuition, then the feeling function, followed by the thinking function, creates ego consciousness. Birth can also be seen as the cause of the so-called split in human consciousness, because at this point consciousness and the unconscious become divided, whereas previously they were undifferentiated and differentiated in the function of intuition.

Intuition is the psychological function that can be seen and compared with the archetype of the Father God in the cosmological myth of Genesis. It can also be seen and compared with a biological level of interpretation, where chaos represents the womb or body of the mother (see Figure 11). On the second and psychological level, the Father God can be seen as the psychological function of intuition, which "divides" into the four psychological functions or psychic energy (see Figure 10). At this point, these three forms of "chaos" or God can be seen as one and the same; each produces the archetype of "child" which on the fourth level is an archetype of the new Self or consciousness that is not divided from the unconscious, but contains both in equal measure (see Figure 12).

Campbell (1979) talks about the biological level and psychic energy in the following way:

nervous system

are the source of many of the most widely known images of myth.

I would add to this statement that these imprints begin in the womb, where experience is not lost, but remembered by the body. In the womb, where the three unconscious functions are merged and exist as one function, intuition, or the soul complex, is dominated by darkness or unconsciousness, yet the opposites are united in a single psychological function. Consciousness is also present and merged with unconsciousness. This image is the theme, so prevalent in mythology and religion, of three that exist as one, or the fourth, which turns into one. This concept, so difficult to put into language, has repeatedly been described by art and images in every culture, because the experience, as Campbell tells us, is necessarily the same for all mankind. It is because this experience is universal that comparisons can be made, identifying seemingly divergent myths with one another as different expressions of the same occurrences. The ability to see similarities in the symbols, rather than differences, was, I think, one of Joseph Campbell's greatest contributions to mythology.

Another image to describe this might be the two principles of Yin and Yang, where nothing exists but Yin or darkness, which, nevertheless, contains a speck of Yang, its opposite. At birth, there is a dramatic change, which occurs as the process of enantiodromia, which Jung (1971/1921) describes as

the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control. (p. 426)

Here it is necessary to see Jung's description of enantiodromia in reverse, as psychic energy that is operating from the beginning of life, insuring growth in the womb. It is not that the opposites do not exist, but that they exist in a merged state where there is no ego consciousness to perceive them, and the consciousness that does exist, soul consciousness, has no awareness of the opposites. The image is similar to the Chinese symbol of Yin or darkness that contains a seed or spark of its opposite, which could be described as a small light. A small light, however, is different from total darkness or unconsciousness, and this is an important distinction, because it signifies life, movement, and possible change from one state to the next. Other metaphors in mythology used to describe this state are twilight, moonlight, dusk, dawn, in-between, and middle. Hillman (1991) describes the soul much in the same way:

We have lost the third, middle position which earlier in our tradition, and in others too, was the place of soul: a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. (p. 121)

This adequately describes the soul complex, which I would associate with the psychological function of intuition. If a way of knowing is present from the beginning of life and gives birth to imagination, passion, and especially fantasy, what psychological function could describe this consciousness better than intuition?

Assuming that intuition is conscious in the womb, while the other three functions are unconscious, it is not difficult to see that the situation is reversed at birth. As the functions of sensation, feeling, and thinking become conscious, intuition becomes, as Jung (1971/1921) says, "the function that mediates perceptions in an unconscious way" (p. 453). Intuition becomes the fourth function, and conscious sensation necessarily delegates intuition to an unconscious position. The intensity of conscious sensation assures that intuition will remain unconscious, because these two functions are opposites and do not work at the same time.

There is some ambiguity in Jung's description of intuition. He names intuition as a primary conscious function, yet he describes it as the function that mediates perceptions in an unconscious way. This confusion can be dispelled if one sees intuition as the function that contains both consciousness and unconsciousness. Intuition is not total unconsciousness and it is not total ego consciousness; it appears to be connected to both. Soul consciousness would better describe the middle position that I am attempting to define. In this sense, the soul draws from the Self, and later, after birth gives to the ego. It is the mediating function, the bridge that unites inner and outer worlds. In this manner, the human child is born into the world of opposites; the function of intuition exists along with the function of sensation, and they are mutually opposed. Jung (1971/1921) says that "For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling" (p. 463). This was correct, for the simple reason that intuition is unconscious sense perceptions that stay in the unconscious and exist at the same time that conscious sensations are manifested. Sensation creates the first split of intuition, which, nevertheless, remains the same function that it was before the split in the form of soul consciousness. One function divides into four functions, one of which stays the same, intuition.

Perhaps an analogy with modern physics can be made to clarify some of the above assertions. Shiarella (1992) describes electrons, protons and neutrons in the following way:

four

none of which is smaller than the two which collided.

causing one of the recently annihilated particles to become reborn.

subatomic particles are both destructible and indestructible at the very same time.

This description of subatomic particles does not appear to be vastly different from what I am attempting to describe as psychological or psychic energy. The cells contained in the human brain are also matter that is very much in motion. The two particles that collide, or the red and blue crystal balls, can be seen as the soul complex (the merged functions), and the ego complex (the separation of the functions), which also collide and subsequently divide. As they do so, they leave in their wake the four psychological functions, which can be compared with the four different particles.

At birth, the "four" can be seen to return to "two" as the functions of sensation and feeling become conscious, leaving the functions of intuition and thinking in the unconscious and creating the split in human consciousness. The split (which is the beginning of the conscious ego and the beginning of the personal unconscious), is then rectified by a return to the Self, created by the satisfaction of the infant's ego desires, which are met by love. (Fordham, whose work will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3, refers to this as "reintegration.") Shiarella's description sounds like the dance of consciousness, which is in constant flux from the beginning of life. I do not think it would be far-fetched to describe psychic energy that is conscious and unconscious at the same time in the same manner: both destructible and indestructible at the very same time.

In Psychological Types, Jung (1971/1921) describes two kinds of thinking: "Active thinking, accordingly, would correspond to my concept of directed thinking. Passive thinking was inadequately described in my previous work as 'fantasy thinking.' Today I would call it intuitive thinking" (emphasis Jung's, p. 481).

In Symbols of Transformation (1956/1912), the earlier work that Jung refers to, Jung describes what he calls "two kinds of thinking" in the following way:

intuitive thinking

In the above quote, Jung describes the intuitive function, which he first called "fantasy" and which he later maintained gave him "so much difficulty" (Evans, 1976, p. 100). He also describes quite well the idea that intuition is half conscious and half unconscious and the function that brings directed thinking into contact with the "oldest layers of the human mind." From all these descriptions, it is not difficult to see that this function, which I am equating with the soul complex, can be imagined to be operating in the human child before and after birth, and it is also not hard to imagine that the function of intuition would develop first in the "oldest layers of the human mind."

In a footnote of Symbols of Transformation (1956/1912, p. 29), Jung states that Schelling regards the preconscious as the creative source, just as Fichte regards the preconscious region as the birthplace of important dreams. They both appear to be using the word "preconscious" in the same way Jung uses the word "fantasy," which he later changed to "intuition." What Jung did not state or appear to apprehend was that what he called two kinds of thinking could also be called two kinds of consciousness, one of which is linked to the ego, that is, active thinking, and the other linked to the soul, that is, passive thinking or what Jung calls intuitive thinking, by which he meant the undirected, irrational function of intuition.

Jung (1971/1921) also makes a distinction between active and passive fantasy:

Active

intuition

attitude

libido

Active fantasy, then, can be seen to be the result of passive thinking or intuition, and if it is a definite sum of libido that cannot appear in consciousness in any other way than in the form of an image (Jung, 1971/1921, p. 433), we might conclude that the image or mental representation starts at birth. If 12 to 21 day old infants can imitate adult facial expressions and gestures, which Meltzoff and Moore (discussed in Jackson and Jackson, 1979) conceive as "made possible by some kind of 'abstract representations' of the adult movements that are no longer going on at the time of imitation" (p. 104), it is conceivable that the infant can innately create images at birth. What Jung describes as taking place in the psyche can just as readily be the infant psyche; it is not likely that the process is radically different from that of the adult.

Again, Jung (1971/1921) describes active fantasy, the product of intuition, in the following way:

individuality

When both ego and soul consciousness flow together, as Jung describes, the infant, in the same way as the adult, is returned to a state of unity or the Self that was first experienced in the womb and is now experienced in the world. The infant who has had this experience may retain the memory as a fantasy, and when a new ego need arises, hopes or expects the same experience to be repeated. In other words, the unconscious archetype may be "filled in" or given content by the sensations and the feelings of the infant. The image may exist in the personal unconscious of the infant long before it is expressed by language.

If the average child is born with the use of two kinds of consciousness, soul and ego, I would also assume that what is often referred to as the split in human consciousness can be identified by this concept. In other words, no human being, Plato, Descartes or anyone else, created by his philosophy the split in human consciousness. It is a condition of human experience created by the very fact of being born; it is phenomenological experience. The act of birth creates two states of consciousness, one which has been called consciousness and the other unconsciousness. This is the split in what Campbell (1973, p. 259) refers to as "superconsciousness." What I am calling consciousness is ego-related, whereas that which is often called unconsciousness is soul-related. Soul unconsciousness, however, also contains a type of consciousness. If we concede that these two states of consciousness begin at birth, an idea that the cosmological myths appear to describe and support, it is not difficult to see that the psychological experience contained within a myth could happen at age 1, 50, or 100. Oedipus is an archetype born when the child is born and every child is born an orphan. He leaves the maternal womb (Paradise), where father, mother, and child exist as one. According to the myth, the child is always killing the father to marry the mother. Whenever there is a return to soul consciousness, ego or the father dies. Ego consciousness is also child consciousness, the child who senses, feels, and thinks he is separate; soul consciousness is child consciousness that perceives itself to be one with the mother and father. Whenever an ego experience predominates, the mother is killed by the child, who demands to be separate. Psychological experience does not depend upon a chronological age.

Samuels (1987) states:

Certainly the split in human nature can be seen in terms of the life and death instinct, but I would not agree that this would be "inorganic from the standpoint of psychology," for to do so would imply that no psychology at all exists in the womb or in the symbolic return to Paradise. The desire for death is often symbolic for a death of ego consciousness to return to soul consciousness, which may strengthen the conscious attitude. There is no desire for life that does not include a desire for death, for we die even as we live.

If we equate the life instinct with ego consciousness and the death instinct with the unconsciousness, the split that Samuels describes can be seen as the splitting of the opposites out of their original unity and a regression as an attempt to restore that unity. Soul consciousness is the reconciling third consciousness that stands in the middle and is connected to both. Soul consciousness is the life and death instincts that are still undifferentiated and exist as one instinct. Thus, it is identical to the function of intuition, and the reason intuition is the primal instinct. Soul is the archetype, intuition is the instinct.

The "preconceived state" that Samuels suggests is "inorganic from a psychological view" is nothing of the kind, because psychological experience would exist in the primal experience of being in the womb in the form of the intuitive function. If the instinct contains the archetype, the soul would also exist in the infant's psyche and could be called psychological. Thus, the origin of the soul would be at conception, when the basic instinct of intuitive matter responds to matter and life begins. To be inorganic would imply that there is no organizational process in the experience of the soul complex, in or out of the womb.

The return to the mother might be a return to the participation mystique of infancy, but not the exact experience of the infant in utero. In this case, the mother's state of psychological being might induce "hell" rather than "heaven," for a state of despair might be shared with the infant. The flow of the ego to soul and back to ego is a natural and essential part of the child's life, not unlike what Fordham describes as integration and deintegration. It is not returning to the soul that creates havoc in the adult or the child, but the inability to arrive there safely and return safely. One way back to soul is through love and another is through fear, which is a perception that "oneness" is missing. In the first reintegration, the mother returns the child to unity by an act of love, by meeting the child's ego demands. If needs are not met on a regular basis, the original unity cannot be experienced in the world, which appears to be essential if relationship is to be a positive experience. The result is a state of limbo for the ego, which fears moving in either direction. This is pathology: Whether in an adult or an infant, the experience is the same. Both long for an experience of the original unity and seek it first in a relationship that will match the inner archetype. Ego is then reinforced by the experience, and consciousness is expanded.

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow
I learn by going where I have to go.

(Theodore Roethke, 1975, p. 1133)

The Irrational Functions of Intuition and Sensation
The Genesis Model

Here I would like to postulate several concepts that Jung did not explicitly address. One concerns the irrational functions of intuition and sensation. According to Jung (1971/1921), these are opposed, but complementary to one another; intuition and sensation do not work together at the same time. Jung (1971/1921) defines both functions in the following way:

I regard sensation as conscious, and intuition as unconscious, perception. For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling as independent functions are developed, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation (and equally, of course from intuition as the necessary counterpart of sensation). (p. 463)

I agree with this statement, but propose that the reason is that intuition and sensation are two sides of the same coin. Jung describes how they are opposite, but does not describe how they are connected. Nor does he suggest how thinking and feeling might develop, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation and intuition.

Intuition is unconscious sensation, and sensation is body sensation that becomes conscious and, in doing so, allows for the first conscious perceptions. In the above statement, Jung suggests the premise that I propose by calling intuition unconscious perception--this is exactly what I mean when I say that intuition is unconscious sensation. It is the body that perceives, whether conscious or unconscious; if intuition is unconscious perception, it is also unconscious body sensation. I do not think that the function of intuition, so long associated with the gods and the spiritual, originates from a source that is outside of the human body, even though it often appears to come from out of the blue like lightning, which "has always been associated with intuition and inspiration" (Fontana, 1994, p. 16). Intuition that occurs in this manner was defined by Jung (1971/1921) as "passive fantasy" (p. 428):

Active

intuition

libido

Here Jung appears to making a distinction between intuitions that occur spontaneously and those that are gained by a conscious involvement in the process, and this is an important distinction. It is here that some of the confusion concerning his description of conscious and unconscious intuition may be understood. Jung (1971/1921) defines attitude as "a readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way" (p. 414). Active fantasy is always connected to a conscious attitude, whereas passive fantasy is mainly an irruption of an unconscious content. This is what Jung means, perhaps, by his definition of intuition as a conscious function, although at the same time he often states that intuition comes "via the unconscious," and is "unconscious perception." He goes on to say:

Both active and passive fantasy could be described as products of the function of intuition, which Jung did not do here. Instead, he calls passive fantasies "automatisms," making a distinction between what is conscious and what is unconscious (p. 428). He appears to link consciousness with intuition and unconsciousness with "passive fantasy" that is always without a conscious attitude.

In the following statement Jung (1971/1921) again describes active fantasy, the product of intuition, in a way that makes clear the significance he placed on this function:

individuality

This is an accurate description of the function of intuition and the contents made manifest by that function; the expression of those contents is what I would call art. Jung's description and value of the function of intuition reflects my own position; I am using the word intuition in the exact same way that Jung describes.

It must be remembered that I am attempting to describe the intuitive position as it applies to the infant, in the womb and at birth. I think that it is the first function that becomes the fourth function, which Jung (1954/1946, p. 119) called it, and as the fourth, it is identical with the first.

Jung (1971/1921) describes intuition in the following way:

Thinking, feeling, and sensation are then largely repressed, sensation being the one most affected,

because

as the conscious sense function, it offers the greatest obstacle to intuition.

Sensation is a hindrance to clear, unbiassed, naive perception; its intrusive sensory stimuli direct attention to the physical surface, to the very things round and beyond which intuition tries to peer.

Jung was obviously not describing the infant at birth or in the womb here; however, if his description of intuition is applied to the newborn infant and the importance of transmitting images in the beginning of life is seen, as well as the method or function by which this might occur, it appears reasonable to at least question the possibility that the infant may be using the function of intuition and the function of sensation in a complementary way shortly after birth. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that the method applied would be significantly different in the newborn than the method used by the adult. The way the human infant makes an image is thus far basically unknown or certainly not clarified in developmental psychology, just as the "nature of intuition is very difficult to grasp" (Jung, 1971/1921, p 366). Difficult as it may be, Jung (1954/1946) included the function of intuition as essential for a "return" to the Self when he describes alchemical symbolism:

fourth

intuition

without which no realization is complete

Intuition

Nothing is more charged with intuitions

lapis philosophorum.

This keystone rounds off the work into an experience of the totality of the individual. (

Jung makes it clear in this statement that the function of intuition is essential for realization of the Self to be complete.

There is no reason to believe that the return would not be through the original function (intuition or the soul archetype) from which it first developed, and every reason, supported by the symbols in mythology, to believe that the "fourth" function, which Jung calls "mainly unconscious" and which I see as becoming unconscious at birth, is also the fourth that becomes the "first."

Jung's description of the repression of the functions of thinking, feeling, and sensation, with sensation being the one most affected, is in exact accord with my understanding of the function of intuition. In applying this idea to the newborn, however, it seems reasonable to assume that there is no need for the infant to repress the function of thinking, since that function is probably already unconscious. The feeling function would necessarily follow the function of intuition or the function of sensation because there would be nothing to judge or value that was not first perceived, either consciously or by the unconscious. If sensation becomes conscious at birth, intuition would necessarily become unconscious, along with thinking, which has never been conscious, and sensation and feeling would be the first two functions of ego consciousness in the normal human child.

In his discussion of the Brahmanic conception of the uniting symbol, Jung (1971/1921) states the following:

The elimination of sense-perception and the blotting out of conscious contents enforce a lowering of consciousness (as in hypnosis) and an activation of the contents of the unconscious, i.e., the primordial images, which, because of their universality and immense antiquity, possess a cosmic and suprahuman character.

Here Jung describes what is necessary (and used by many other religious systems besides the Brahmanic concept) for what I believe to be the route to the knowledge contained within the intuitive function. Note that he describes the elimination of sense-perception, (the function of sensation, not the elimination of intuition) which he earlier described as the primary "hindrance" to the function of intuition. If sense perception is eliminated and conscious contents are "blotted out" to produce an activation of the contents of the unconscious, the function used must be intuition. This is also what I am describing as the unconsciousness of the three ego functions of sensation, feeling, and thinking. When they are unconscious and merged, the function of intuition occurs. In mythology, this is usually described as a sacrifice or death of the conscious ego.

Moustakas (1990), in describing heuristic research, says the following concerning the tacit dimension:

What Moustakas and Polanyi are calling the tacit dimension, which would be the silent or unknown dimension, would be what I believe Jung would call the unconscious position. Moustakas (1990) goes on to say:

This appears to me to be an exceptionally clear description (and there are many more in this excellent book) of what Jung called conscious intuition, and I believe it is comparative with what Jung is attempting to describe (in less clear language) on page 428 of Psychological Types. "Every act of achieving integration, unity, or wholeness of anything requires intuition" (Moustakas, 1990, p. 23). I certainly agree with this statement and think that Jung would also have agreed with Moustakas and said almost the same thing in the quote previously stated concerning a return to wholeness, "the imaginative activity of the fourth function--intuition, without which no realization is complete." (Jung, 1954/1946, p. 119).

Obviously Jung links active imagination with what he considers to be active fantasy, the product of conscious intuition and this requires a degree of conscious participation in observing the images that are produced by the unconscious. In this way, unity between the conscious and the unconscious would be established, being the "highest expression of a man's individuality" (Jung, 1971/1921, p. 428). I am in complete agreement with Jung concerning the function of conscious intuition and believe that without the capacity to use this function or without the capacity to use imagination, nothing new would ever be said or created. It is not enough, except perhaps for the individual, to simply have a vision by the function of intuition; the vision must be expressed if it is to contribute anything new or significant to the world.

It is with Jung's definition of the function of intuition that I return to a discussion of the possibility of applying these concepts to the infant in the womb and the infant at birth, assuming that intuition must be as important in the beginning of life as it is in adult life. If intuition is necessary for a return to wholeness, it must be involved with the leaving of what was originally whole.

There is only one instinct, one golden egg, that contains all four psychological functions. At birth, this instinct splits into two psychological functions, intuition and sensation, which are the two perceiving functions. With the first conscious sensation comes the first perception, and it is negative because it is only half of an opposite and because the infant has not yet experienced the other half, which exists in the function of unconscious sensation, which is intuition. With the first sensation of any kind, the opposite sensation has become unconscious and is registered in the function of intuition. This is essential because it allows for sensations to become differentiated. Then, the feeling function enters and desire is born. With desire comes the first perception of the experience of an opposite that does not contain its other half in consciousness. The infant in the womb has not experienced the splitting of opposites; pleasure and pain have not been consciously experienced, nor have love or hate, knowing or not knowing, or any of the opposites. This idea is justified by the assumption that the infant in the womb is without ego consciousness and without the ability to discriminate. Instead, he or she has lived in a neutral place, where all opposites are merged and exist as one, which is, as Jung so often called it, the objective psyche. Campbell (1979) describes this state in much the same way:

retreat to the womb.

Desire, that emotion that can and does fill books and is often the subject of major religions, is a quality that belongs to the feeling function. Desire is not the lack of anything, but the perception of a lack of something, and the perception is adequate in all respects, because the infant has yet to experience the other half of the sensation, the opposite that has become unconscious at birth. In order for the infant to experience that opposite, the perceived body sensation must be attended to: What is experienced as cold must be made warm, light made dark, pain made pleasure. This is accomplished by an "other" in the world (thought to be the mother, but in reality whoever first satisfies the primary needs of the newborn), who removes the negative sensations by introducing the opposite ones, which are positive.

In other words, conscious sensation introduces the human infant to the experience of opposites, and the feeling function must also become conscious to make a value judgment concerning the positive or negative sensation.

With the experience of having its needs met, the infant has experienced the opposites, merged in the womb, with this difference: They have been experienced in succession or in time and space, and separately in the world. They have been experienced by relationship. Regardie (1970) quotes the alchemists when he says that the "white space" is the "Catholic Magnesia and Sperm of the world out of which all natural things are generated" (p. 166). This white space can be compared with relationship between subject and object, which separates and unites conscious and unconscious perceptions. The white space is the Divine male Child. I shall return to this topic with more discussion of the rational functions of thinking and feeling in the following pages, but I would first like to continue with a discussion of the irrational functions, the functions of perception.

What we know of an object through sense perception comes from focused awareness; if we listen intently, for example, we no longer see the object with our eyes, even though our eyes are open. The more focused we are with one of our senses, the more the other sense perceptions recede. They do not, however, disappear, but are recorded as unconscious information. One can experience all five senses and become acutely aware of sense perceptions, in which case, that which does not include the object recedes into the unconscious. Another example would be that when there is a global view, with no focus on a particular object, intuition records this in a diffuse and holistic way. This is a simplification of the process, but what is important is the idea that we are always perceiving on two levels and in two ways, and the first way is limited compared with the second way, which duly reports or perceives what is going on, whether we will it or not. In other words, the body is always in relationship to the surrounding world, as well as the inner world, and those "messages from the gods" depend on our ability to turn down or turn off our conscious perceptions based on sensation, and sometimes feeling and thinking. When feeling, thinking, and sensation shift into neutral, we respond with instincts that are supplied by the intuitive function. One could liken this to a stove with four burners, supplied by a tank of gas that is distributed in four equal ways. If we turn down the flame on the functions of sensation, feeling, and thinking, the flame that is intuition will be using all the fuel and will burn with an oversized flame.

This concept is extremely important to the hypothesis that I am suggesting. It assumes that the process of knowing begins as a biological factor, existing in the cell, the fetus, or the prenatal infant's body on an unconscious level. The cell is living matter that is organized and contains a form of consciousness. Intuition does not come from outside our own bodies and is not something disconnected from the human body. I would suggest that intuitive knowing is the basic instinct that contains all other instincts because it is the first to contain psychological knowledge. The instinct to life is also the instinct to death because these are opposites that are dependent upon one another. When one is in the intuitive function psychologically or what I would call soul consciousness, the ego is absent or partly absent, and this can be described as a state of death. When ego is present, the "I" that knows itself to be alive and separate describes conscious life, but this is a state of death for soul consciousness. Ultimately, these two states of being, which appear as opposites, can be seen from a middle, united position, and maintained in consciousness. This is the purpose, as I understand it, of what Jung called the transcendent function or the union of opposites. The union of soul and ego returns one to the Self, where there is no relationship, because both archetypes exist as one united psyche represented in the myths as the Divine Child. Jung (1958/1952), says that "the self is the whole man, whose symbols are the divine child and its synonyms" (p. 106). Thus, the Divine Child archetype is the prevalent symbol of psychological wholeness and the Self.

In addition to inherent duality of Universe
There is also and always
An inherent threefoldedness and fourfoldedness
Of initial consciousness
And of all experience.
For in addition to (1) action, (2) reaction,
(3) resultant,
There is always (4) the a priori environment,
Within which the event occurs,
i.e., the at-first-nothingness around us
Of the child graduated from the womb,
Within which seeming nothingness (fourthness)
The inherently threefold
Local event took place.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Intuition, 1972, p. 14

The Rational Functions of Feeling and Thinking

The rational functions of feeling and thinking are also two sides of the same coin: Thinking contains unconscious feeling and feeling contains unconscious thinking. There can be no thought that does not having feeling attached to it either consciously or unconsciously. Likewise, there is never a feeling that does not suggest at least a potential thought that can be expressed. In the womb, both are unconscious; at birth, sensation becomes conscious, along with feeling. Feeling is contiguous with sensation and dependent upon it. The seed or the beginning of thought is (conscious) sensation and with the first (conscious) sensation comes the first feeling (value judgment), which may produce the first symbol in the form of a primordial image, the precursor of thought. Because the feeling function is eminently conscious, the thinking function is equally unconscious and contains the archetype in form only, as Jung so often pointed out, but the form is given content by the experience of body sensations and the feeling function, which gives value to the experience. The feeling function, which is rational and conscious, gives content and meaning and helps to create the image.

For instance, assuming we have never seen light, if we close our eyes and perceive darkness, and then open them and perceive light, light is the object of our conscious perception. We may respond that "it is good" without knowing what the "it" is, thereby making a value judgment. The "it" is the unnamed object, but feeling has made a judgment concerning the "it" before it is named. The "it" can be said to exist in the world and in the psyche in the form of a symbol, which may be simple and abstract, but still a representation of the object. It may also be subject to change, as experience changes. Our feeling--negative, positive, or neutral--helps to create the symbol that connects the visual and outer perception of the object to the inner, or what Jung (1921/1976a p. 445) called the primordial image or archetype. In this manner, the thought, feeling, and sensation would all exist in the original experience. The idea is always contained in the experience. The feeling of good, bad, or indifferent always has an object of reference and a body that first perceives the sensation, either consciously or unconsciously.

What is revealed as thought that does not have an equivalent in the concrete world or is not arrived at through the physical senses is seen as that which is given in the form of intuition or what Jung referred to as "passive thinking." Therefore unconscious physical sensations (which I am calling intuition) would precede conscious, active, rational thinking. It appears reasonable to think that active thinking is preceded by passive thinking, which does not appear from outside oneself, but is connected to the body. An example of this would be Einstein's flash of intuitive knowledge concerning relativity, which occurred before he could work out the details in a rational manner that could be explained by reason and empirical means. This would be the realm of the archetypes, or archetypal knowledge that Jung claims is not knowable in and of itself, but is the source from which the forms and images are created as archetypes. Every abstract and divine thought could be conceived as occurring in this manner, and what is seen symbolically as soul, which would be the function of intuition, would be connected with the function of thinking, which is often seen symbolically as the spirit. But nothing would exist, including the most pristine of philosophical or spiritual thought, that was not first connected to the body and the soul.

If the first sensation creates ego consciousness of one of the opposites and is connected to the feeling function, which makes a value judgment concerning a second choice of opposites, such as good or bad, it can be said that these two conscious functions match the image or archetype that is contained in the thinking function, even though the thought may remain in the unconscious. Intuition, which contains the unconscious body sensations, and sensation, which contains the conscious body sensations, would produce the "whole" of the experience, just as the thinking function would contain the image or idea in its completed form. In other words, the instinctual functions would be identical with the rational functions; archetypes and instincts would be identical at this point.

This image would correspond to what Jung (1971/1921) describes as a "primordial image or archetype" (p. 442). Although he appears here to be speaking of this experience as "a fantasy-image" in the psyche of an adult, there is no reason to believe that this idea cannot be applied to a child.

Elsewhere, in discussing the child, Jung (1959/1938) says that "we can only suppose that his behavior results from patterns of functioning, which I have described as images" (p. 78). If it is true that the first conscious sensation produces the first conscious feeling, which in turn produces the first primordial image, this is more than the potential for thought: It is the beginning of thought. What Jung described as "passive thinking" (intuition) would begin in the womb with active thinking unconscious; what Jung described as "active thinking" would begin at birth with passive thinking (intuition) also present and now unconscious, representing the split in human ego consciousness and the unconscious soul. This describes the beginning of human conflict as the functions differentiate.

Jung (1959/1938) describes the instincts in this way:

unconscious images of the instincts themselves,

The archetype appears to be contained in the instinct and in the original experience of the infant. Sensation and feeling provide the experience, and the archetype remains mostly unconscious in the thinking function. But universal experience, even if it is unconscious, will be activated by the expression of the experience in the form of a myth, such as the creation myth of Genesis, which best describes that experience in archetypal terms. In other words, many people accepted the myth as true (and still do) because it best describes what is unconscious in their own psyche. It matches their own instinctual patterns of behavior, experience, and unconscious knowledge of the event. Neumann (1949/1954) describes the beginning as

the symbolic story of the beginning, which speaks to us from the mythology of all ages, is the attempt made by man's childlike, prescientific consciousness to master problems and enigmas which are mostly beyond the grasp of even our developed modern consciousness. If our consciousness, with epistemological resignation, is constrained to regard the question of the beginning as unanswerable and therefore unscientific, it may be right; but the psyche, which can neither be taught nor led astray by the self-criticism of the conscious mind, always poses this question afresh as one that is essential to it. (p. 7)

The beginning is equally important for developmental psychology in understanding the fundamentals of infancy.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation. And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling. And they call up the future; and though they err and embrace blindly, the future comes all the same, a new human being rises up, and on the ground of that chance which here seems consummated, awakes the law by which a resistant vigorous seed forces its way through to the egg-cell that moves open toward it. Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a young poet, 1962, pp. 37-38)

Aspects of Jung's Four Psychological Functions and their Relationship to One Another before and after Birth

I see psychological experience as dependent upon physiological experience and created by it. In other words, body sensations that are unconscious in the infant supply him or her with the knowledge that becomes the psychological function of intuition. Seen from this perspective, the biological would never be separated from the psychological; indeed, the psychological would be dependent upon the biological, but it would not be in the same way that conscious body sensations give specific or isolated knowledge of the object. Psychological knowledge would be more global and diffuse, just as the function of intuition usually is, with all body sensations participating at the same time. Put another way, sensation that is conscious separates, divides, and gives specific information, whereas intuition does just the reverse and gives information as a whole.

Of the four psychological functions, which are methods of knowing, intuition is seen here as the psychological function that develops first. We can reasonably conclude that the other three functions do not appear to be operating on a conscious level in utero, although intuitive knowledge in the form of instinct does appear to be operating. If this is so, is this not the beginning of intelligence when knowledge is supplied or given to the organism by the experience?

Pearce (1980) appears to be asking a similar question: "At what point does intelligence, the interaction between an organism and its environment, begin to function" (p. 46)? Surely, if one takes this definition of intelligence as correct, one would have to consider the possibility that intelligence begins in the womb because the organism is in constant interaction with its environment from the beginning. Pearce (1980) suggests this when he states: "Even two brain cells in proximity begin some preliminary form of interaction. This may not rate as thought in any mature sense, but there is almost surely a form of learning taking place" (p. 47). I would agree. This is not active thinking, but what Jung (1971/1921, p. 453) called "passive thinking," a name he suggested to clarify the function of intuition.

The form of learning taking place is obviously not constructed by the ego, but can be connected to soul or God or whatever archetype is chosen to describe the Other that provides knowledge or information that is not dependent upon "I" or ego. One could say that God, or what Jung called the Self, exists in the human body as instinctual behavior that provides experience, behavior that is determined by body sensations that are not always conscious. I would question Pearce's use of the term "learning," because it cannot be determined that anything has been learned by the fetus. It is rather a "knowing" that has been given, not learned, especially if this is inherent in the genetic make-up of the fetus.

In turning to Jung's description of psychological functions, it is possible to examine them one by one to determine the following:

a. Does an order exist?

b. If so, what is the order?

c. If an order exists, at what point in human development does each function appear?

Jung (1971/1921) describes thinking as "active, concerned with logic, reason and abstractions" (p. 481). Thinking falls into the realm of cognitive development and what is often called the logos. It appears reasonable to assume that the infant in the womb is not involved with active thinking; he or she cannot "name things" and has no language. All thought would exist as potential, and negative and positive thoughts, or the opposites, would be merged in a state of neutrality which would be a description of the opposites contained. This function, by most psychological standards, appears to be the last to develop in the human child.

The feeling function gives value judgments. It tells us if a thing or object is good or bad. It is often related to "Eros" in mythology. An infant in the womb cannot give a conscious value judgment, assuming he or she is without a conscious ego. He or she does not have knowledge of good or bad and cannot differentiate his or her body sensations. The feeling function, then, as Jung describes it, appears to be unconscious in the womb, just as the thinking function is unconscious. Both exist as potential. In creation myths, such as Adam and Eve in Paradise, this would be called innocence. The first couple in Paradise had no knowledge of good or evil. The same thing might exist in a fetus in the womb. The sensation in the body would exist, but a "bad" sensation would not be experienced any differently than a good sensation. Without the ability to make a value judgment and without an ego, all sensations would be experienced as the same. The feeling function would also exist in a state of neutrality, where opposites are merged or undifferentiated.

The third function is sensation. Mothers and scientists, I think, would agree that infants in the womb experience sensation. They obviously react to stimuli and movement. Their experience of sensation is pure experience because they are not conscious of what they are experiencing. They may hear their mother's voice, but there is no conscious awareness that they hear. There is no ego (as we know it), and like the functions of thinking and feeling, sensation is unconscious. Thinking is pure unconscious potential. Feeling is also potential; it is unconscious but experienced, and undifferentiated from sensation. Sensation is also unconscious and undifferentiated, but very much experienced. I would suggest that this unconscious sensation, which is merged with the other functions, is what we call intuition. The functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition are psychic energy that is merged, undifferentiated, and unconscious. In this state, they are the intuitive function, which has a consciousness of its own. In other words, consciousness and unconsciousness are both present, but not separated. They exist in a state of "oneness." In the womb, the function of sensation, as well as the functions of feeling and thinking, can be seen as being in a neutral state with the opposites merged.

Seeing them in this way suggests a comparison with the myth of Paradise. The infant in the womb would never experience pain or pleasure as we know these experiences; one would be the same as the other. This would be a neutral state, a state without desire, and a state of being that would embrace the opposites. It could, indeed, be called a state of Paradise or what Campbell called "Bliss."

In speaking of the birth trauma as an archetype of transformation, Campbell (1979) says:

comparable to a birth and has been ritually represented, practically everywhere, through an imagery of re-entry into the womb. This is one of those mythological universals that surely merit interpretation, rather from a psychological than from an ethnological point of view. (

This "re-entry" into the womb is what I would call a psychological return to the function of intuition, whether it is immediately after birth or in any later experience of transformation. It is a way of returning to the mother while in the world, rather than in the womb, which was the original experience.

Intuition is irrational and instinctual, like sensation. It is knowledge or information that comes to one with no known cause or reason. It is given. Intuition has often been linked to the gods or angels or divine entities in mythological literature. Jung (1971/1921) quotes Spinoza as describing intuition as the "highest form of Knowledge" (p. 453). I would suggest that it is also the lowest form of knowledge (certainly from a scientific view and considered as a basic instinct) and that the lowest and highest are two opposites that are reunited in mythological literature when the hero "returns to Paradise" or, clinically speaking, the client desires or experiences a return to the womb. In this way, intuition can be seen as both the highest and the lowest of all the psychological functions, as well as the first and the last.

Intuition also would contain the opposites, negative and positive merged, and exist in a state of neutrality or undifferentiation on the one hand, and as a differentiated function, on the other.

This function appears to be experienced by the infant in the womb from the beginning. From cell to fetus, there is movement toward (growth) or away from (decay) the environment, which is the womb. Dennett (1991) describes this process, using the word "wired" in the same way I would use the word intuition, in the following quote:

Even more primitive are the withdrawal and approach responses of the simplest organisms, and they are tied in the most direct imaginable way to the sources of good and ill; they touch them. Then, depending on whether the touched thing is bad or good for them, they either recoil or engulf. They do this by simply being "wired" so that actual contact with the good or bad feature of the world triggers the appropriate squirm. (pp. 177-178)

Whether one uses the word "wired" or the word "intuition" makes no difference, to be wired means to have the knowledge built in, and both refer to basic instincts. (And neither word explains who or what does the wiring or provides the information.) Science usually describes instincts, human or animal, as "matter at its lowest." Instincts in general are not usually seen as a form of intelligence, even though they obviously contain knowledge.

Pearce (1980) says that "intelligence is the ability to interact with one's matrix" (p. 23). If this is so, the living cell contains intelligence from the beginning, but this knowledge would fall under the realm of intuition if viewed as a psychological experience. No learning, as we know it, is taking place; the cell or the infant learns as Roethke (1975) writes, "by going where I have to go" (p. 1133). It is a given, contained within the experience, which in mythology is always linked to God, the gods, angels, or the unknown. Pearce calls this an act of intention, but that word seems to imply a conscious will, and it is doubtful that this is possible if there is no ego to will. The organism responds intuitively to its environment. It knows what to do without being told, or rather it is told by its own body sensations, which are unconscious, but nevertheless in constant interaction with its environment. It is possible that the subject (fetus) is wired by instinct to respond to the object (womb or environment) in the best possible way, and that the womb (the body of the mother) is also wired to respond to the fetus in the best possible way. A relationship takes place from the beginning, one could almost say a silent relationship, between the mother's body and the unborn body of the child. Instinctual relationship may be considered a lower form of knowledge, but it is still knowledge that must precede, and be the foundation for, all knowledge that follows.

Pearce (1980) describes the first matrix, the infant in utero, as "only a symbiotic extension of the mother" (p. 20). This is certainly different from Fordham (1976), who sees the infant "as separate from his mother from the beginning" (p.11). I would agree with Pearce that the infant is a "symbiotic extension of the mother," excluding the word "only." Because he or she is also "separate," as Fordham describes, from the beginning his or her experience in the womb is not the identical experience of the mother. It would appear more reasonable to argue that both Pearce and Fordham are correct: Mother and child exist as one unit, yet they are also separate from the beginning.

In a rather sardonic vein, Pearce (1980) states: "As everyone 'knows,' this psychologically undifferentiated organism lacks consciousness, perception, sensation, and all other psychological functions" (p. 46). I understand this statement to reflect what Pearce does not believe to be true, and if this is so, I agree. I believe that the newborn infant is conscious, perceiving and experiencing sensation, and that the infant in utero is also conscious, but in a different way. That the experience in utero is different from the experience the infant has after birth appears certain; it is just this difference that needs to be explored.

The psychological function of intuition appears to be present in the infant in utero. It is my assumption that this function is conscious, although perhaps in a different and more mysterious way than we usually think of consciousness. I see the function of intuition as identical with the soul complex. From this function, all of the other functions and archetypes follow. Intuition stays the same: It is intuition because the other three functions are merged and unconscious. In other words, it is the one function that contains the other three to make the fourth function, which is a return to "one."

This description is not meant to be mystical although it may appear to be if one uses ordinary logic. Reason and Rowan (1989) discuss "the Hegel level" of understanding when they describe three levels of consciousness, the Primary level, the Social level, and the Realized level:

our

the

Thus, it may be necessary to use the very function which I am attempting to describe to understand the concept of three functions that become one. It is probably for this reason that the image of three-in-one (another example is the Holy Trinity) has been used in symbolic and seemingly mysterious ways that exclude ordinary rational language, but not art, poetry, myth, images, and archetypes. Yet, I believe, difficult as it may appear to be, it is not impossible to describe with language. What is needed is thinking that goes beyond Aristotelian logic (see Reason and Rowan, 1989, p. 114).

Sensation introduces consciousness and the child ego, and is always followed by the feeling function and the thinking function. When sensation and feeling are conscious, the ego complex begins. Thus, two kinds of consciousness can be seen to begin at birth, that of soul and that of ego. The opposition appears obvious and I would suggest, is psychic energy that is always engaged in coming apart (the splitting of the opposites) or coming together (the uniting of the opposites). In mythology, this is often described as the hero (ego) in a quest for something that is missing or lost (soul).

In alchemy, which is not a description of birth in the sense of a creation myth, but a description of rebirth or Paradise regained, ego and soul are referred to as Sol and Luna, sun and moon, gold and silver, brother and sister, male and female. The four functions are the psychological quaternity and can be seen as comparable with that mythology. The two that are to be re-united are ego and soul, represented in the alchemical literature as male and female. The ego functions of thinking, feeling, and sensation are to be married to the soul function of intuition, which contains the same three functions as one, merged in unconsciousness and undifferentiation. This marriage produces the Self.

Jung (1954/1946) says that "the quaternity is one of the most widespread archetypes and has also proved to be one of the most useful schemata for representing the arrangement of the functions by which the conscious mind takes its bearings" (p. 45). Here Jung is referring to the four psychological functions and their relationship to the alchemical myth of squaring the circle or obtaining the philosopher's stone.

Obviously Jung saw a relationship between the four functions and alchemy. What never occurred to Jung was that he was only a step away from seeing how closely his descriptions of the four functions as psychic energy did exactly fit the process that the alchemists described. I have been unable to find a description in any of Jung's extensive writing, including Psychological Types, that indicates he had conscious knowledge of the three functions of sensation, feeling, and thinking, as being the "three that becomes four, which becomes one." Jung (Evans, 1976, p. 100) said that intuition was a "difficulty" because we do not know ordinarily how it works, indicating that he did not equate the psychic energy of the three functions as being contained in the function of intuition. I have little doubt that he knew this intuitively, but it was never brought to conscious thought, awareness, or expression. I do think that he might have eventually understood the possibility of how the three functions might be seen symbolically as the one function of intuition, because it is the natural outcome of his work on this subject. His fascination with the "axiom of Maria" and the Trinity archetype indicates his interest in the three-in-one phenomenon.

By seeing the three functions of sensation, feeling, and thinking as contained within the function of intuition, one can compare the four psychological functions with the "axiom of Maria" which Jung referred to so often in his writing. He (1954/1946) says that "this progression from the number 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 is the 'axiom of Maria,' which runs in various forms through the whole of alchemy like a leitmotiv" (p. 45). What is three becomes one, which is also the fourth. (See Figure 19.)

If we look at this "progression" backwards, as we would to see it as a symbol for birth or the beginning of things (creation), we can see that one refers to the undivided Self that exists in the womb, where consciousness and the unconscious are united and undifferentiated. Two represents the division of that Self, which reflects the soul and ego as still one, but separated from the Self. Three refers to the birth of the Divine Child (ego) that becomes the one that is also the fourth.

When the movement is away from the center and consciousness is coming into play, three and four can be seen as the human child who contains the soul and ego in child form, in the functions of sensation and feeling. Sensation and feeling are the shadow side of intuition and thinking. Undifferentiated, they are the child soul and child ego or archetype of the human child, who is a reflection of the Divine Child contained in the center. Four also refers to the fourth function, intuition, which becomes unconscious at birth and the function that, as Jung so often said, is connected to the unconscious or Self. This axiom is another description of the soul archetype and the intuitive function. What is three becomes one, which is also the fourth. The three unconscious functions of thinking, feeling, and sensation are intuition as one function, and that which becomes the fourth function of the quaternity, when seen on a conscious level. The progression is Self or Divine Mother (three-in-one), Soul or Divine Father (also three-in-one), the Divine Child/human child archetype, the third that also contains all three. These three archetypes (three-in-one that becomes the fourth) are the psychic energy that moves away from the Self and becomes conscious; they are a reflection of the Self made conscious. (See Figures 5, 6, 7, 8.)

Jung (1954/1946 talks about the fourth stage, the anticipation of the lapis in the following way:

Here Jung describes the intuitive function as necessary for the final realization of the stone or a return to the Self, and states that realization would not be possible without this function. Looked at backwards, the same can be said: Realization is always contained in the function of intuition. Paradise or the soul state of intuitive knowing, which the stone represents, would not be lost if the infant was not born. At birth, he acquires all four psychological functions: sensation, feeling, thinking, and, finally, intuition by a reintegration with the other three functions, a return to soul or the intuitive function, which will be equally divided now. What was one in the beginning shatters into three and finally four or the quaternity and represents, as Jung (1954/1946 says,

the pluralistic state of the man who has not yet attained inner unity, hence the state of bondage and disunion, of disintegration, and of being torn in different directions--an agonizing, unredeemed state which longs for union, reconciliation, redemption, healing, and wholeness. (p. 46)

Jung calls this the state of the man, but I think one could readily see that it could also describe the human infant, crying and demanding to be loved, or the infant in the human adult, suffering from the same need.

Psychological experience begins in the womb. I think that the first psychological function is intuition; the second is sensation, which becomes conscious at birth; the third is feeling, which also becomes conscious at birth; and the last is thinking, which also becomes activated at birth in the form of the personal unconscious. Most developmental theories completely disregard the function of intuition in infancy, whereas sensation and feeling are fairly obvious in the newborn and are given more consideration, even though they are not considered ego functions. Thinking, on the other hand, is usually thought to begin around the age of 2 or thereafter. It appears reasonable to me, however, to think that active thinking--Jung's thinking function in his later writings--is preceded by the qualitatively different passive thinking, which Jung later called intuition. Active thinking contains the archetype, which had its beginning in passive thinking or intuition, which is the basic instinct.

The four functions are present in the womb and exist as the unconscious ego functions that are the shadow side of the soul, which has a consciousness of its own. At birth, this is reversed. The ego functions of sensation and feeling become conscious, and intuition and thinking are unconscious. The order that I have given previously does exist although the functions are contiguous with one other. This process can be seen as occurring in fractions of time, which to the observer may seem spontaneous. The process is in motion, however, and continuously repeats, which is why it can be seen as circular. In this way, all the functions can be seen to begin at birth, even though they had their genesis in the womb, where the soul complex contained the ego complex in potential and unconscious, undifferentiated form. The Self comes first, then soul, then ego.

Life's original event
And the game of life's
Order of play
Are involuntarily
initiated,
And inherently subject to modification
By the a priori mystery,
Within which consciousness first formulates
And from which enveloping and permeating mystery
Consciousness never completely separates,
But which it often ignores
Then forgets altogether
Or deliberately disdains.
And consciousness begins
As an awareness of otherness,
Which otherness-awareness requires time.
And all statements by consciousness
Are in the comparative terms
Of prior observations of consciousness
("It's warmer, it's quicker, it's bigger
Than the other or others").
Minimal consciousness evokes time,
As a nonsimultaneous sequence of
experiences.
Consciousness dawns
With the second experience.
This is why consciousness
Identified the basic increment of time
As being a second.

Not until the second experience
Did time and consciousness
Combine as human life.

Time, relativity and consciousness
Are always and only coexistent functions
Of an a Priori Universe,
Which, beginning with the twoness of secondness,
Is inherently plural.

(R. Buckminster Fuller, Intuition, 1972, pp. 11-12)

The Womb Archetype and the Psychology of the Child in the Womb as Metaphors

Paradise, the womb, and the Divine Child as fruit of the womb all appear to be related archetypes significant to the early stages of developmental psychology. If "the archetypal form or pattern is inherited but the content is variable, subject to environmental and historical changes," (Samuels, 1987, p. 25), I would suggest that the cosmological motifs of mythology that depict creation and those that have the theme of rebirth reflect humanity's attempt to reconstruct its origins, and quite possibly its endings, reflected in myths concerning death. The myths, stories, images, concepts, or ideas are art as the reconstruction of the basic experience of being or being alive, as well as the experience of death. It is our reconstruction of the existing archetypes, and how we arrange the forms and patterns, that create new archetypes, expanding our vision of human experience and consciousness.

Samuels' (1987) interpretation of Jung concerning the symbolic regression to the mother is that it "is for regeneration or rebirth, perhaps before moving on developmentally" (p. 167). But what is there in that experience that provides regeneration? If regression becomes a psychological experience after birth, could regression be less than psychological during the primary experience? If we substitute the mother archetype for that of the soul archetype or complex and imagine that this takes place as psychological knowledge contained within the intuitive function, it is not difficult to see that a longing for mother might simply be a desire to return to that middle position where the soul is connected to the Self or unconsciousness and also connected to ego consciousness. Seen in this way, regression would not really apply, because it is possible that this connection was not meant to be destroyed in the first place, and when it is damaged or destroyed, it is that rather than the desire, which causes pathology,

If the experience of being in the womb and the experience of rebirth or a return to the womb is often a central theme in the mythology, literature, and initiation rites of many cultures down through history, perhaps we should ask about its psychological importance. Is there a psychology of the organism or infant in the womb? If so, what is that psychology? Certainly there is an experience in the womb, and I think that this can be called a psychological experience, based on what we know about the four psychological functions as described by Jung (1971/1921) and by investigating when and in what order each function might appear in the human infant.

Samuels (1987) states that Fordham, a Jungian developmental psychologist, "postulates a primary self, existing in a sense before birth, and containing all psycho-physiological potentials" (p. 155). I agree with this statement with one exception: There is an experience in the womb that does not depend on "potential." It already is! From cell, zygote, organism, embryo, to an 8-or 9-month-old fetus, there is always potential, but there is also always the experience of the moment. Whatever this experience is, and I would assume that it has a significant role to play in human development, the nature and contents should be questioned if they contain an experience that humans often yearn to recreate. Literature appears to contain symbols in abundance that express a desire for the "return to the womb" experience.

Paradise "symbolizes primordial perfection and the Golden Age; the Cosmic Centre, pristine innocence; beatitude; perfect communion between man and God and all living things" (Cooper, 1988, p. 126). This description could easily be interchanged with the symbol of the womb which Cooper (1988) describes as "the feminine principle, the matrix, the Earth Mother . . . the well and all waters and all that encloses or contains, such as walls, caskets and cups, are symbols of the womb" (p. 122). The womb can be seen as a symbol of Paradise, and Paradise can be seen as a symbol representing the womb experience. Womb symbolism is linked in a spiritually positive way, as described by Cooper, or a pathological way, as described by Guntrip (1989), who says that "womb fantasies and/or the passive wish to die represent the extreme schizoid reaction, the ultimate regression, and it is the more common, mild characteristics which show the extraordinary prevalence of schizoid, i.e., detached or withdrawn, states of mind" (p. 58).

In a discussion of schizoid withdrawal and reasons for this action, Guntrip (1989) names one reason for the regression to a symbolic womb in the following way:

Guntrip sees the fantasy of regression to the womb as a reaction of the infant or adult to its (negative) environment, with dangerous implications, which certainly appears to be one possibility. Guntrip apparently overlooks the possibility that the infant might be attempting to return himself to the womb position when the environment fails to accomplish this for him. This experience might be very different when the return is a defense mechanism, rather than a positive experience provided for by the mother. In a positive experience, the ego might be strengthened, but as a defense mechanism, the ego might not wish to return, becoming stuck in a position that becomes pathological because it does not allow for the flow of ego to soul and soul to ego.

Jung sees the entire experience in a different and more positive light. Jung (1959/1938) gives as an example of the process of transformation, the eighteenth Sura of the Koran, entitled "The Cave," which is a womb symbol:

Anyone who gets into that cave, that is to say into the cave which everyone has in himself, or into the darkness that lies behind consciousness, will find himself involved in an--at first--unconscious process of transformation. (p. 135)

Jung (p. 136) goes on to say, "This may result in a momentous change of personality in the positive or negative sense," indicating that a womb regression may be dangerous, but is also necessary for a process of transformation to occur. If we assume that this "womb regression" takes place immediately after birth, in what Fordham refers to as reintegration, it is possible to see that this experience is natural and what happens in the beginning of life. The infant has by being born lost the original state of oneness experienced in the womb and is returned to that state, transformed, one might say, by the experience of having his body/ego desires met by an "other" in the world.

Because the brain's TV prime resource
Consists of images,
We may call the total brain activity
Image-ination.

All we have ever seen
Is and always will be
In the scopes of our brain's TV station.
All that humanity has ever seen
And will ever see
Is his own image-ination;
Some of it is faithfully reported new,
Some of it is invented fiction or make believe;
Some of it is doggedly retained "want to believe."

(R. Buckminster Fuller, Intuition, 1972, p. 122)

Eros, Thanatos, and the Desire for Paradise

Psychoanalytic theory, as developed by Freud, is concerned with instincts, mainly the sexual instinct (which Freud attributed to Eros) as a primary source for all physical and psychic development. Libido is sexual energy, and all other instincts flow from this basic force. Miller (1983) says that Freud, "in his final account, described two basic instincts, Eros (sex, self-preservation, love, life forces, striving toward unity) and the destructive instinct (aggression, undoing connections, the death instinct, hate)" (p. 112).

Freud apparently was concerned primarily with the irrational function of sensation as it applied to sex, and considered it the basic instinct. For Freud, everything starts with the body. In a certain sense this may be true, but not in the way that Freud described it, which leaves out the possibility of body instincts that are connected to the soul. Looking at Eros as an archetype of one kind of love or only half of what love is, connected with the ego and the body, and Psyche or the soul as the other half of love, love that is not in need or that does not desire, it is not difficult to see that love also relates to the death instinct, because it always means a death of the ego or a death of desire. Consummated love, whether it be in the psyche of one individual expressed as union between two different states of being or two different people in the world, always cancels the subject and object, two become one. One cannot strive towards life and love without striving towards death. If one sees death symbolically, as it is often intended to be seen in mythological literature, death represents a desire to leave ego consciousness for a return to a non-ego consciousness, which would give the experience of unity to the person rather than that of being separate. This was probably one meaning inherent in the Greek Eleusinian mysteries. The destruction of the ego allowed a non-ego or soul consciousness, which I equate with the function of intuition, to prevail and witness the bliss of unity. Life and death are not separate, but contained in one another in the form of soul, which embraces both in one and expresses the mystery of being and the mystery of nonbeing. Soul looks into the eternal on one side and the finite on the other and knows that this moment contains both. Death cannot exist without life, and life cannot exist without death. This experience takes away the fear of actual, physical death, which would have psychological value in any age or society.

When Jung (1971/1921) introduced the function of intuition as one of the basic four psychological functions, inherent in a healthy or ideal psyche, he assigned an importance to that function that has (especially in psychology) often been overlooked. That the body experiences sensation appears in the literature as a given fact. What, how, where, when, and why are equally significant questions concerning intuition as an important psychological function. Jung called intuition the function closest to the unconscious and considered it necessary for individuation, yet little has been included in developmental psychology literature on this function compared with the other three functions. It would seem that children, who live close to the unconscious, are excluded from the possibility of using this function in a significant way that may contribute to their growth and development in ways yet unknown.

It may seem strange to speak of psychological development in a fetus or in the womb, yet if that experience exists, it is one that all humans share and suggests a universal archetype that exists in the psyche of every adult.

Hall and Lindzey (1978) state that "Freud believed that the most extreme symptom of dependency is the desire to return to the womb" (p. 55). Does this statement imply that the independent ego that no longer desires to return to the womb or, indeed, to "Paradise" is the psychologically healthy ego? To take statements about the desire to return to the womb literally, we might deduce a desire for incest, which is how Freud viewed it, but if it is seen symbolically, it might be interpreted as a desire for a relationship with the mother where two are fused in oneness by the act of mutual love. This could take place in the actual blissful experience of the child with his mother after birth or it could describe the experience in the womb, where ego and soul were not separated. In either case, the desire is for the psychological experience of being "one with" in spirit, soul, mind, and body. If after birth the infant never had that blissful experience with his mother or a mother substitute, he or she might spend a lifetime looking for the experience in the world. If a oneness does exist in the womb, this experience would be universally true for all individuals and would explain why a womb fantasy was imagined more often than a fantasy of being an infant in a mother's arms. What the individual appears to be seeking is the archetypal match that was not provided after birth.

Pearce (1980) stresses the importance of early relationship when he says: "Bonding is a psychological-biological state, a vital physical link that coordinates and unifies the entire biological system. Bonding seals a primary knowing that is the basis for rational thought" (p. 72). The return of the infant to the state that he experienced in the womb or to the experience of being in the soul or intuitive function is what "bonding" is about. I agree with Pearce that this "seals a primary knowing" that allows for and is the foundation of rational thought. It begins, not after a year or two, but at birth. I may be accused of adultomorphism when I state that if reintegration to the soul or intuitive function shortly after birth could be put into language, the infant might say "I know love." This is knowledge experienced by the ego-body of the child. Knowledge of love and love of knowledge are not inseparable; they can exist in the first experience of the newborn's life. When they do, cognitive development or rational thought takes place at the same time as affective development, and they are certainly complementary to one other. Knowledge does not require language, any more than love does; what is required is the experience. Feeling, as Jung described, is a way of knowing and one of the rational functions. Few would deny its existence in the newborn, yet the knowledge that it provides appears to be overlooked. That rational thinking proceeds from that of rational feeling is the point that Pearce appears to be making, and I agree with him.

No one is more dependent than the newly born human infant, who seeks a return to bliss through relationship, which gives knowledge that "we are one" and knowledge that "we are not one," opposites that either are united or shattered by the experience with the "other."

The experience of soul consciousness depends on the loss or partial loss of the ego to love the "other," whereas ego love is always a desire to be loved. These two different states of consciousness and two types of love, often conflicting in nature, exist in the psyche of one person or in a complex relationship. If the desire to return to the womb is such a common experience, it is possible that the reasons are more significant than merely dependency needs or, rather, that dependency needs are basic and significant for human relationship. If, indeed, mythology is the expression of psychological experience, many of Freud's interpretations can be seen as limited, for on a depth level, they would represent something very different indeed. The desire for Paradise would not only be considered normal, but perhaps essential, because this metaphor would describe an ultimate human experience designed to produce psychological wholeness. If it begins at birth and is part of a psychological process that all humans engage in to some degree, there would be nothing pathological about it. The metaphor would simply describe humanity's desire to be one with God and the world, and to know it on a conscious level. The transcendent function or the symbol that unites these two types of consciousness, ego and soul, would be the way and the means to achieve that goal. The experience of being separate created by birth and the experience of not being separate created by an assimilation of the womb experience would be two opposites experienced in the world, and the transcendent function would provide the symbol that unites them. I think this takes place in relationship, both within and without, and creates that middle place where both experiences exist and both are equally important. If a transcendent function exists in the human child, it is reasonable to assume that it begins at birth, when opposites as well as the need to reconcile them begin. It is creation that destroys oneness. Without creation, there would be no need for a transcendent function or a symbol that describes the experience of the opposites reunited.

Many people still adhere to the view that we are more than ego and more than body. A psychological concept of how or why humans cling to a spiritual or soul view has not been explored thoroughly, with the possible exception of Jung and analytical psychology. Faith and reason appear forever divided. A psychological concept, however, that attempts to provide a more total picture of early human experience might come closer to objective truth than one that ignores or considers pathological human beliefs that refuse to die. That consciousness of some kind, which I am describing as intuitive or soul consciousness, may exist in the womb does not appear to be the prevalent mainstream world view; however, it appears safe to say that research is being done that supports this view and that makes this possibility increasingly credible.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The star that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
   Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
   He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
   Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
   And by the vision splendid
   Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

(From William Wordsworth, "Intimations of Immortality," 1888, p. 355)

G.A. Lenhart Dissertation-Chapter 2: Review of the Literature

Chapter 2: Review of the Literature

Piaget and Genetic Epistemology

Jean Piaget was a genetic epistemologist, logician, biologist, philosopher, and psychologist, although he is usually described as a psychologist whose contributions to the field of developmental psychology are invaluable and numerous.

Genetic epistemology, which is considered a discipline that Piaget created, is basically an experimental philosophy that seeks to answer epistemological questions through the developmental study of the child. Elkind (Piaget, 1964/1967) in an introduction to Piaget's work says: "The problems [in genetic epistemology] are to discover the psychological structures that underlie the formation of concepts fundamental to science" (p. v).

This sentence reminds us that most of Piaget's work is concerned with the development of one particular psychological function, namely, that of thinking (although he does discuss the other three functions) whether abstract or concrete, and a belief that conceptual thinking was the end and desired goal in a series of stages, all designed to complete this process.

There is much that I agree with in this statement, even the idea that conceptual thinking is the last in this series to develop. The bias that I detect appears to reflect not only Piaget, but the rationalization of Western humanity in general toward the idea that the psychological function of thinking is superior to the other three functions. I see thinking as the accumulation of the experiences of the other three functions, given form and content.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that investigates the origins, methods, nature, and limits of human knowledge, and even though Piaget appears to be focused upon one aspect, he did not leave the others out entirely. In a sense, I agree with Elkind (1964/1967, p. vi) who claims that Piaget was unjustly criticized for the book he did not write, rather than the one he did write. Piaget's work contains a significant amount of information relevant to the topic of this research, especially concerning the early stages of cognition in childhood.

Piaget (1947/1950) describes his work in the following way:

Emphasizing the interaction of the organism and the environment leads to the operational theory of intelligence. According to this point of view, intellectual operations, whose highest form is found in logic and mathematics, constitute genuine actions, being at the same time something produced by the subject and a possible experiment on reality. The problem is therefore to understand how operations arise out of material action, and what laws of equilibrium govern their evolution; operations are thus concerned as grouping themselves of necessity into complex systems, comparable to the "configurations" of the Gestalt theory, but these, far from being static and given from the start, are mobile and reversible, and round themselves off only when the limit of the individual and social genetic process that characterizes them is reached. (p. 16)

The first of these systems is the newborn child. Miller (1983) states that Piaget was primarily concerned with cognition that "occurs in stages as a process rather than a state" (p. 37). "A newborn is a bundle of reflexes; wired-in responses that are triggered by particular stimuli" (p. 45). Piaget's first stage is the newborn, but the process that led up to this point (9 months in the womb) is not discussed, at least in Miller's explication of Piaget's work. It is just these reflexes or "wired-in" responses (instincts) that I would describe as related to the intuitive function. It was only after turning to Piaget's writing directly that I found any reference to the function of intuition or a reference to the child in utero.

Piaget (1964/1967) places a great deal of importance on the first few years of life when he states that "this early mental development nonetheless determines the entire course of psychological evolution" (p. 9). This statement makes it abundantly clear that Piaget considered these rudimentary elements in cognition significant to any later developments in cognition and the latter dependent upon the former. Shortly after this statement, he says, "At birth, mental life is limited to the exercise of reflex apparatuses, i.e., of hereditarily determined sensory and motor coordinations that correspond to instinctual needs, such as nutrition" (p. 9). I agree with Piaget's first statement concerning the importance of early mental development, but disagree with him concerning the second: I do not think that mental life is limited in any way at birth, in most cases. Quite the contrary it begins at birth by processes that Piaget adequately describes, but assigns to a later period. I will attempt to defend this assertion as I proceed to examine some of Piaget's general concepts related to my research topic as well as Jung's comparative ideas and current post-Jungians in developmental psychology, mainly Fordham.

Piaget and Inhelder (1966/1969, p. 5) do not consider the exact moment when sensori-motor intelligence appears as important as the problem of understanding the mechanism of this progression. This is because Piaget is more interested in structures which, if they hold true for the individual, also hold true for the species (1964/1967, p. vi). He is primarily concerned with the identification of the structures. Once identified, the successive forms of these structures can be compared to arrive at an explication of their genesis (1964/1967, p. vi).

For the purposes of this research as well as psychology in general, I would consider the exact moment of sensori-motor intelligence extremely important if one is attempting to link it to the previous stage of development. Piaget did not attempt to do this, although he does mention this possibility, which I will later discuss.

Understanding the mechanism of the progression of stages, which Piaget thought to be the real problem, is equally important for my purposes because I am attempting to describe the transition of one stage beginning in the womb to the next stage, which is birth, and the differences in psychological functioning in both stages. I am attempting to link them with cosmological myths, which I believe to be describing this process in symbolic language.

Piaget's stages underlie the hypothesis offered in this research. If the four psychological functions are the basic methods of acquiring knowledge, which was Jung's assertion, it is reasonable to assume that they start in the psyche of each individual, either in the same way, which Piaget would state was true for the species, or not, which would imply a random acquisition. Einstein said that he could not believe that God plays dice with the world; I do not think that this idea is less true of the inner world, the human psyche.

In attempting to understand the mechanism of this progression of states, Piaget and Inhelder (1966/1969) continue to describe their ideas concerning assimilation. Piaget rejects the mechanism of association, which he claims many psychologists accept, and instead gives his views on assimilation:

It is not difficult to see this as the relationship between mother and child; the needs of the infant are satisfied by assimilation. The internal schemes to fit reality are matched and accommodated. This description sounds very much like Jung's description of archetypes. The infant has a picture or an inner image that matches the outer world.

I also see the shortcomings and therefore question the validity of the SÆR mechanism of association. I consider Piaget's model of assimilation and accommodation much more in keeping with the model that I propose, and "assimilation" a word that describes the process in some respects better than Fordham's description of integration, though they appear to me to be comparable.

It becomes apparent that Piaget is describing something quite similar to Fordham's idea of integration and the idea that the infant acquires what is needed from the object or stimuli. One difference appears to be that the subject in Piaget's system is absorbing knowledge from the world or the object into its own self without changing the basic structure of subject and object. In Fordham's system, the infant is integrating to return to the Self or its original state of wholeness.

Piaget's system is always one of reciprocation based on his idea of equilibrium. Subject and object are always in a state of relationship to one another. Seen in this way, it is the relationship that provides the equilibrium or, in Jungian terms, a return to the Self.

Both Jung and Piaget (Fordham less so) appear to use the dialectic method for their constructions, and it is not difficult to see Jung's idea of a Self as totality or Self in balance or harmony as one in a state of equipoise. Equilibrium, which is conceived as a steady state much like the Self concept, is an indispensable part of Piaget's genetic epistemology system. In speaking of the fundamental interaction between internal and external factors, Piaget (1964/1967) states:

All behavior is an assimilation of reality to prior schemata (schemata which, in varying degrees, are due to heredity) and all behavior is at the same time an accommodation of these schemata to the actual situation. The result is that developmental theory necessarily calls upon the concept of equilibrium, since all behavior tends toward assuring an equilibrium between internal and external factors or, speaking more generally, between assimilation and accommodation. (p. 103)

The "prior schemata" in the hypothesis that I propose can be seen as the four psychological functions, existing undifferentiated and contained in the function of intuition, where consciousness and unconsciousness exist as one steady state in the prenatal child. Put in Piagetian terms--the infant exists in a state of equilibrium, a steady state that does not imply inactivity, as Piaget (1964/1967, p. 151) points out--but just the opposite, activity. In other words, the infant in the womb would exist in a state of equilibrium, while at the same time be essentially active.

Piaget's schemes, which he sees as the precursors of symbols or images and innate in the infant, bear a close resemblance to Jung's descriptions of archetypes, which are without content, and filled in by the experience of the person. Ryce-Menuhin (1988) says much the same thing when he discusses Fordham:

The payoff for Fordham's theory based on Jung's self-as-totality theory is that the archetypal interpretative base in the reading of infant behaviour has led to definitive areas of agreement between Piaget's longitudinal infant observation and Fordham's ego theory; that is, that the infant is matching inner with outer from birth. (p. 62)

That the infant is matching inner with outer from birth appears certain in the ideas of both men, however, Fordham wavered considerably in his ideas concerning the appearance of the ego. It is only when Fordham considered the ego present at birth that his theory links to that of Piaget's theory in an important way. Piaget relates schemes to the body and body functions from the beginning, even though he doesn't use the word "ego."

Other similarities in Piaget's and Jung's thinking, which also influenced Fordham, appear to me to be readily apparent, especially in the method both employ and in the conclusions they arrive at concerning schemes, archetypes, and equilibrium. In speaking of the difficulty in knowing one's own type, Jung (1971/1921) states:

This subjective clouding of judgment is particularly common because in every pronounced type there is a special tendency to compensate the one-sidedness of that type, a tendency which is biologically purposive since it strives constantly to maintain the psychic equilibrium. (p. 1)

Since these words appear on the first page of Psychological Types, the concept of equilibrium and compensation for biological purposes appears to be significant in Jung's thinking and exceedingly close to ideas later introduced by Piaget. What is apparent in both of their beginning observations is the biological model and the one of equilibrium, which was also used by Freud and many others attesting to the numerous, diverse concepts that come from a theoretical model used in different ways.

Jung's interpretation of that model, however, led him eventually to his major conclusion that the transcendent function was of the utmost importance; the uniting of opposites was achieved by a third, unknown, and irrational factor, which was the symbol that joined the opposites and restored, even if only temporarily, a state of equilibrium. Most of Jung's work and thinking centers on this basic concept--including his work on alchemy, dreams, and his descriptions of introversion, extraversion and the four psychological functions. The problem of opposites or "squaring the circle" is the problem of returning to the state of equilibrium or the Self; in other words, it is a psychological problem. Since much of Jung's later work was centered on the healing of adults, he doesn't comment directly on when the symbolic function or what he called the transcendent function comes into existence, but he does discuss the inborn, preconscious, and unconscious individual structure of the psyche. He (1959/1938) states:

a priori

I agree with this statement. What appears at birth has been in motion and experienced for 9 months in utero. The structures for acquiring knowledge as well as the application of the transcendent function, whenever it may appear, all have their root and foundation in the individual structure of the infant psyche. With this idea in mind, one could easily say that the child who is dominated by his parents' psychology or in a state of participation mystique is guided by his own inner principles or individuality as well as his environment. This is probably one reason Jung did not see a contradiction in his ideas concerning the influence of the parents on the unconscious of the child. Some children are individually equipped by their own psychology in the beginning to be influenced by their parents unconscious, other are less so, which explains how two children with the same parents are often very different, without this difference being only the result of the parents' behavior. This subject will be discussed later in the work of Frances Wickes.

Piaget (1964/1967), like Jung before him, considers the "semiotic function" extremely important and states, "It can thus be argued that the source of thought is to be sought in the symbolic function" (p. 91). He saw it as emerging in stage 6 of the sensori-motor period, which is around the age of 2, and corresponds in time with many concepts in psychology concerning the appearance of the developing ego. Before the emergence of the symbolic function the infant is operating by the function of intuition, which is Piaget's term for perception and movement. But intuition or perception and action are not the foundation for thought; thought is derived from the symbolic function.

The following is Piaget and Inhelder's (1966/1969) conclusion on the symbolic function:

In spite of the astonishing diversity of its manifestations, the semiotic function presents a remarkable unity. Whether it is a question of deferred imitation, symbolic play, drawing, mental images and image-memories or language, this function allows the representative evocation of objects and events not perceived at that particular moment. The semiotic function makes thought possible by providing it with an unlimited field of application, in contrast to the restricted boundaries of sensori-motor action and perception (intuition). Reciprocally, it evolves under the guidance of thought, or representative intelligence. Neither imitation nor play nor drawing nor image nor language nor even memory (to which we might have attributed a capacity for spontaneous reproduction comparable to that of perception) can develop or be organized without the constant help of the structuration characteristic of intelligence. (p. 91)

Here Piaget speaks almost with reverence of the symbolic function; he makes it clear that this is a milestone in development and a stage of transition; the baby has come to the end of the sensori-motor period and the semiotic function "presents a remarkable unity." I cannot help agreeing that this is a remarkable achievement for the human child; what I cannot agree with is the idea that these functions all begin at the end of the sensori-motor period, as defined by Piaget.

This remarkable unity can also be seen as taking place shortly after birth when the infant has experienced two things: the loss of unity that occurs with the first conscious sensation and the first desire, and the re-establishment of unity when the desire is satisfied.

Piaget, who often states that feeling should not be divided from thought, appears to leave out the possibility that the feeling function contains the thought or the knowledge, which may create the image on an unconscious level in the thinking function. If conscious feeling is derived from conscious sensation, these are the first functions to give knowledge of the separation of the experiencing organism, they are also the first functions that unite them or return them to a previous state. The opposites are reunited by an apparently invisible third thing called relationship. This is the space between subject and object, and it exists on the inner level as well as the outer level when there is, as Piaget or Fordham would say, a match.

The experience of the first relationship may be more significant in the formulation of the symbol than previously recognized. If a 1-year-old child draws a circle, which is one of the first symbols drawn by children (Drachnik, 1985, p. 11), she or he may be expressing a representation that existed in the personal unconscious from a much earlier age and it may be a description of experience that is only remembered through a simple symbol that expresses a dynamic process.

If the archetype, thought, image, representation or concept all exist as potential in the unconscious thinking function that is not separated from the first feeling, conscious feeling would be more significant than previously described also, because it would be connected to the thinking function in an important way from the beginning of life.

It would be a mistake, I think, to believe that the feeling function does not provide an image or representation of the experience that occurs in the relationship. It is simply that the image always comes after the experience. The feeling can unite the opposites without the conscious thought and, indeed, create the thought or image, whether it ever becomes conscious or not. This is why we can identify with the contents of a myth, even after rejecting the literal interpretation as questionable, and recognize that it still contains a psychological truth.

It would appear to me that the age of 2, which Piaget equates with the emergence of the symbolic function, is the age of the child when he or she can be observed by adults to be using all four functions, but in reality the child has been doing so from the beginning, just as the ego comes into play at the first sign of body consciousness. New methods of research and clinical observation of infants appears to support the idea that the infant uses cognitive functions long before the end of the sensori-motor period.

Jackson and Jackson (1979, pp. 104-105) discuss research by Jerome Kagan of the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, who believes that infant cognitive activity is apparent around the end of the first year. He bases this on research that showed that infants' fixation on masks of the human face diminishes from 2 to 9 months of age, as if they could be more and more easily assimilated in the infants' maturing schemata for faces and so require less and less attention. However, after the age of 9 months until 36 months of age, the concentration of infants and children on masks increases. Kagan proposes that this shift manifests the emergence of a cognitive process in which infants formulate hypotheses to explain unfamiliar events.

Kagan (quoted in Jackson and Jackson, 1979) also discusses research that suggests that the heart rate of infants and adults increases during cognitive activity. Jackson and Jackson (1979) say, "If heart rate increases in infants signify an increase in cognitive activity, as they do in children and adults, the age of reason has taken a quantum leap backward to age one" (p. 106). I agree with this and suggest it may be much earlier than the age of one.

In more recent research, Wynn (1992) shows that 5-month-old infants are capable of simple arithmetic, a feat that I do not think Piaget would include in the sensori-motor period. Wynn states:

perceptual discriminations may underlie these abilities

Research such as this and the previous examples indicates several things, one being the importance of what Wynn calls "purely perceptual discriminations" and the other the possibility that this kind of holistic recognition by infants may involve the function of intuition.

Piaget apparently did not regard perception as a source for conceptual knowledge. After giving various reasons, which are presented almost as mathematical equations in much of his writing on perception, he states that "It seems obvious, therefore, that operations, or intelligence in general, do not derive from the perceptual systems" (quoted in Piaget and Inhelder, 1966/1969, p. 50).

Miller (1983), in discussing Piaget's views on perception, states:

Perceptual development seems to be a more continuous, quantitative process than does cognitive development. Piaget makes a sharp distinction between perception and cognition in terms of what each can achieve. The most advanced level of perception allows the semi-reversible regulations we saw in the preoperational period. Perception can never achieve the reversible operations eventually developed by the cognitive structures. It follows, then, that perception can never give certainty; it can give only approximations. Perception always remains a subsystem of intellectual structures. (p. 67)

It appears to me that Piaget, at this point in his thinking, divides perception from cognition in an arbitrary way that is reminiscent of the philosophy that stated that body and soul are separate and distinct entities and the idea that the so-called highest form of knowing, conceptual thinking, is not based on the so-called lower methods of knowing, which would be conscious sensation that is known through the body, or unconscious sensation or intuition, which is also known through the body. Perception and action, connected with body sensation, cannot achieve reversibility and this is a reason Piaget often gives for the divorce of perception and reason.

I agree with Piaget that body sensations can be seen as perceptions and actions and that they are intuitions. He is saying very much the same thing that I have stated earlier, that sensation and intuition are two sides of the same coin. And Piaget went beyond Jung in his definition of what intuition is and where it comes from, but not in the value assigned to that particular function, which Jung considered essential for all the higher achievements of humans, whether scientific, artistic, or psychological. I do not agree that perception and cognition serve two different purposes, but that perception is instead the foundation for all future cognitive processes, including conceptual thinking. If the perception contains the knowing, there is no need for it to be reversible, at least in the beginning; intuition may give the concept in its totality before it is ever known rationally, in which case, the knowing would be complete, but the expression of what is known would necessarily have to be expressed in some form to communicate what is known to others. Art and science both serve this purpose quite well.

The bias that Piaget appeared to have concerning perception may have influenced his thinking in several ways, including his thinking concerning the function of intuition and the functions of sensation and especially the feeling function. Piaget was looking for the little scientist in every child, but he failed to find, indeed, did not appear to be looking for, the little artist, which may have been a flaw in his system, for one may necessitate the other.

Koestler (1975, pp. 146-147) states something like this when he says that the greatest of scientists have a basic trust in the intuitive function, and he gives examples that he says could be continued indefinitely, although he cannot think of any explicit statement to the contrary by any eminent mathematician or physicist:

turns out to be dependent on mental processes which are subjective, irrational, and verifiable only after the event.

This does not seem quite that paradoxical if one thinks of the intuitive function as containing what Jung called "passive thinking," which in the expression is brought to the level of scientific or conceptual thought which Jung called "active thinking."

Piaget talks about intuition, but thus far I have not determined that he ever gives it the importance that Koestler mentions, at least not in the making of a concept by an adult, whereas Jung thought it was indispensable for the complete realization of the Self. This is a large difference in their thinking and I am inclined to believe that Jung was correct; he gave all four functions equal value and insisted that all four should be developed as far as humanly possible in a conscious way. Overall, I believe that Jung's system was the more reasonable one, and that the inclusion of the intuitive function as essential for creativity and psychological wholeness was an aspect that Piaget missed in his overall theory of knowledge. Epistemology is more than the thinking function, and it is perhaps the complex relationship of the functions to each other that produces the end results.

Jung does not refer to Piaget in his work, which is understandable since Piaget was 21 years younger and was only 25 years old when Jung wrote Psychological Types, but Piaget (Piaget and Inhelder, 1966/1969) does refer to Jung and symbols when he states:

But, without any proof (lack of concern for verification is even more noticeable in the Jungian school than it is in the Freudian schools), he [Jung] argued from the universality of these symbols that they are innate and went on from there to the theory of hereditary archetypes. Yet one would no doubt find the same universality in the laws of the child's play symbolism; and since the child is anterior to the man and was so even in prehistoric times, it may be in the ontogenetic approach to the formative mechanisms of the semiotic function that the solution to the problem will be found. (p. 62)

In other words, when psychology discovers the beginning of the symbolic function or the beginning of representations in the individual infant, the solution to the problem of how symbols are formulated will be found. Jung (1956/1912) said something about this in "Two Kinds Of Thinking," a description of directed thinking and passive thinking or what he later called intuition, when he stated:

These considerations tempt us to draw a parallel between the mythological thinking of ancient man and the similar thinking found in children, primitives, and in dreams. This idea is not at all strange; we know it quite well from comparative anatomy and from evolution, which show that the structure and function of the human body are the result of a series of embryonic mutations corresponding to similar mutations in our racial history. The supposition that there may also be in psychology a correspondence between ontogenesis and phylogenesis therefore seems justified. If this is so, it would mean that infantile thinking and dream-thinking are simply a recapitulation of earlier evolutionary stages. (pp. 22- 23)

Apparently, Piaget later (1928/1964) had similar thoughts when he said: "The day will come when child thought will be placed on the same level in relation to adult, normal, and civilized thought, as primitive mentality" (p. 256).

At this point, I agree with both Piaget and Jung; it is in the ontogenesis that the answer to the relationship between the intuitive function and the thinking function and the creation of symbols can be found, and the interpretations of ontological and cosmological myths may contain information that has yet to be discovered, especially the Western myth of Genesis.

It is also possible that child thinking ultimately is no different from adult thinking if what is conscious in one is unconscious in the other and vice versa. This would mean that the ontogenesis and the phylogenesis are not only comparable, as Jung described, but identical. In other words, the beginning contains the end, just as the end contains the beginning. In religious mythology this is expresses as a return to child consciousness.

Before continuing with Piaget's ideas on intuition, however, I would like to look at his views on the feeling function or what he referred to as affect. Piaget (1964/1967) states:

There is a close parallel between the development of affectivity and that of the intellectual functions, since these are two indissociable aspects of every action. In all behavior the motives and energizing dynamisms reveal affectivity, while the techniques and adjustment of the means employed constitute the cognitive sensorimotor or rational aspect. There is never a purely intellectual action, and numerous emotions, interests, values, impressions of harmony, etc., intervene--for example, in the solving of a mathematical problem. Likewise, there is never a purely affective act, e.g., love presupposes comprehension. Always and everywhere, in object-related behavior as well as in interpersonal behavior, both elements are involved because the one presupposes the other. (pp. 33-34)

Here I am in complete agreement with Piaget; this describes and supports my earlier statement that there is not a thought that does not have a conscious or unconscious feeling related to it and not a feeling that does not have a conscious or unconscious thought attached to it. But which function comes first or do they originate at the same time? Piaget does not exactly say, although he implies that the functions of feeling and thinking commence simultaneously. But if the child is born into time, and feeling and thinking do not work together at the same time, as Jung describes, and one function is developed and conscious, while the other is unconscious, it would appear more reasonable and perhaps even obvious that the feeling function would precede the thinking function, even if the time involved is only a fraction of a second or a number of years. It also appears obvious that these two functions are contiguous to one another, but can still be described separately and be seen to serve two different purposes, at least in expression, if not always in content. Feeling can be observed in the behavior of a newborn infant, while thought is much more difficult, but not impossible, as recent research has shown. It would seem reasonable to me to assume that thinking and feeling appear simultaneously, but that feeling is conscious whereas the thought takes place in the unconscious.

Since Piaget thought that a close parallel existed between the development of affectivity and the intellectual functions and that they were indissociable aspects of every action, it is difficult to understand how he appears to discount the development of the feeling function in the beginning of life. Perhaps he simply was more interested in the structures of cognitive development in the child and realized the enormous difficulty of the relationship between two distinct, but closely related functions, namely, thinking and feeling. Elsewhere (Piaget and Inhelder, 1966/1969), concerning these two functions, Piaget states:

As we have seen repeatedly, affectivity constitutes the energetics of behavior patterns whose cognitive aspect refers to the structures alone. There is no behavior pattern, however intellectual, which does not involve affective factors as motives; but, reciprocally, there can be no affective states without the intervention of perceptions or comprehensions which constitute their cognitive structure. Behavior is therefore of a piece, even if the structures do not explain its energetics and if, vice versa, its energetics do not account for its structures. The two aspects, affective and cognitive, are at the same time inseparable and irreducible. (p. 158)

Translating this into Jungian terms, if we take patterns of behavior to be the archetypes that have not become conscious but are identical with the instincts, which Jung thought possible, the "perceptions or comprehensions which constitute their cognitive structure" would be either conscious sensation or unconscious sensation (intuition) or both and the perceiving functions or instinctual functions can be seen, as Piaget states, as constituting or creating the archetypes, which are only empty forms until they become conscious. In other words, the instincts create the archetypes and they are contained each in the other.

Here I certainly agree with Piaget, and this statement appears to support one of my premises in a meaningful way: If there can be no affective states without the intervention of perceptions or comprehensions which constitute their cognitive structure, the feeling of love or the knowing of love would provide a perception and a comprehension that would be affective and cognitive at the same time. Love and knowledge would be interchangeable! Perception or comprehension, known through the function of feeling, does not require a conscious image or representation when the experience is one of pure feeling. The image may follow, but it does not need to become conscious to be effective or known. Indeed, one feeling may engender numerous images, all representing the same feeling. The symbol itself does not unite the opposites; the symbol only represents an image of the experience. It is the experience that unites the opposites, expressed by the symbol.

If Piaget or, indeed, any other theorist of developmental psychology had seen affect as beginning at birth in the form of an infant demanding to be loved, the energetics of that particular behavior pattern can be seen as a marvelous example of the cognitive structures that underpin them; the human organism would not survive without a means to ensure that his needs and his demands be met in the world. What could be more reasonable?

If feeling starts at the beginning of life, and why dispute the idea that an infant feels, how could the intellectual functions start at a later time if they are indissociable, as Piaget suggests? That an infant feels and makes value judgments from the moment of birth appears so obvious that it has almost been overlooked in the field of psychology, but not in major religions of the world, or in mythological literature. In some Eastern religions, desire is the cause of all pain and suffering in the world, and eliminating desire is the means to end human suffering. In the Western myth of Genesis, the desire of Eve is seen as the downfall of humanity and it is her desire that causes her expulsion from Eden. In Greek mythology, Eros bursts from the golden egg and his name, which means "demanding love," tells us he represents love that desires. And the human newborn experiences the same thing; he or she is born with desire. The first conscious feeling is desire, which comes from the first conscious body sensation that delivers the message that he or she is no longer one with the world, but separate and in the world.

What appears missing in psychology is the possibility that when this first desire is satisfied and the infant is returned to a state where the opposites are united, a feeling that corresponds in intensity accompanies the experience. If Eros shatters the golden egg and desire is born, Psyche or soul (of the mother) returns the infant to a state of no desire, and the accompanying feeling is bliss, pleasure, or joy, all names given to the child of Psyche and Eros. This experience, which is probably the experience of most human infants, probably happens in the first few hours of life. The opposites are first separated by love that demands and then reunited by love that does not desire, the double-edged sword of Christ or two kinds of love and two types of consciousness.

Piaget says that love presupposes comprehension; therefore, to know love is knowledge, and knowledge is knowing love. Desire is the perception of a lack of something; to be without desire is the perception that nothing is lacking; both are knowledge on a feeling level.

The feeling function must follow the function of sensation. If, as Jung stated, feeling is a rational function the human newborn is a rational creature from the beginning and his or her reason begins with the feeling function. The first representation is an image contained in the personal unconscious of the thinking function and this process is repeated, probably until the thinking function gives expression to its contents in a conscious way.

Piaget's (1964/1967) stages begin at birth, yet he states that:

whenever one is dealing with a structure in the psychology of intelligence, its genesis can be traced to other more elementary structures which do not constitute absolute beginnings themselves but have a prior genesis in even more elementary structures, and so on ad infinitum. I say ad infinitum, but the psychologist will stop at birth. He will stop at the sensorimotor level, and at this level there is, of course, the whole biological problem because the neural structures themselves have their genesis, and so it continues. (p. 149)

This appeared to be true in the past, the psychologist did stop at birth, but that is not always the case today, however, as more psychologists are interested in the experience of the infant in utero and the possibilities that the ego may originate shortly before or after birth and that some kind of consciousness begins in utero.

The first 9 months of life in the womb may be more elementary in structure, but certainly would have a structure, according to Piaget's logic. If development occurs in a process of stages, it seems important to start at the beginning, which is not birth, but the developing fetus in the womb. The hypothesis that I suggest here can be seen to be dealing with the genesis of the previous structure, that is, with the experience of the child in the womb and the transition from the womb to the world. Piaget (1964/1967) says that "every structure has a genesis that emanates from a structure and culminates in another structure" (p. 49). If this is so, the myth of Genesis can be seen as a description of the structure previous to birth (Paradise) and as a description of the loss of Paradise or the Fall, which is birth. It also describes the beginning of what is presented in the myths as superconsciousness, which is not at birth, but in the womb, in the form of the psychological function of intuition.

The general hypothesis offered in this research can be seen to link with Piaget's theory if one determines that it attempts to describe the genesis of the previous structure, the womb experience, in the same way that Piaget starts with the description of the structure at birth. If the new structure always contains elements of the old structure, as Piaget claims, it seems reasonable to conclude that the newborn infant repeats the previous structure at the same time he or she is learning a new structure, which would describe integration and deintegration as a process, or assimilation and accommodation, to use Piaget's terms. And if every genesis refers to a previous genesis, what is psychological in the womb has yet to be explored thoroughly.

If we conclude that there is a kind of knowledge or a kind of consciousness innate in living matter, the biological problem, as Piaget calls it, can be overcome. The neural structures appear to arrange themselves in some sort of preconceived plan that constitutes an intelligent choice in most cases, whether we understand it or not.

Most theorists assume that cognition does not begin at birth; so-called "wired-in" responses are not considered real knowledge; yet the experience of sensation is accompanied by the feeling function and the feeling function gives a value to the experience and contains knowledge. Being in the womb is more than a physical experience; it also contains psychological experience in the form of intuitive knowing. Without this stage, which is an important part of the process, no other stage could develop. My thesis states that the infant has consciousness in the womb and that this consciousness is based on the functions of unconscious sensation, feeling, and thinking, which is the psychological function of intuition. In other words, the infant in the womb is in a state (which is also a process because it is in constant change) of conscious intuition. The rational functions of thinking and feeling exist as potential; the function of sensation is constantly active and totally unconscious. Pain and pleasure are not differentiated because the fetus cannot give value judgments (feeling function) and cannot name (thinking function) the experience.

If we concede that the archetype exists in the instinctual behavior of the organism, a connection can be made that unites them; in other words, intuition as an instinct is not different from the function of thinking, which produces the archetype. The archetype exists before, during, and after the instinct.

Piaget's description of thought is especially interesting and can be related to many of the assumptions I have previously made concerning two types of consciousness, the intuitive and ego consciousness; it is also of interest to relate his description of thought to Jung's idea's concerning "Two Types of Thinking" (1956/1912, p. 7) which I have previously described. Piaget (1964/1967) says:

Thought is like all behavior. The child does not adapt himself right away to the new realities he is discovering and gradually constructing for himself. He must start by laboriously incorporating them within himself and into his own activity. This egocentric assimilation characterizes the beginnings of thought just as it characterized the process of socialization. At every stage during the period from two to seven years, one finds all the transitions between two extreme forms of thought, but the second form gradually gains precedence over the first. The first of these forms is thought by means of pure incorporation or assimilation, in which egocentricity excludes all objectivity. The second form is that of thought adapted to others and to reality, (intuition) which is a preparation for logical thought. Most infantile thinking oscillates between these two extremes. (p. 22)

Here Piaget appears to be describing the ego and what I have referred to as soul or intuitive consciousness. Egocentricity is certainly the ego in its most extreme form and he describes the second form as that of intuition, which he sees as the precursor for all later and rational thought. Egocentricity is the first form of conscious thought and intuition is the second. My thesis is that intuition is the first conscious function in the womb, but at birth the emerging ego comes next, with conscious body sensations, conscious feeling or affect, which produces unconscious thinking. By a process of assimilation, the infant's ego is returned to the earlier state of intuitive functioning. The first reintegration would be returning the infant to his or her previous "genesis" to help orient himself or herself to the new state, that is, life in the world as opposed to life in the womb. By defining egocentricity as the first form of thought and a totally subjective form, it can be linked with the first desire or the first need, which contains a thought, were the infant able to express it in words. "I desire or I want the object, which is love," might express this thought, and such a statement would certainly be subjective and egocentric, but not necessarily pejorative.

What is the difference in what I propose than in the above statements by Piaget? It is in his statement that this process occurs in the years between 2 and 7; otherwise there is no difference. What Piaget describes as taking place in the sensori-motor functions, I would say takes place at birth; what he describes as taking place in the intuitive state, I would also describe as happening at birth or, at least one hopes that it does. Piaget states that most infantile thinking oscillates between these two extremes, but I think that one could also say that adult thinking often does the same thing, especially when the ego complex and the soul complex have not been connected in a conscious way.

The second form that Piaget calls thought adapted to others and to reality and a preparation for logical thought is intuition. I have described intuition as beginning in the womb and the ego as beginning at birth, and then returning to the intuitive state, which is the same order that Piaget gives, at least after birth. One can see that this describes what Jung (1956/1912) called "two kinds of thinking." One is active thinking and connected to the ego; one is passive and connected to the soul or intuition. It is also not difficult to see in mythology that most stories are describing an excess of ego or soul: A character, such as Oedipus, is in a state of egocentricity, or an archetype like Psyche, is in a state of excessive soul unconsciousness and looking for (Eros) ego development. Usually, the dilemma to be solved is the reuniting of these two extreme, infantile positions.

Piaget (1964/1967) describes the second form of thought, intuition, in this way:

At the other extreme there is the form of thought that is the most reality-oriented of any to be found in early childhood. This we have called intuitive thought. In a sense, it is sensori-motor experience and coordination that can be reconstituted or anticipated thanks to the ability to use representation. We shall return to this form of thought later because intuition is in some measure the logic of early childhood. (p. 24)

Since Piaget (1964/1967, glossary) defined intuition as "a form of thought in which judgments regarding physical reality are made on the basis of perception rather than reason," this definition can still be seen as being applicable to the experience of the child in the womb, especially since I am defining intuition as unconscious sensation, feeling, and thinking. It is not difficult to imagine that the human infant in utero starts life with a psychological function that will continue after birth and be the foundation for all future sensing, feeling and thinking in a state of consciousness. In this respect, I believe that intuition is more important than Piaget thought, as is perception; neither can be divided from conceptual thought. The structure of the mental system of the child in utero is different from the parts that make it up, simply because the child lives primarily in a state of intuition or soul that is only in existence when the other three functions are unconscious. The parts that comprise intuition, however, separate and become conscious after birth, only to reorganize in unity during states of a lowered ego consciousness, such as sleep or mutual love, or a conscious awareness that one is not only ego, but also soul and both in equal measure comprise the Self. One could call this idea an epigenesis, not only in a biological sense, but in a psychological way, because the mental development of the infant in utero is seen to develop from the successive differentiation of an originally undifferentiated structure, which I am calling the psychological function of intuition. Intuition is the instinct; soul is the archetype that expresses the original undifferentiated structure.

After stating four major factors in the development of the child, Piaget (Piaget and Inhelder, 1966/1969) states:

It may even seem that affective, dynamic factors provide the key to all mental development and that in the last analysis it is the need to grow, to assert oneself, to love, and to be admired that constitutes the motive force of intelligence,

This statement confirms Piaget's final analysis concerning the cognitive and affective functions. They are not seen as separate entities, but forces meant to function in harmony.

Perhaps ego consciousness alone and even soul consciousness alone can be seen as afflicted infantile states of being, regardless of age, if both are not flowing back and forth in a rhythmic process designed to function as the Self.

Piaget's last statement appears to be both simple and profound; it echoes the words of Emily Dickinson (1960), "That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love; It is enough, the freight should be Proportioned to the groove" (p. 714).

make yourself like a desert, unconscious of everything,
the nearer you come to that estate.

(Meister Eckhart, R. B. Blakney, trans.)
1941, p. 120.

Erich Neumann and the Primary Relationship

Neumann (1973/1976) sees the human child as going through

an extra-uterine as well as an intra-uterine embryonic phase . . . the human child, after the nine months it spends in the womb, requires another year to attain the degree of maturity that characterizes the young of most other mammals at birth. (p. 7)

This argument does not say much about human development. One month in the life of a mammal could be compared to one year in the life of a human. The comparison of the human child to "other mammals at birth," then, does not support the idea that the child is in an embryonic stage for the first year of her or his life.

The kind of symbiosis that Neumann suggests implies that an infant has no individual experience or perceptions, save the one experience with mother. The psychological experience of the child before the age of 1 is difficult to discuss from this viewpoint because there does not appear to be any psychic experience beyond symbiosis.

From a classical Jungian perspective, Neumann (1973/1976) theorizes about the early, uroboric phase of child development, seeing that early experience as being symbolized by the myth of Paradise:

Because the ego has not yet developed, the relatedness and Eros-character of the primal relationship is manifested cosmically and transpersonally and not personally. That is why Paradise and Original Home, Round, Ocean or Pond are among the symbols of the remote past. Containment in this cosmic world is an expression of the embryonic form of pre-ego existence, in which the containing mother is manifested in the symbols of an encompassing reality, namely, the unitary reality. (p. 15)

In the last sentence of this statement, Neumann describes quite beautifully what I would call the reintegration or assimilation of the infant, returning him to that primal state of unity that existed in the womb but is now experienced in the world. But a reintegration or assimilation would not be necessary unless there was first a deintegration, and what comes apart is the primal unity that was shattered by the experience of birth and ego consciousness, which is also the experience of the opposites. Although Neumann sees the infant after birth as in a state of Paradise that appears to be a replica of the child in the womb, he never describes the important differences between these two experiences or the complex transition that takes place as the infant leaves the womb and comes into the world.

"What distinguishes the child's experience from the adult's is its unique intensity: impressions falling fresh and sudden upon the sensibility are overpowering" (Goodenough, 1989, p. 144). The child that Neumann describes appears to have endured the profound and intense occurrence of being born without a disturbance in his primal unity! Where is the infant psyche when it is not in a state of unity or participation mystique with the mother after birth? Neumann does not say. Neither does he distinguish between the original, embryonic form of pre-ego existence of the prenatal child, and the same experience of the neonate in the world, recreated by the mother when she meets the infant's needs, which is always a reproduction of the original experience.

Neumann sees the primal relationship as nonpersonal, cosmic, and transpersonal because he believes the ego to be undeveloped, and it is this belief that appears to me to be problematic. An undeveloped ego is not the same as an absent ego, yet he often appears to confuse these differences. I think it is the presence of a beginning ego that does give the first experience of integration, deintegration, and reintegration significance and that includes the personal experience with the cosmic and with the transpersonal. What could be more personal than the beginning of a conscious relationship that will, as Neumann so adequately describes, influence all further relationships?

If what was experienced in the womb as unity is reproduced in the world and experienced as unity, inner and outer worlds have matched, that is, have been experienced as the same. The beginning ego would be experienced as almost identical with the soul complex if this is true, but the "oneness" would be in the world, and it would certainly depend upon relationship. It is the demanding ego (Eros) that needs to be appeased, thereby returning the infant to the original state of unity.

I agree with Neumann that the Paradise myth symbolizes the womb experience. I would not, however, agree with his idea that the total experience of the child after birth is almost identical with the fetus in the womb. This is true when the infant is in a state of reintegration, but leaves out the experience of deintegration and the possibility that it is the ego that deintegrates. If one sees the birth of the child as the first deintegration, in the sense that Fordham (1970, p.103) describes, the "wholeness" of the womb experience has been shattered by the experience of birth. Fordham (1970) states:

Accepting then--the primary psychosomatic unity of infants, the model which I began to formulate in 1947 has now been developed as follows; The primary or original self of the infant is radically disrupted by birth in which the psyche-soma is flooded by stimuli which give rise to prototypic anxiety. Following this, a steady state re-establishes itself and the first clear sequence of disturbance followed by resting or steady states has been completed. The sequence repeats again and again during maturation and the motive forces behind them are called deintegrative and integrative. (p. 103)

Fordham later says that this process can be observed at birth. The primary self deintegrates, that is, it comes apart from its original integration or state of wholeness. This coming apart is not acknowledged by Neumann as a shattering of the original unity. Fordham diverges here from Neumann (1973/1976), who sees the infant in the post-uterine phase of existence in the following way:

participation

mystique

But how would this unity be possible after birth, when the infant experiences the opposites in the form of body sensations that tell her that she is hot or cold, hungry or filled, loved or ignored? It simply cannot be true that an infant does not experience the opposites in conscious functions, namely, sensation and feeling, and that when these functions are conscious, intuition and thinking are equally unconscious because they do not work consciously at the same time, as Jung described in Psychological Types. All the functions are working; half appear to be working on a conscious level and the other half appear to be working on an unconscious level.

If an infant is born in an extremely hot room, he or she would experience the conscious body sensation of being hot and the opposite experience of being cold would not be conscious, but it would certainly be a potential experience in the unconscious. And one could have unconscious intuitive knowledge of what cold body sensations (the opposite of what one is experiencing) are like even if one has never experienced them consciously. I think it quite possible that all the functions, in a healthy infant, even thinking, if it is considered an unconscious function, begin to work immediately after birth. The problem is that this is difficult to observe, but apparently not impossible, since research shows that infants are capable of mathematical calculations shortly after birth. They must be using some kind of thinking, and intuition appears to me to be the more likely function. Stern (1985) describes what might be the function of intuition:

amodal perception

representation

Obviously, the division of the functions into four makes them very broad categories. Perhaps the unknown aspects (which are many) of the function of intuition contributes to the difficulty of understanding its purpose in early development. At any rate, the "unknown supra-modal form" that Stern describes appears to me to be a description of the psychological function of intuition. What is not registered in the conscious body sensations may be experienced and registered in unconscious body sensations (intuition), creating a "whole" experience that would be different (one would now be two) from the primary unity experience in the womb. It would, however, give the infant immediate access to two modes of being or two forms of consciousness, intuitive knowing or what Jung called unconscious perception and sensate knowing or what Jung called conscious perception (1971/1921, p. 463). This would explain how the baby appears to know (Stern, 1985, p. 51) so many things innately or without learning them. Conscious and unconscious interaction would be present from the beginning to the end of life and the end would be a natural return to the beginning.

Neumann's description sounds more like what Fordham calls reintegration. Because he does not allow for the flowing experience of ego to soul, or soul to ego, his description appears static and denies the possibility of infant consciousness.

Psychologically speaking, Paradise, or what Neumann calls "dual union," is "lost" at birth and "found" when the first deintegration flows back into reintegration, when the infant experiences the opposites eventually, that is, in succession rather than merged together as they previously were experienced. In mythology, this would be the transition from eternity to time. The cycle is then repeated, as Fordham (1970) suggests, "over and over" (p. 103).

Neumann (1973/1976) describes a similar process when he says that "whereas dual union is guaranteed by nature in the uterine embryonic phase, it emerges after birth as the first need of the mammal and especially of the human child" (p. 17). I would certainly agree that a duplicate of the original experience is the essential and first need of the human child, but Neumann apparently does not see the contradiction in his logic, because if the postnatal infant exists in a total state of participation mystique or unity, how can it have a need? To be needy is certainly not Paradisical; rather, it is more akin to being human than divine, and expresses that something is perceived as lacking by the body (sensations) or by the emotions (feeling) of the infant, or both. If there were no ego consciousness attached to these two functions, what purpose would they serve?

Neumann, the Circle (Mandala), the Uroboros, and the Self-Ego Axis

Perhaps no one before or since Erich Neumann has described the symbol of the uroboros with the same elegance, luminosity, and depth. Neumann uses this symbol as a representative of creation mythology, relying on other specific and varied myths to describe what he calls stages in the evolution of consciousness. Neumann (1949/1954) describes the uroboros in the following:

uroboros

This is the ancient Egyptian symbol of which it is said: It slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once.

As the Heavenly Serpent, the uroboros was known in ancient Babylon; in later times, in the same area, it was often depicted by the Mandaeans; its origin is ascribed by Macrobius to the Phoenicians. It is the archetype of the All One, appearing as Leviathan and as Aion, as Oceanus and also as the Primal Being that says; "I am Alpha and Omega." As the Kneph of antiquity it is the Primal Snake, the "most ancient deity of the prehistoric world. (p. 10)

Undoubtedly, Neumann has picked an important primary archetype to describe the fundamental experiences described in cosmological mythology. I see the Serpent as an archetype that is perhaps the most significant animal in most major and many minor mythologies, when seen as a representation of a deity, with or without the symbolism of the circle.

Figure 13: Self Ego Axis

Neumann sees both the womb experience and the experience of the infant after birth, as phases that can be symbolized by the image of the uroboros, a symbol he equates to the experience of Paradise. Neumann (1973/1976) describes what he calls the pre-ego phase of existence (after birth) as, "Best symbolized by the 'uroboros,' the circular snake, touching its tail with its mouth and so 'eating' it, is characteristic of the oppositionless unity of this psychic reality" (p. 10). He (1973/1976) also describes this as "characteristic of the uterine embryonic situation, which is largely, though not fully, preserved after birth" (p. 10). Here I would agree that this is a good symbol to describe the child in the womb, because it can symbolize unity and the opposites undifferentiated and merged. What is missing in Neumann's explication is the expansion of the sentence "not fully preserved after birth," and this difficulty appears to be because of the lack of an ego in the newborn infant; Neumann cannot explain the state of deintegration because he does not acknowledge that there is an ego to deintegrate. Since we are never told of the experience of the infant when he or she is not in dual-union with the mother, or the possibility of any other relatedness during the first year, we would have to assume that the infant could not distinguish between his mother and father, or anyone else. This does not seem likely.

From the Genesis model that I propose, the symbol of the uroboros can also be seen as an image of two kinds of consciousness: When the dragon or serpent eats its own flesh, one can see that the subject and object are made of the same substance and what appears to be opposites are united and one in substance. Ego consciousness and soul consciousness, which appear to be opposite, are two (extreme) sides that make up the whole.

In The Golden Bough, Frazer (1981) discusses the symbolism of the sacrifice and eating of the flesh of the gods:

Thus we have the strange spectacle of a god sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. And as the god is supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the god's old self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the goat-god Dionysus is represented as eating raw goat's blood; and the bull-god Dionysus is called "eater of bulls." On the analogy of these instances we may conjecture that wherever a god is described as the eater of a particular animal, the animal in question was originally nothing but the god himself. (p. 328)

This idea can also be seen in Christianity, where a "Father God" sacrifices his "Son" or "Child" for the love of humanity; the uroboros image is reenacted when the old God destroys the new God, who is also Himself.

Sometimes, Frazer tells us, a human child was the sacrifice that represented the god; whether child or animal, the god is partaking of his own flesh. Frazer never mentions this symbolism as similar to the Catholic mass (he was mainly describing "pagan" rites) which it certainly appears to be. I suggest that the symbolism represents psychological knowledge and experience that can be interpreted in the same way, whether the myth is from the alchemists in the form of the uroboros, or Greek in the description of the god Dionysus who devours himself, or Christian, where one eats the Body of Christ. In Christianity, the same idea holds true; at the last supper, which was the first communion, Christ shares the bread and the wine with his disciples, and says that they are his blood and his body, sacrificed for all humanity. The "old" God has sacrificed his son or child and the faithful are to participate by eating the sacrifice.

The eating of the flesh or the child or animal part of the god can be seen as the sacrifice of the ego or ego consciousness (the first birth) in order to gain soul consciousness (the second birth or rebirth); it is the ego that appears to be the enemy of the soul. Put in terms of psychic energy, the intuitive function or the instinctive function that contains the united opposites, that is., life and death united, is only gained when the ego functions, all or in part, are sacrificed. In Christianity, Christ did this for the world; faith negates the necessity of each human doing the same thing, at least in the death of the body, and so it is done symbolically in the partaking of the blood and body of Christ in the mass.

The animal or child part of the psyche is the enemy within, the ego who desires, the ego who believes itself to be separate from God and the world, the "I" that seeks perfection, for to seek is to be without the object. The animal or child is also the innocent ego, consciousness that believes itself to be superior, the child who knows the opposites, but is innocent of their unity, the Eros of desire who first cracked the cosmic egg.

The symbol of the uroboros is also related to time; like alpha and omega, it signifies the beginning and the end, which are both contained in the eternal "now." The uroboros seen thus would not be "sheltering the ego-germ" as Neumann (1973/1976, p. 10) describes it, but would represent the ego and its relationship with itself. Eating would represent the last stage, that of reunion, which would not describe the child in utero, but better describe the newborn in the process of becoming reintegrated.

Neumann (1973/1976) states:

Because the early, uroboric phase of child development is characterized by a minimum of discomfort and tension, and a maximum of well-being and security, as well as by the unity of I and thou, Self and world, it is known to myth as paradisiacal. (p. 14)

This description is one that appears ideal; we might wish all children to have this experience in the first year of life, but it does not seem likely that one can apply this condition to all children after birth, for many of them do not have this "maximum of well-being." Even the child who has a "good-enough" mother cannot be provided with the constant state of bliss that Neumann proposes. Every time the baby wakes hungry and crying, Paradise is lost.

In the womb, if the fetus has no ego consciousness, and the functions of active thinking, feeling, and sensation exist as unconscious and undifferentiated potential merged in the psychological state of intuition, one could compare this state with Paradise. If good or bad sensations can be experienced but not differentiated because there is no ego to make a value judgment, pain and pleasure would not exist or, rather, they would exist as the same experience. Neumann (1949/1954)describes this in part when he states:

This autarchy holds absolute sway in the womb, where unconscious existence is combined with absence of suffering. Everything is supplied of its own accord; there is not need of the slightest exertion, not even an instinctive reaction, let alone a regulating ego consciousness. One's own being and the surrounding world--in this case, the mother's body--exist in a participation mystique, never more to be attained in any environmental relationship. (p. 33)

Undifferentiated existence is not, however, identical with unconscious existence, and the word undifferentiated implies that consciousness and unconsciousness exist side by side or merged. In addition, it is difficult to imagine that a fetus has no instinctive reactions in the womb when all of its movements appear to be motivated by instinctual knowledge.

There would, in the womb, exist a state closer to the description of Paradise than the infant after birth, who would be more likely to experience both consciousness and the unconscious, which would necessarily occur simultaneously. When he experiences the object of his desire, he returns to the unity and Paradisical experience that Neumann describes; when he experiences needs not yet met (in other words, when he is crying)--and this is certainly a common experience of babies--he has lost Paradise.

Neumann's description of the appearance and development of the ego appear to reflect the mainstream world view of his time and time past; more recent research, although not always in agreement, generally asserts that the ego begins much earlier than Freud, Jung, and Neumann thought possible.

Neumann (1973/1976) believes that "any discussion from the standpoint of analytical psychology of the development of the personality--and especially of the child personality--must start from the assumption that the unconscious comes first and that consciousness follows" (p. 9). This appears to be a reasonable statement from a Jungian standpoint and a commonly held view, but I would disagree for the following reason: If intuition, defined as energy that contains all the other functions, is the first psychological function to appear in a human, it would necessarily exist in the unconscious, along with what Neumann calls its directing center, the Self. It would, in fact, be identical with the Self. But in that sea of unconsciousness, everything would have to exist and that would include a spark of consciousness. It is this spark that I am calling conscious intuition and unconscious sensation. It is the merging of the four functions in unconsciousness that creates one function that is the opposite, that is, consciousness that is not differentiated from what is unconscious.

The child in utero, then, could be seen as being contained in opposites that are not divided, which is a description of the Self. Ego and soul comprise the Self and they exist as one. If this is so, consciousness does not follow unconsciousness, as Neumann believes, but both become differentiated at the same time--at birth. The psyche of the neonate would be conscious and unconscious, as it was in the womb, but different because it is now separated into two forms of consciousness that have become differentiated. Thus, the soul complex and the ego complex could be seen to be born at the same time. Unconsciousness would not precede consciousness, as Neumann describes, in the womb or in the first experience of the newborn. The first experience of the infant, consciousness of one side of the opposites would create the personal unconscious, which would necessarily be a repository for the other side of the opposites that cannot be held in consciousness at the same time by the neonate. In other words, the infant would no longer experience hot and cold, good or bad, or any of the opposites as the same experience.

If we assume that the fetus exists in a state of consciousness and a state of unconsciousness, then birth would be the same experience, only reversed; ego consciousness would be equally present with soul consciousness, which is usually described as unconsciousness. The intuitive function becomes unconscious at birth because the opposites are experienced by the function of conscious sensation, which does not work at the same time because they are opposite to one another. Thus, the personal unconscious comes into being at birth when the functions of conscious sensation and conscious feeling begin. The function of intuition becomes one of the four psychological functions and is unconscious, and the thinking function, which is opposed to the feeling function, is also unconscious.

Jung (1971/1921) said the following concerning psychic energy:

Identification with one particular function at once produces a tension of opposites. The more compulsive the one-sidedness, and the more untamed the libido which streams off to one side, the more daemonic it becomes. When a man is carried away by his uncontrolled, undomesticated libido, he speaks of daemonic possession or of magical influences. In this sense manas and vac are indeed mighty demons, since they work mightily upon men. All things that produced powerful effects were once regarded as gods or demons. Thus, among the Gnostics, the mind was personified as the serpent-like Nous, and speech as Logos. (emphasis Jung's, p. 207)

It must be remembered that I am attempting to describe psychic energy as it begins at birth. I am often discussing what might occur in split seconds and minutes, but this is the experience of the infant in time. I do not think it unreasonable to assume that a newborn infant might have an identification with the function of sensation as he enters the world and becomes conscious of the opposites or that it might be one-sided in the first few moments of life. I can image birth as a profound experience, if nothing else and creation myths appear to be an expression of that experience. According to von Franz (1972),

Creation myths are of a different class from other myths--hero myths, or fairy tales for instance--for when they are told there is always a certain solemnity that gives them a central importance; they convey a mood which implies that what is said will concern the basic things of existence, something more than is contained in other myths. Therefore, one may say that as far as the feeling and emotional mood which accompanies them is concerned, creation myths are the deepest and most important of all myths. (emphasis mine, p. 5)

The experience of human birth may be important enough to parallel the "deepest and most important of all myths," as von Franz describes. And Jung (1971/1921) was also correct that

the idea of a creative world-principle is a projected perception of the living essence in man himself. In order to avoid all vitalistic misunderstandings, one would do well to regard this essence in the abstract, as simply energy. On the other hand, the hypostatizing of the energy concept after the fashion of modern physicists must be rigorously rejected. The concept of energy implies that of polarity, since a current of energy necessarily presupposes two different states, or poles, without which there can be no current. Every energic phenomenon (and there is no phenomenon that is not energic) consists of pairs of opposites: beginning and end, above and below, hot and cold, earlier and later, cause and effect, etc. The inseparability of the energy concept from that of polarity also applies to the concept of libido. Hence libido symbols, whether mythological or speculative in origin, either present themselves directly as opposites or can be broken down into opposites. (p. 202)

It is not essential for one function to be up when the other is down. They can both be present at the same time. "In these cases there is also no question of a differentiated type, but merely of relatively undeveloped thinking and feeling" (Jung, 1971/1921, p. 406). If we speak of the differentiation of one function to its fullest capacity, however, we must speak of the subordination of the opposing function if it has remained more or less unconscious. If a process for the differentiation of the functions exists, there is no reason to believe that it might not start at birth and function in the same way it does in later life, and this would certainly be an involvement with the polar opposites.

All four functions can be seen to begin at birth; the two that are conscious are sensation and feeling, and the two that are unconscious are thinking and intuition. Sensation necessarily delegates intuition to the unconscious, but it remains the bridge to consciousness. Only later, after the first experiences of the newborn, can consciousness be said to be divided from the unconscious because there would be no unconsciousness without a conscious attitude at the same time. In other words, consciousness is necessary not only as a way of communication, but also as a method that allows for division and separation of the opposites that would otherwise exist undifferentiated, which was their status in the womb or the collective unconscious or the Self (see Figures 2, and 3). For these reasons, I would not agree with Neumann that the unconscious comes first, followed by consciousness. Consciousness disrupts the collective unconscious or the Self and creates consciousness and unconsciousness simultaneously.

Soul consciousness needs to be differentiated from the Self. This is a distinction that Jung himself makes when he describes the soul archetype as being the bridge to the Self. Symbolically speaking, it is the marriage of the soul with the ego that leads to the birth of the Divine Child, archetype of the Self. But this marriage describes a return to the original Self, a reintegration, whereas what I have just described is the division of the original Self or a deintegration into psychological functions or energy that can be identified separately.

We cannot assume, however, with Neumann and possibly Jung before him, that soul consciousness is always given up for ego consciousness. (This may be true in infancy at the moment of birth, but thereafter they work or malfunction together.) It may happen that the reverse is just as possible; Psyche or soul needs Eros or ego consciousness in the same way that Eros or the ego needs Psyche or soul consciousness. In the psyche, both are transformed in the relationship and the marriage. It is possibly a mistake to assume that these two archetypes are not active and related from the beginning of life because they represent psychological experience that exists from the beginning and continues throughout life. In other words, the split in human consciousness, which produces two kinds of consciousness, attempts to heal itself in every phenomenological experience where it feels divided. Attempt is an apt word because sometimes there is a marriage of the two types of consciousness and sometimes there is not. In this case, the attempt continues. This process is what Fordham describes as integration and deintegration.

The primary difficulty contained in Neumann's description of the child in the primal relationship appears to be a one-sidedness that allows only for the soul consciousness of the child for 1 year, an exceedingly long period, where the child appears in a rather static limbo awaiting its second birth, the birth of consciousness. But if we consider that this oneness originates in the womb and is disturbed by the act of birth, where one becomes two, it is ego consciousness that returns to soul consciousness that is the second birth because this is a return to the original unity. Birth creates two forms of consciousness; re-birth returns ego and soul to the Self or a state of oneness. This implies we are born again into the world at birth when and if we are met with unconditional love from other in the beginning, symbolized by the archetypes of the Divine Virgin and Divine Child. This second birth experience can happen at any age, but it begins at birth. It is also "the eternal return" which Eliade (1991) describes as

the death of the individual and the death of humanity are alike necessary for their regeneration. Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it exists as such and endures, necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the formless if only for an instant; it must be restored to the primordial unity from which it issued; in other words, it must return to "chaos" (on the cosmic plane) to "orgy" (on the social plane), to "darkness" (for seed), to "water" (baptism on the human plane, Atlantis on the plane of history, and so on). (p. 88)

It is the needy ego, the individual ego, that is the "form" that Eliade describes, and it is the same ego that is "reabsorbed into the formless if only for an instant" and restored to the primordial unity from which it issued. It is this instant that enables the ego to change and the repetition of the act that allows for growth in individual development. Beebe (1987) describes this process when he states of Jung:

In the quest for consciousness, he saw, in Symbols of Transformation, the reaching back toward the mother--not as Freud had imagined it--as the reawakening of the enormous infantile longing for the first love of one's life--but rather as an initiation drama in which the hero goes back into the mother's womb to wrest back from her--something precious she's hoarding under her self and that precious thing is consciousness. (lecture, tape 1)

Thus, obtaining the "precious thing" of consciousness may always necessitate a return to the mother/soul archetype to create anything new.

In speaking of Neumann and Fordham and their respective theories, Samuels (1987) states:

It is possible to say that each theory is half of a whole. Viewed together, Fordham's and Neumann's models enable us to speak of a "Jungian" approach to early development with important differences of opinion expressing themselves in the Schools. (p. 160)

With respect particularly to the early beginnings of human development, this appears to be true; Neumann's ideas on the first year of life make it relatively easy to dismiss what actually occurs besides symbiosis with the mother. Fordham, on the other hand, takes on the more difficult job of attempting to describe what happens to the infant shortly after birth. Neumann's description of the child appears to revolve around the soul (undifferentiation and unconsciousness) function, whereas Fordham is concerned with the child as a separate person, which is primarily a description of the ego complex. Fordham, however, attempts to unite these two states of consciousness and describe how they work together shortly after birth. Obviously, Neumann cannot do this because of his original premise that a child is not psychologically born until the age of 1 year.

Besides the uroboros as the first stage, Neumann names the archetypes of the Great Mother, the World Parents, the Hero, and Osiris, among others. I will focus primarily on Neumann's descriptions of the beginning of life. Many of the archetypes and symbols that Neumann uses can be seen immediately before and after birth, if they are presented as archetypal energy related to the four functions. If this is so, consciousness would not occur in stages as depicted by Neumann, but the archetypes would describe primary experiences that take many shapes and forms, depending upon the culture and creature who experiences and describes them. The hero, for instance, can be imagined as being present and representing the early ego/body experiences as well as any life experience, at any age, that requires that particular psychological energy. The separation of the world parents by the hero can just as easily represent the newborn infant who has split or destroyed his own original unity (contained in the World Parents). Consciousness (Divine Father archetype) and unconsciousness (Divine Mother archetype) can be seen as the undifferentiated Self (Divine Child archetype), who by being born into the world of opposites, separates the World Parents, who represent the first opposites.

Neumann (1949/1954) combines two primary symbols in his explication of the evolution of consciousness, the circle or mandala and the uroboros, or the serpent who bites his tail, creating the magic circle. Neumann describes the circle:

One symbol of original perfection is the circle. Allied to it are the sphere, the egg, and the rotundum--the "round" of alchemy. It is Plato's round that was there in the beginning: Therefore the demiurge made the world in the shape of a sphere, giving it that figure which of all is the most perfect and the most equal to itself.

Circle, sphere, and round are all aspects of the Self-contained, which is without beginning and end; in its preworldly perfection it is prior to any process, eternal, for in its roundness there is no before and no after, no time; and there is no above and no below, no space. All this can only come with the coming of light, of consciousness, which is not yet present; now all is under sway of the unmanifest godhead, whose symbol is therefore the circle.

The round is the egg, the philosophical World Egg, the nucleus of the beginning, and the germ from which, as humanity teaches everywhere, the world arises. It is also the perfect state in which the opposites are united--the perfect beginning because the opposites have not yet flown apart and the world had not yet begun, the perfect end because in it the opposites have come together again in a synthesis and the world is once more at rest. (p. 8)

If no light or consciousness were present, how could unity that contains the opposites of darkness and light be possible? Neumann's description appears to equate the circle, and therefore the Self, with a sort of total unconsciousness rather than undifferentiated energy, and this is an important distinction. Consciousness and the ego emerge from the Self, leaving the Self as the opposing factor, which is unconsciousness. The Self, in other words, divides into the ego and Self or consciousness and unconsciousness. Neumann calls this the separation of the world parents and equates it with the principle of opposites (1949/1954, p. 102). Heaven and earth, among other symbols, represent the original parents.

This idea appears to be the basis for the ego-self axis that is traditionally described in analytical psychology (see Figure 13). Edinger (1974), who later amplifies Neumann's concept, states the following:

Neumann, on the basis of mythological and ethnographical material, has depicted symbolically the original psychic state prior to the birth of ego consciousness as the uroboros, using the circular image of the tail-eater to represent the primordial Self, the original mandala-state of totality out of which the individual ego is born. (p. 4)

I find Neumann's description and Edinger's adherence to that description of the circle or the Self as a symbol of perfection and wholeness, problematic. Undifferentiation is not the same thing as unconsciousness, yet the Self is scribed as the unconscious. If the Self contains the All, it necessarily contains both consciousness and unconsciousness in their undifferentiated form; one form would not outweigh the other. Can one assume that consciousness depletes itself totally, leaving the Self in a total state of unconsciousness? Apparently Edinger (1974) is aware of what appears to be a logical discrepancy in this idea when he later states:

According to these diagrams [see Figure 13 for diagram of Edinger's Self-ego axis], and to the method of this presentation, it would seem as though ego and Self became two separate entities, the ego being the smaller lump and the Self the larger lump of the totality. This difficulty is inherent in the subject matter. If we speak rationally, we must inevitably make a distinction between ego and Self which contradicts our definition of Self. The fact is, the conception of the Self is a paradox. It is simultaneously the center and the circumference of the circle of totality. Considering ego and Self as two separate entities is merely a necessary rational device for discussing these things. (p. 6)

I agree that there is "difficulty inherent in the subject matter." I also believe, however, that the paradox can be seen in a different way. According to the ego-self model, the Self, as a symbol of totality, could just as easily be seen as consciousness (usually symbolized as the masculine principle) which would reverse the whole idea, suggesting that unconsciousness (usually symbolized as the feminine principle) is the ego and flows out from consciousness, which would be the Self. This is an interesting idea, though I doubt that Neumann would have adhered to it, even though Jung (1959/1938) said:

The conflict between the two dimensions of consciousness is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is also why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity. (p. 269)

The reverse of the ego-self axis reveals an attitude close to Eastern psychology, where ordinary ego consciousness is the illusion and Self consciousness the goal. It is possible that this reversibility gives a certain amount of validity to both positions or at least shows a connection between opposed archetypal constructions. The word "consciousness" as Edinger (1984, p. 35) tells us, means "to know, to be cognizant of." Edinger also explains the etymology of the word, with the conclusion that consciousness means "knowing with" or "seeing with an other" (p. 36.) I think that most therapists would agree, however, that there can be an "unconscious knowing" (dreams and the information contained in art are examples) which appears to be a contradiction in terms. If we translate this as "knowing with not knowing," we can say that we know without knowing that we know. This level of knowing appears to be rooted in the body. Stern (1985) describes something similar when he asks about infants:

It must be asked, what kind of a sense of self might exist in a preverbal infant? By "sense" I mean simple (non-self-reflexive) awareness. We are speaking at the level of direct experience, not concept. By "of self" I mean an invariant pattern of awareness that arises only on the occasion of the infant's actions or mental processes. An invariant pattern of awareness is a form of organization. It is the organizing subjective experience of whatever it is that will later be verbally referenced as the "self." This organizing subjective experience is the preverbal, existential counterpart of the objectifiable, self-reflective, verbalizable self. (p. 7)

What Stern is calling sense or non-self-reflexive awareness I would describe as body awareness and the beginning of ego and consciousness that is rooted in the body. There is a subjective (introverted) "I" (body) that knows by direct experience which is "the preverbal, existential counterpart of the objectifiable, self-reflective, verbalizable self." I think that it may even be possible that this organizing subjective experience precedes and determines the form and content (the archetype) that registers in the psyche/body /memory of the infant, as an unconscious thought.

Concerning Eastern philosophy, Jung (1959/1938) states:

There are dreams and visions of such an impressive character that some people refuse to admit that they could have originated in an unconscious psyche. They prefer to assume that such phenomena derive from a sort of "superconsciousness." Such people make a distinction between a quasi-physiological or instinctive unconscious and a psychic sphere or layer "above" consciousness, which they style the "superconscious." As a matter of fact, this psyche, which in Indian philosophy is called the "higher" consciousness, corresponds to what we in the West call the "unconscious." Certain dreams, visions, and mystical experiences do, however, suggest the existence of a consciousness in the unconscious. But, if we assume a consciousness in the unconscious, we are at once faced with the difficulty that no consciousness can exist without a subject, that is, an ego to which the contents are related. Consciousness needs a centre, an ego to which something is conscious. We know of no other kind of consciousness, nor can we imagine a consciousness without an ego. There can be no consciousness when there is no one to say "I am conscious." (pp. 282-283)

Here I disagree with Jung. Whenever there is a conscious thought, feeling, sensation or intuition, the opposite is present in the unconscious and they "exist" side by side. What is not present in the unconscious is the full fledged, reflecting ego and it is this very lack that gives unconsciousness its own peculiar form. If the Self is seen as unconsciousness and at the same time "a transpersonal center of latent consciousness and obscure intentionality" that is "at first a defeat for the ego" but leads to "light born from darkness" (Edinger, 1986b, p. 9) and an encounter with the Self, why not call it superconsciousness? The "light born from darkness" is not necessarily the identical light of ordinary ego consciousness. If it were the same, why would a journey through the unconscious or the defeat of the ego be necessary in the first place? If the Self is the place of wholeness and unity, the light that it sheds is on what was unconscious and conscious at the same time, showing the unity of opposites.

Perhaps this position can only be maintained in ordinary ego consciousness by paradox. It seems to me that what ego consciousness can know is that the "not knowing" of unconsciousness, the soul, the entering into the darkness, the "death" or sacrifice of ego consciousness is the route that leads back to the Self. Here ego and soul, light and darkness, consciousness and unconsciousness exist as one, in a state of undifferentiation that is a reproduction of the original experience. Consciousness and unconsciousness are two extremes of one spectrum that converge and at the midpoint where they cross is the energy of superconsciousness, represented in many myths as the Divine Child.

Jung (1959/1938) goes on to state the following:

One hopes to control the unconscious, but the past masters in the art of self-control, the yogis, attain perfection in samadhi, a state of ecstasy, which so far as we know is equivalent to a state of unconsciousness. It makes no difference whether they call our unconscious a "universal consciousness"; the fact remains that in their case the unconscious has swallowed up ego-consciousness. They do not realize that a "universal consciousness" is a contradiction in terms, since exclusion, selection, and discrimination are the root and essence of everything that lays claim to the name "consciousness." "Universal consciousness" is logically identical with "unconsciousness." (p. 287)

I do not believe samadhi (enlightenment) is equivalent to only the state of unconsciousness. Jung does not appear to make a distinction here between the soul and the Self and samadhi is more akin to an experience of the Self, which would contain both consciousness and unconsciousness. This is why it is called "universal consciousness" or "superconsciousness." This appears to be the same problem that Neumann has when he divides the Self into consciousness and unconsciousness and then arbitrarily assigns the ego to consciousness and the Self to unconsciousness. There is no reason to believe that the Self is identical with a state of total unconsciousness. Certainly the ego is "swallowed," as Jung describes it by unconsciousness, but this is the necessary process by which the soul can be experienced and the reason that mystics (Eastern or Western) attempt to rid themselves of ego. When the ego is withdrawn or lowered, one sees and "knows" with soul consciousness (knowing with not knowing), which "gives birth" to the Divine Child or what Jung called the Self.

Thus, when Jung says that there can be no consciousness when there is no one to say "I am conscious," he appears to be describing only the function of conceptual thinking and not the possibility of direct experience or what Stern above describes as "simple (non-self-reflexive) awareness." Jung, in his early struggle to define intuition and distinguish it from active, conceptual thinking, called it "passive thinking." Both terms, it seems to me, describe a state of being or type of energy where consciousness and unconsciousness exist without division.

I have refrained throughout this work from using Jung's description of the archetypes of anima and animus, using instead the word "soul" or "spirit" to include either the masculine or feminine. This is primarily because I believe that what can be defined as masculine in a woman, or feminine in a man, other than an archetypal reference, is a subjective value judgment subject to change depending upon the culture or individual who describes it. Obviously, there are physiological differences between male and female (and sometimes between male and male or female and female). I do not believe that this distinction can be made in the realm of psychology, other than the superficial differences described in pop psychology, which are mostly based on mythological symbols and archetypes that are taken as literal truths and projected onto real people, usually to the detriment of the female. Neither do I believe there is a male ego and a female ego, nor a female spirit and male soul.

I do not think that "it can be established at once as a basic law: even in woman, consciousness has a masculine character" (Neumann, 1949/1954, p. 42). A masculine character is the archetypal description of consciousness, not present in all mythology as an absolute and not to be confused with a living female. At times, Neumann insists he is describing archetypes that are present in both sexes; at other times, he makes no distinction whatever and appears to confuse the archetype with the living male or female. Neumann also asserts that: "man experiences the masculine structure of his conscious as peculiarly his own, and the feminine unconscious as something alien to him, whereas woman feels at home in her unconscious and out of her element in consciousness" (1949/1954, p. 125). That is Neumann's perception; it certainly is not my perception or my experience. I perceive this as a blatant sexist statement, the undercurrent of which permeates a great deal of Neumann's interpretations of mythology, as well as his description of what he calls feminine psychology. Sexism (in the work of Neumann or Jung, who is also guilty of it at times) is not the topic of this work. However, it appears necessary to state that I can feel "at home" (or the reverse) in my unconscious, but no less "at home" (or the reverse) in the state of consciousness. I value consciousness. I do not, however, value one state of being more than the other, which I think Jung and Neumann often do. If we call ego consciousness "male" and unconsciousness "female" and insist this is more than a symbolic use (Neumann, 1949/1954, p. 42), that it applies to living men and women, and then choose consciousness as the supreme value, we are simply reinforcing the sexism and prejudices of the historical past that insist upon the superiority of the male and the inferiority of the female.

I consider consciousness and unconsciousness to be mutually valuable and mutually dependent upon one another. What some women and some men may value more or less is ego consciousness (associated symbolically with the male) or soul consciousness (associated symbolically with the female). The individual human psyche appears to contain and need both positions in equal measure.

I think that the soul archetype is more than the unconscious side of the masculine sex or what Jung called "anima" and that the spirit or animus archetype is more than the unconscious masculine side of the feminine sex. This is not to say that these terms cannot be used or applied, or that they sometimes fit. I am simply choosing not to use them in this work. I see ego, soul, and Self as archetypes that represent psychic energy; psychic energy does not have gender, only people have gender. Newborn infants, in my experience and to my knowledge, do not appear to display a pull toward consciousness or the unconscious, based upon their anatomical differences.

Much of modern developmental research does not appear to support Neumann's ideas concerning the newborn infant and ego consciousness. Stern (1985), for instance, assumes that a sense of the self exists long before self-awareness and language:

If we assume that some preverbal senses of the self start to form at birth (if not before), while others require the maturation of later-appearing capacities before they can emerge, then we are freed from the partially semantic task of choosing criteria to decide, a priori, when a sense of self really begins. (p. 6)

Additional recent research from the field of neurobiology may have significant applications in developmental psychology. This research can also be seen as a meaning of the ancient uroboros archetype, in a completely different way than previously described by Neumann. I think it could be named "The Uroboros Update."

University of California at Berkeley neurobiologist, Dr. Walter J. Freeman (1995), has just published his book, Societies of Brains, the results of which appear to address some of the issues that von Franz (1972, p. 42) discusses in her book Creation Myths, concerning the requirement of additional investigation of physical and psychic interaction. Dr. Freeman states:

This appears to support (from a scientific and experimental perspective--data based on observed facts) von Franz's definition (and Jung's) concerning objective reality. Von Franz (1972) correctly states that

the only reality we can talk about, or with which we are really concerned, is the image of reality in our field of consciousness. The spontaneous argument of the extravert, who is by temperament terribly object bound, will be to say: "yes, but there is a reality, only we cannot talk about it." There we can only say that if he likes to assume it, he may, but it is a sheer subjective assumption. (p.11)

An "objective reality" seems unconvincing, unless it is seen as the collective view of the majority, which usually "rules," but it is not necessarily objective truth. Another possibility is that the only objective reality is the reflective view of all possible subjective realities.

Von Franz's statement appears to me to be in keeping with Jung's (1971/1921) statement: "Human reason, accordingly, is nothing other than the expression of man's adaptability to average occurrences, which have gradually become deposited in firmly established complexes of ideas that constitute our objective values" (pp. 458-459).

Both of these statements are in keeping with one of the major premises in this research, namely, that the child, called human and/or divine, subjectively creates (or co-creates with God, if seen in that way) the universe or creates her or his reality.

Freeman's research data also appear to support what I have been describing from an entirely different approach (using the psychological functions as described by Jung), namely, that the human child creates her/his world. Freeman (1995) continues:

epistemological solipsism

metaphysical solipsism

Freeman is right to say that "phenomenology will take a bath in these data" or that phenomenology should do so! The "initial position of every mind must be solipsistic," including that of the infant at birth. I came to separate but similar conclusions in various ways, one from tracing information in the mythology and attempting to connect it with Jung's terminology and the psychological functions. I have from the beginning of my research suggested that ego consciousness has its beginnings in the function of conscious and subjective (introverted) body sensations. The first "object" is the infant's (subject) own body. The move toward the object in the world (extraversion) is the move toward the created (by the infant) image of the object, which is always subjective, even though, as von Franz (1972, p. 11) described, the temperament of the "object bound extravert" would like to believe otherwise. It could be that modern empirical neuroscience (for example, Dr. Freeman's research) has succeeded in demonstrating ideas that Jung previously described.

Freeman (1995) states:

From my analysis of EEG patterns, I speculate that consciousness reflects operations by which the entire knowledge store in an intentional structure is brought instantly into play each moment of the waking life of an animal, putting into immediate service all that an animal has learned in order to solve its problems, without the need for look-up tables and random access memory systems. (p. 136)

Could this description possibly apply to the newborn, who might be doing something quite similar? It is possible. Is it possible that this describes what Neumann (1966) attributed to

matriarchal consciousness--in which the totality experience of the self outweighs that of the ego--is dominant in the psychology of woman and of the creative man, or at least has special importance for them. But this form of consciousness--which strongly emphasizes the unconscious processes and gives less significance to ego-centered patriarchal consciousness--is likewise characteristic of childhood development. (p. 86)

What Neumann refers to as "matriarchal consciousness" (and he here identifies two types of consciousness) is what I am suggesting is the result of the intuitive function. The substance that von Franz compares with matter is what I perceive to be just that--matter--or the living body of the human infant (from cell to fetus to newborn) who first experiences life by the mysterious instinct of conscious, subjective intuition, which, like a god, provides knowledge and direction to the living organism.

This function, however, would not only belong to what Neumann describes as "matriarchal consciousness," but would be the primary method for obtaining any new knowledge at any age. It is not that this type of consciousness gives less significance to ego-centered patriarchal consciousness, but that it would be the very foundation for ego consciousness, which I see as only symbolically related to patriarchal consciousness. The psyche of the beasts and the children along with women, pagans and men would create consciousness in the same way.

"There is no objective world independent of the observer" (Chopra, 1993, p. 11). We are the uroboros that bites its own tail, for we must eat (sacrifice, destroy, kill) the conscious ego and the old image we have created (may love and cling to) before we are given a view of the other images we have also created in the darkness of unknowing. We create both. We are the eater and we are that which is eaten. We are the creator and the destroyer, the subject and the object. The uroboros archetype, therefore describes exactly that--we are the beginning and the end. Our perceptions, whether conscious (sensation) or unconscious (intuition) are what is known of the object.

Dr. Freeman (1995) asks the question: "How can knowledge be based on the experience of each individual separately, through the sensory systems that form the windows of minds onto the world"? (p. 3). Perhaps if it were not so, there would be no need whatsoever for human relationship. He goes on to ask:

Above all, how do they [brains] communicate with other brains? This problem is not translating or mapping knowledge from one brain onto another. It is the prior establishment of mutual understanding through shared actions, during which brains create the channels, codes, agreement and protocols that precede that reciprocal mappings of information in dialogues. (p. 3)

It appears essential to first understand the concept that we create, from our experience, our bodies and our brains, what we call knowledge. If all knowledge is self-referential, to whom would I refer, other than another person to inquire what her or his brain has created and share the similarities or differences in our individual experiences?

R. Buckminster Fuller (1972) put it thus: "All we have ever seen is and always will be in the scopes of our brain's TV station. All that humanity has ever seen and will ever see is his own image-ination" (p. 122). If that is so, then the uroboros archetype is describing more than the original experience of undifferentiated containment in the womb of the mother. It is also describing the experience of any age, the end as well as the beginning. It is describing the eternal now. The "prize" to be had, is consciousness that the ego (Serpent) is none other than the Serpent tail he eats, which is also the ego in its primary form, the soul or what I would call the absence of ordinary ego consciousness.

It is not my purpose to deny the numerous important insights of Jung, Neumann, Edinger, or others, generated by the ego-self axis, but simply to say that other views are possible. Exploring the development of the four psychological functions as they might occur in infancy is a different approach and difficult to compare with previous concepts. It is like opening a previously locked door to get to the same room. I will describe what I believe to be an important door that has thus far never been entirely opened.

Frances G. Wickes, Participation Mystique, and the Inner World of Childhood

Samuels (1987) states that Jung "contradicts himself" when asking if the child is an extension of the psychology of the parents or can be recognized as an individual in his or her own right. Samuels sees this as a weakness in Jung and "Jung at his most ambivalent" (pp. 139, 140). He goes on to assert that a strength can be found in this weakness insofar as the child must relate to the real parents and the parents must accept the child's individuality.

Jung apparently embraced both positions in this seeming dichotomy; however, failing to choose one position over the other does not mean that Jung is what Samuels calls "ambivalent and weak," if we conclude that the child as an extension of his parents and the child as an individual can be equally operative. This appears to be Jung's conclusion by the year 1931, when he wrote his introduction to Wickes' book, The Inner World of Childhood. Jung (Wickes, 1988) states that "it would be a very grave omission for parents and educators to ignore psychic causality, just as it would be a fatal mistake to attribute all the blame to this factor alone. In every case both factors have a part to play, without the one excluding the other" (p. xx).

Later Jung (Wickes, 1988) repeats his position, which takes into account both sides of this controversy:

The psychology of "identity," which precedes ego-consciousness, indicates what the child is by virtue of his parents. But what he is as an individuality distinct from his parents can hardly be explained by the causal relationship to the parents. We ought rather to say that it is not so much the parents as their ancestors--the grandparents and great-grandparents--who are the true progenitors, and that these explain the individuality of the children far more than the immediate and, so to speak, accidental parents. In the same way the true psychic individuality of the child is something new in respect of the parents and cannot be derived from their psyche. It is a combination of collective factors which are only potentially present in the parental psyche, and are sometimes wholly invisible. (p. xxii)

These statements make it clear that Jung did not choose identity with the parents over individuality, but thought that both were combined in one complex and human psyche. What Jung refers to as the pre-ego consciousness of the child soul, I am in this research calling soul consciousness; what is seen as individuality, I would refer to as the beginning of ego consciousness. There is no reason to believe that Jung neglected the importance of either type of consciousness. It is soul consciousness that connects ego consciousness to the Self, the archetype for wholeness that includes individuality. What Jung apparently did not conclude was the possibility that the unconscious soul has its own form of consciousness.

Frances Wickes, along with Erich Neumann, represents the classical school of Jungian thought, and one emphasis in her work appears to be primarily concerned with the state of participation mystique, where the unconsciousness of parent and child are merged. Wickes (1988) explains that "a compendium of child psychology would present both sides of the picture; here we deal with only one: the inner side" (p. 35). By this statement I understand that Wickes is talking primarily of what I would describe as soul consciousness. But it is difficult to imagine that she, or anyone, can present only one side of the picture, to do so would deny the relationship of the inner world with that of the outward world, which I think is constant from the beginning.

In a statement concerned with beginnings, Wickes (1988) states:

From the time of its conception the child is moving toward the attainment of an individual life. As in the womb his body is being prepared for an individual and separate existence, so during the necessary identifications of infancy his psyche is being prepared for separate and individual life. At each tiny step forward he is beset by two great currents which from his birth to his death he must meet whenever he is confronted with a new situation: the surge toward the new, and the pull backward toward the safety of the old. (p. 78)

I believe this statement contains a subtle truth that neither Wickes nor Jung followed to its logical conclusion. The "two great currents" that appear to be opposed begin at birth and end with death and can be seen as two forms of consciousness. But this idea negates the possibility that an infant only lives in a state of participation mystique, because if that were the case there would not be two great currents that begin at birth. What is present besides identity with the mother, which is identity with the All if the mother is in soul, is individuality, which must be seen as related to ego consciousness. In other words, soul consciousness always contains the ego, just as birth divides soul from ego and causes two kinds of consciousness, one of soul and one of ego.

If participation mystique is an unconscious identity of subject with object, it would be almost identical with the original state of oneness where differences are undifferentiated and the infant in or out of the womb is in an integrated state of being. But the experience would be different in both cases. If, for instance, in the first deintegration of the infant, the functions of feeling and sensation are conscious and desire is experienced, the opposite sensations and feelings would exist in the thinking and intuitive functions, which would be unconscious. In other words, after birth, a conscious attitude of need would always be experienced at the same time as the unconscious attitude, where there is no need, but this experience would have to be unconscious.

Participation mystique should not be confused with soul consciousness, they are related but not identical. Participation mystique describes a state of unconscious identity that may be with the human mother or an object, but if the mother is not in soul herself, she will not return the infant to his or her original state of oneness or soul consciousness; the infant may feel what she feels, but if that is sorrow, sorrow is what the infant will feel. Ideally, the mother who loves her child and who is in soul consciousness herself will return the child to an assimilation of the original experience, but participation mystique will always be a duplicate of that experience. In that way, the inner world becomes identical with the outer world or the soul and the ego are reunited.

Like Neumann and the mainstream thinkers of the time in which she wrote, Wickes (1988), appears to underestimate the appearance of the ego in time and considers the infant until birth to be "part of the mother" (p. 36). At birth, the child becomes a separate physical entity, but the psychic cord still remains, thus paving the way for psychic identity, which is a normal condition of early childhood, but considered pathological when the unconscious of the parent intrudes upon the unconscious of the child.

Although Wickes and Jung stressed the importance of the parents unconscious and how it might affect the child, it should be remembered that this was not the mainstream thought of the day. In many ways, Jung's ideas of the unconscious influences of parents on their children paved the way for ideas existent today in family therapy. Often when the parent or parents' relationship is treated or altered, the child is relieved of his particular neurosis. That this is possible does not negate the possibility that a child might suffer from psychic experiences that do not belong to the parents, but are caused by the child's individual constitution. Both experiences can exist at the same time, and probably often do.

Wickes (1988) describes Jung's interpretation of the Oedipus complex:

Jung conceived of the problem symbolically. To him the desire of the child for the mother is the expression of the longing to remain a child, that is, to remain unconscious of himself and of the demands of adult life. Because the mother protects and guards the child, taking upon herself the responsibility for his well-being, she represents to him the happy irresponsible state before the awakening of consciousness and individual responsibility--the Garden of Eden. (p. 29)

But it is possible to take Oedipus even more symbolically than Jung does and see him as representing ego consciousness that desires to return to the state of bliss where all things are given or soul consciousness that was experienced in the womb. If the human mother successfully assimilates this experience for the infant, he will be in soul and in the world. The desire for a return to mother is the desire to return to the oneness that was experienced in the womb and to experience this in the world. This is soul consciousness and ego consciousness, no longer divided. The ego is strengthened by having a soul experience, which I believe is Jung's interpretation of a return to mother. What Jung did not recognize, perhaps, is the possibility that this process is present and continuous in early childhood and describes the developing ego.

Wickes (1988) states:

Psychologically, man seeks to return to the mother for a renewal of life, a rebirth into a higher attitude. He explores the unconscious, not that he may remain in a state of infantile unconsciousness, but that he may understand the forces that lie within himself and from contact with them may obtain a new way of life, a spiritual rebirth. (p. 30)

Here it appears obvious that Wickes and Jung are referring to the mother as the unconscious; to return to the mother is to go into the unconscious, but what is there, in that experience, that brings "spiritual rebirth"? Perhaps it is the knowledge of connectedness; what appears to be severed by ego consciousness is seen as united in soul consciousness. This cycle or flow of the ego to soul and back again appears to be what is essential in the construction of a healthy ego, and a possibility that Wickes did not consider in her work concerning early childhood.

Wickes (1988) makes use of Jung's typology in her work with children, apparently with his approval, since he does not contradict her statements concerning psychological functions. Of especial interest are her observations concerning the functions of sensation and intuition. Concerning intuition, Wickes says:

To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backward. His conclusions are reached before his premises. This is not because the steps which connect the two have been omitted but because those steps are taken by the unconscious. (p. 149)

This is a suitable description of the intuitive function. What I would add is that it is the unconsciousness of sensation, feeling, and thinking, which are merged and exist as one, that creates the function of intuition. Intuition is the one that contains all four functions. If this is the case, the premise that Wickes describes is contained in the intuitive function along with the conclusion.

Wickes (1988) describes identification as "another form of infantile adaptation. Identification is an unconscious process in which the attitudes of another are taken over as if they were one's own" (p. 31). Jung also (1971/1921) speaks of projection as the result of "archaic identity of subject and object" and active projection as "an essential component of the act of empathy" (p. 457). He describes (1971/1921) introjection as "an indrawing of the object into the subjective sphere of interest, while projection is an expulsion of subjective contents into the object" (p. 452).

Neither Wickes nor Jung describes the more positive aspects of these terms in relationship to the early aspects of the mother-infant bond. Identity, projection, and introjection are all essential ingredients of the first contact between mother and child. The mother knows her child by identity. She actively projects herself onto the baby, she imagines, often with his or her help, what her child needs. By empathy she brings the object, the infant, into intimate relationship with the subject, herself. She introjects the infant; she takes the infant into herself. Jung (1971/1921) defines introjection as "an assimilation of object to subject," and projection is "a dissimulation of object from subject through the expulsion of a subjective content into the object" (p. 452). The mother projects herself onto the object, the infant, when she says "I think you need this or that." She introjects or assimilates the infant when she is in empathy, when she imagines what she might need if she were the infant or how she might feel if she were in the infant's place.

Jung (1971/1921, p. 452) mentions how these terms are related to the transference phenomena. That they are equally active in infancy, especially by the mother, is seldom, if ever, mentioned. Yet it is this very important process, the ability of the human mother or primary caretaker to identify with her child by means of projection and introjection, that allows the child to become human; he or she learns by experience how to project, introject, and identify with other human beings. What has been "done unto him" so to speak, the child learns to "do unto others."

Just as the mother identifies by projection and introjection, so also does the infant in the opposite way. He or she does so with the ego and the body, in the form of physical sensations. The infant desires a previous state of existence, characterized by being one with the mother, and it is the body sensations, the instinct to suck and take nourishment, that will assist the child in returning to this state of being. The infant sees, touches, tastes, smells, and hears the milk, the breast, and the body of the mother. The child "introjects" the mother in an almost literal way, taking her or part of her back into the self. The infant is communicating or attempting to communicate with the mother from the very beginning; the nuances of the infant's attempts at language are in the body and the expressions of the body, which the mother interprets by projection, introjection, and identity.

If we look at the mother and child as a pair of opposites, we can see the newborn child as the best representative of ego consciousness or desire and the human mother as the best representative of soul consciousness without desire. The mother would be in a state of conscious extraversion, where all energy would be directed toward the child and her own ego would be unconscious. This can be seen as a state of identification. Just as the mother is in a conscious extraverted state, the opposite would be true for the human infant, who would be in a state of conscious introversion, where the ego energy is flowing backwards toward the subject or the Self. In the infant, extraverted energy would be unconscious. In this way, the mother contains the infant in her unconscious, just as the infant contains the mother in his or her unconscious. This would be a positive view of beginning consciousness, however, rather than the pejorative view Eve represents. This positive view is often symbolized by the ancient archetype of Virgin Mother and her Divine Child. Her child is divine because he or she exists as her unconscious ego. (See Figures 14, and 15.)

This experience, then, is not new to the human race; it has been recorded in various myths down through time. The virgin birth symbol connects the Jewish religion to Christianity, but the experience does not need to be years apart; whenever soul love sacrifices its own ego for the sake of other or the ego in need, which is ego love, a "virgin" birth has occurred. The experience is eternal even when it takes place in time. It is because the ego of the mother is unconscious that it is also divine. Put in other terms, the momentary death of the ego creates soul or soul consciousness.

In many cases, the mother may not be in soul consciousness, but this is the match that is essential for her to return the infant to that state of bliss, where two exist as one. In returning the infant to original bliss, his or her ego is reinforced by the experience.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the human mother is only and always in soul consciousness; she has ego consciousness and uses it from the beginning with her ability to choose how to approach her infant--that is, she chooses which form of consciousness she will use. The main point here is the idea that both mother and child use identity, projection, and introjection in the beginning of the mother/child relationship (the first transference), and this is seldom mentioned by Wickes or Jung.

Wickes (1988) writes:

The child, like the primitive, is primarily a creature of sensation and intuition. Thought and feeling develop slowly. (I do not speak here of the first instinctive emotions but of feeling as a judging function.) Through sensation he comes into contact with the outer world of objects; through intuition he becomes aware of the inner forces at work in himself and in those about him. In his own inner world lie embryonic the fantasy-building powers of the collective unconscious. (p. 38)

Certainly the child is primarily a creature of sensation and intuition; however, I would not agree that "thought and feeling develop slowly." Sensation is the instinct that creates feeling, and the infant makes feeling judgments from the beginning. The infant cries when he or she does not like something or is in need of something and it is quite possible that the infant's psyche produces a symbol of the "what" or the desired object, with the first sensation and the first feeling, which is registered in the unconscious thinking function. If sensation and feeling are conscious, which I do not doubt, the experience would create the symbol, which would lie dormant in the thinking function. The idea might exist in the infant's mind, a reflection of the experience, and repetition of the experience would eventually evolve into a conscious thought or a rudimentary one in the form of a symbol that represents the experience.

Why should we assume that "the first instinctive emotions" are not really emotions as we know them to be, as Wickes suggests? If an adult could not speak and was injured with painful body sensations, and instead started to cry, we would not assume that this was only an instinctual reaction to painful stimuli and that crying was not a real value judgment. We would be more accurate in thinking that crying was the adult's only means of communication, expressing feeling, which would also be a value judgment, of discomfort. The bias that Wickes appears to have is that babies don't express genuine feeling or that somehow instinctual feeling is not real or not a value judgment. But if the instinct contains the archetype and the archetype represents the instinct, instinctual feeling is certainly genuine.

Later, Wickes (1988) correctly goes on to explain that "sensation is the first means of contact with the outside world. It is the basic material from which thought and feeling are molded. In children as well as in primitives we find sensation and intuition strongly dominant" (p. 151).

Sensation is the function that introduces ego consciousness; intuition is the function that connects the infant to soul consciousness. Both of these functions are indeed "strongly dominant" from the beginning. But both functions are the "basic material" from which thought and feeling are molded; intuition is connected to the inner world of soul consciousness and sensation is connected to the outer world of ego consciousness. Here Wickes, influenced by Jung, places sensation where it belongs as one of the dominant psychological functions in the human child, along with intuition. What she did not grasp is the possibility that intuition is unconscious sensation that also contains unconscious feeling and thinking, and that conscious sensation is like an "on" switch that separates and differentiates the four functions and brings them to consciousness. Her words echo those of Jung (1971/1921) who explained that

like sensation, intuition is a characteristic of infantile and primitive psychology. It counterbalances the powerful sense impressions of the child and the primitive by mediating perceptions of mythological images, the precursors of ideas. It stands in a compensatory relationship to sensation and like it, is the matrix out of which thinking and feeling develop as rational functions. (my emphasis, p. 454)

Wickes also discounted the feeling function as one that makes value judgments from the beginning of life and is just as dominant and important as intuition and sensation in childhood.

It is the complexity of how the four functions work together as psychic energy that needs to be questioned and explored further. Wickes sometimes attempts to answer these questions, but often leaves them dangling. Speaking of the child Wickes (1988) states that "he has influences both from without and from within which at an early period brings his sensations and intuitions under the influence of reason and of feeling judgment. These latter functions, however, develop more slowly" (p. 152). Perhaps it appears "more slowly" to us simply because we cannot see what is taking place, and because the process may be more structured than we have previously imagined it to be; the healthy infant may be wired in his ability to use all four psychological functions from the beginning of life.

Figure 14: Jung's Attitudinal Types of Introversion and Extraversion
Von Franz and Hillman (1979, p. 1) Jung's Typology

Von Franz & Hillman (1979) give the following definition of extraversion and introversion: In the extravert the conscious libido habitually flows towards the object, but there is an unconscious secret counter-action back towards the subject. In the case of the introvert, the opposite occurs: he feels as if an overwhelming object wants constantly to affect him, from which he has continually to retire; everything is falling upon him, he is constantly overwhelmed by impressions, but he is unaware that he is secretly borrowing psychic energy from and lending it to the object through his unconscious extraversion (p.1).

Figure 15: The First Transference - The "Match" of Soul with Ego and Ego with Soul

The First Transference

The "Match" of Soul with Ego and Ego with Soul

Extraversion

Mother Love or Soul Love

Extraversion of Mother's ego embraces the object, in this case, the child. The Mother's ego goes into the unconscious. Without ego consciousness, Mother is in "Soul Love." She contains the "child," that is, her own ego in the unconscious and her ego is identical with the child's conscious ego. In other words, Mother and Child are One. The image or archetype that represents this experience is the Virgin Mother and Divine Child, an ancient archetype that was prevalent before Christianity. The Virgin Mary replaced Eve as an archetype for Divine Love, that is, Love that is from Soul, not ego. She "crushed the serpents head," that is, she destroyed the negative sensation of desire and replaced it with no desire or Soul.

Introversion of the Child's Conscious Ego

Ego Love or Desire

Here, the reverse is true. The child's conscious ego desires and fears the object, moves away from object toward itself, while unconscious and extraverted energy moves toward the object or mother. Mother (Soul Love) is contained in the child's unconscious. When ego Love is satisfied by the object, that is, the Soul Love of the mother, the child is returned to "Paradise," which is now a place in the world, rather than in the womb. This is the "match" that occurs between mother and child and the first experience of the "transference." This is "primary Love" or Love that is desire seen in its positive aspect, rather than its negative aspect, which is represented in the myths as Eve and in psychology as "narcissistic." The human child can be seen as both human and divine; psychology is only beginning to describe the divine aspects of ego.

Figure 16: Mother and Child - Squaring the circle

Who shows a child
     as he really is?
          Who sets him among the stars
and puts the measure of distance
     in his hand?
          Who makes the child's death
out of gray bread
     that gets hard
          who leaves it there
in his round mouth
     like the core
          of a lovely apple?
Murderers aren't hard
     to comprehend.
          But this:
to contain death
     the whole of death
          even before life has begun
to contain it so gently
     and not to be angry--
          this is indescribable.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies,
1978, p. 48)

Figure 17: Mandala of a three year old

Frances G. Wickes, David L. Kay and Foetal Psychology

David Kay is a physician who practices general medicine; he is also a Jungian analyst. According to Kay (1984), "the greatest opportunity for linking medical and analytical concepts, lies in the area of mother/infant observation and interaction" (p. 317). Kay gives a case history concerning a mother and her 6-week old infant (she was not in therapy or analysis) who would not eat and who screamed and vomited with painful attacks of colic. After frequent and apparently unnecessary visits, Dr. Kay finally told Mrs. J. that nothing was wrong with her child and that it was she who felt ill and troubled inside. She then collapsed and began to cry in an uncontrolled and hysterical manner.

Mrs. J. then began to relate her own experiences in childhood, which included the divorce of her parents and the loss of her mother and brother when she went to live with her father. After years of intense depression, the patient's mother committed suicide, 4 years before the birth of the patient's baby. She felt that she had never had a mother and, according to Kay, had repressed any positive early experiences. Kay (1984) states that the "birth of her baby daughter at this point in her life confronted her directly with the intense pain of her maternal deprivation" (p. 319).

Mrs. J. appeared to be terrified of the experience of motherhood and resented her husband because the infant seemed to relate to him in a much more positive way. Near the end of this session, both Dr. Kay and his patient noticed that something had changed; the baby was looking directly into her mother's eyes for the first time and seemed totally relaxed. Dr. Kay describes how deeply his patient was affected by the baby's response to her and how they appeared then as "lovers who are sharing feelings of mutual adoration." It was his feeling that Mrs. J.'s intense negative feelings had been sensed by her baby, who had been too frightened to look at her and had consequently lost contact with the person she most needed. "her case had so profound an effect on me that it initiated an investigative psychological journey on my part whose aim was to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of neonatal and prenatal psychic life" (Kay, 1984, p. 317).

After this incident, Kay considered how and when communication between the two of them first became established, and the possibility that it might have started before 6 (extra-uterine) weeks. He began to question other issues that might affect the fetus by a loss of contact due to deprivation of external stimuli or other reasons, and possible interventions that might provide comfort to the fetus who might have a "less than good enough environment."

The foetus is undoubtedly sensitive to pain and (while still free enough to move around) will repeatedly and purposefully seek to avoid sustained pressure from a microphone or a knuckle on a prominence, by moving around and trying to find a new position of comfort. (Kay, 1984, p. 323)

Along with avoiding painful stimuli, Kay goes on to describe other fairly well-known facts concerning the fetus in the womb: The fetus prefers sweet to bitter substances, thumb-sucking occurs in the womb, and the fetus is capable of visual, auditory, and tactile perceptions. His descriptions, which I have only described in part, all suggest that the infant is active and responsive to his first environment, the womb. His major conclusion at this point is that "a facilitating environment for infantile development is best provided by contact with external stimuli which are familiar and rooted in early experience. My paper proposes that the statement should be enlarged to include early foetal experiences" (Kay, 1984, p. 323).

I have included this brief summary of Kay's case study and several of his reflections concerning the child in utero to compare my hypothesis concerning issues he raises about the unborn child, as well as about the child after birth. Kay's explication of his patient and her infant is quite convincing. The infant was obviously responding to the mother's anxiety, which was having a negative effect upon their relationship. There is nothing revolutionary about this; it has long been known, if not by scientists, then by caretakers of children, that infants are affected by their mother's state of mind and her feelings. I think that this can be explained by what Jung called participation mystique, and this is a very good example for describing this experience as one that neither returns the infant to a state of oceanic bliss or oneness nor reinforces her ego. Because of the block or what Kay refers to as a loss of contact, the baby does not experience a oneness with her mother that provides her with unconditional love. To be one with her mother is a painful experience, and she expresses this discontent in her crying, refusal to eat, and not looking at her mother.

The very fact that she responds to her father in a different way shows that she is also in participation mystique with him. Because he does not have a secret agenda, so to speak, but provides her with unconditional love, she responds in a positive manner. He is the one providing soul (unconditional) love in this case, which proves that soul and ego are not gender-specific, but two different ways to respond, which, in the best of circumstances, both parents are capable of providing. When some of the mother's anger, doubts, and frustrations, all ego defenses, have been expressed in the presence of another, something different happens; the baby looks at her mother and smiles. Without the block in her mother, she responds to a mother who obviously has good intentions toward her child. The infant is still in participation mystique, but what she feels now are the feelings of her mother with the block removed. Perhaps it is just as easy to say that the child mirrors its mother, just as much as the mother mirrors for the child. Participation mystique is a double-edged sword that allows for the shared experience, whether of heaven or of hell.

Does the child begin to communicate, as Kay suggests, with her mother while in the womb? I do not see how one could argue that the baby does not communicate, if one takes all the actions, reactions, and movements of the fetus as a form of communication. The fetus responds to the mother's body. How the mother feels and what she eats all affect her body, which in turn affects the infant. This might appear to be a very basic form of communication, but it is body-to-body, and information is being exchanged. Concerning this, Kay (1984) states:

The single-celled amoeba cannot see or hear, but it is sensitive to touch. Its reflex-arc primitive nervous system permits it to move by altering its shape and forming a pseudopodium. When this meets an obstruction it withdraws and changes direction. As the human foetus has, by comparison, achieved an infinitely more complex state of development, it is not unreasonable to ascribe to it some dimly perceived and rudimentary form of consciousness in utero. (emphasis mine, p. 323)

Kay's description of a single-cell amoeba appears similar to my earlier suggestion that the cell or fetus moves toward the object or moves away from the object, and knows, almost by osmosis, one could say, which direction to take. Here I would also repeat that this appears to be the lowest form of instinctual life, whether in a cell or in a human being. But it is just this instinct that I am calling the intuitive function, and the first psychological function to develop in humans. Perhaps, the word "develop" is not adequate, because the egg and the sperm might also contain this knowledge in their solo journey toward each other and what develops is the body of the fetus, not the instinct.

But within the basic instinct of intuition lies the fallow contents of sensation, feeling, and thinking. This is the "stone that is not a stone," as the alchemists referred to it; three are contained in the fourth, which is also the "one" symbolized by the stone. What I am suggesting is that the thinking function, which is the function that produces the archetype and often equated to the Spirit, is contained in the instinct, as are the other two functions. Instinct and archetype have never been separated. Jung (1959/1938) describes instincts and archetypes:

The instincts are not vague and indefinite by nature, but are specifically formed motive forces which, long before there is any consciousness, and in spite of any degree of consciousness later on, pursue their inherent goals. Consequently they form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour. (emphasis mine, pp. 43- 44)

Here Jung constructively links instinct to archetype. Although he named intuition as one of the basic psychological, irrational, and instinctive functions, he did not describe intuition as originating in the infant in utero, as I believe it does.

Kay's suggestion that it is not unreasonable to ascribe to the fetus some dimly perceived and rudimentary form of consciousness in utero parallels my idea of the instinctual function of intuition as being the primal form of consciousness. If intuition is unconscious perception as Jung (1971/1921, p. 463) suggests, it seems likely that it is the function that would be conscious in the womb, where sensation and intuition are undifferentiated, containing both consciousness and unconsciousness. Kay does not state what kind of consciousness he believes this to be, but what he describes is what I am calling intuitive, non-ego consciousness or soul consciousness. To live in this state of consciousness constitutes a (psychological) return to the Garden of Eden or state of original innocence, where conscious sensing, feeling, and thinking would not be necessary because it would be provided without effort, just as it was in the womb.

Whether or not this is the actual case regarding the infant in the womb, mythology often assumes that this is so and the myth of Genesis represents that position. If mythology contains a psychological truth, perhaps an archetype so universally significant contains a truth about the actual experience of the infant in the womb. One would certainly like for this to be the case because it would mean that the infant in utero does not suffer, regardless of what the experience might be. To experience the opposites but not experience the pain or conflict of the splitting of opposites would be a neutral and undifferentiated state, and this could certainly be described as Paradise.

Kay (1984) goes on to describe and agree with the research of Dr. Thomas Verny, who wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. He states:

The unborn child is an aware, reacting human being who from the sixth month onwards (and perhaps even earlier) leads an active emotional life. Not only can he see, hear, experience, taste, and on a primitive level even learn in utero, he can also feel--not with an adult's sophistication, but feel none the less. (p. 324)

It is possible that he "feels" with a child ego that is different from an adult ego and unconscious, as sensation, feeling, and thinking are unconscious. Kay and Verny are correct in recognizing that the infant in utero is leading an active emotional life, that is, acting and reacting in an emotional manner, but neither Kay nor Verny appear to consider whether this behavior is conscious or unconscious or both. Recent research supports many of these findings, but there is really nothing new in this idea, except perhaps to the scientist; many pregnant women and experienced mothers have long believed that their feelings affect their unborn child and that the unborn child experiences what they feel.

If we return to Jung's description of the conscious feeling function as one that makes value judgments, that is, evaluates by feeling if the object perceived is something good or bad, we cannot assume the infant in utero is capable of this, since consciousness, as we define it, needs an ego to perceive. If, however, we concede that the infant feels but that this feeling and the value judgment made is unconscious on the infant's part, then it appears possible. Unconsciousness, however, doesn't mean that feeling is not present, which we know quite well from adult life, it means that feeling lives, as Jung suggests, an autonomous life, when it is not connected to conscious awareness. The feeling function is in operation, but it is unconscious, as are the functions of sensation and thinking. It is the unconsciousness (or repression in an adult) of these three functions that allows the fantasy image, the product of the intuitive function, to break through and this may be the function that Kay describes as that which "dimly perceives."

Jung (1971/1921) calls intuition the function that "mediates perceptions in an unconscious way" (p. 453). This is what the unborn child is doing while in the womb, but a child is no more consciously aware of what he or she is feeling than the adult who is not aware of an unconscious feeling. This is a rudimentary form of consciousness, as Kay describes it, because it is the first psychological function that is conscious. I consider this soul consciousness and a way of knowing that is not dependent on the ego; if fact, it is dependent upon there not being an ego, at least in the beginning or in utero. This consciousness can best be described as a middle position that is connected to both consciousness and unconsciousness, it contains both but is neither.

Kay (1984, p. 326) goes on to focus on the importance of tactile sensory contact. He says that the fetus and neonate cannot defend themselves when deprived of their freedom to touch and conceptualize the boundaries of their environment, as adults do, by drawing upon their life's experience to fill the psychic void. He says that "I consider that the ability and freedom to use one's tactile sensory system by touching is vital to both human development and to the maintenance of psychic health" (p. 326). Tactile sensory contact is vitally important, but the fetus has been doing that all along; body sensations, which appear to be unconscious if there is no ego present, have been the means for communication with the mother from the beginning. The mother's body has, in ideal cases, provided the fetus with the necessary stimulus and environment and the baby has responded to the mother in the same way with his body. If no words were ever uttered by the mother, this would still be true; one could call this a communication of silence. Kay describes this interpsychic communication: "as the developmental processes proceed, interpsychic communication probably does occur, and it is important to remember that this link can (as in the postnatal state) be two-way" (p. 331).

I am not sure that the unborn child needs to defend itself because he or she is not deprived of tactile sensory contact in the womb; he or she is always "touching" itself, the wall of the maternal womb, or the umbilical cord. The fetus is always being touched by the amniotic fluids that surround him or her. The neonate might have the experience of sensory deprivation, because after birth this is not ensured, but the experience of being in the womb appears to guarantee adequate tactile sensory contact, if there is nothing wrong with the infant's body. Kay correctly concludes that if the mother's feeling can affect her body, negative feelings, such as not wanting the child, might adversely affect the mother's body, which in turn would affect the fetus as he or she responds to the mother's body.

I question that a psychic void exists in the fetus; if fetal "knowing" is derived from the function of intuition, which I am defining as unconscious sense perceptions and unconscious thinking and feeling, there would not be a psychic void, the fetus would always be acting or reacting to the object or be in a neutral state, such as sleep. It is possible to see the infant as experiencing everything that happens in utero on two levels, one unconscious and the other relating to body consciousness that tells the fetus how to act and react intuitively.

Kay makes the excellent observation that the umbilical cord or the placenta might be the first transitional object of the child in utero. The cord would represent what is "me" and that which is "not me." He says, "the holding of one's own umbilical cord can be seen as the precursor of the transitional object, which is also held" (pp. 327-328). Other symbols that might represent the umbilical cord will be discussed later in this paper, specifically in the creation myth of Genesis, where the twin trees, the tree of Life and the tree of Knowledge, (which also is death and the loss of innocence), exist side by side. The tree of Life might represent the umbilical cord, which provides all things with no effort by the infant; it might also represent the tree of Knowledge, for when it is severed, when the infant is born, knowledge of the opposites comes into being.

The cord, like the symbol of twin (same but different) trees, is (1) "me" and (2) "other." It is also (3) "not me" and (4) "not other." It is the archetype. The tree symbol or archetype can be seen as representing an object that is specific, concrete, and composed of substance, the umbilical cord. I would suggest that the infant in the womb knows all four of the above positions intuitively; after birth, he or she will come to know them also by the psychological functions of conscious sensation, conscious feeling, conscious thinking, and conscious intuition. One can substitute any archetype for what I am attempting to describe; mother, for instance, could be seen as "me" and "other" and "not me" and "not other." The same would be true in therapy; with the withdrawal of the projection onto the therapist and the withdrawal of the introjection on one's self, the archetype can be seen, which is "you" and "me" and "not me" and "not you." In other words, ideally, four points of view will be conscious and perceived; and as Jung (1971/1921) states, all will function "in an equal manner" (p. 21). Perception would be expanded to encompass all four possibilities, which would include the archetype and its concrete manifestation in the world.

Returning to Kay, (1984) he states:

In studying the world of sub-atomic particles, it has become apparent that there are no clear-cut boundaries between one particle and another. Instead, there exists a rapid and continuous interchange of matter, which destroys the illusion of "solid bodies" and moves towards a concept of universal wholeness. Ironically, this shift helps to bring modern science more into line with certain eastern religions, whose origins lie in antiquity. The foetal/maternal unit and the processes operating therein could probably be studied from that modified viewpoint. It seems reasonable and appropriate to accept that there exists a continuum of psychic activity from conception to death and that parturition is a significant incident along the pathway rather than a firm boundary. Furthermore, it is probably valid to speculate that there exists both intrapsychic and interpsychic activity during the prenatal months. (emphasis mine, p. 330)

Psychic life can be seen more readily if we consider that the psychological function of intuition is basic or primary and has its beginning in the womb. It continues after birth and throughout life, either consciously or unconsciously, and is also the function necessary for a "return to Paradise" experience that is represented in mythology. Intuition, as the function of the soul archetype symbolizes a psychological experience of wholeness, and is a reflection of what Jung refers to as the Self.

Alessandra Piontelli and Observations of the Child in Utero

Phantasies about birth or about being back inside the womb are often acted out with great clarity and with striking concreteness in the play of many young children. These phantasies can at times take on a more defensive quality and in the latter the womb is principally seen nostalgically as an ideal place into which one can retreat safely in moments of distress or pain. (Piontelli, 1988, p. 74)

Piontelli describes her analysis of a 2 year old psychotic girl who had an exceedingly difficult birth, born with the umbilical cord around her neck. After birth, one of her many peculiar obsessions was wearing a heavy chain knotted around her neck, or the cord of a curtain, which she also would wind around her neck. Piontelli relates this behavior, and many other strange behaviors of this child, to her original experience in the womb and her near fatal experience at birth. Her inability to live in the world and relate to those around her, and her constant regressions and attempts to get back inside the womb, appear to be an attempt to alleviate the pain of being a separate person in the world. For the first month of her life she was kept in the hospital where she underwent intravenous feedings, was kept in an oxygen tent, and was subjected to three lumbar punctures. Piontelli (1988) states that "even the most organically-minded doctors found no apparent or obvious organic cause" (p. 75).

With this type of history, along with the fact that she was not adequately mothered for that month and that her eventual relationship with her mother was not ideal, it does not seem inconceivable that this child would want to return to a place without pain. If there is no mother or primary caretaker to help a child duplicate the womb experience while in the world by meeting her needs, there would be no reason for a child to stay in the world, and a regression would serve the purpose of not needing a mother in the world. If the fantasy of the womb experience is universal and is seen as a method for eliminating pain, it seems likely that the explication given previously, which is that pain and pleasure in the womb are experienced as neutral, because there is no ego to make a value judgment, would be justified. Who would choose ego consciousness if the primary sensation was pain? A retreat to a state of being where pain was obliterated could be called an act of instinctual and intuitive intelligence by the child. Nature intends a "match" in the world, but if it does not exist, alternatives that assist in survival appear to be reasonable. If it were ego consciousness that existed in the womb and the infant experienced pain, why would a regression be necessary; what biological or psychological purpose could it possibly serve?

When does psychological life begin? In later and more detailed research, Piontelli (1992) states:

One of the most intense debates within the psychoanalytical movement centres on the psychological birth of the human infant; its capacity to live mentally and emotionally in the outside world once out of the narrow boundaries of the womb. On the one hand are the analysts who consider that the infant is not psychologically born for at least the first few months of its post-natal life and regard it as an ego-less creature still living inside a kind of post-natal womb. On the other hand are those analysts who consider mental life to be operative from birth, and for most of them the actual event of birth is regarded as the turning-point that sets mental functioning in motion. Only with the meeting of other human beings after birth do they consider that the infant begins to feel and think. Very little mention can be found in psychoanalytical literature of the possibility of mental life, ego functioning, and awareness in the fetus and of the possible bearings of this previous stage, fetal life, not only on the future development of the individual, but also on the mental functioning of the baby. (pp. 18-19)

One could also add that there is very little mention of the possibility of mental life in the fetus, not only in psychoanalytical literature, but also in analytical psychology and indeed any other psychology. In the world of mythological literature, however, the womb and Paradise appear to be related symbols, expressing something psychological and universal in human experience.

Dr. Piontelli used ultrasonic scans to observe the fetus in the womb, and she then observed each child's development from birth to the age of 4 years. The major conclusion of her research is that "there is a remarkable continuity of behavior before and after birth and many small children show signs after birth of being influenced by experiences they had before birth" (1992, p. 23). She continues:

Recent research has proved all human senses to be "operative" at least by some time during the second trimester of pregnancy (Chamberlain, l983, her reference) and therefore by that time the fetus responds to tactile, pressory, kinaesthetic, thermic, vestibular, gustatory, and painful stimuli. (p. 34)

The question to be asked is whether or not those sensory functions are conscious, unconscious, or both. Providing that it is the unconscious sensory experience (intuition) of the fetus that gives it the information of how to act and react toward its environment and that this happens because the functions of active thinking, feeling and sensation are unconscious potential, one could surmise that conscious intuition is the first psychological function. If this is so, the fetus could be said to "think" in the womb, only the thinking would be passive or what Jung called intuition. This would be soul consciousness, and unconscious sensory experiences of the body would be the original source of "knowledge" in the human infant.

Piontelli, like other psychoanalytic theorists who discuss ego splitting after birth, questions whether there is ego functioning in the womb, but the fetus does not need an "I" to act or react. This action in the womb could better be described as a soul reaction. This idea connects it to matter in a fundamental way and mother, or matter reacting to matter. Mother and child both appear "wired" to communicate with each other. The soul complex would be different from the ego complex from the beginning, insofar as the choices made are not from an ego viewpoint, but given by unconscious body sensations. Piontelli (1992) continues:

As my experience developed, I was more and more struck by the individuality of movement of each fetus and by their preferred postures and reactions. I could no longer regard the fetuses I was watching as non-persons, as each of them seemed already to be an individual with its own personality, preferences, and reactions. (p. 9)

If intuition is seen as unconscious body sensations that react to the environment of the womb, the question is whether there is some form of consciousness inherent in the fetus, as he or she acts and reacts. Piontelli (1992) concludes her results with a question: "In view of my findings that characteristic individual behaviors develop well before birth, can one assume that some rudimentary self-awareness is present before birth?" (emphasis mine, p. 238). I would answer yes to this question, but the self-awareness would not be the ego, as Dr. Piontelli suggests; it would be intuitive consciousness that contains the unconscious ego.

Piontelli's research conclusions indicate that what was once considered only basic instincts may contain something that is psychological. Certainly she has paved the way for further research by directly observing the fetus using ultrasound scans and by simply asking, "When does psychological life begin?"

Chapter 3: Michael Fordham

Michael Fordham and Jungian Developmental Psychology

Michael Fordham is considered a pioneer in Jungian developmental psychology, not only because he extended Jung's concept of individuation to include children, but because many of his concepts are based on actual clinical experience with children.

Both the primary question that is being asked in this research (whether an order to Jung's psychological functions can be determined) and the hypothesis that a circular order does exist with the psychological function of intuition being first are more compatible with the work of Fordham than with the work of most other theorists. They are also more easily linked to Fordham's concepts of the child as an individual from the beginning, although Fordham exaggerated the possibility that the infant is totally separate from the mother from the beginning. Fordham does not give a structural concept of the experience of the fetus in the womb, except in his description of the primary Self, but he does often refer to the inherent possibilities; furthermore, he proved that Jung's concepts can be used to expand upon knowledge pertaining to child analysis, not only the archetype of the child, but the actual child.

The hypothesis offered here presupposes many of Fordham's ideas concerning integration and deintegration. Also, by starting at the beginning, it completes a theory of developmental processes using basic Jungian concepts of psychological functions, as well as integrating the ideas of Michael Fordham.

Fordham had an excellent grasp of Jung's theory of individuation, and he was familiar with Jung's book on Psychological Types, which he helped to edit, but he apparently did not always make the link between all four functions as they pertain to individuation. Fordham begins with a construct of the Self that includes the ego and a description of the ego flowing out of the Self; what appears missing in his construct is the soul archetype, which necessarily needs to be differentiated from the Self or the ego and which is, I think, directly concerned with the psychological function of intuition. Intuition is the basic instinct; the Self, the soul and the ego are the archetypes that are contained in the basic instinct. This assertion can be supported by a depth interpretation of the cosmological mythology, about which Fordham says very little.

There is also, not surprisingly, very little in Fordham's writing concerning the psychological function of intuition or its importance in the psyche of the child.

Fordham on the Child in the Womb

Fordham asked many questions concerning the child in utero and after parturition because many of his theories rested on the concept that a child was an individual from the beginning and not just an extension of the mother. Just where to place the emerging ego is also a question related to the child in utero, and Fordham fluctuated in his opinion concerning this difficult but important aspect of his theoretical construct. In 1970, he says:

Since the time that the self concept was originated, much more has been discovered about ego fragments and there can be no doubt that quite a firmly established ego structure is in being by two years of age; therefore the concept of the self may not be so necessary or central. The new data have indeed suggested an alternative theory of the ego, just because its organisation begins much earlier than was believed. (p. 100)

By 1976, Fordham appears to have accepted the idea that the ego is present much earlier than he had previously conceived. In 1951, Freud, Jung, and other psychologists thought the ego to "be in place by the age of 5 or 6," which Fordham began to doubt. By 1970, Fordham thinks the ego is firmly established by the age of 2 years, but by 1976, Fordham accepts that the ego or parts of it are present at birth and that the importance of when the ego begins is crucial to child psychology:

The time at which the ego is formed is important for the study of child psychology. The discovery of its early appearance has compelled a substantial revision in much of our thinking and understanding of infants; it has had repercussions on our orientation toward the structure and organization of the infantile psyche; it has compelled a revision of views about the possibilities of infant and child management and therapy. But, in spite of all this, the necessary modifications are congruent with the main body of Jung's thesis, which was so much ahead of its time. (p. 37)

By placing the ego as emerging at birth with the soul complex also present at birth, many of Jung's descriptions of the soul archetype can be seen to apply to early childhood. The intuitive function, which is often placed willy-nilly, or worse yet, totally ignored as an important psychological function, can be seen to commence and work in relationship with the other three functions from the beginning, which is in the womb.

Concerning the child in the womb, Fordham (1976) says, "recently there have been serious attempts to investigate this difficult topic and, while there is not yet a psychology of intrauterine life, there is now a growing consensus that there are organized perceptual ego-functions at birth" (p. 46).

Here Fordham accepts the view that the ego or at least some organized perceptual ego-functions are present at birth, an idea that slightly alters some of his original ideas concerning the infant. Fordham's views on consciousness and when the ego begins vary considerably and obviously changed over the years. In l970, he states:

Just when consciousness of any kind begins can only be inferred, because the study of intra-uterine life is manifestly difficult, but, enough is now known about the foetus to state confidently that he experiences some kind of rudimentary consciousness. Rapid as development may be after birth, in the first weeks of life there is every reason to suppose that perception is vague and transitory. Consequently the ego can play only a small part in the infant's existence, which is best understood in terms of patterned archetypal drives. Soon, however, ego fragments can be noted; they are closely related from the beginning to the drives and their unconscious fantasy representations. (p. 93)

Here I suggest that what Fordham is calling "vague and transitory perception" is what Jung would have called "unconscious perception" or intuition (Jung, 1971/1921, p. 463); the unconscious fantasy representations are created by the intuitive function, which sees into the Self and returns with a symbol that not only expresses the ego, but strengthens and reinforces the ego complex. By this method, Self, soul, and ego archetypes can be seen to be organized and working together from the beginning, and the soul archetype, which I equate with the intuitive function, can be seen to be the mediator, as Jung described, not only in later life, but from the beginning.

Fordham never seems to expand upon his statement that a rudimentary consciousness might exist in the womb or what kind of consciousness it might be; from this statement, however, he obviously did not believe it to be ego consciousness, which he says only plays a small part in the infant's existence. A "rudimentary consciousness," however, implies several things; either the ego is present in the fetus or another kind of consciousness is present. I would suggest that this consciousness is not ego, as many of the writers who consider some kind of consciousness present think, but comes from the absence of the ego and is the soul complex or intuitive consciousness. Other adjectives that could be used to describe this consciousness are: basic, elementary, fundamental, initial, original, and primary. What is present in the womb is passive thinking (intuition) rather than active thinking, and Jung makes the necessary distinction in his description of the two functions. It seems almost obvious that passive thinking would precede active thinking and be the foundation upon which all future active thinking rests. What Jung called passive thinking or intuition, however, consists of more than unconscious thinking; it also contains unconscious feeling and unconscious sensation. In other words, these three major psychological functions exist as one undifferentiated function, which is intuition.

By 1976, Fordham is even more empathetic with the idea that an infant has conscious (ego) experiences and that the fetus may have "perceptual experience," even if it is vague. He states:

It would, I think, be very daring to assume that an infant is not capable of any conscious experience and there is some indirect evidence in favour of there being ego-consciousness in very early situations. Right from the start, i.e., after birth, and indeed while still in utero, the infant (or foetus) reacts to stimuli. That the responses involve reflexes and neural discharges of an organized kind is certain and it would be much more logical, since reflexes involve afferent stimuli, to assume that at least some of them are accompanied by perceptual experience, however vague. (pp. 45-46)

Again, Fordham uses the word "vague," which is closely related to words chosen by other writers to describe this state, such as dim, faint, or blurred, but he does not attribute these vague perceptual experiences either to the ego complex or to the soul complex; indeed, he does not comment on the nature of what he is describing as consciousness in the womb. I think that what he describes quite well can be seen as intuitive consciousness or soul consciousness, which exists simply because there is no ego consciousness present.

Fordham (1976) calls instinctual behavior a release-manifestation that is laid down within the organism before birth by the innate release-mechanism. He compares this to the baby gull who first feeds because of the red color, which is a sign-stimulus. The behavior of the infant is considered to be caused by the same sign-stimulus. Fordham states:

When a baby starts to feed at the breast it is likely that there is a sign-stimulus that starts him feeding. It would not be a breast, or a nipple as such. I emphasize this because it would seem that the sort of consciousness that an infant has is most unlike anything we know of, but it is not necessarily hazy but remarkably precise. (p. 173)

If the sign-stimulus is not the breast, nipple, or the body of the mother, the human infant appears to be somewhat different from the baby gull, who is stimulated by a red color on its mother's beak. Fordham does not specify what this stimulus might be in the human infant, but he does attribute this activity to consciousness that is remarkably precise and different from anything we know. Here I would conclude that the infant "knows" by the consciousness of soul, that is, by the psychological function of intuition, which informs the ego that it is in a state of need or a state of desire, which is manifested in the body by the sucking behavior of the infant. Thus, the infant draws on the Self from the soul position and expresses what is needed through the ego; unconsciousness and consciousness are connected by the soul position. Jung (1971/1921) describes this process in the following way:

The soul never loses its intermediate position. It must therefore be regarded as a function of relation between the subject and the inaccessible depths of the unconscious. The determining force (God) operating from these depths is reflected by the soul, that is, it creates symbols and images, and is itself only an image. By means of these images the soul conveys the forces of the unconscious to consciousness; it is both receiver and transmitter, an organ for perceiving unconscious contents. What it perceives are symbols. But symbols are shaped energies, determining ideas whose affective power is just as great as their spiritual value. (pp. 250-251)

Here Jung was not necessarily commenting on the soul as an aspect of infancy, but his description can be seen as one that describes that period just as adequately as any other age in life, especially if we assume that the infant starts life with two kinds of consciousness, one of soul and one of ego. Life appears to be the journey towards reconnecting these opposites in the most possible conscious way, not only year to year, but also moment to moment.

Fordham (1976, pp. 42-43) gives his views on the previously accepted concept of the infant as "psychically part of his mother." Here, he disagrees with the mainstream view and suggests that the baby influences the mother just as much as she influences the baby. He goes on to state:

The idea that the infant is psychically part of his mother is implicitly combined with another one: the infant is said to be unconscious. In current usage the term unconscious is ambiguous: it refers on the one hand to a negative state in which perceptual functions are not giving rise to conscious awareness and on the other to a more or less organized and partly inherited system of structures referred to as unconscious archetypes. (p. 45)

Here Fordham has identified a part of the problem due to terminology; whether in the womb or after birth, the term "unconscious" is ambiguous; if the more or less organized and partly inherited system of structures referred to as unconscious archetypes are active and functioning in the fetus or the infant, they could better be described as part-conscious and part-unconscious; this would be a middle position and one that I would call soul consciousness or intuitive consciousness. The infant could be said to have an unconscious, in which the primary Self exists; and a soul consciousness that contains the major archetypes, including both consciousness and unconsciousness; and ego consciousness, which is always connected to the body in the beginning. Here it is not difficult to see the soul position as that which can be compared to a twilight state; it is not all dark or all light, but contains both to produce a different state of consciousness, which describes the intuitive function quite well. "Through a glass darkly" could be said to be describing the function of intuition as the way we first see.

Jung (1971/1921) describes the soul complex in this way:

Looked at historically, the soul, that many-faceted and much-interpreted concept, refers to a psychological content that must possess a certain measure of autonomy within the limits of consciousness . . . . It must be a content in which spontaneity is inherent, and hence also partial unconsciousness, as with every autonomous complex. (p. 247)

This is a good description of the child in the womb, and the child at birth, who has his original state of unity shattered by birth into two types of consciousness that appear split or divided; one is soul consciousness and one is ego consciousness. In the womb, these two existed as the Self archetype and the soul archetype that reflects the Self.

It is possible that Fordham carried his idea of the child, especially the unborn child, being separate from the mother to the extreme, possibly to refute Neumann's insistence that they exist as a symbiotic pair in utero and a year after birth and possibly to allow him to formulate ideas that were not conceivable by using the concepts that Neumann proposed.

Fordham's arguments concerning the infant in the womb are sometimes hazy and often rather ineffective. He maintains (1976) that an infant has boundaries in the womb that "may very well be thought of as present at conception" (p. 11). Before this, he claims that we can ask how these boundaries are formed, but it is not possible to answer that question. He then goes on to say:

Fordham is wrong concerning "all other respects," because the baby responds to other conditions in the womb besides the very important one of nourishment. The womb is the baby's environment, and he or she constantly responds by being in relationship with its surroundings. What about the possible effects of the mother's emotional life on the fetus? In addition, the baby has inherited the genes of both parents. A particular baby has the genetic make-up of specific parents and does not acquire a random genetic system. The parents, genetically speaking, live in the child. Pregnancy can be seen as a "special state of intimate fusion," and it is certainly disrupted at birth; there is nothing fantastic about this assessment. The infant's body is connected to the mother's body via the umbilical cord; it is also contained within her body surrounded by the womb. It is difficult to conceive of a more intimate relationship. Furthermore, the physical as well as the mental condition of the mother may affect the fetus; a mother who uses crack cocaine or various drugs may produce an addicted, lethargic, or psychically damaged child; a mother who has the HIV virus may give birth to a child with AIDS. These conditions have nothing to do with the genetic constitution of the child, but they certainly have an influence upon his or her body and ability to respond had they not been present.

Kay (1984) cites research that was concerned extensively with stress, depression, and the effect of the mother's negative or positive emotions on the unborn child, and concludes with the statement: "What seemed to matter most of all was what the mother felt about her unborn child" (p. 326). If the mother wanted and loved her unborn child, the child appeared to be protected by a "shield of protection against adversity" (p. 326).

Fordham's statements concerning the separate state of the infant in the womb appear simplistic because they don't consider many aspects of the child in the womb that might be affected by the mother. A more reasonable view might be that the infant in utero has a separate Self and separate soul that is always acting and reacting to the mother or the mother's womb, which is its environment. They are separate bodies, but always connected by the umbilical cord, which is a connection that cannot be ignored; without that connection the infant would not survive. The state of unity or fusion that the fetus experiences may be because of the three psychological functions of thinking, feeling and sensation being unconscious and merged in the function of intuition, which allows the fetus to respond to stimuli from within or without in the best possible way. The genetic inheritance would be present in the intuitive function, making the child an individual from the start, but he or she would always be an individual in relationship to his or her surroundings, practice, one might say, for life after birth, which is the same, with the exception that the ego comes into play and ego consciousness usually takes the lead, whereas soul consciousness becomes or is called "unconscious." For these reasons, I would consider both Neumann and Fordham to be correct if taken together; the unborn child is separate, but also lives in what Neumann called "primal unity." In the womb, these opposites are united.

Fordham on Cosmogonic Myths and the Womb as Paradise

Fordham did not comment on the cosmogonic myth of Genesis, although he does correctly state that the closest parallel to the deintegration concept lies in cosmic creation myths. I would add that perhaps the most important cosmogonic myth in our Western culture is the creation of Adam and Eve, who lived initially with God in the garden of Paradise. Paradise and the enclosed garden are symbols that are equivalent to the cosmic egg described by the Greeks, and both can be seen as symbols of the womb.

Fordham (1957) describes the Greek myth of Eros who sprang from the cosmic egg:

Indeed, if we take Eros to represent the first deintegration or the first "coming apart" of the Self, it is not difficult to see that he can be compared with the emergence of ego and the first body sensations or the psychological function of conscious sensation and the psychological function of feeling, because the sensation produces the first desire, and the image created is the desired object, which is a product of the thinking function, conscious or unconscious. Eros, which means "demanding love," (Jung and Kerenyi, 1949, p. 53) can be seen as the ego of the newborn child who demands to be loved. At this point he represents only half of the feeling function or half of love, the desiring half. The other half remains in the unconscious. Freud called this primary narcissism, which has pejorative connotations similar to those placed upon Eve, who was cast from Eden when she first experienced desire. A more positive view would be one that called this primary love, which is the body ego or child ego, and its demand for survival, which appears to be a reasonable attitude for the infant to possess. Feeling is, as Jung pointed out, a rational function.

Eros does contain the contents of the cosmic egg; the cosmic egg can be seen as a symbol of the Self that contains all four, undifferentiated, unconscious psychological functions. The cosmic egg contains everything, including soul and soul love, and when it bursts (when the child is born), Eros comes forth and all the functions that were merged begin as conscious functions connected to the ego and unconscious functions connected to the soul. Love is the double-edged sword that severs and unites and can be seen as the Divine Child and the human child. (Most Divine Children in mythology are portrayed as having a double nature, for example, Hermes.)

The integration of the ego takes place when its demands are met with soul love from the mother or other and it returns to that psychological place where there is nothing to want or desire. The experience of the other half of feeling or love that was left in the unconscious replaces the ego needs of the infant and he has experienced the opposites in time. This is a return to the womb experience that allows the infant to match inner world with the outward world, ensuring a sense of wholeness. Metaphorically speaking, the child is returned to the cosmic egg or the Self by a process of assimilation. This process is continuous in the beginning of life and essential for the child-body-ego to develop adequately. The early mother and child relationship can be seen as one of soul (mother) to ego (child); the return to the mother at any age is a desire to return to soul consciousness, which has been damaged or blocked for whatever reason.

Kaplan (1978) expresses much the same thing: "all later human love and dialogue is a striving to reconcile our longings to restore the lost bliss of oneness with our equally intense need for separateness and individual selfhood" (p. 27). In early infancy, this is a natural process; Eros or the ego must be expressed, satisfied and, by satisfaction, be lost, in order to be returned to soul, which strengthens the ego that next expresses itself in consciousness. It appears as a peculiar quirk of fate that the old ego consciousness must die before a new ego consciousness can be expressed--or put another way, consciousness is only enlarged by the loss of consciousness. This is true in adult life, but it is no less true in infancy, where the process first began. Two kinds of consciousness that appear split or divided must be reconciled in the human psyche, which is what so many of the myths appear to describe. Jung (1959/1938) describes this when he says:

Fordham apparently did not agree with Jung on the interpretation of the myths describing a desire to return to the mother, and although he saw the Eros myth of the cosmic egg as a parallel to describe the deintegration process, he does not appear to equate Eros with ego (even though Eros is always portrayed as a child, youth, or young god), which is necessary to link his concepts with what the myth is describing. The Self deintegrates or comes apart to create the soul complex and the ego complex but the Self remains the same. Put another way, the Self is the soul and ego merged. When it splits or divides, it becomes soul and ego that have become differentiated and conscious.

Gayley (1939) describes the Orpheus version of the Greek cosmological myth as, "assuming the form of a huge world egg, [which] flew, by reason of its rapid rotation, into halves. Of these, one was Heaven, the other Earth. From the center of the egg proceeded Eros (Love) and other wondrous beings" (p. 3). Heaven and earth can be seen as another form of the Divine Syzygy or opposites that become soul (Mother) and ego (Father). Eros, as the Divine Child, proceeds from the center. Here he represents the adult ego and soul merged, or the functions of intuition and thinking merged. In the coming apart of Heaven and Earth or the Self, he represents the beginning of consciousness in the functions of sensation and feeling in the human child. These are the "child" functions; sensation is the child soul and feeling is the child ego. As a symbol of the Self, Eros contains them all, and they flow out of him (deintegrate) or back to him (reintegrate.)

Ryce-Menuhin (1988) describes Fordham's hypothesis:

It is not the Self that spontaneously divides to become Self and ego, as Fordham apparently thinks and Ryce-Menuhin suggests, but the Self that divides to become the soul complex and the ego complex. If the Self is what Jung described as God or totality, it would not be subject to division; indeed, it would be the core aspect of life impervious to division or change of any kind. Jung (1971/1921) described the soul as "the organ of perception, the soul, apprehends the contents of the unconscious, and, as the creative function, gives birth to its dynamis in the form of a symbol" (p. 251). What would the organ of perception be if it is not one or both of the irrational functions of sensation or intuition, which Jung referred to as the perceiving functions? If it is the soul that perceives, it appears to me that the psychological function that it perceives with must be intuition. (It is the body that perceives by the function of sensation.) If this is so, it would be the irrational functions of sensation and intuition undifferentiated (the soul complex and the ego complex combined) that would create the symbol. It could also be seen as conscious and unconscious perception working together in the psyche. Conscious sensation would be the ego function and unconscious intuition would be the soul function. If all opposites meet in the middle and I think that they do, sensation and intuition probably work together (ideally speaking) in the human psyche in a way that has yet to be explored. And if they are, as I later suggest in more detail, mirror images of one another, it would be both instinctual and irrational functions that create the archetypes or fill in the empty forms. The irrational functions would both contain each of the other three functions in unconscious form or, put another way, each irrational function would contain the other three functions in unconscious form (see Figure 22). This would also be a description of the instinct that contains the archetype and will later become the archetype. Intuition and sensation appear to be the psychological functions that are personified in mythology as the twin Serpents (Sumerian) or the twin fishes Lucifer and Christ (Christian) which will be discussed in detail in Chapter's 4, 5 and 6 of this work.

It is the leap from the Self archetype to the ego archetype, leaving out the soul archetype that caused Fordham difficulty with his hypothesis; it is probably the soul that is the organ of conscious perception and the cosmic egg is a symbol for the Self that contains the ego and the soul within itself. One could say that it contains the contents of the Self as a reflection of the soul and ego merged; the soul, ego, or the reflection comes apart or deintegrates, but the Self does not. The cosmic egg symbolizes the four functions in undifferentiated form. Intuition is the first function out of the cosmic egg (symbolized as mother or earth or soul) and still contains all the other functions within itself. These are the ego functions of sensation, feeling and thinking. The soul is a reflection of the Self and identical with the Self, but has also become something separate (the spontaneous division that is also a state of transition) and can be identified as the soul archetype which is identical with the instinct of intuition. Her child is the function of sensation or the child soul that has not yet become fully conscious. At birth and the experience of the opposites, sensation (soul) and feeling (ego) become conscious ego functions and intuition (soul) goes into the personal unconscious. The thinking function or what Jung called active thinking is either not yet conscious or possibly contains the thought as an unconscious image that was experienced in the rational function of feeling and experienced before that in the irrational function of sensation.

As Ryce-Menuhin and Fordham attest, the cosmic creation myths are an excellent source for parallel ideas of the deintegration theory; what is missing in some of Fordham's concepts is a better description of what happens before birth, a more precise definition of the beginning ego and the role the soul archetype plays in the process of individuation in childhood, based on Jung's excellent description of that archetype as a mediator between the Self and the ego.

Fordham (1982) did not comment specifically on the cosmological myth of Genesis, but he did have definite ideas concerning the womb experience as one related to or describing a state of Paradise. He states:

Take the idea of Paradise being in the womb, well, if you study what goes on in the womb and quite a lots been done--it's not particularly Paradisical, it's, what it is, or if it is, Paradise is a very noisy place, indeed. The beating of the aorta in the mother is a constant sort, like an old fashion steam train going on all the time. Then you [presumably the child] get cramps, can't get sorted out--have to kick--turn yourself upside down by peculiar spiral movements. External noises can be quite intrusive, too. You can't say you would like to call that Paradise, a place like that; it's not likely anyone will. (recorded lecture)

In this unlikely research, I am making exactly that proposal; I am looking at the myth of Paradise as a metaphor that describes the womb experience and the experience of the child at birth. This is not a new idea; Heinberg (1989) gives the following example:

Refutation

All

Heresies

The world navel is a symbol for Paradise, as Eliade (1991) tells us. "Paradise, where Adam was created from clay, is, of course, situated at the center of the cosmos. Paradise was the navel of the earth and according to a Syrian tradition, was established on a mountain higher than all other" (p. 16). In biological terms it is not difficult to see this mountain as the pregnant body of the mother and her navel as the center of the world, the connection between Heaven and Earth. It is also not difficult to see the umbilical cord as the container for the river (water of life) that flows into Paradise or the womb, thereby nourishing it. Biologically, one can also compare the act of physical love and female orgasm (water of life) to the river flowing out of Paradise, leaving behind the egg that will generate new life at conception.

Fordham did not make a connection with the myth of Genesis as a metaphor for the experience of being in the womb or birth. His rejection for the experience of the unborn child being in a Paradisical state, however, appears to me to be extremely subjective and therefore not a very convincing one. The beating of the mother's heart or noise in the womb means very little; it implies that the infant prefers silence, indeed, that the infant has a preference, which is probably not the case at all.

If there is no ego (as we know it) present in the womb and no knowledge of the opposites, the infant is not able to make a value judgment concerning his or her own body sensations, such as the one Fordham is making. (Fordham appears to be identifying with the conscious sensate and conscious feeling and conscious thinking experience of the infant in the womb, from an adult, conscious, ego position, which certainly does not sound like Paradise. But what would an intuitive description sound like?) The infant may act and react to stimuli, but does not appear to be using the functions of active, conscious thinking, conscious feeling or conscious sensation, as defined by Jung. The one psychological function that appears to be possibly present and possibly conscious is intuition; the infant moves toward and away from the object or stimulus by what appears to be an in-born instinct, and intuition appears to fit the description more than any other psychological function, especially if we consider the possibility that it contains some form of consciousness. The infant appears to know what to do and when to do it, in most cases, intuitively. (The infant in the womb is alive and it is my assumption that the state of being alive contains some form of consciousness, even if we have not yet been able to define what it is.) If there is no ego present, the experience of the body sensations of the infant might be such that what is pain is experienced no differently than what is pleasurable. The experience of differentiating opposites would not be present. If this is the case, one might readily define such a state as Paradisical.

Birth, which can be seen as the beginning of the ego, represented in the Genesis myth as the "Fall," would create the second kind of consciousness, ego, which would exist as a conflict with soul consciousness from the beginning. The soul contains all the psychological functions merged; the ego separates all the functions as consciousness comes into being. Thus, the opposites are born and in conflict, represented in the myths as the hero and his search for Paradise or what was lost by consciousness. An interpretation of the myth of Genesis will be discussed later in this research in detail, where I suggest that the four major archetypes of the myth, God, (intuition) the snake, (sensation) Eve (feeling) and Adam, (thinking) all represent psychological functions and psychic energy that can be seen as a description of the infant in the womb and the experience of birth and a description of psychological processes that can occur at any age. The creation myth of Eros can be seen as comparable to the creation myth of Genesis; in both myths Chaos comes first, then Heaven and Earth in the Genesis myth, and Earth and Heaven in the Greek myth. Chaos is the Self, Earth is the soul, and Heaven is the Ego. But the child ego is the shadow of Heaven and Earth or the unconscious side of the "Divine" functions of intuition and thinking. Paradise is identical with Eros or Love, and both are symbols that unite the opposites.

Because I think the functions of unconscious thinking, unconscious feeling, and unconscious sensation are merged and, by the merger, create the function of intuition, I consider this to be the first conscious psychological function present in the human psyche and the psychological experience that is desired by the symbolism of a "return to Paradise" motif in mythology. One cannot return literally to the womb, but one can return to the psychological experience that one had in the womb and do so on a conscious level, which the idea of rebirth symbolizes. This is the message of the myths, especially the religious myths that promise a "new Heaven and new Earth" or a "New Jerusalem." This experience, I would suggest, also takes place in the beginning of life, if the infant is fortunate, every time the child is returned to an assimilation of the original state of what I would call soul consciousness. After birth, Paradise is to be found and recreated in relationship, by loving and being loved.

Fordham (1982) concludes: "All this longing for the mother, which Jung talks about--I'm afraid it's not so" (recorded lecture). Jung (1959/1938) is more convincing on this point:

yoni,

The longing for the mother can be seen as a desire to return to the original experience of unity and wholeness or a desire to return to the psychological state of soul consciousness, which observes the Self and the ego simultaneously.

Even though Fordham (1976) rejected the idea of the womb experience being symbolized by the myth of Paradise, he gives an excellent description of a state of complete integration in the beginning:

A symmetrical theory of the relation between the first and the second half of life can be envisaged: assuming that complete integration, based on realization of the self, is the final aim of individuation, it becomes possible that there is also a state of complete integration in the beginning. It is not realized, nor realizable, at all because there is no ego distinct from the self to perceive it. When the original integrate exists must be left open; it may, however, be conveniently located before birth, which disrupts it--hence the persistent idea of birth as the earliest source of anxiety. (p. 16)

Here Fordham apparently contradicts himself when he says that the original integrate must be left open because he goes on to say that it may be conveniently located before birth, which disrupts it. I do not think that the original integrate must be left open, but does exist before birth, which is in the womb. Birth would certainly be a disruption of that original state of unity and the first deintegration. Fordham says that there is no ego distinct from the Self to perceive that state of harmony, and it is therefore not realizable or realized, yet one has to question the purpose of such a state; if it is not realizable in any way, how can we imagine that it ever existed? I would agree that there is no ego (as we know it) present to perceive, but ego consciousness is not the only kind of consciousness possible. The experience of the Self is perceived by soul consciousness, which also contains memory, and depends on the absence of the conscious ego. If the Self, indeed, is the archetype that contains everything within itself, that would have to include some form of consciousness. It would also have to include a psychological function, which is the human means to knowledge, and that function would necessarily be the function of intuition.

The absence of the ego as a means of obtaining spiritual knowledge or transformation is documented in numerous accounts of religious or mystical literature. Jung (1971/1921) describes this process as:

The elimination of sense-perception and the blotting out of conscious contents

The infant in the womb, however, does not need to eliminate conscious sense impressions; he already exists in the state that the yogi is attempting to return; he exists in a psychological state of being where opposites are united, thus the many references to returning to the state of infancy for union with God.

Fordham states that his theory of integrates and deintegrates can best be compared with the cosmic creation myths, but he only mentions the myth of Eros and the cosmic egg; it is regrettable that he did not link his theory with the myth of Genesis or the idea of Paradise in the womb, because by doing so his theory could be seen from the beginning of life and connected to the very important Western cosmic myth of Genesis. In addition, the link or comparison between the Greek cosmological myth of Eros and the Jewish and Christian myth of Genesis can be more readily seen. Fordham was correct when he said that cosmic myths could be compared with deintegration, but he failed to see a connection between integration and the Paradise myth of Genesis. If, as Piaget previously stated, every Genesis has its roots in a previous Genesis, integration can readily be seen as a Paradisical state of being that begins in the womb, and can only be recaptured after birth by a reintegration to the previous condition.

Archetypes, the Unconscious, and Mandalas

Concerning the unconscious, Fordham (1957) states:

It will be assumed that the unconscious, whose organs are the archetypes, is formed before birth. Since the archetypes are bound up with the functioning of the central nervous system it must presumably be there by the time the brain is formed. (p. 105)

This concept can be extended to assume that consciousness and unconsciousness both exist, as living potential, in the body or in the cell from the beginning or even before the brain is formed. If the brain did not exist as potential in the beginning organism, how could it come into being? The point I believe Fordham to be making is that the archetypes exist in the unconscious before birth and exist in a state of unity. Fordham (1957) continues:

Fordham (1957) goes on to say that he compared his observations with the work of A. Gessel (The First Five Years of Life), who found that children of 18 months used the word "I" with some regularity, inferring that it must have appeared for the first time even earlier still (p. 113).

Fordham (1957) compares his views with those of Winnicott, who postulates a primary unintegrated state in infancy (p. 114), which would be in direct opposition to Fordham's description of a primary integrated state out of which the ego emerges. In discussing Winnicott's concept of a "continuity of being," Fordham (1957) says, "the notion of a 'continuity of being' in a single psyche-soma implies a condition of wholeness, but where Winnicott speaks of the psyche-soma and environment then the self has already been divided up even if the fit be perfect" (pp. 114-115).

This is an excellent observation by Fordham; if the ego flows out of the original Self, yet the Self remains intact, obviously there are two states of being at this point: one of non-ego or what I would call the soul and one of ego. Why would it not be possible to assume that each "bit of consciousness" can coexist with what is unconscious or preconscious or undifferentiated by the infant? This would imply a continuity of being in which the infant would acquire consciousness, but it would still flow out of the unconscious.

My research supports that of Winnicott; at birth the self of the infant is divided; two kinds of consciousness come into being, one of soul and one of ego. Fordham is also correct if he means that the infant is, right after birth, in a state of primary wholeness or a state that could be called the Self because it includes both states of consciousness. If he means the infant is born with a Self that is not in conflict and in a state of unity, however, he is only half right. Fordham defines the primal Self as an integrate, a steady state, that must deintegrate, and one that contains opposites within itself; when the self deintegrates it will divide into opposites that are psycho-physiological in nature (l976, p. 12). It is unclear in Fordham's many descriptions, as well as in other explications of his work, whether Fordham's primal Self, described as a steady state or integrate, is the state of the infant at birth and shortly thereafter or if it is a condition present only in the womb. It would appear that he thought the Self existed in the womb and was also present at birth and shortly thereafter.

Fordham (1979) says:

This kind of unity can only be described as that which occurs in the womb, and it is not difficult to see that it is symbolically represented as Paradise or the Golden Age in mythology. In the myth of Genesis, the gates of Paradise are guarded by cherubim with flaming swords, meaning that one cannot reenter by that route; one cannot go back into the womb, but must find a new Paradise, one that will be obtained through relationship, love, and (usually) the mother. The "drive to regain what is impossible" can be seen as the infant's desire to return to that blissful state that can, according to Fordham, never be re-gained, only approximated in sleep or in blissful experience. Elsewhere, the investigator (Lenhart, 1990a) has described something very similar to Fordham's description of returning to the original unity through relationship with the mother:

The relationship with mother or primary caretaker, will consist of two different, but related aspects thereafter, nonego (or soul) to nonego, and ego to ego.

assimilate

This assimilation is of the greatest importance, because each time mother and child re-enact a state of "unity" the ego or "I that am separate," I that demand: food, warmth, comfort, love, relinquishes itself in the process of accepting those needs. Ego that is satisfied returns to a nonego state, the state of unity,

This description is very much in keeping with Fordham's idea of the infant attempting to return to a state of primary wholeness; I have called it an assimilation of the original experience, for the same reasons Fordham gives.

More on Mandala Symbolism

The mandala played an important role in the formations of Fordham's early hypothesis of childhood individuation. His reference is often to Jung's description of mandalas and the significant role they can play in the process of individuation. Fordham (1957) states:

Psychological Types,

If the mandala represents the fourfold structure of the psyche, all the psychological functions would be present, but in the child many aspects of the functions would still be unconscious. Those images put in the mandala might represent aspects that have been seen by the soul complex and made conscious, which is described by the pictures that the child draws and puts into the circle.

Fordham (1957) gives a description of a 1-year-old child who scribbles on the wall of the nursery and began to make circles. After doing this for some time, the child says the word, "I," and the circles stop. Fordham continues:

Far from contradicting our interpretation, Jung's observations that the circle represents an archetypal nonego confirm it, even though his researches are on individuation in which the separation is essential and this research is based upon the concept that the separation has not yet occurred. This inversion is a logical consequence, as we have seen, from Jung's theories. (p. 134)

Fordham is right in saying that the mandala represents the Self or totality of the child. If separation had not yet occurred, however, why would the child make mandalas as protective devices in the first place? Jung (1959/1955) said of mandalas, "their object is the self in contra-distinction to the ego, which is only the point of reference for consciousness, whereas the self comprises the totality of the psyche altogether, i.e., conscious and unconscious" (emphasis author's, p. 5). If this is the case, the mandala would represent an already present ego that expresses its connection to the Self. Fordham (1957, p. 135) quotes Jung, who states that the circle is a protection against the "perils of the soul," but it is conceivable that this is a natural occurrence in infancy and early childhood, and is necessary for the filling out of the ego rather than from an always inherent danger. It is possible that the archetype of the circle may be present at birth or shortly thereafter and represents the soul position, where the four psychological functions existed as one in the form of intuition in the womb and later or after birth when the infant has experienced a return to that state via the mother, by having needs met. A return to the soul position would allow a view of the Self, which would be expressed by the ego. If the soul is the archetype that the adult returns to, as Jung describes, to return to the Self, then the reverse would be true in childhood: The soul would flow firstly out of the Self. It would be a reflection of the Self, but not the Self in its totality, which would not be needed. The progression would be away from the Self, via the soul, towards ego consciousness. The ego would regress in that case for two different reasons; when it is threatened (fear, which is ego love), and when it is loved by "other." In both cases, the purpose would be the same--the strengthening and protection of the ego.

Fordham here (1957) gives a case of a 2-1/2-year-old girl who he invited to sit on his lap and draw. He describes her first scribbles as "aggressive" and concludes that

her apparent acquiescence had been under secret protest; it was only when the circle appeared, however, that her ego could express itself in action. It seemed to represent the statement that my power had become neutralized and that there was now a magical boundary between herself and me which made her position safe; no aggression from me was now possible. (p. 135)

He continues:

Jung states that the circle is a protection against the "perils of the soul" thereby relating it to psychical functions rather than to real persons. This contradiction is, however, more apparent than real, for the child must have seen me as a danger--I would not have pressed her to scribble had she not acquiesced. The danger was due to a projection of the "soul," in this case the father imago. If I had been more active the projection would not have been withdrawn, therefore in cases where the environment is dangerous or hostile the projection becomes indissoluble because it is "true" and strong indissoluble defenses are set up against it. (1957, p. 135)

Fordham concludes:

These observations and reflections point to the circle as representing a delimiting or protective magic used to ward off real or imagined dangers from without or from within, or a danger inherent in the condition itself, a condition which provides the circumstances out of which the ego can come into being. (1957, p. 137)

I would suggest that Fordham's description is accurate. By making the circle, the little girl returned to an earlier state where the father imago was contained in the primal unity of the soul complex: father, mother, and child as one. I do not think, however, that the making of the mandala is necessarily always a protective or defensive device by the child, but can be seen as an attempt to communicate and express psychic experience in the form of symbols and images, which probably are formed long before the formation of language. Jung (1959/1938) describes something like this when he says:

Wholeness is never comprised within the compass of the conscious mind--it includes the indefinite and indefinable extent of the unconscious as well. Wholeness, empirically speaking, is therefore of immeasurable extent, older and younger than consciousness and enfolding it in time and space. This is no speculation, but an immediate psychic experience. Not only is the conscious process continually accompanied, it is often guided, helped, or interrupted, by unconscious happenings. The child had a psychic life before it had consciousness. (p. 178)

Therefore, I would conclude that early attempts to make mandalas, such as those by the 1-year-old girl or the 2-year-old child that Fordham describes, are or can be protective devices, but they can also be more than that. They are possibly an early attempt by the child to express the psychic life that is becoming conscious. Ego, which I consider to be present at birth, is certainly present at the age of 1 or 2 years. The making of the mandala is the ego complex that returns to the soul complex and draws from the Self, then returns to give expression to that experience via the ego. Jung (1959/1955) had this to say concerning the mandala:

The young child, however, does not appear to be attempting to "square the circle" as the adult might be doing, but instead trying to give expression to the circle itself and its contents, which would denote a developmental difference in the making of mandalas and suggest that the early attempts to make mandalas have a different purpose than those made by the adult. The squaring of the circle may well be the incorporation and consciousness of all four psychological functions, which would be the work of a lifetime and what Jung called individuation. The individuation of children would necessarily be different and the reverse of adults. Children would have first to empty, so to speak, the contents of the circle, which I would take to represent the soul or Self, and make thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition, conscious and differentiated, before they could begin to "square the circle." But, they would be individual from the start, because that circle or that soul would contain all the contents of their own unconscious psychological functions. Most of childhood would, in fact, be devoted to this task, which is probably why Jung thought that this was a time for ego development rather than soul.

Fordham's work on the mandalas of children is important because it helped to establish his idea that individuation, although different, begins in childhood.

Primary Narcissism or Primary Love?

Fordham (1979) states that he derived his ideas on primary unity and individuation from Freud's "ingenious derivation of the ego ideal from primary narcissism":

The idea that I found especially interesting was that since the earlier state of primary narcissism could not be regained--but continues to be desirable--it leads to the construction of an ideal which refers to but does not repeat the original condition. Individuation, though conceived as a process, is also thought of as an ideal state that can never be reached. (p. 27)

I would have to take "primary narcissism" to be the original state of the infant at birth, which is what I would call primary or ego love. This is the first state of desire experienced by the child. But the child does not long to get back to a state of ego love, indeed, it is just the opposite: What he desires is to return to a state of soul, where ego is still connected to the Self. But the experience of unity does not necessitate a narcissistic state, only at birth is this possible, when the desire to return to that state becomes apparent. The infant or even the adult, who desires to experience this state of unity, does not wish at this point to be individual; he or she wishes to be reunited with "other"; he perceives that "other" in the world (the mother), will return him to that state of unity. I see primary narcissism as the ego's demand via the body to be returned to that original state of unity, and when this has been accomplished by the unconditional love of the mother, the infant is returned to that experience.

Balint (1992) describes this in a similar way when he says, "the aim of all human striving is to establish--or, probably, re-establish--an all-embracing harmony with one's environment, to be able to love in peace" (p. 65). The striving of the adult to return to that state of unity could be seen as a desire to return to the moments in infancy when the child had that experience (which is how Jung described this desire), but it could also be seen as a striving to return to the original experience, especially in those cases where the child lacked the necessary reassimilation of the primal experience.

Fordham (1979) goes on to ask this question:

But is there a persistent period in the life of an infant that can be called primary narcissism? The idea that states of satisfaction, of unity, fusion or bliss have their root in a natural "stage" in the early life of an infant is very persistent. The idea that there is a stage in infancy when there is no conflict because there is no ego and the mother's provision is so good that there is no conflict and the infant is always satisfied, is elaborated by Neumann as the "primal relationship." (p. 27)

I do not believe there is such a stage either, except for the infant in utero; after birth, there is a recreation of the womb experience, which comes and goes for the most part, and appears necessary for the development of the ego. The experience of the ego being returned to soul and back to ego appears to be a cycle necessary in infancy, childhood, and possibly throughout adult life. A stage is reached that embraces both positions and the opposites are united, which is possibly the method nature intended for healthy psychological functioning; when it does not occur, neurosis and pathology become apparent. If the soul is the archetype that connects the conscious to the unconscious, the "system" does not come into being at random, but probably is fully in place from the beginning of life. The psychological function that the soul archetype represents is intuition. The idea of a primary state of unity persists, as Fordham states, because it is a universal experience that all humans share. The only possible explanation for this experience is the unity of the infant in the womb, and very small children who have not had this assimilated often enough in infancy can be seen as attempting to get back there, that is, to recreate the experience, any way possible.

Neumann (1973/1976) considered this primal relationship as one before birth as well as after birth. I think it is better described as the infant in the womb; after birth, the infant is brought back to that blissful experience by being loved and by having his needs met by the mother or primary caretaker. It is just this experience that reinforces the ego and leads it to believe that one can be separate, but still united, through the act of love.

Fordham (1957) continues:

The return to wholeness, however, would mean first a return to soul consciousness. If the soul is the bridge or the guide that leads to the Self, then it follows that the archetype of the soul would first flow out of the Self, and that this would precede ego consciousness and be necessary as a link between the Self and the ego. But Fordham appears to see the ego flowing out of the Self with no thought to the soul archetype, even though he later speaks of a progression of archetypal images where the Self is followed by the mana personalities.

The point I am trying to make is that the infant would need to return first to the soul archetype before the Self is reached, and it is just this archetype that gives a sense of unity as it was originally experienced. It is from the soul position that the Self is seen. The experience cannot always be described. It is, as Jung states, unknowable in its entirety because it depends on the uniqueness of each individual soul's experience. But it is just this experience that finds expression in art, especially for children, and later language and every form of creative expression that human beings are capable of achieving, whether in the arts, science, mythology, or religion. The soul observes the Self and returns to give form and content to that experience via art, science, and literature from the position of the ego. (This is a description of the adult; the infant creates symbols that assist him in making sense of his experience; a concept probably contains thousands of perceptions, conscious and unconscious, that are arranged and rearranged in the psyche to form a picture that becomes archetypal.) Thus, the soul looks both ways. It sees into the depths of the Self or the collective unconscious, and it returns to record what it has seen by means that are always ego-related. This is the middle position, the "bridge," that connects Self to ego and the archetype that Fordham appears to skip over in his description of the Self. Jung (1959/1938) described this bridge as: "the unity of our psychic nature lies in the middle, just as the living unity of the waterfall appears in the dynamic connection between above and below" (p. 269).

Fordham (1976) states some of the views of Balint, a psychoanalyst, on primary narcissism. "In the place of primary narcissism he substitutes primary love" (p. 52). Object-cathexis, Balint maintains, is very intense, but there are no definable objects, only a vague or nebulous experience of them which slowly comes to clear definition. (This is an excellent description of the intuitive function.) Fordham suggests that Balint supports the idea that object-cathexis before birth is possible:

Balint's description of an intense object-cathexis that has no definable objects describes the essence of experience that is intuitive. Balint (1992) describes this as a "harmonious interpenetrating mix-up" (p. 66).

Piontelli (1992) also might support Balint. She saw many variations of fetus activity in the womb. If one assumes that the global (it is interesting that Balint uses the word global because this word is often used to describe the function of intuition) object-cathexis is unconscious, that is, the feeling function is unconscious because there is no ego to perceive the feeling, one can also assume that the feeling or the object-cathexis is known intuitively. If intuition is conscious in the womb, and is the only conscious function, Balint and Piontelli are right--with this difference, that what is conscious is not the adult ego, as they are inclined to believe, but the soul complex represented in the psychological function of intuition.

Balint's (1992) views, which are not discussed at length, support the work of more recent psychoanalysts, such as Piontelli (1992) who questions the possibility of mental life, ego functioning, and awareness in the fetus, and David Kay (1984), a Jungian analyst, who writes of foetal psychology and the possibility of a "rudimentary form of consciousness in utero." Using the model that I propose, one can see that these functions all exist in the form of what is usually called unconsciousness. Thinking, feeling, and sensation are merged, and from the merger, the psychological function of intuition is in operation. It is just this function that is conscious. I would question whether this state of consciousness is as faint or dim as some writers describe. It might be that this description is our view looking in from the outside and to be in the actual experience of the intuitive function, is less than "dim"; it is a "knowing" that often contains certainty beyond doubt and what Jung called "numinosity."

Balint (1992) describes this effectively as "primary love," rather than primary narcissism. After rejecting Balint's idea of a global object-cathexis before birth, Fordham (1976), states:

Nevertheless the idea of the infant's first cathexis being active "loving" and seeking satisfactions, rather than his having to be seduced out of his primary narcissism, is in line with conclusions arrived at from infant observation and experimental data on early modes of perception. (p. 52)

Both Balint and Fordham recognize that the first cathexis (at birth) is love, and active is a just description. Balint (1992, p. 69) gives an example of what he calls primary love. The Japanese have a very simple, everyday word, amaeru, which means "to wish or to expect to be loved." Balint claims that we have no equivalent simple word like this in the West, only long psychological phrases that describe something similar.

I believe that we do have such a word, although the significance has been largely ignored, and a simple one, the word Eros. What Balint is calling primary love is described in the myth of Eros. The name Eros means "demanding love," and from birth the human child demands to be loved by having its needs met. Eros and the Japanese word amaeru appear to have very close meanings. It is possible that unconditional love is the goal behind every object that the infant seeks and demands. When the "I want" has been obtained, such as food, warmth, or comfort, the infant experiences the state of "I have"; in other words, desire has been met and the infant is returned, if only momentarily, to a state of "oneness." If one sees the infant as being in a state of Eros, but defining this state as the ego that is in need, it is not difficult to say that the human child is "born loving," even if this loving is ego centered.

If love is the second or indeed, the real, object of all desire and has been supplied, Eros can be said to be closely related to death. For when the object is no longer desired, the ego or Eros has "died." Thus, the striving toward life and love would also be the striving toward "death," and the dual instincts of love and death could be seen to coexist from the beginning. But death of the ego that puts the infant back in the state of original oneness can simply mean that he or she is satisfied, he no longer desires, and this can be seen as a state of the soul or the soul complex. What is usually referred to as the death complex can be seen as the soul complex, for they have the same meaning symbolically. The child does not have to "fall back asleep" as Fordham suggests to be in this state; indeed, it is the infant who has been fed, cleaned, or cared for, and who does not want anything, but is awake, who is capable of play. Ego and soul are merged in one psyche, and joy is the natural outcome.

The child who seldom has his or her needs satisfactorily met is continuously in Eros or ego love; he or she is always hungry with a hunger that is seldom satisfied, for there might have been food provided without the real object yearned for by the infant, that of love. If the ego is injured, the soul is also injured and both are separated, just as Psyche and Eros were separated, as the myth describes. It is their reconciliation and unity that symbolizes the birth of a girl-child named Joy, and she is born in heaven as an immortal, because these two "opposites" or two kinds of consciousness, or two kinds of love, Eros or ego love, or Psyche or soul love, are united and give birth to Joy. Psychologically speaking, Eros or ego love is the conscious function of sensation, feeling, and thinking; Psyche or soul love is equivalent to the function of intuition, which Jung (quoted in Evans, 1976, p. 100) refers to as "perception by ways or means of the unconscious." Shortly thereafter, Jung says, "you cannot tell why or how, but we have a lot of subliminal perceptions, sense perceptions, and from these we probably draw a great many of our intuitions" (my emphasis, p. 102). This sentence indicates to me that Jung saw a connection between body sensations and the function of intuition. In many myths, these two states of being are often described as opposites at war: the hero and the dragon, the two brothers at war, and good and evil.

The soul can be seen as one who does not desire and love that does not want because there is nothing it does not have. It exists in the original state of oneness where thinking, feeling, and sensation are merged and unconscious, described in mythology as Paradise. This is a description of the two types of consciousness or two types of love that appear to be opposites in the human psyche. This topic will be discussed later in this research in more depth, in the interpretation of the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche, which is a myth that describes a psychological process that I would contend begins at birth and continues throughout life.

The Self, Ego, and Individuation

When Fordham deviated from the idea that the infant was primarily a part of his mother, which was the attitude of Neumann and other analytical psychologists before him, he postulated the possibility of what he was to call the primary child self. Fordham (1988) states:

While the nature of the self, according to Jung, was not all that clear, its action was usually thought of as essentially integrative. The mandala, for instance, tended to appear when the psyche was disorganised in one way or another. Thus the self seemed to introduce an organising process that centralised the personality. It could be defined as a totality, a system that combined in itself both the conscious and unconscious structures and processes. It followed that descriptions of the self involving the idea of its being an archetype are inappropriate, and I found it better to think of the self as beyond archetypes and the ego. In its original state the self was thus before consciousness, in the way analytical psychologists conceive it, and so before the psyche becomes structured into conscious and unconscious elements. (pp. 24-25)

Here Fordham again appears to be describing two different archetypes, that of the Self and that of soul, without differentiating between the two. He appears to disagree with himself in the same paragraph, for at first he says that the Self contains conscious and unconscious elements, then he states that the Self exists before consciousness. But before consciousness there was unconsciousness, which still does not define what the Self is. It seems more appropriate to stay with the description of the Self as that which contains everything or that which contains all the opposites including the soul and the ego. The soul can better be described as that archetype that contains three other archetypes merged into one, and one that does contain both consciousness and unconsciousness because intuitive consciousness is born out of the other three unconscious functions.

From these conclusions Fordham (1979) began to formulate the idea that an infant is separate from his mother, not only after birth, but also while in utero, and is an individual from the beginning:

Applying the idea of integration means that an infant began from a state of unity--a primary unity of the self. This conception leads on to seeing a number of quite obvious facts in a way that had not been possible before because an infant was conceived, among Jungians, to be in all essential respects a part of his mother. The hypothesis of a primary self leads in quite a different direction: the foetus can be seen as essentially separate from his mother and so also can the new-born child. This being so, then coming into relation with his mother becomes an achievement worked out gradually as maturation progresses. It begins with behaviour which involves deintegration out of his primary integrated state. (p. 2)

This primary unity, however, is a psychological unity, where the four functions exist in a state of oneness, but this state is also a state of oneness with the environment, which is the mother's womb and her body, as well as the world. One cannot say that the infant is in a state of oneness that excludes the mother or the world, which is apparently what Fordham is attempting to do. To be "one with" must include the inner world, that is, the psyche of the infant in utero, as well as the outer world, which is the mother. Fordham apparently had difficulty with seeing these two opposites as united in the womb, which they must certainly be, if a primary unity is to be described in any way. His description appears to only describe the infant in a state of unity with itself.

Fordham writes extensively of the relationship of the Self and the ego and their relationship in the process of individuation, but there is little mention of the soul archetype or the soul complex, even though Jung (1964, p. 185) describes the soul as the mediator that returns the ego to the Self. In "Individuation and Ego Development," Fordham (1958) states that various analytical psychologists "all agree, following Jung, that in individuation the ego gives way to the self, which becomes a 'new centre of the personality'" (p. 59). Fordham then goes on to ask:

But what of infants and children, who must inevitably be given some status on the thesis that the process is innate? In their case the ego develops away from the self, for the wholeness of the self is dangerous to them for reasons the exact inverse of those found in adults. (p. 59)

The point that Fordham appears to be making is that the reverse is true in infancy; the ego flows out of the primary Self, a reasonable view except for one point, the archetype of soul, the mediator between the Self and the ego is not included in this premise, yet Fordham does include the possibility of this archetype being included. If we reverse this situation, which seems necessary, it can be said that infants and children innately complete the process by having the soul flow out of the Self and the ego flow out of the soul. The Self is not dangerous to the child, unless he or she never manages to leave it by the soul, but this is not possible if one sees that the child in utero is contained in soul, which is a reflection of the Self. What is dangerous for the infant is the possibility that he or she will not be returned to the soul complex after birth when the ego has come into being. The ego does not, as Fordham state, develop away from the Self; it returns to soul, where it can see the Self and then return to its ego position. The progression is circular and experienced in the moment to moment life of the infant, as well as day to day and year to year. To be stuck in any archetype and not having the flow of psychic movement is dangerous, not only for the child, but also for the adult.

In speaking of the archetypes in childhood Fordham, (1957) states:

There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from the regular progression of archetypal images in individuation: in childhood one would expect them to appear in the reverse order to that found in individuation, i.e., instead of the progression, shadow, animus, or anima, mana personalities, self, we should find the self first followed by the mana personalities, animus or anima and lastly the shadow. Search for such a progression in children is beginning to bear fruit, but the problem is difficult in infancy because the lack of ego makes the recording of images impossible and we have to rely on behaviour alone to confirm or disprove our hypothesis. (p. 117)

Here I assume that the example Fordham gives of a 1-year-old child who scribbles a picture and says "I" is a progression that bears fruit, for it appears to be empirical evidence that the ego is formed at a much earlier age than what was previously accepted by psychologists.

The difficulties that Fordham mentions do not appear to be insurmountable, however, and a hypothetical model can be construed that gives information on the process. In the model that I propose, the archetypes do appear in reverse order, if one begins in the womb instead of at birth. The Self is the center, containing all, and by all I mean unity, oneness, and the usual metaphorical definition of that word; in addition, I would state that this all contains the four psychological functions, merged and undifferentiated. Out of the Self comes God or the "mana personalities" as Fordham refers to them, animus and anima (or soul and spirit) and finally the shadow or that which is still unconscious or the child/animal archetype. These three exist as one and in the Genesis myth are symbolized by the Golden Age of Paradise. From a psychological view, they can be seen as the functions of thinking, feeling, and sensation, which are unconscious and therefore merged and existing as one function, intuition. Thus, the first psychological function that flows out of the Self (intuition) is knowledge that we are one with God, in other words, in Paradise. This is the state, or at least it appears to be what the myth is telling us, of the child in the womb; active thinking, feeling, and sensation, all exist in the unconscious and merged, producing that often-called "dim" state of perception called intuition. I am aware of the difficulty in proving such an abstract concept as being a possibility in the womb, but would suggest that this idea can be supported by numerous myths, not just the Judaic or Christian myth, but mythologies from around the world. Campbell (1988c) said, "When your eyes are closed to distracting phenomena, you're in your intuition, and you may come in touch with the morphology, the basic form of things" (p. 202).

Intuition can be seen as the first psychological function that contains consciousness, or one might call this state "pre-conscious," to distinguish it from what is unconscious or what is conscious. I dislike the term preconscious because it implies before consciousness; however, I would argue that it is a type of consciousness that must be distinguished from ego consciousness. Non-ego or soul consciousness is a better description. Fordham (1957) says, "In using the term preconscious Jung means to designate a state of consciousness in which the ego is very weak and the images representing unconscious vitality are highly charged with libido, i.e., are numinous" (emphasis Fordham's, pp. 107-108). This would fit my description; sometimes the ego is weak, sometimes the ego is absent altogether. The contents would certainly, as Jung described them, be numinous. The important point is to recognize that it is a state that contains knowing and a knowing that great religious leaders, mystics, and philosophers often consider the highest way of knowing. Thus, what appears to be lowest could also be seen as highest; what we had in the beginning and did not know we had (Paradise, innocence) would be the state (Paradise) to which we desire to return, symbolized by the myths of rebirth, and a second birth. This state, however, would necessarily be different, for it would contain ego consciousness (knowledge) of our original innocence, which was a knowing or a consciousness that existed without the ego. In the first state, we would know without knowing that we know; in the second state, we would know that we know. There would be no tension of the opposites because they would be united if a return to Paradise or what I would call a return to the intuitive function or soul consciousness has been achieved.

Ryce-Menuhin (1988) appears to be describing something very similar to the idea of intuition as a way of knowing when he writes:

In my view there is a fourth knowing, or a consciousness in which knowing is not known or transformed to cognitive knowing. If behaviour does not become an object of another behaviour by the same actor it is less than conscious or unconscious, but one can none the less speak of it as a knowing, or at least as a ground of knowing. This fourth level, a ground of knowing or being, is not a higher level of cognitive judgment but may relate to a ground of self-experience that intuitively includes unconscious and conscious self-integrates in its psychological resonance. Both Jung and Fordham have clinically elaborated a possible psychotic core of experiential influence of the self, thought of not only empirically but experientially as "beyond experience," that is, in the totality-of-self.

My theory of a fourth level of knowing that is not dual or cognitive clarifies the sense that every experience is a partial experience of mind's total nature and activity, or totality-of-self. (p. 169)

This is an excellent description of the function of intuition; it is not dual or cognitive, but contains the other three modes of knowing within itself in unconsciousness that is also conscious in the form of intuitive knowing. In other words, as Ryce-Menuhin states, it contains both consciousness and unconsciousness. What Ryce-Menuhin, a Jungian analyst in developmental psychology, describes as "my theory of a fourth level of knowing" is not, however, something new that he has suddenly discovered; Jung gave the function of intuition an equal billing when he included it in the four basic psychological functions, a fact that Ryce-Menuhin and Fordham before him tend to overlook. Part of the problem is understanding the function of intuition, about which Jung (quoted in Evans, l976) said, "and intuition--there is a difficulty because you don't know ordinarily how intuition works" (p. 100). It works automatically when the ego withdraws, in whole or part, from conscious sensation, feeling or thinking. It works in small, everyday ways like knowing in advance who is calling when the phone rings; it works in larger ways, like Einstein's theory of relativity, which he first saw in an "intuitive flash," or in the way that Bucke (1948) described when he referred to cosmic consciousness:

the result is an intuition and the establishment of the intuitional mind, or, in other words, cosmic consciousness.

The self-consciousness that Bucke refers to is what we would call ego consciousness. He saw a similarity in their "birth" although he did not entertain the idea that they might originate simultaneously (or appear to do so) and operate in rhythm from the beginning, mainly because he saw intuition as an acquired function that evolved in the race in the same way that he thought simple consciousness and self consciousness evolved. Simple consciousness can be equated with the ego function of sensation and self consciousness can be equated with the ego function of thinking. The feeling function or what Bucke referred to as the moral nature was the most important function for the development of cosmic consciousness. Bucke is correct in believing that it is feeling that returns the infant to the soul or intuitive consciousness. This is probably also often true in the case of an adult. If the feeling is conscious and intense, the thought exists equally powerful in the unconscious. In that case, both functions would be working at the same time, one conscious and one unconscious. The reverse would be equally true. If the thought is conscious and the feeling intense but unconscious, the result would be the same. In other words, either function might return an adult to an intuitive state in the way that Bucke describes. But in the infant, it is the feeling function because active thinking is unconscious in the very beginning.

There is little doubt that Bucke saw cosmic consciousness as the result of the intuitive function. Throughout his work he attempts to show what it is and how it is acquired. Bucke describes Walt Whitman, his idol and close friend as referring to cosmic consciousness as "my soul." Yet, it does not seem likely that one's soul would be the product of evolution; what would appear more likely is the possibility that the evolution would be in consciousness itself. This would imply soul consciousness, the archetype that represents the instinct of intuition, which is in the psyche from the beginning. Cosmic consciousness is another name for the Self archetype.

(Albert Einstein, The World as I see it,
1979, p. 24)

Fordham, Jung, and the Genesis Hypothesis

At this point, I would like to briefly recapitulate my hypothesis, which is based on Jung's four psychological functions and show how I think these concepts can be linked to Fordham's theory of deintegrates, mainly concerning the unborn child.

My hypothesis assumes that from the beginning of life at conception and during the approximately 9 months in the womb, the unborn human child contains within itself the potential for all the psychological functions which are present and individual from the beginning. Since thinking, feeling, and sensation all appear to be unconscious and undifferentiated, I am also making the assumption that they exist as one psychological function, intuition, which is necessarily conscious in the womb and can be called the soul complex. At birth, there is a major change and by the process of enantiodromia (Jung, 1971/1921, p. 426) the extreme position of intuitive or soul consciousness, which prevailed in the womb, is changed to one of consciousness, where the ego, especially the ego that is connected and related to the body, begins to function and uses from the beginning the functions of sensing, feeling, and thinking. The soul complex or intuitive function recedes and has much the same position that the other three functions had in the womb. It is usually called unconscious, although it also contains consciousness. The soul is the middle position and the complex to which the ego, which has just begun, returns, and from that position is connected to the undifferentiated Self and the conscious ego. The newborn child now lives in a state where consciousness and unconsciousness are present, and at the moment of birth they are equally present and begin to function together. With ego and body consciousness present in the form of conscious sensation and conscious feeling, the functions of intuition and thinking form the personal unconscious. Intuition becomes the fourth function to appear at birth, which makes it identical with the first function that appeared in the womb (see Figures 2, and 3). The intuitive function or soul complex is not entirely unconscious, but different, as Hillman previously stated, from ego consciousness.

Ryce-Menuhin (1988) states the following: "Fordham argues that the development of consciousness in the child violates an original condition of wholeness and postulates, theoretically, a primary integrated state at birth" (p. 55). Fordham never states for certain when he thought consciousness actually started and his views appear to fluctuate and change over the years. How could the child be integrated at birth, if it is consciousness or the ego that disrupts the integrated state? If it is not ego that disrupts the Self and creates consciousness, what is it? Sometimes Fordham attributes ego consciousness to the infant at birth and sometimes he does not, but the point he appeared to be defending was that the child is separate and an individual from the beginning. He starts his theory with this assumption and states that the infant is in an integrated state at birth.

Fordham (1976) states:

The primal self can be conceived as an integrate, a steady state, but if the dynamic systems that we observe later on are to come into existence, it must deintegrate. According to current theory of analytical psychology the self combines opposites within itself; therefore we may assume that when the self deintegrates it will divide into opposites that are psycho-physiological in nature. We may assume, following Jung's theory of psychic energy, that the energy bound in the primary self is neutral and divides into creative and later loving activities on the one hand, destructive and aggressive ones on the other. Each drive follows a partly predetermined pattern and is directed towards objects. (p. 12)

Certainly the energy bound in the Self appears to be neutral, as Fordham claims, and divides into opposites that are psychophysiological in nature, but the division is not one of loving activities on the one hand and destructive and aggressive ones on the other hand, as Fordham describes. This description is too simplistic in giving a value judgment of good or bad to what has been created by the division of the Self. The word "division" is subject to question, because the Self really does not stay divided, it creates the soul and the ego complexes, both of which contain new opposites within each complex. The soul complex can be seen as the psychological part of the psychophysiological duo, whereas the ego complex can be seen as the physiological part of this combination. In his description of the deintegration of the Self, Fordham leaves out the soul archetype, a crucial omission, because the instinctual psychic energy that it represents is the intuitive function that Jung so rightly described as essential to the individuating process.

Fordham earlier says that the primary Self is disrupted by birth, which I would take to mean that in the womb the Self is whole or unified and separate from the mother, and it is birth that disrupts this steady state. This is identical to my theory that the child in the womb lives in a state of wholeness that I am equating with the psychological function of intuition or the soul complex, because the soul is a reflection of the Self. What Fordham calls "prototypic anxiety" (desire) would be the first deintegrative. He places it right after birth, which supports my idea that ego or ego consciousness creates the loss of soul consciousness. With the first experience of the opposites, the soul complex becomes temporarily unconscious.

Fordham calls this the "psyche-soma," which is identical to what I would call the soul (intuition) and body (ego) consciousness that begins with body sensation that is conscious and conscious feeling that makes value judgments). When the "psyche-soma" deintegrates, the infant can be seen to be aware (consciously) of body sensations and how he or she feels about them; functions that were contained in the state of soul or intuitive consciousness have become conscious or deintegrated. When these disturbances have been rectified or the needs of the child satisfied, he or she returns to an integrated state of unity, as Fordham describes, only there will be this difference: The unity then experienced will be in the world, not in the womb, as it was in the beginning of life. The child is satisfied and probably returns to sleep, which Fordham compares with the original state of the Self, but I believe that he equates that state too much with sleep, which is not always the case, and he suggests that the state of unity is also disturbed in the uterus when the fetus is awake and responding to stimuli from within or without. But if the unity is disturbed in the uterus, how could a steady state of integration in the womb be possible?

Fordham (1970) gives a description of the child in utero:

Whilst in utero, there is minimal exteroceptive sensory stimulation. Increase in knowledge of intra-uterine behaviour reveals, however, that some of the activities in which the foetus engages are responses to stimuli such as noise reaching it from outside its mother's body. There are also signs of muscular activity, besides arm and leg movements; thumb-sucking, swallowing amniotic fluid and breathing "exercises" that take place during intra-uterine life. All these show that disturbances in the unitary state occur whether they be stimulated by sensory stimuli or by spontaneous discharges from within the nervous system. But in spite of all these the predominant state of the embryo and foetus is quiescence and something very much like sleep. If we take the infant's intra-uterine life as sleeping and his emergence into the world as the prototype of waking, the cycle repeats throughout life. (p. 111)

Fordham hints here that deintegration takes place in the womb, but he does not elaborate on this interesting thought. Obviously, he thought of integration as occurring primarily in sleep, which is possibly true in early infancy, but not entirely, for if that were so, the infant or the adult would have to go to sleep to be in soul consciousness. This is certainly not the case, although one may be closer to that state of consciousness in one's dreams than in waking life. Dreams, however, can become conscious and their content known and expressed. There comes a time when the infant does not experience bodily needs and is wide awake, and this could be in the first few hours of life. If the infant has been returned to what I have previously called an assimilation of the original experience, which Fordham calls reintegration, often enough, his or her ego would be made stronger, but ego and soul could be seen to be working together. What Fordham calls reintegration, I would call returning to soul or intuitive consciousness. What he attributes to deintegration, I would call related, in the same way he describes, to ego consciousness. But the ego cannot come apart without creating its shadow side, which is the soul.

I am not distinguishing between bits of ego consciousness, although that is certainly legitimate; but I think it becomes easier to see the whole by assuming that ego begins at birth in the form of body sensations, and there are many theorists in psychology who share this view, although it continues to be debated.

The first archetype to become conscious after birth would be the ego archetype, which is related to the psychological functions of conscious sensation, feeling, and thinking. When the ego is born, so also is the shadow, because what was previously conscious in the soul complex disappears into shadow or becomes unconscious; when the infant is in the soul complex, it is the ego that is in shadow or unconscious. The second archetype to become conscious after birth, and there is consciousness even in sleep, is the soul archetype, which returns the infant to the psychological function of intuition, which Jung often referred to as the function that was closest to the unconscious. It is from the soul archetype that the Self is seen and expressed by the ego. This archetype, as Jung describes, is attached to consciousness and to the unconscious. It stands in the middle, looking both ways.

Fordham (1976) states:

At one time I suggested that the order in which they (archetypes) appeared in maturation was the reverse of that in adults, especially those in later life. Since nothing more has developed from this idea, I do not think it can be decided whether it be true or false. (p. 29)

I have previously quoted Fordham's earlier statement concerning the possibility that the archetypes might appear in reverse order (1957, p. 117). I think that he was correct in his assessment, although he didn't appear to realize that he was also describing the soul archetype when he talked of integrates or integration. He did not always believe the ego began at birth and so did not always equate deintegration with the emerging ego at birth, although he does, of course, assume that the ego eventually deintegrates from the Self.

Looked at more broadly, I believe Fordham describes two archetypes, ego and soul, without realizing it. Jung describes the progression of the archetypes in adulthood one should first approach before reaching the Self: First, the ego, then the shadow, then the soul, and finally the Self. The reverse would be true in infancy: first, the Self, then the soul, then the shadow, then the ego. The Self and the soul archetypes would be present in the womb; at birth, the soul and the ego would be present alternately with the shadow because the shadow represents whichever archetype is not in consciousness. A multitude of other archetypes could come under these headings, such as anima (soul) and animus (spirit) or numerous other opposites like the "Divine Syzygy," but the point is that they can be seen, as Fordham described, in reverse order. Out of the Self flows the soul, followed by the shadow and the ego, archetypes that probably appear in quick succession. One could also say that two shadows exist, one dark and one white. When the ego is in a state of desire or deintegrating, as Fordham would say, what has been unconscious becomes conscious, but what remains in the unconscious is what was loss. When opposites come into play, they always have a shadow side.

Fordham (1988, p. 26) undervalued the concept of fusion with the mother and the symbolism inherent in mythology that there is an ideal state equal to Paradise. It is the mother or mother substitute, who helps the baby to reintegrate and return to an experience that simulates the original experience of unity. To that extent, she could certainly be seen as the soul of the infant, who has been manifested in the world, and the vehicle that will carry the infant back to a place where she exists as one with him in his psyche as he existed as one with her in her body. If the primal child Self that Fordham describes is identical with the Self that Jung described, it is a Self united with God and the world, which certainly could be seen metaphorically as Paradise, a concept that Fordham was never able to accept. Yet, he gives no clear definition of his concept of a child-self that is unified. One has to speculate on what kind of unity Fordham's definition of Self described; to say that it is not knowable is justified, but unity is a symbol that can be imagined and described. The child can be seen as an individual from the beginning without destroying the idea of its being also part of the mother, because it is always in relationship to the mother from conception to birth as well as after birth. Indeed, the personal mother will help to create the archetypal experience of the infant, both positive and negative. The first deintegration may evoke the negative mother (witch) archetype very early in the child's life. Neumann (1973/1976) understood that

after birth as the first need of the mammal and especially of the human child.

Neumann is saying that there must be an "other" in the world to hold and contain the human child and who, by loving the child, leads him or her to a place of oneness that subsequently allows the child to be separate. The experience of fusion that Fordham (1988, p. 29) says is an idealized fantasy which cannot be maintained over long periods, is simply a state of being loved, and the experience does not need to be maintained forever: If it is only known and believed, the effect will last forever. If fusion is a fantasy, then the idea that "I love" and "I am loved" must also be a fantasy, which I doubt. Love always ends in fusion because subject and object cancel each other by loving; fusion is just another word for one.

The first experience of the infant and mother at birth can also be seen and understood by Jung's definitions of introversion and extraversion or psychic energy that moves toward or away from the object. (See Figures 14, and 15.) Although Fordham discusses transference in older children, there is no mention of it in early infancy. It is not likely that transference begins at random.

Many of Fordham's interpretations of mythology, which he mostly only briefly mentions, seem misguided, especially concerning the myth of Paradise. His concepts of integration and deintegration, however, are valuable contributions to psychology, especially if one assumes that the first integration is in the womb and the first deintegration is at birth. He had difficulty making the leap from the child in utero to the child at birth, and his uncertainty was often related to not placing the ego at birth. Even so, his contribution to Jungian psychology is invaluable because he surmised that children are capable of individuation and analysis, and in a pragmatic, intelligent manner, showed how this was possible. He cared about the archetype of child, but more than that, he cared about the experience of the actual, living child.

I have attempted in the previous pages to show how the hypothesis offered in this research, based on Jung's concepts of psychological functions, can be linked with the concepts of Michael Fordham, and I would like to end this chapter with my original question: Does an order of Jung's psychological functions exist? I believe that an order does exist and that the first psychological function is intuition, which begins in the womb and can also be described as the soul complex, which contains the other three functions in unconscious and undifferentiated form. By looking at Jung's description of the functions in this manner, it is possible to see aspects of mythology, religion, developmental psychology, and Jungian psychology in general in a way that connects them and allows one to see that art or the archetype is always a reflection of living, psychic experience that is not separate from the body, but dependent upon the substance of which we are composed. Body, soul, and spirit exist as one in every human individual and the knowing is psychological wholeness; the knowing is going home--a return to Paradise.

Returning briefly to Jung (1959/1955, p. 4) and his description of the mandala as an archetype of wholeness and the importance of the "quaternity of the One," I would like to show how the idea of intuition as the first psychological function relates to Jung's description of what he considered the most important archetype. He states:

Because of this significance, the "quaternity of the One" is the schema for all images of God, as depicted in the visions of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Enoch, and as the representation of Horus with his four sons also shows.

Timaeus

Faust

the motif of four as three and one was the ever-recurring preoccupation of alchemy.

What Jung so adequately described as being the most important archetype of wholeness, the motif of four as three and one or, the Maria Axiom, (see Figure 19) is exactly what I am describing in this research when I say that intuition is the function that contains the other three functions plus itself to equal four which is one. This idea can be seen as the key to my interpretation of psychic energy personified by the archetypes and other symbols of mythology and religion, not only of Christianity, but many other divergent cultures. I believe that an interpretation of the cosmological mythology will support the theoretical hypothesis I have given concerning the infant in the womb and the infant at birth.

Jung described the mandala as the most important archetype of wholeness. This is probably because it describes the first living experiences of the human child from the Paradisical unity in the womb to the first experience of a negative opposite in the form of desire, to the experience of a positive opposite of no-desire that occurs when ego demands are met and back to a recapitulation of the original womb experience. The opposites have been lived and experienced in the world and time, whereas in the womb, they were merged and experienced as Paradisical and eternal. Time and eternity are expressed in the simple, abstract circle or mandala. Its multiple variations express that primary, universal, and important experience. (See Figure 18.)

All the images that Jung describes above in mythology and religion can be seen as psychic and instinctual energy that is expressed by archetypal form. The four psychological functions enable us to see first, the separation of this energy; second, the relationship between the energy patterns; and third, the synthesis of the energy patterns and functions to produce psychological wholeness.

I will attempt in the subsequent chapters to support these ideas by interpretations of Sumerian cosmology and symbols, the archetype of the Fallen Angel, the Divine Child archetype, the Divine Mother archetype, the Divine Father archetype and the Hero archetype. I will also interpret the mythology of the four Archangels: Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel, the first and second (lost Paradise) creation mythology of Genesis, American Indian symbolism, and other related mythological references.

The mythologies contain the archetypes, the living expressions of all human experiences that began as basic instincts derived from a single source, the ineffable mystery of the Self.

Figure 18: Circle of Fire

Figure 19: The Maria Axim

Figure 20: The Cosmic Serpent

Figure 21: Golden Trio of the Child

Figure 22: Difference of Functions Without Myth

Chapter 4: First Prelude to Genesis

Chapter 4: First Prelude to Genesis: Antecedent Archetypes That

Describe Basic Psychic Energy and the Four Functions

In Chapter 4, I will briefly identify, compare, and interpret cosmological, archetypal images concerning the mythology of ancient Sumer. The first image discussed is the fourfold structured myth of the creation gods of ancient Sumer: Enki, Enlil, Ki, and An, who can be compared with the Father God, the Serpent, Eve, and Adam in Genesis (see Figure 23). Both cosmologies can be seen as personifications of the four psychological functions of intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking, in their conscious, introverted form. Nammu, the Sumerian mother goddess who precedes the four creating gods (actually three gods and one goddess) can be equated with the Void or Chaos (feminine) archetype, which also antecedes the creation in Genesis. Nammu, called the Primal Sea, and the Void archetypes can both be compared with the archetype of the Self in analytical psychology. I suggest that these five significant cosmological archetypes, in each mythology, are a metaphorical description of the four psychological functions as they differentiate out of the Self, and describe the universal, phenomenological experience of the individual child, as consciousness and unconsciousness begin.

Another related Sumerian cosmological archetype worthy of note is the art image of the Serpent Lord (see Campbell, 1964, p. 10 or Figures 24 and 25 of this work). The Serpent Lord image, which contains two twin images, that of twin serpents and twin lion-birds, is seen as a variation of the Sumerian cosmogony and describes the same process of individuation (see Figure 24). The two sets of twins can be seen as the two sets of primal parents in the Sumerian cosmological material, both describing the birth of the hero archetype, the sensate ego. The Sumerian archetypes are comparable with similar personifications in Genesis, which also contain two sets of primal parents: first, as the Divine Void and the Divine Father God, and second, as Eve and Adam, our "human" parents. The tragic Hero archetype in Genesis is the Serpent, the bringer of light or consciousness and the bringer of darkness or unconsciousness. The dual Parents in all three images can be seen as personifications of the Self (Void) and Soul function of intuition (Father God) archetypes (the Primal Parents) as they give "birth" to the ego archetype, in the function of conscious, introverted sensation (tragic hero). The second set of parents (Eve and Adam) are the rational functions of conscious introverted feeling and thinking.

I will also discuss Lucifer, the Fallen Angel archetype, as Hebrew mythology that preceded and is related to the myth of Genesis (see Figure 27). I suggest that the myth of Lucifer is describing a biological and psychological experience that is similar to the Sumerian cosmology that preceded it and that the later Genesis symbolism continues the myth. The Fallen Angel archetype can be seen in what I have described as level three (see Figure 11), the biological level and creation of the human child. Simultaneously it describes the psychological process of the soul and ego complexes as the functions of intuition and sensation differentiate (fall) from the Self (see Figures 12 and 13).

The Divine Child archetype, the surface layer of the story, can be seen in what I have described as level one (see Figure 9). Moses, as author of Genesis, and representative of the Divine/human Child and Hero archetype, will also be briefly discussed.

Figure 23: Sumerian with Genesis - Four Creating Gods

Figure 24 Difference of Functions with Serpent Lord

Figure 25 Serpent Lord Image

Figure 26 Sumerian with Trinity

Sumerian Archetypes and Symbols as Personifications of Archetypal Energy Patterns

Campbell (1976) states the following:

The roots of the Genesis cosmology appear to be intertwined with the ancient Sumerian vision of the universe and had their beginning in the same soil. Elsewhere, Campbell (1964, pp. 16-17) describes numerous images and archetypes of Sumerian origin, antecedent to the archetypes in Genesis by at least several thousand years. Campbell suggests that the Creation/Paradise myths in Genesis utilize the same archetypes, and many were borrowed from earlier Sumerian mythology.

"The Hebrew story of creation parallels the Sumerian account of "The Huluppu-Tree" in many ways" (Wolkstein and Kramer, 1983, p. 144). The twin trees in Paradise and the Sumerian Huluppu-tree symbol appear to be describing the same psychic experience in a slightly modified form. "For both cultures the tree represents the first living thing on earth" (Wolkstein and Kramer, 1983, p. 145). I suggest that the tree, in both cultures, symbolizes the human spinal column, which forms early in the living fetus and can be seen as "the first living thing on earth." (See Figure 44.) Wolkstein and Kramer (1983) state the following:

The tree also provides for both cultures a configuration of the forces of life and death and consciousness and lack of knowledge. It may be that the powers of the biblical trees in the center of the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, are based on the joined powers of the Sumerian huluppu-tree. (p. 145)

Both mythologies, I would add, attempt to describe how conscious and unconscious sense perceptions, that is, intuition and sensation, work as separate functions that have a common source.

"One of the great puzzles of biology is the question of how each cell knows what it is to become" (Nilsson, 1993, p. 77). I suggest that this "knowledge" has often been attributed to God in the mythological literature, symbolizing the instinctual function of intuition. Since it is still a great puzzle in modern biology, one can understand the difficulty of cultures existing thousands of years ago, attempting to answer the same question. Their answer appears contained in the metaphorical descriptions of human origin, awaiting a biological interpretation. Although this sort of interpretation does not appear as part of the collective consciousness of modern society, it does appear in descriptions such as the following by Jordan Peterson:

Tree and serpent, coupled and singly, have an extensive, pervasive, and detailed history as symbolic agents. They serve similar functions in a multitude of myths describing the loss of paradise, and must therefore serve as apt representatives of some process or structure playing a central part in that loss. It appears that this structure is the nervous system, as it manifests itself in intrapsychic representation. (1995, p. 12)

The "tree" grows in the human mind and body and is necessarily part of the nervous system. The process that it represents symbolically is birth and two forms of consciousness, ego and soul, which ends the Paradise of the womb experience.

One important distinction that many of the stories appear to have in common is a descent or fall-from-grace theme. I interpret this important theme as an attempt of the authors to describe the transition from the womb, symbolized by Paradise, to the experience of the opposites, as consciousness and unconsciousness are differentiated from the Self. The myths appear to be describing a circular process that takes place in the human psyche and body, the eternal return of psychic energy that is also biological, human experience.

Campbell (1976) describes the Sumerian goddess, Nammu:

Nammu is the Sumerian Serpent Queen archetype, an older version of the tail-eating uroboros, but appears to represent the same energy of the undivided Self. She divides (while staying herself) into Twin Serpents, who become Enki, her Serpent lover and Enlil, her Serpent child. Neumann (1949/1954)describes the same division when he says: "The uroboros as a ring-snake, for instance the Babylonian Tiamat and Chaos Serpent, or the Leviathan who, as the ocean, "twines his girdle of waves about the lands, later divides, or is divided, into two" (p. 49). Psychologically speaking, the two that Nammu, as a Self representation divides into, become the functions of intuition, her Serpent Lord Enki, and sensation, or Enlil, her Serpent Child. Thus, there are three psychological archetypes here, Nammu as the Self, Enki as the soul, and Enlil as the nascent ego.

Neumann (1949/1954) goes on to describe the urorobos archetype: "when the Great Mother assumes human form, the masculine part of the uroboros--the snakelike phallus-demon--appears beside her as the residuum of the originally bisexual nature of the uroboros" (p. 49). And this is exactly what happens in the Sumerian cosmology; after taking the form of Enlil, Nammu takes the form of Ki, the Earth goddess, equivalent to Eve in Genesis. Nammu also becomes An, the Sky god and mate to Ki. Before Nammu becomes Ki, however, she mates with her spouse Enki, the god of the Waters, and together they give birth to Enlil, the god of Air. Nammu's Serpent child is the god of Air, Enlil, a Serpent Lord, equivalent to the Serpent in Paradise.

Thus, Enlil has two sets of primal parents, the first set being Nammu and Enki (both symbols of the primal water and birth) and the second set being Ki and An or Heaven and Earth. The description of dual parents gives Enlil a special importance as a Divine male Child/Hero archetype. Enlil, or the function of conscious sensation, is the male child/hero who separates the World Parents. The undifferentiated Self, personified as Nammu in Sumerian mythology and the Void in Genesis, and the soul, personified as Enki, the Father God of Sumer and the Father God of Genesis, are the first primal parents who give birth to the ego, personified as Enlil. The second set of parents to Enlil are An and Ki, Heaven and Earth, and they are considered the creating gods in Sumerian mythology, while their equivalent in Genesis are the fallen Adam and Eve, our first human parents. An and Ki, Adam and Eve, are personifications of the conscious, rational, introverted functions of thinking and feeling.

Consciousness does not rise up like an island from the sea of unconsciousness, dividing into the island and the sea or only two that are no longer one. Consciousness and unconsciousness arise simultaneously out of the primal sea of undifferentiation, which might better be described as twins born from the same mother. The Self is the Mother, one twin is (soul) consciousness and the other twin is (ego) consciousness. Or, before the soul becomes undifferentiated further, they are seen as the son/lover, in the Sumerian mythology and other myths with that symbolism. The Self, or Great Mother archetype, remains undifferentiated energy.

Nammu, the Self, who was in a state of total undifferentiation, reflects Enki, the Father God, who symbolizes nascent consciousness (intuition), showing the equilibrium of undifferentiation has been changed or moved. Enki represents the ego in its primal form--soul consciousness--which is passive thinking, or the function of conscious intuition. Conscious intuition is the function out of which all conscious sense perceptions flow and as such, can be identified as unconscious body sensations of the human child. In the myths, conscious body sensations are seen as the Serpent Lord Enlil, or the Serpent of Genesis. In Genesis, conscious sensation is the Serpent, who has as his unconscious and dark side, the Father God, who has been "lost" at birth.

Enki is represented as Father/Son god, who still contains the all as one in the one differentiated function of intuition. This is an important distinction and the same energy that is described in the Genesis myth. Out of the primal sea, the void archetype in Genesis, comes consciousness and unconsciousness, the god and the goddess, still merged but distinguished from Nammu, the void or the Self. The Father God of both religions now becomes the container rather than the contained. Self and Soul are mirror images of one another.

Enki is the Serpent King, mate to Nammu, the Serpent Queen. The snake symbolism represents the world of primal instinct. Jung (1956/1912) calls the snake "representative of the world of instinct, especially of those vital processes which are psychologically the least accessible of all" (p. 396). That is probably why the Sumerians and numerous other people repeatedly use the snake as an archetype for cosmological material, and why it personifies the Self, the soul or the ego in their primal form. As a primal creature that renews itself by shedding its skin, which symbolizes rebirth, it is an excellent symbol of transformation. It can also be seen as an important archetype that represents the process of individuation as the instinctual life energy and the beginning of the four functions. As the initial instinct of superconsciousness, we can understand how intuition is represented in the mythology as the creating Father God, with sensation as the Child God or deceiving serpent, depending on the myth.

The Earth Mother Goddess Ki and Earth Mother of all the living, Eve, represent the function of feeling, which, "allies itself with every sensation" (Jung, 1971/1921, p. 434). In this case, sensation would be the Serpent, either Enlil or the Serpent of Eden. On a psychological level, the numerous representations of the woman and the snake can be seen as representations of the functions of feeling and sensation in their conscious and introverted form. The appearance of Ki or Eve can be seen as the further differentiation of the functions as they separate from Nammu, the Void or the Self and become conscious. Eve becomes conscious before Adam in the myth of Genesis and the Serpent is already conscious (knowing) when he offers Eve the infamous apple. Eve, Ki, or the feminine principle (not any living woman) represent feeling as the first conscious, introverted rational function (in the human child) that is closely associated with the irrational function (in the human child) of conscious, introverted sensation or the snake.

Nammu, superconsciousness or the Self, mates with the Father God, Enki (intuition), who is her spouse and son. Enki represents the first instinctual movement of life and the first form of consciousness, previously contained in the primal sea of undifferentiation (Self), which is not the same as total unconsciousness. In the human child, this would be the irrational and instinctual function of intuition that contains primal consciousness.

Nammu and Enki, both archetypes of the primal waters, can be seen as personifications of the same primal energy that is described in Genesis as the separation of the primal waters. Nammu is the receptive water of the feminine and Enki is the creative water of the masculine, the human sperm that is symbolized by the serpent. The serpent who is "water," who connects with the living water, is in the water of the womb. Both describe psychologically the first differentiation of the functions as intuition separates from the Self. And both describe the biological conception and separation of the human child. It is necessary to understand my interpretation of the mythology, to see the human cell and body as containing an awareness of its own. "Our bodies are composed of energy and information" (Chopra, 1993, p. 14).

Enki is the Father god, god of the Water, the god of Earth, and the god of Heaven, where he was one with Nammu. He is the Nammu's Serpent Lord and the god of Wisdom. Enki, after being awakened by Nammu and at her instruction, creates humanity out of clay (Campbell, 1976, p. 108). This is comparable with the symbolism of the Father God of Genesis, who creates Adam from the slime of the earth.

Wolkstein and Kramer (1983) describe Sumerian deities:

The leading deities of this pantheon were the four creating gods controlling the four major components of the universe: the Sky God An; the Earth Goddess Ki, whose name was changed in the course of time to Ninhursag, Queen of the Mountain; the Air God Enlil, who gradually became the leader of the pantheon; and the Water God Enki, who also came to be designated the God of Wisdom. (p. 123)

Out of Nammu or the Self, the four creating gods of Sumer are born: Enki, Enlil, Ki and An, which is the same fourfold pattern of Genesis and the archetypes of Father God, the Serpent, Eve, and Adam. "In practically all cultures, the division of the world into four, and the opposition of day and night, play an extremely important part" (Neumann, 1993, p. 108). This is what happens in the Sumerian mythology, as the four creating gods, what I consider to be the four functions in a state of conscious introversion, evoke the opposite positions that are unconscious. Light has been born and with it the unconscious or darkness, is also "born." In psychological terms, this darkness is the unconscious, extraverted side of the four functions.

Of the four creating deities and as the spouse of Nammu, Enki appears to be the most important creating Sumerian male god and can be equated with the creating Father God in Genesis. Both archetypes can be seen to personify the psychic energy of the function of intuition and subjective or introverted intuition as the first movement of creation. Like Nammu, as the primal sea, Enki is the god of water, symbolizing the undifferentiated functions that exist as one in a primal state. Enki can be seen as the soul mate of Nammu, who represents the Self. Like a twin, the image used by the Sumerians when they describe the Serpent twins, he is a mirror image, the same yet different and this difference defines the beginning of the differentiation of the functions as they flow out of the Self.

Heaven and Earth are the second set of parents to Enlil. In the Sumerian cosmology, they are Ki, the Earth goddess, and An, the god of Heaven. These two gods represent the further differentiation of the Self as the rational functions of feeling and thinking begin. Conscious thinking (Heaven) has unconscious feeling (Earth) as its mate. In other words, when thinking is conscious, feeling is unconscious, and when feeling is conscious, thinking is unconscious. Each reflects the other and both personify the conscious and the unconscious that has been divided, what Neumann (1949/1954) calls the "World Parents" (p. 103). In the Genesis myth, this energy is personified by Adam (thinking) and Eve (feeling), the first parents of humanity.

Nammu and Enki and Ki and An are the dual parents. The Divine Child that they all give birth to is unmistakably Enlil, the god of air, who separates both sets of parents, causing the ego and consciousness, as well as the soul and unconsciousness, to begin. This would describe the function of conscious sensation (Enlil) as it awakens in the human child. This is represented as Enlil, who is asleep (unconscious) when Nammu awakens him. He is Enlil while asleep, still contained in the primal parents, and Enki when he awakens (becomes conscious), thus the Serpent Lord or mate of Nammu when awake and her child/son or Enlil when asleep. Enki, as intuition, is Nammu's spouse and Enlil or sensation is Nammu's child. Finally, Enki becomes Enlil, the son that separates the first parents (the Self). This is the function of conscious, introverted sensation. Neumann (1949/1954) describes the separation of the World Parents using Egyptian mythology; the meaning appears the same:

Shu appears to be the same archetypal energy that Enlil represents, and both gods of air can be compared with the Serpent in Genesis, who appears to have been sleeping or absent until Eve's scene at the tree.

Campbell (1976) compares Enlil with the Greek Kronos archetype: "An begot the air-god Enlil, who separated Earth and Heaven, tore them apart just as, in the well-known Classical myth of Hesiod, Gaia (Earth) and Uranos (Heaven) were separated by their son Kronos (Saturn)" (p. 108). A numerous pantheon was born in the Greek myth, just as the Sumerian pantheon comes into being with Enlil. The pantheon can be seen as symbolizing the numerous and powerful conscious sense perceptions of the human child. Enlil or Kronos (conscious sensation) will lead the group.

An inversion can be seen at this point. In the Sumerian religion, Enlil is seen as a beneficial, divine creating son/child/god. He is twin Serpent to Enki, the Father God, the same but different, which describes the process of differentiation and the transformation that takes place as one function becomes two functions. In the Hebrew religion that followed, the same energy is seen as opprobrious, as the Serpent in the Garden who deceives humanity and causes the loss of Paradise. The inversion of the Hebrew mythology, however, occurs again in Christianity, where Enlil has his counterpart in the Christ archetype. Like Enlil, who is twin Serpent to the Father God and the spouse/lover of Nammu, Christ announces that he is the Son and one with the Father God. The Virgin Mary is Mother to the Son and Mother to the Father God, since they are one, in the same way that Nammu is Mother to Enki and at the same time Mother to Enlil.

Neumann (1949/1954) describes the transition of Mother and Child as twin Serpents who later become the Madonna and the Christ Child, as something that develops over time. He states:

The fully human end-figure, the human Madonna with the human child, has her forerunner in figures of the human mother with her companion snake in the form of a child or a phallus, as well as in figures of the human child with the big snake. (p. 49)

What appears to have changed, from the Sumerians, to the Hebrews, to the Christians, was the perception of psychic energy or the function of conscious, introverted sensation as positive or negative. Genesis describes the loss of oneness with God, life as now separate from God, while Sumerian and Christian mythology describe the creative potential of energy that is like God or a Child of God or equal as a creating God. This is a description of the differentiation of energy from two perspectives, two opposite views that can be seen as having a common source on a depth level.

The symbolism of the feminine principle, energy that flows out of Nammu, becomes the Earth goddess Ki, Queen of the Mountain. As an Earth Mother archetype, Ki can be compared with Eve and both represent the differentiated function of feeling, specifically introverted feeling (desire) that has become conscious, leaving its opposite of "no desire" in the unconscious. This is the creative energy of the introverted (subjective) feeling function.

The sky god An is also a Father archetype and can be compared with Adam in Genesis. Both represent the function of introverted, conscious thinking. An and Enki are the two "father" archetypes in Sumer; Adam and The Father God of Genesis are the two "fathers" in Genesis. Adam is the first human father; God is the Heavenly Father. Rational, conscious, introverted thinking is the first function to give birth or create; irrational, introverted, conscious intuition is the first function to stir in the body of the human child as primal instinct. God is the instinct that creates the archetype (Adam) in His image.

With the birth of consciousness in each of the rational functions, unconsciousness is also born, separating Heaven and Earth or creating the functions of feeling and thinking. These two opposites are portrayed in the Sumerian myth as the Lion-birds. Thinking and feeling and their alternating rhythms of consciousness and unconsciousness are one twin Lion-bird. The functions of feeling and thinking are opposites that in this symbol are joined as one powerful animal. In the Sumerian mythology, they are An and Ki or Heaven and Earth, separate archetypes when apart and mates when joined, which describes consciousness and unconsciousness in the thinking and feeling functions in the same way.

Sensation and intuition, with the same oscillating rhythm, are the irrational functions that compose the other twin Lion-bird. Enki and Enlil, or intuition and sensation, like the Father God and the Serpent in Genesis, have been separated but are still joined in the image of one robust animal who contains both consciousness and unconsciousness and the power of both. The Lion-birds are personified as puissant, fabulous creatures whose primary task appears to be guarding and protecting the twin serpents and the open doors that lead back to Paradise or the Self. The guard/protector symbolism may describe the necessity of maintaining both the irrational and the rational functions in a balanced state. At the same time, they depict the process of differentiation out of the Self.

The Serpent Twin image (see Figures 24 and 25) describes what I believe to be the same archetypal pattern contained in the cosmological image of the four creating gods of Sumer. Campbell (1964) describes the ancient image of the Serpent Lord:

The winged dragons or lion-birds, which are equivalent to cherubs or angels (see Campbell, 1964, p. 12), link this image to the much later archetype of Lucifer, the favorite angel of God, who is transformed into the rejected child or angel and is seen as a serpent. Both images of serpent and angel appear in the later Paradise myth, the Serpent as the deceiver of Adam and Eve and the Lion-birds as the angels or cherubim who guard the entrance to Paradise with flaming swords. The same sword symbolism is present in the Sumerian image and possibly has a similar meaning. The open doors are the entrance back to Self, Void or Nammu. The copulating vipers are Nammu and her Serpent Lord, Enki or what Jung called the Divine Syzygy. Symbolized by an act of sexual love, they return to the original oneness, or if seen as coming out of the Self, which would be the case at birth, they are the first splitting of the Serpent Lord or primal energy into two, namely, the king and his queen or the ego and soul.

The Queen Serpent Nammu, represents the undifferentiated Self, who contains the Serpent Lord and their child as one. The King Serpent represents the psychological function of conscious intuition, a reflection of the Self as an image of the soul. Thus, the Twin Serpents can be seen as the Self and the soul, followed by the soul and the ego or the two irrational functions of intuition and sensation, who now become the Serpent Twins. While in a state of unconscious sensation, Nammu's son/lover is Enlil. When unconscious sensation becomes conscious, it becomes Enki, the spouse of Nammu. The Self, the Void in Genesis, or the goddess Nammu, is always in contact with either the spouse, Enki or intuition or the child/son, Enlil or sensation. In this way, Nammu or the Self is spouse and mother simultaneously, which is often depicted in this mythology. Ego and soul have not yet been differentiated until Enlil is born, which represents the separation of the soul (intuition) and the ego (sensation) and the beginning of two separate functions in the human child.

The bird/angel, the winged aspect of the lion-birds, represents the divine or that aspect of the creature closest to the Serpent King, God, Heaven, Spirit or the masculine principle. The body of the lion represents one of the most powerful animals on earth, often described as monarch of the jungle. The lion appears to represent the instinctual but royal nature of humanity, symbolized by being associated with the sun and the color gold, both symbols of the divine or the spiritual. The lion half of the Lion-bird archetype represents the feminine principle, being associated with Earth rather than Sky, just as the bird/angel is associated with Heaven. The dragon, lion, or serpent that has wings similar to the Greek caduceus appears to be describing the divinity of consciousness and unconsciousness that are differentiated but united in a new form as a powerful creature.

The twin serpents of intuition and sensation stand alone as separate functions, as Jung described, and appear as opposites of one another. All extreme opposites necessarily depend on one another and are connected to one another; the psychological functions of sensation and intuition, as well as feeling and thinking, are no exception. Each of the irrational functions has a three -in-one motif that is the exact opposite of the other. I have previously described this as the unconsciousness of the functions of sensation, feeling, and thinking, while intuition is conscious. Sensation is the reverse, with feeling, thinking, and intuition unconscious (see Figures 22 and 24).

As the first function of consciousness after birth, according to my hypothesis, sensation can be seen to stand alone. Intuition is unconscious like the two rational functions of feeling and thinking. I have previously stated the rationale for this description: From birth, feeling is the second function to become conscious because there is nothing to judge before body sensations are experienced. Thinking is the third function to become conscious, and intuition is the fourth function to become conscious after birth, which suggests a return to the first function of intuition, experienced in the womb. This is the theme of Maria's axiom, which states that one becomes two, two becomes three, three becomes four, and the fourth is a return to the first.

In the newborn, but not necessarily later, conscious feeling would necessarily have thinking and intuition as unconscious, but sensation would be conscious and the object of all value judgment. Chopra (1993) appears to be describing the same thing: "Because there are no absolute qualities in the material world, it is false to say that there even is an independent world 'out there.' The world is a reflection of the sensory apparatus that registers it" (p. 11).

Even though conscious feeling later "extends to every content of consciousness" (Jung, 1971/1921, p. 434), in the first round of consciousness in the ego functions, feeling would have no object of consciousness except for its own conscious, perceived body sensations. Conscious feeling would be contiguous with conscious sensation, and it might be said that conscious feeling thereafter could be defined as always containing conscious sensation even when it is seen as an independent function. Feeling is, as Jung (1971/1921) described, "allied with every sensation" (p. 434). Thus, the human infant would have one conscious rational function (feeling) and one conscious irrational function (sensation), whereas one rational function (thinking) and one irrational function (intuition) would remain unconscious. (I am describing the unfolding of the functions in the first moments of life, as I believe the myth does.)

Jung (1971/1921), described the Syzygy archetype:

Thus, the Divine Syzygy archetype of the Serpent Lord image can be seen as a moment frozen in time, either the Syzygy that is born out of the Self or the Syzygy before a return to the Self. The latter is what Jung describes as leading directly to the experience of individualization and the attainment of the Self.

Sensation can be seen as negative and described as the Fallen Angel or Devil Serpent, or positive and described as the Divine Child, depending on the interpretation of the experience. In the old Sumerian myths when the consort of the goddess dies, the death describes a fall from grace and a transformation, birth as the death of oneness followed by a rebirth. If sensation is seen as positive, the myth describes the goddess and her Divine Child or the Virgin and Christ archetypes, which represent a return to Paradise motif by the reintegration of the infant back to its original state of oneness or the psychological function of intuition. Thus, the Divine Child, the psychological child and the biological child can be seen as identical experiences that occur simultaneously (see Figures 9, 10, 11, and 12).

It is the conscious thought, for example, the god or the old thought that stands alone without its opposite, that dies, and this is necessary for a new thought to be born or created. When this sacrifice is made (often with pain and suffering as well as with unconditional love and joy), the goddess or the divine child or the father god, for they are all one and the same in intuition, gives a new thought or a new image. It is given or experienced as given by the function of conscious intuition because no effort is required after the sacrifice of the ego has been made.

I suggest that the numerous mythologies and religions that attempt to describe this process by symbolic images and simple stories were describing, among other things, the making of an image and the process of imagination in the human psyche, as Jung was in his description of active fantasy as the product of the function of conscious intuition. That function so often referred to as the fourth is also the first, the alpha and omega of psychic energy.

Radhakrishnan (1988) describes intuition beautifully:

Creativity is often described as the ability to see as a child. There is every reason to believe that the human body and brain of the child are working much earlier and in most cases, in a more structured and organized manner than previously described in psychology. I believe that the process begins when life begins and is the same for an infant as it is for an adult, were we able to observe it directly. How and why a new symbol is given remains a mystery and a question to be asked. It may be that the new message given, like the message of an angel, comes from the depths of the Self, like a divine child waiting to be born. It may even be that this is the information stored in the genetic structure and human instincts of the body of the human child. If intuition is unconscious body sensation, which I believe it to be, the body would help construct the first image given to the human mind, and it would not be separate from the soul.

The motif of the twin vipers or the Serpent's Bride that Campbell says originated in 2025 B.C. is an ancient image (see Campbell, 1964, pp. 9-10, Figure 1) that appears to be related to the much later image of an angel falling out of Heaven into Hell or the fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise to the earthly realm of human struggle. Lucifer will be discussed next, as another image of conscious, introverted sensation that falls out of Heaven (see Figure 27).

The Fall of the Divine Child/Angel, Lucifer: The Serpent Archetype and the Four Psychological Functions

The monotheistic religions of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam share a common belief in angels and demons. Most of the information concerning this archetype comes, as Godwin (1990) describes, "from outside the orthodox scriptures and canons of the four religions that believe in the existence of angels" (p. 9). Godwin (1990) says that "the term angel derives from a Greek translation of the original Hebrew Mal'akh, which originally meant the shadow side of God, but later came to mean messenger (p. 7). Both terms, Thompson (1991) also tells us, "refer to a function or status rather than an essence" (p.148).

The four psychological functions can be seen in the same way, as messengers or angels of the human psyche or brain. The premise that I have previously presented, namely, that intuition is the first function to develop and begins in the womb as the undifferentiation of all four functions, can be applied to the myth of the Fallen Angel (see Figure 27). This is comparable to the archaic Sumerian myths that came before, as well as the Genesis myth, which came later.

Schneiderman (1988), discussing Augustine's views concerning angels, states:

The Serpent and Angel archetypes are both significant symbols in the Judaic-Christian religions; most of the important messages in the Old Testament come from God through the voice of an angel. Although Augustine thought it was the Lord himself speaking in the New Testament, angels are never far away on important occasions and appear to be the consequential method of communication between God and humanity.

The myth of Lucifer and the Paradise myth in Genesis both appear to be variations of the same theme; both describe the transition of one state of being (Heaven in the first, Paradise in the second) to another state (loss of Heaven and loss of Paradise) by the symbol of a Fall (which represents a physical and psychological birth) from grace that separates first Lucifer, then Adam, Eve and the Serpent from God. Psychologically, both myths also appear to be describing the transition from the psychological function of intuition (Heaven, Paradise or being in the womb) to that of the function of sensation and ego consciousness (birth). Thus, they describe the biological or physical birth of the child and the psychological birth of the child simultaneously. This is in addition to the first level of the myth, in which the Lucifer as Divine Child myth is simply the loss of oneness with God after birth, while the Genesis myth, with Adam and Eve as the divine children, says the same thing but takes the story further.

If the functions of intuition and sensation are mirror images or the reverse of one another (as are the functions of feeling and thinking), they would not function at the same time, although the transition from one to the other could occur expeditiously by human standards of time. To differentiate or become separate, it would be necessary for one function to become unconscious while the opposite function occurs in consciousness. This would be the beginning of not only consciousness, but also unconsciousness.

Figure 27: Lucifer

The human child can be seen as being one in his or her individuality, while possessing two forms of consciousness, that of ego consciousness or the ability of the four functions to operate (apparently) independently of one another and that of soul consciousness or the ability of the four functions to operate as one undifferentiated function. This translates psychologically as consciousness and unconsciousness in Jungian terminology. The marriage of these two forms of consciousness can be seen as giving birth to what Campbell (1973, p. 259) describes as superconsciousness, a third position that would represent a return to one or the Self. The human child would thus be more than androgynous in nature, he or she would be tripartite or three-in-one: biological (body), psychological (soul), and spiritual (spirit). He or she could be said to possess consciousness, unconsciousness, and superconsciousness, the third being the result (child symbol) of the first two that are joined.

In Judaic lore, Lucifer was the Bringer of Light (light being a primary symbol for consciousness), and he was also the Serpent of Darkness, symbolizing the unconscious. Peterson (1995) describes Lucifer:

Lucifer can be seen as a personification of the human nervous system, which brings not only light, but darkness as well. He can also be seen as the bringer of consciousness, comparable with the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, with whom he is later associated. If, however, consciousness is seen as the loss of superconsciousness, light without darkness would be an opposite that lacked its other half, thus, consciousness can be seen in the pejorative way that Genesis describes. Light or consciousness and darkness or unconsciousness that has become divided would destroy Paradise.

As the favorite angel, the Divine Child, Lucifer was one with God and lived in that middle place where consciousness and unconsciousness are not separated, but exist as one. For this reason, I equate Lucifer in his Divine Child aspect with the psychological function of intuition, which I understand to be all the functions existing as one undifferentiated function. When he falls from Heaven, Lucifer becomes the fallen angel turned Serpent, or the function of conscious sensation. The archetype or image representing this function is always subject to change, but it will always be an archetype representing the Divine Father, the Divine Mother, or the Divine Child, either as a person, animal, plant or stone, such as the philosopher's stone.

The image of the Serpent as a deity is prevalent in cultures and religions throughout the ancient world, as is the association of the serpent with the body. Neumann (1949/1954) describes the body scheme in the following way:

It derives from one's own body sensations

Mythology often appears to be describing body sensations when it speaks of serpents, as well as describing the human spine, which can be symbolized as the tree or twin trees or the serpent or twin serpents. The serpent image connected with the spine has its best-known representation in the Indian Kundalini mythology. Chetwynd (1982) describes body symbolism that is related to the serpent as "connected with the spinal column, which joins the physical nature (the genitals) to the spiritual nature (the head)" (p. 65).

Because the Serpent archetype has been symbolized repeatedly in multiple and diverse religions as a god that creates humanity, or a devil who deceives humanity, I believe it can be seen as a symbol for either of the irrational functions. It is with the perceiving functions, followed by the rational functions, that the human child creates and sometimes destroys the world. If, as Freeman (1995) describes, "all knowledge originates within brains of individuals" (p. 2), the only thing known is what we ourselves create.

The human spine delivers the message of sensation, whether conscious or unconscious. Those that come to consciousness can be seen as Lucifer after the fall, while those that remain unconscious can be seen as the Divine Child archetype, that is, unconscious sensation or intuition, still contained in God.

It was Lucifer, angel turned serpent (or our human, animal nature, that is, the instinctual function of conscious introverted sensation), who offered the apple (consciousness) to Eve, which psychologically speaking, would mean that the function of sensation offers or introduces consciousness to the function of feeling, personified as the innocent Eve, who is still contained in God as undifferentiated energy.

It is the subjective body experience of the human child that provides an object (of self-reference if the emphasis is placed on the subject (introversion) rather than the external object (extraversion), which would mean that the subject and object are not yet separated--the object is also the subject) on which a judgment of good or bad can be made. Eve does not use her feeling, she is the archetype that represents feeling in the human child. In the very first experiences of the human newborn, which is the topic explored here and what I believe to be an underlying theme of the cosmological material, sensation could not possibly follow feeling. Feeling that is undifferentiated is feeling that is still, like Eve, in a state of innocence. There must be an object of reference before a value judgment can be made and the only object present in the beginning is the body of the infant as it experiences body sensations stimulated by his or her experience of opposites in the world. After the first experience, and with many repetitions of sensuous or feeling experiences in the child or adult, feeling could follow sensation. How the mythology might appear to be describing that experience is another topic. The objective of this research, however, is the beginning experience of the infant (before and immediately after birth). I am not concerned with inferior or superior functions in any way. I do not believe that consciousness is superior to unconsciousness or the reverse. If anything is superior it would be the state of superconsciousness, which would describe a balanced Self.

Western mythology usually assigns the masculine principle to consciousness and the feminine principle to unconsciousness. The subjective value judgment that states that consciousness is superior to unconsciousness has often been erroneously used and applied to living women, rather than the archetype and used against them in the most derogatory way. Not being able to see the archetypes as possible representations of psychic energy inherent in most human psyches, male and female, leads to a concrete, literal, and fundamental interpretation of the myth that has been used (especially in the Judaic-Christian religion) to subjugate and control women. That is not the fault of the myth but the shortcoming of those who interpret any literature in a rigid, simplistic, and concrete way, ignoring the implications of metaphor.

It appears logical to me to assume that a pure phenomenological experience of the body can and does exist that is free of a value judgment, but the reverse does not appear to be logically true. No value judgment can be made that does not refer to an object of some kind. In addition, if sensation is an irrational and instinctual function, it would necessarily precede feeling as a rational function, and as Jung (1971/1921) stated, be "the matrix out of which thinking and feeling develop as rational functions" (p. 454).

Conscious sensation seeks to divide and separate, giving specific knowledge of the object as perceived by the subject. It appears reasonable to me to assume that a function that gives a picture of the whole would precede a function that gives specific isolated information and that sensation would be the function that flows out of intuition, and not the other way around.

Intuition may provide what is perceived as catastrophic and evil information; the function itself, however, has always been identified with a Divine God or Goddess or a variation of the Divine Child archetype, such as the angel. Because intuition appears to me to be the function that contains all the other functions, the Father God archetype in the Judaic-Christian religion appears to be the closest description of this energy. One function contains them all, just as one Father God contains everyone in Paradise. This, from my perspective, supports the premise that Paradise is in the womb, where all functions are contained in potential form, including the ego, which is first represented by the sleeping or absent Serpent.

The function of sensation, unlike intuition, has not been associated with the divine, but just the reverse. Body knowledge, carnal knowledge has its best representative in the idea of sin and separation from God. This is my rationale for defining the Father God as an archetype for the function of conscious, introverted intuition and the Serpent as an archetype for the function of conscious introverted sensation. It is also my rationale for seeing the first function present in the fetus as the intuitive one and the second function present as that of sensation, which begins at birth and like Lucifer, brings consciousness, and at the same time, darkness or unconsciousness. He then becomes the angel or Prince of darkness. From my reading of the myth, this describes the split, which is not in consciousness, really, but in the superconsciousness or Self that preceded it. We can know little or nothing without a return to that state, which may necessitate first a return to the function of intuition. If it is the first function to flow out of the Self, the ego complex merged with what I am calling the soul complex, would precede the ego and ordinary ego consciousness. It would be the splitting of the merged ego/soul that creates them as separate functions and separate complexes, the soul being attached to the function of intuition and the unconscious, and the ego being attached to the function of sensation and consciousness.

The image of the woman or goddess and the serpent together is described in numerous mythologies other than the Judaic-Christian one, and they are all probably attempting to describe psychic energy and the relationship of the two functions of conscious, introverted sensation and conscious, introverted feeling. (See Johnson, 1988 for numerous descriptions and images of the relationship of the goddess and the serpent.)

The first cry of the newborn is negative feeling that judges (bad) when he or she perceives, by conscious body sensation, a lack of something, namely, the loss of the merged opposites, when conscious sensation is first experienced. This is knowledge (known by and through the body) of the opposites of good and evil and produces the first value judgment, which is followed by the first emotion (love that desires, that is, ego love) of the human child, the only animal on earth capable of shedding tears, a physical manifestation of the body functions of sensation and feeling. This is personified in the Genesis myth as the Serpent and Eve or in the myth of the Fallen Angel, simply as the Serpent or the function of conscious, introverted sensation, with the earth representing the mother or the feminine. The value judgment of the feeling function is pure phenomenological experience brought on by the first phenomenological experience of the sensations experienced in the body. Feeling is not identical with affect, as Jung (1971/1921) described when he said:

subjective

Feeling that "allies itself with every sensation" is describing body sensation and what Jung did not say is that this is possibly because the body sensation precedes every possible feeling, which in turn would precede every possible affect. Without a perception of the sensation there would be nothing to judge or value and without the value judgment it could not turn into an affect. Jung (1971/1921) describes this when he goes on to say:

affect

In this short description, Jung distinguishes the difference between the feeling function and affect or human emotion and suggests that they are separate aspects of psychic energy, but aspects that are closely related, because it is the intensity of the value judgment given by the feeling function that creates or, as Jung puts it, turns into affect or human emotion. Obviously affect can be brought on by any of the functions in ordinary life. However, at birth or shortly thereafter, feeling will turn into an affect based only on conscious body sensations or perception of the body experience. If intuition and thinking are unconscious, as I believe them to be, they will not be evaluated; the conscious evaluation will be concerning the conscious sensate experience. Sensation will flow out of intuition and proceed to conscious feeling, which will register as an unconscious thought in the thinking function.

I think that Jung's description of feeling is adequate in every respect and can be applied to the infant at birth, which the mythology is describing in another, more pictorial manner, using the images and archetypes as personifications of minute psychic energy that is difficult, but not impossible, to describe by other means. Lucifer, as the Serpent/Devil archetype and one of the important archetypes in Judaic-Christian mythology, appears to me to be the personification of the psychic energy contained in the function of conscious introverted sensation. If that is so, his importance as an archetype may be important to developmental psychology that attempts to see archetypes and mythology as instinctual patterns of energy that represent psychological experience.

Godwin (1990) describes Lucifer, the Fallen Angel archetype, as the "Morning Star" (see Figure 33) archetype:

seven

Five centuries

Lucifer's image obviously did not begin with Hebrew mythology, but had its roots in other ancient, primitive religions. Serpent gods were prevalent in these cultures without the pejorative connotations of the Genesis myth. Campbell (1964) tells us: "In Eve's scene at the tree, nothing is said to indicate that the serpent who appeared and spoke to her was a deity in his own right, who had been revered in the Levant for at least seven thousand years before the composition of the Book of Genesis" (emphasis mine, p. 9).

That the archetypes and, particularly, the archetype of the Serpent Lord, which was the probable prototype for Lucifer and the Serpent in Genesis, are repeated in numerous mythologies down through the centuries, indicates that they are universal and that they represent psychological and physical experience. Cosmological myths or any myth of beginnings, such as Lucifer, contain a description of primal individual experience, the microcosm contained within an apparent description of the macrocosm, mirror reflections of one another and identical. It is for this reason that the cosmological myths can be seen as an attempt to describe not only the creation of the world, but the creation of the human child, as she or he creates the world. They are, therefore, relevant to developmental psychology, which thus far has only hinted at this connection.

The myth of Lucifer as the Fallen Angel may not be described in the orthodox scriptures, yet the influence of this myth upon those religions that describe angels cannot be underestimated. This is particularly true of Christianity, because without the Fall of both Lucifer and mankind, there would be no need for the redemption by Christ. If this is so, a psychological interpretation of the myth of angels, and especially the myth of the fallen angel as a prototype of fallen man, appears relevant.

Moses as Divine and Human Child: The Hero Archetype, Confidant of Angels

The motif of the fallen angel and the motif of fallen humanity both appear to be related to the abandoned child/hero archetype, who usually is a divine or magical child, and like Lucifer or Adam and Eve, has lost his original parents or original home. The purpose of his journey is to find what was lost, what Campbell calls "his ultimate god." Campbell (1973) describes the hero thus:

Moses is an archetype of the hero, expressing the dual nature of man (see Figure 29). Moses, as Divine Child and confidant of angels describes in Genesis how the human child creates or co-creates the world with God. Moses, as archetype for the human child, tells the world that he was once one with God, is now separated and must make his way back to the Promised Land, a symbol describing the Self. This describes the universal human attempt to reconcile the opposites of consciousness and unconsciousness, or soul and ego.

The child lifted from the water represents the first separation of the four functions from the primal Self of undifferentiation. This is the first mother (parents) of Moses, contained in the Self and the soul. This is also another version of the separation of the primal waters, the Self personified as the primal mother and intuition personified as the primal father. From the separation of the Self to the soul or intuitive function describes the first instinctual movement of life and twilight consciousness or the beginning male God. The undifferentiated functions are contained in one function, intuition, which is the first light or form of consciousness (the instinctual and unconscious body sensations of the human child). Unconsciousness and undifferentiation that tips the scales on the side of consciousness represents the Father God, who is now the container, while the Self that remains (the equilibrium has been altered) is usually personified as unconscious undifferentiation or the Mother. In this way the primal parents have been separated by the Son, the Divine Child of intuition, who represents both parents but is a male child, showing himself to be a replica, a beginning aspect of the Father God or consciousness. The loss of both parents (the Orphan archetype) represents the transition from: first, the Mother (Self that contains All) to the Father (Soul that contains All) and finally to the experience of birth and the function of conscious sensation (the tragic and heroic ego). Consciousness and unconsciousness, the original parents, have been separated entirely, becoming the ego and the soul divided, with the Divine Child as the middle or connecting symbol, which can be called superconsciousness. The Divine Child's duty, as Campbell tells us, is to restore the unity in multiplicity that he once knew, by a return to the Mother, which is a return to the soul or Self, both being a state of undifferentiation. The soul (intuition) will come first, the first function to become conscious and the one necessary for a return trip.

Figure 28: Moses from Water

Figure 29: Hero Archetype

Angels often appear to those who see or hear them, as something entirely other than their own psyche or as a gift from God. Intuitive knowledge that appears to come from outside oneself or which is not based on ordinary logic can appear as an angel, especially if this is in the belief system of the individual. This knowledge is then experienced by the feeling function and expressed by the thinking function in the form of an archetype that describes the experience of the received message. This is a similar view to that of Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, described by Springer and Deutsch (1981) concerning early Homo Sapiens:

Whether gods or angels, the message appears to come from the intuitive function and is then expressed by the thinking function or active thinking, both of which could be described as the "executive part called god." The "follower part called man" would correlate with the functions of sensation and feeling. Consciousness is ego consciousness, however, and does not come about without its opposite, unconsciousness, which can be seen as the silent goddess. I find it difficult to imagine, however, that early man did not have body consciousness in much the same way that modern man does, and it is possible that he had thoughts that he did not attribute to the gods. Certain otherwise unexplainable thoughts could be supposed to come from something other than from himself, which describes intuitive knowledge in many cases.

Identifying the human and psychological method of functioning does not refute the existence of God in any way, which the above quote might imply; what these ideas support is that God can only be known directly by individual human experience, which is a ancient idea.

The Divine Child archetype or the Angel archetype fits the psychological function of intuition quite well since the message of intuition often appears as something given with no effort extended by the receiver. Jung's description of an attitude of conscious expectation would necessitate an already existing thought that a god or an angel would respond to the expected message.

The impact of this can appear as a simple knowing, such as knowing who is on the other end of the ringing telephone, or as a Divine revelation, such as the ten commandments that Yahweh gave to Moses. Moses obviously expected God to reply and had an attitude of conscious expectation as he was given the message. This is how Jung described active fantasy as the product of conscious intuition. God or an angel of God gave the Word, but it was Moses (as Divine Child) who expressed that word by writing it on a stone and delivering the message to his people. In this sense, Mo