Heisig, James W.  “Whitehead and the Jungian Archetypes.” n.d. [Unpublished Paper].

Abstract

As systematic thinkers who continued to think at the edge of  their own thought, both A.N. Whitehead and C.G. Jung provide us with conceptual patterns open to interdisciplinary work. Although there is no evidence that they were influenced by one another or even knew one another’s work, a synopsis of texts regarding Whitehead’s suspicions about the role of emotion in conceptualization and Jung’s quest for a methodology that would lend credence to his theory of the archetypes suggest several points at which process thought and analytical psychology might complement one another’s weaknesses. For his part, Whitehead felt that evidence for the emotional derivation of thought forbade adherence to any notion of pure conceptualization, and that these derivations would show the same modes of relational existence which he head assigned to all entities. On the other hand, Jung, inheriting the disdain for speculative metaphysics that had marked the psychoanalytic movement from which he had broken camp, sought a philosophical methodology at once sensitive to the canons of science and freed of the dogmatism he found in most metaphysical systems. The present essay aims to lay out these two problems as mutually resolving by focusing on Jung’s theory of the archetypes and Whitehead’s theory of knowledge.