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Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2001, 46, 591–611

The Baldwin effect: a neglected influence

on C. G. Jung’s evolutionary thinking
George B. Hogenson, Chicago

Abstract: This paper considers the claim that C. G. Jung used a Lamarckian model of
evolution to underwrite his theory of archetypes. This claim is challenged on the basis
of Jung’s familiarity with and use of the writings of James Mark Baldwin and Conway
Lloyd Morgan, both of whom were noted and forceful opponents of neo-Lamarckian
theory from within a neo-Darwinian framework. The paper then outlines the evolu-
tionary model proposed by Baldwin and Lloyd Morgan, which has come to be known
as Baldwinian evolution or the Baldwin effect. This model explicitly views psychological
factors as central to the evolutionary process. Finally, the use of Baldwinian thinking
in contemporary theorizing regarding language and other symbolic systems is reviewed
and suggestions are made regarding the implications of Baldwinian models for theory
building in analytical psychology.

Key words: Baldwin effect, computer simulation, evolution, Lamarckism, language

systems.

[An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the National Conference of
Jungian Analysts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 18, 1999, under the title,
‘Evolution, psychology, and the emergence of the psyche’.]

Introduction
In 1919, C. G. Jung presented a paper, entitled ‘Instinct and the Unconscious’
(Jung 1960), at a symposium in London jointly sponsored by the Aristotelian
Society, the Mind Association, and the British Psychological Association. At
the symposium, several papers, all with the same title, were presented by
prominent figures in British psychology. Jung alone represented the continent.
Generally speaking, this paper is referenced for one of two reasons; it repre-
sents Jung’s first public use of the terms archetype and collective unconscious,
and it is the first instance where Jung refers to the archetypes as being ‘engraved
on the human mind’. This latter expression is taken by some commentators to
be indicative of Lamarckian tendencies in Jung’s thought (Stevens 1990). Jung

0021–8774/2001/4604/591 © 2001, The Society of Analytical Psychology

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592 George B. Hogenson

more famously repeats the engraving metaphor in volume 9 part 1 where he

writes:
There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition
has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of
images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing
merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.
(Jung, 1959, para. 99, emphasis in original)

Was Jung actually endorsing, or even thinking in terms of a Lamarckian basis

for his theory of archetypes? Did he believe that the archetypes existed by
virtue of the transmission of acquired characteristics wherein a trait or ability
developed in the life time of one organism is passed directly to its offspring, as
a Lamarckian would argue? (Lamarck’s position will be discussed in greater
detail below.) This is an important question regarding our understanding of
Jung, and his place in the history of thought, insofar as a Lamarckian argu-
ment for the origins of the archetypes would jeopardize Jung’s repeated claim
to have grounded his theory in sound scientific method and doctrine. Indeed,
Freud’s unwavering commitment to Lamarckism stands as one of the more
perplexing elements of his programme, and Freud’s followers went to some
lengths to blame Jung for Freud’s errant theorizing. However, as the phil-
osopher of science, Patricia Kitcher, demonstrates in her superb study of
Freud’s uses of late 19th Century scientific concepts, Freud’s Dream: A Com-
plete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind (Kitcher 1995), Freud’s system rested
heavily on Lamarckian concepts. ‘Even in the thirties’, she writes:
Freud clung to Lamarckianism and recapitulationism. In noting that he could not
do without Lamarckian inheritance, he was not announcing the fall of his theory.
Despite the ‘difficult position’ he had been placed in by ‘the present attitude of bio-
logical science, which refuses to hear of the inheritance of acquired characters … [he]
must, however, in all modesty confess that [he] cannot do without [it]’ (Moses and
Monotheism, 1939, SE XXIII:100).
(Kitcher 1995, p. 177)1

Similarly, Frank Sulloway concludes his assessment of Freud’s Lamarckian

commitment by showing that it was not a peripheral or incidental concomitant
of his theory as his followers maintained following his death. Rather:
From the discovery of spontaneous infantile sexuality (1896/97) to the very end of
his life, Freud’s endorsement of biogenetic [recapitulationist] and Lamarckian view-
points inspired many of his most controversial psychoanalytic conceptions. More
especially, these premises bolstered the heart of his developmental theories, legitim-
ating their controversial claim to universality amidst a storm of skeptical opposition.
Furthermore, these assumptions prevented Freud from accepting negative evidence
and alternative explanations for his views. All in all, it is easy to see why Freud’s
erroneous biological assumptions prompted such elaborate steps by his followers to
deny their importance in Freudian theory.
(Sulloway 1979, p. 498)
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The Baldwin effect 593

As Sulloway also shows (p. 440), one of the preferred means used by Freud’s
followers to exonerate Freud of the charge of pervasive Lamarckism was to
locate Lamarckian tendencies in the late works of Freud and then blame Jung
– and sometimes Ferenczi – for having introduced such misguided thinking
into psychoanalysis.
On its face the claim that Jung was responsible for Freud’s Lamarckian
commitments is difficult to understand. Jung never mentions Lamarck in the
collected works, if the general index is any guide, and Lamarck is not discussed
in the Freud/Jung correspondence. Jung was, to be sure, deeply interested in
what he called ‘a phylogeny of the mind’ (Jung 1961, para. 521). Roazen observes
that Jung was ‘far more prone to cite phylogenetic interpretations than was
Freud himself’, and Freud’s objection that Jung had a tendency to ‘seize on a
phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities had been ex-
hausted’ (Roazen 1975, p. 261), but all that meant was that Jung was interested
in the evolutionary history of the mind, with no implied commitment to any
particular theory of evolution. Phylogeny refers to the historical development
of a species over evolutionary time, regardless of what evolutionary model one
embraces. Ontogeny refers to the developmental history of an individual
organism. Thus Freud’s objection to Jung’s phylogenetic interests simply refers
to Jung’s failure, in Freud’s mind, to exhaust the possible causes of pathology
in the development of the individual prior to opting for a more evolutionary
or phylogenetic explanation. Indeed, the notion that Jung’s phylogenetic inter-
ests prompted Freud to embrace Lamarckism, as proposed by Jones and others,
is spurious, for, as both Sulloway and Kitcher make clear, Freud’s commitment
to Lamarckism significantly predated his work with Jung.
Nevertheless, defenders of Jung have found it necessary to finesse the
charge of Lamarckism in Jung by arguing that his theories do not require a
Lamarckian basis, as Freud’s so manifestly do. Thus Anthony Stevens remarks
in his book, On Jung, that ‘the collective unconscious is a respectable scientific
hypothesis, and one does not have to adopt a Lamarckian view of evolution
to accept it’ (Stevens 1990, p. 36). Rather, Stevens argues, one can interpret
Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious and the archetypes in terms
derived from later developments in evolutionary theory and comparative
psychology, to make sense out of Jung in more contemporary terms. Stevens
is correct, but his comments leave open the question of what exactly Jung
himself thought his position was in relation to evolution, Lamarckism, and the
basis for his vision of a phylogeny of the mind. It also leaves open the question
of what Jungian theoreticians at the beginning of the 21st Century are to do with
theoretical constructs that appear to be based on 19th Century assumptions.
These are the issues that I intend to address in the rest of this paper. While,
regrettably, Jung did not leave behind a detailed working out of his position
on evolution, I hope to show that there are some hints, at least by 1919, and
perhaps earlier, that he was well aware of the inadequacy of Lamarckian
thinking and in fact rejected it. Additionally, I hope to show that an alternative
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594 George B. Hogenson

to Lamarckism, which has since come to be called Baldwinian evolution or the

Baldwin effect, with which Jung was familiar, provides the basis for the develop-
ment of Jungian theory today to an even greater degree than it did when Jung
proposed his theories of the collective unconscious and of archetypes nearly
100 years ago. Thus, I intend to show that an argument Jung advanced in
1919 regarding inheritance, and his reiteration of that position throughout his
life, sheds important light on our understanding of the relationship between the
theory of archetypes and evolutionary theory. Additionally, I believe that
Jung’s 1919 paper points to a variety of other possibilities for theory building
and research in analytical psychology. To make these arguments, however, it
is first necessary to briefly sketch some controversies regarding the relation-
ship between evolution and the mind that were current at the end of the 19th
Century.

Lamarckism
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), is
often imagined as some sort of flat earther or equally benighted crank whose
ghost Darwin decisively laid to rest with the publication of On the Origin of
Species (Darwin, 1859/1964). In reality, Lamarck was one of the leading
zoologists of his time and was decisive in setting in motion research into how
life on earth had changed over time. He was a vigorous opponent of creation-
ist views, and in that degree helped set the stage for Darwin. The essence of
his theory was that characteristics acquired by an organism in response to
environmental imperatives were directly passed on to that organism’s offspring.
This is the so-called doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Additionally, Lamarck viewed the transformation of life as fundamentally
progressive. In other words, life was moving toward ever-higher degrees of
success and well-being. Although Lamarck was opposed to traditional religious
views of creation, this progressivist point of view did reflect his own deistic
inclinations.
Although Darwin disliked any association between his theories and
Lamarck’s, their actual differences had less to do with the inheritance of
acquired characteristics than with the idea of progressive change. Darwin’s
innovation in thinking about change was the theory of natural selection
applied to variation among organisms. But we must keep in mind that until
the work of Gregor Mendel was rediscovered in 1900, no one had any idea
what the unit of variation was. Indeed, Darwin himself proposed that the
somatic cells of adult individuals all contributed, by way of particles he called
‘gemmules’, to the constitution of the reproductive cells. This notion, which
Darwin termed ‘pan-genesis’, was nothing more nor less than straightforward
Lamarckism. What mattered to Darwin was that there was no inherent direc-
tionality to his theory. If two animals both acquired the ability to stretch their
necks to eat leaves higher up, pan-genesis would allow both of them to pass that
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The Baldwin effect 595

characteristic along to their offspring. But it was natural selection that would
determine which variation would be most successful, and thereby determine
which bit of stretching would enjoy the greatest success in reproduction. And
that determination was entirely dependent on the circumstances of the moment.
There was no deistic incline toward ever-higher levels of organization.
Thus as late as the 1890s, the Lamarckian dimensions of Darwin’s theory
still formed an essential aspect of the theory of evolution. Indeed, some of
Darwin’s closest and most devoted followers, notably George John Romanes,
were open exponents of what had come to be called neo-Lamarckism, advocating
the inheritance of acquired behavioural, if not morphological, characteristics.
Romanes, for example, in his book Mental Evolution in Animals, proposed
that a hen, who had raised several broods of ducklings and had become
habituated to their taking to the water, had in fact acquired a new instinctual
response when she would fly to a rock in the middle of a pond and wait for
her charges (Romanes, 1884/1969). Freud, Sulloway recounts, was an avid
reader of Romanes, particularly of his subsequent book, Mental Evolution in
Man (1888 in Sulloway 1979, p. 247f).
A contrary point of view, however, was emerging. In Germany August
Weismann debunked Lamarckian views of morphogenesis by amputating the
tails of several generations of rats and demonstrating that all of their offspring
were nevertheless born with tails. In the United States and England, two
figures will concern us, James Mark Baldwin and Conway Lloyd Morgan.
Baldwin was the leading child psychologist in the United States and one of the
first social psychologists until a sexual indiscretion lead to his academic exile
from Johns Hopkins University in 1909. He subsequently took up residence in
Paris where, until his death in 1934, he continued to write and met regularly
with his long time friends Pierre Janet and Théodore Flournoy, through whom
he influenced the young Jean Piaget (1982). Jung, of course, was deeply influ-
enced by Janet, and personally close to Flournoy, and thus we may imagine
that he became familiar with Baldwin’s work under their influence. C. Lloyd
Morgan was the leading comparative psychologist in the United Kingdom,
working primarily at Glasgow University. He was also a close friend and the
literary executor of George Romanes, although he was intensely critical of
Romanes’ neo-Lamarckism. These researchers, Weismann, Baldwin, Morgan,
and others became known as the neo- or ultra-Darwinians. For them, the notion
of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was anathema (Richards 1987).
While Baldwin and Morgan were committed neo-Darwinians, as psycho-
logists they were also concerned with the relationship of mind to the process
of evolution. Baldwin and Morgan took seriously Romanes’ questions regarding
the influence of learning and habit on the inheritability of behaviour.
Evolution under natural selection is a slow process, Romanes argued, but
some environmental demands require quite rapid adaptation if survival is
going to be insured. This means, Romanes went on, that intelligent action will
be engaged to solve the problem, and in so doing natural selection, which is
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596 George B. Hogenson

predicated on differential responses to environmental conditions, would not

function as Darwin’s theory demanded. In consequence, Romanes went on, in
the absence of Lamarckian transmission, the germ material would not carry
the trait to subsequent generations, because evolution by natural selection
would not have taken place.
Baldwin, and – independently – Lloyd Morgan, argued, to the contrary,
that one result of evolution is the organism’s ability to alter the environment
and thereby shape the circumstances of evolution by natural selection. In
this regard, then, mind does indeed play a role in the evolutionary process, but
not in the way neo-Lamarckians like Romanes proposed. Rather, behavioural
plasticity, the ability to learn how to deal with a situation, allows a species to
survive, and even create the circumstances that shape the selection process,
until its genetic makeup evolves to deal with the environment independently.
Behavioural plasticity can define a pathway along which natural selection
runs, thereby solving the adaptive problem quicker and more successfully than
through purely random variation and selection (Baldwin 1896/1996, p. 77).
This process, proposed by both Baldwin and Lloyd Morgan in separate
publications in 1896, was originally called ‘Organic Selection’ and only later
came to be known as the Baldwin effect (Baldwin 1896/1996; Morgan 1896b).
Baldwin’s seminal paper was titled ‘A New Factor in Evolution’, and the new
factor was consciousness. As Baldwin remarked near the end of this paper,
We thus reach a phylogeny of mind which proceeds in the direction set by the ontogeny
of mind, just as on the organic side the phylogeny of the organism gets its deter-
minate direction from the organism’s ontogenetic adaptations. And since it is the one
principle of Organic Selection working by the same functions to set the direction of
both phylogenies, the physical and the mental, the two developments are not two,
but one. Evolution is, therefore, not more biological than psychological.

(Baldwin 1896/1996, p. 74 emphasis in original)

The Baldwin effect

What exactly is the Baldwin effect, how does it work, and, above all, what
does it have to do with Jung’s theory of archetypes and the collective uncon-
scious? A simple example will help to tie these issues together. One unusual
characteristic that distinguishes humans from other mammals is the ability of
adults to metabolize the lactose in raw milk. Virtually all juvenile mammals
possess this ability, but adult mammals other than humans universally lose
the ability and can become quite intolerant to lactose. However, this capability
is not identical in all human populations. Rather, almost all human populations
retain some ability to use lactose in adulthood, but not all human populations
retain the ability in the same degree. Take two population groups as examples:
Among dairying populations of northern Europe (above 40 degrees north) an
average of 91.5% of the adult population retains the childhood ability to absorb
lactose. Among dairying peoples of North Africa and the Mediterranean the
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The Baldwin effect 597

average is 38.8% (Durham 1991). Why is this the case? As it happens, the
ability to absorb lactose plays an important role in the ability to fix vitamin D
in the absence of sunlight, and, in consequence, to retain calcium. Hence, the
ability to absorb lactose has distinct survival value in northern latitudes where
sunlight is at a premium. But how is this capability acquired? Both populations
have long traditions of animal husbandry – they raise a lot of cows. So we have
the first step in a cultural pattern that underlies a biologically evolved trait.
But cows alone are not enough, you have to do something with the milk.
In the Mediterranean, India, and other warm climates, it is common to reduce
milk to one or another cultured form, such as butter, yogurt or cheese. These
forms of milk product are more readily stored in warm climates, but they also
have greatly reduced levels of lactose in them, as the bacteria used to culture the
milk digests most of the lactose. In Northern Europe, on the other hand, large
quantities of raw milk are consumed, with lactose constituting an important
element in the diet.
What probably happened was that as Indo-European populations migrated
north, those members of the population who could absorb lactose enjoyed
higher rates of survival and prospered enough to pass along more genes for
lactose uptake than other members of the population. However, this evolu-
tionary process presupposed a variety of cultural innovations, beginning with
animal husbandry itself, which allowed migration to take place at all. In other
words, natural selection was no longer natural in the sense of simply respond-
ing to the natural environment. It was now a culturally driven natural selection.
Biologically, the entire process still took place by means of natural selection,
but the human cultural ability to learn animal husbandry, and consequently
alter the environment to meet the needs of the organism, i.e., to cultivate a
means of overcoming vitamin D deficiencies in Northern climates, meant that
natural selection was going on under the supervision, if you will, of the human
psyche. Processes such as this are often referred to as ‘co-evolutionary’, but
they are in fact examples of the Baldwin effect because an element of behav-
ioural plasticity is involved in the process of setting up the environment of
biological evolutionary adaptation. Human plasticity and the ability to learn
ways to cope with or alter the environment, thereby altering the context
within which natural selection operates, established a place for the workings
of the mind in the evolutionary process, without giving in to the neo-
Lamarckian commitment to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The
genome, in the Baldwinian model, is still only affected by variation and
natural selection. But the environmental conditions under which the selection
is taking place are at least partly shaped by the human psyche.

Jung and Baldwinian evolution

Where does Jung fit into this story? While Jung appears to have been better
informed about the controversies surrounding evolution than he is often given
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598 George B. Hogenson

credit for, it would be a mistake to claim that he was deeply informed or that
he cared a great deal about controversies in the field of evolutionary theory.
Nevertheless, he was familiar with the work of both Baldwin and Morgan,
and this familiarity appears to have helped form the basis for what he does
have to say about evolution. He cites Baldwin in Wandlungen und Symbole der
Libido (The Psychology of the Unconscious) (Jung 1991), regarding Baldwin’s
work on the social foundations of language, and Morgan is cited in both
‘Instinct and the Unconscious’ and ‘On the Nature of the Psyche’. After 1896
Baldwin introduced his evolutionary thinking into most of his works, if only
in a tangential manner. Jung’s reference in Wandlungen is to Baldwin’s three
volume Thought and Things or Genetic Logic, published between 1906 and
1911 (Baldwin 1906), which, while it is does not provide an explicit discussion
of the 1896 thesis, is nevertheless clear on Baldwin’s evolutionary commitments.
Jung’s references to Morgan are to his book of 1896, Habit and Instinct (Morgan
1896a), which is a sustained critique of neo-Lamarckism culminating in his
own rendering of the evolutionary mechanisms that would later be referred to
as the Baldwin effect.1
Returning then to 1919, what can we say about Jung’s supposed Lamarckism
in light of what we can infer about his familiarity with Baldwin and Morgan?
One striking aspect of this short paper is that Jung’s arguments run counter to
a naïve endorsement of Lamarckism, and, read as examples, in fact come across
as a rather clearly worded rejection of the inheritance of acquired character-
istics. How so? Jung actually proceeds on two fronts, one having to do with
the nature of instinct and the other having to do with the situatedness of the
organism, what Jung comes to call its image.
To argue his first point, Jung draws a distinction between genuinely instinctual
behaviour, which he sees as compulsive in nature, but shared by all members
of a species, and the compulsive behaviour associated with phobias and neuroses.
The definition of instinctual behaviour as behaviour that has an all or nothing
quality to it, a definition advanced by W. H. R. Rivers, a strong advocate for
Freud and another participant in the symposium, is too broad because com-
pulsiveness is also associated with individual phobias. Indeed, Jung points out
that we naturally make this distinction when we recognize that a compulsive
fear of snakes is not only shared among humans, but also among other primates,
while a compulsive fear of chickens would immediately be recognized as a
phobia unique to a given individual. What is important here is that under
a neo-Lamarckian interpretation a phobic response to chickens on the part of
one individual should be no different from the chicken which raised ducks,
thereby acquiring, as Romanes commented at the time, ‘the basis of a new in-
stinct’ (Romanes 1884/1969, p. 215). This was precisely why Lamarckism was
so important to Freud; he had to have a means by which a singular historical
event – the primordial killing of the father by the band of brothers, postulated
in Totem and Taboo – could give rise to the elaborate apparatus of the
Oedipus complex. But this is not the position taken by Jung. To the contrary,
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The Baldwin effect 599

Jung distinguished between genuine instincts and compulsions that are not
instinctual. A Lamarckian, on the other hand, would have argued that the
children of a person with a chicken phobia would inherit a chicken phobia,
just as Freud argued that subsequent generations have inherited the anxiety
associated with the primal killing of the father.
Jung’s second argument, which also conflicts with Lamarckism but plays a
role in the development of Baldwinian theory, is the case of the yucca moth.
In Habit and Instinct, C. Lloyd Morgan describes the breeding behaviour of
the yucca moth. The moth emerges from its chrysalis state on the one night
that the yucca plant opens its flower for pollination. The female moth mates
and then gathers a bit of pollen from one plant, flies to another plant and
makes a small incision into which it lays its eggs. It then closes the incision
with the pollen ball and dies. The flower closes and the fertilized eggs and the
now fertilized ova of the plant develop together. Upon hatching, the moth larvae
eat some of the plant ova, but leave behind many more, thus allowing for
the propagation of the plant. On Morgan’s account, experiments conducted
with the plant demonstrated that the moth was the only natural means by
which the yucca plant could be fertilized, and the yucca plant was essential for
the development of the moth larvae (Morgan 1896a, p. 14)
Both Morgan and Jung point out that the reproductive behaviour of this
moth is instinctual, but could not be the result of learning turned into instinct
by Lamarckian transmission because the entire reproductive sequence takes
place in only one day. Morgan does not go much further with his analysis of
the behaviour of the moth, but Jung does. Invoking Henri Bergson, Jung pro-
poses that in addition to the instincts one may posit the functioning of intuition
which, he argues, allows for the workings of a ‘hunch’, by means of which the
organism apprehends a complex situation, in the development of the organism
(Jung 1960, para. 269). Jung goes on to argue that it is the combination of this
kind of intuition, ‘namely the archetypes of perception and apprehension’ with
the instincts that comprise the collective unconscious (Jung 1960, para. 270).
Baldwin knew Bergson, and appreciated his work in philosophy and the
theory of evolution. He also – correctly – distinguished Bergson from vitalists
such as Hans Driesch, pointing out, in Thought and Things, that Bergson’s
theories are perfectly compatible, in their actual application, with Darwinian
evolution (Baldwin 1906, vol. 3, p. 275). Indeed, as we will see shortly, the notion
that a hunch or guess plays a role in the later development of Baldwinian theory,
as proposed by Jung – albeit without direct reference to Baldwin; the role of
intuition, or having a hunch about a situation, may have been unusually
prescient on Jung’s part. But Jung’s concern regarding the yucca moth has
more to do with the way in which he views the situatedness of the organism.
Although this point is often missed by his followers and critics alike, Jung’s
original thinking regarding the theory of archetypes, which actually originates
in his reflections on the word association test and the theory of the complex,
falls within the frame of what we would now call cognitive neuroscience
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600 George B. Hogenson

(Spitzer 1992). As Jung remarks near the end of ‘Instinct and the Unconscious’,
‘Archetypes are typical modes of apprehension, and wherever we meet with
uniform and regularly recurring modes of apprehension we are dealing with
an archetype …’ (Jung 1960 para. 280, Jung’s emphasis). At this point Jung
associates the archetype with the behavioural role of the instincts, and remarks,
just prior to the last passage that the ‘primordial image might suitably be
described as the instinct’s perception of itself’ (Jung 1960, para. 277, Jung’s
emphasis). In the case of the yucca moth, Jung remarks that there must be some
image of the yucca plant that ‘triggers off’ the instinctual response that leads
to the moth’s reproductive behaviour (ibid.). What does he mean by image?
Jung repeats this nearly thirty years later in his important essay, ‘On
the Nature of the Psyche’ where he uses another interesting insect example,
that of the leaf-cutting ant. Beginning with a comment on evolution, Jung
remarks:
In view of the structure of the body, it would be astonishing if the psyche were the
only biological phenomenon not to show clear traces of its evolutionary history, and
it is altogether probable that these marks are closely connected with the instinctual
base. Instinct and archaic mode meets in the biological conception of the ‘pattern of
behaviour’. There are, in fact, no amorphous instincts, as every instinct bears in itself
the pattern of its situation. Always it fulfils an image, and the image has fixed qual-
ities. The instinct of the leaf-cutting ant fulfils the image of ant, tree, leaf, cutting,
transport, and little ant-garden of fungi. If any one of these conditions is lacking, the
instinct does not function, because it cannot exist without its total pattern, without
its image … The same is also true of man: he has in him these a priori instinct-types
which provide the occasion and pattern for his activities, in so far as he functions
instinctively. As a biological being he has no choice but to act in a specifically human
way, and fulfil his pattern of behaviour … They [the primordial images] are not just
relics or vestiges of earlier modes of functioning; they are the ever-present and bio-
logically necessary regulators of the instinctual sphere, whose range of action covers
the whole realm of the psyche and only loses its absoluteness when limited by the
relative freedom of the will. We may say that the image represents the meaning of
the instinct.
(Jung 1960, para. 398, Jung’s emphases)

The example of the leaf-cutting ant derives from C. Lloyd Morgan’s book
Habit and Instinct (Morgan 1896a), which Jung apparently continued to use
as a touchstone for his reflections on evolution. That said, what impression
does this passage make on us, and what are the theoretical implications of Jung’s
position? On the face of it, one is tempted to assume, as I believe many do,
that Jung is proposing that the all important governing images, or archetypes,
are really rather complete inner or mental representations of various states of
affairs encountered over evolutionary time. But this would be mistaking. Rather,
it seems to me that Jung takes very seriously the notion that the archetypal is
always imbedded in a context, and that the context is equally as important as
any structure that may be provided by the archetypes. To understand how this
could be the case I want to now move to an examination of the ways in which
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The Baldwin effect 601

the works of Baldwin and Morgan have come into play in contemporary
theorizing.

The return of Baldwinian thinking

To make this transition I will first have to connect the controversies that arose
around the turn of the last century with developments in evolutionary thinking
that are taking place at the turn of the new century. And here a question might
be asked: Whatever became of Baldwin and Morgan, or at least of their theory?
Baldwin, as I have noted, was forced into a gentleman’s exile in Paris after
1909, where he continued to write and collaborate with Janet and Flournoy.
Morgan continued to lecture on problems in evolution, and championed a
position which he termed emergent evolution, in which he argued for a point
of view on the development of organisms that would later find new life in the
work of other theoreticians working outside the rapidly developing modern
synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics. But discussion
of the Baldwin effect largely dropped out of the evolutionary discourse. Some
people remembered it was there, but it had little effect on developments
in theory because it did not fit comfortably into the research programme in
evolutionary theory that came to be known as the new synthesis of Darwinian
natural selection and Mendelian genetics.
This state of affairs began to change in the 1980s, with the rise of the
computer as a research tool, in particular as a means of simulating complex
processes that in nature require either very long or very short periods of time
to complete. In 1987 two researchers, Geoffrey Hinton and Steven Nowlan,
conducted a simple computer simulation in which they added a learning
variable to a 20 segment simulated genetic code, and demonstrated that if an
organism could set some of its alleles, that is its actual genetic variables, by
guessing at an optimal fitness, it stood a better chance of actually meeting
a simple fitness criterion than did an organism that relied entirely on random
variation and natural selection. The title of their paper was ‘How Learning Can
Guide Evolution’, and the story of its publication is that when they sent it to the
journal Complex Systems the editor had to write back telling them that their
fundamental insight had been anticipated by nearly one hundred years (Pinker
1997). The insight, of course, was into the workings of the Baldwin effect. This
paper had a profound impact on a new group of theoretical biologists, and a
host of papers subsequently appeared that used computer simulations to examine
how learning could affect evolution. By and large, these initial computer simu-
lations addressed very simple models, but they opened up a way of studying
evolution that jumped over the constraints of the new-synthesis to examine the
possibility of theoretical variations on the derived neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.
One such study was presented at the second international conference on
artificial life in 1990. The paper, entitled ‘Learning in the Cultural Process’, was
written by Edwin Hutchins and Brian Hazlehurst, at the University of California
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602 George B. Hogenson

at San Diego (Hutchins & Hazlehurst 1990). Basing their work on that of
Hinton and Nowlan, Hutchins and Hazlehurst asked how an evolutionary
process might lead the individuals in a culture to know more about a natural
phenomenon – in this case the relationship between the phases of the moon
and the level of the tides – than any individual would be able to learn in their
lifetime. The crucial insight in this paper was that cultures produce artefacts –
myths, rituals, and objects of various kinds – and that these artefacts have to
be taken into account when viewing evolution in that culture. Put another
way, once you have culture, no matter how simple, evolution under natural
selection no longer takes place in relation to the natural environment alone,
but also in relation to the artefactual environment. This is precisely the situation
outlined above in relation to lactose absorption. But it is also the case that
in a world of artefacts, there are some artefacts that work better than others
in relation to the task at hand and the cognitive capabilities of those who
employ the artefacts. In their simulation, Hutchins and Hazlehurst created
computer ‘citizens’ of a culture concerned with moon and tide variation.
Each citizen was allowed to ‘create an artefact’ that predicted these variations,
then create an offspring and then die. The result of the simulation was that
if a ‘genetic’ learning bias was introduced into the process, successive
generations were increasingly able to judge which artefacts worked the best in
making the predictions, and were thereby able to learn to predict the moon-
tide relationship far faster than would have been the case without the learning
process. Importantly, however, the connectionist networks that were used to
run this simulation were not learning the phases of the moon or the level of
the tides. They were learning, or adapting, to making judgments regarding
how well an artefact created by an individual in the previous generation had
performed in making the prediction. Although Hutchins and Hazlehurst were
less concerned with biological evolution than Hinton and Nowlan, one can
immediately see how this process of cultural learning would influence genetic
evolution under the conditions associated with the Baldwin effect.
So, by the early 1990s Baldwin and Morgan had been resuscitated in at least
some research circles where the importance of their insight was recognized and
applied to a variety of situations. I am even tempted to say that the simulation
of Hutchins and Hazlehurst provides a model for the emergence of archetypes,
but that would be to jump too fast in the direction of interpretation. We first
need to examine a more complex cultural and evolutionary process. Just such
an examination has recently been undertaken by Terrence Deacon, professor
of neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology at Boston University, in his
book, The Symbolic Species (Deacon 1997).

Why Baldwin matters: the crisis of the Chomskian paradigm

The sciences advance, in part, by drawing analogies and metaphors from other
disciplines. This is particularly the case with interdisciplinary sciences such
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The Baldwin effect 603

as psychoanalysis, and Jungian theory is no exception. But, just as Patricia

Kitcher makes clear in her study of Freud’s attempts at interdisciplinary theory
building, this process has a number of inherent dangers, not the least being
that the disciplines one draws on for insight may, in the course of their own
theoretical and empirical development, suddenly conclude that things are
not what they once seemed to be. Thus, to the degree one discipline hitches its
theoretical wagon to findings in some other field, it runs the risk of having to
explain itself all over again when the borrowed theory begins to break down.
A case in point is the frequent invocation of Noam Chomsky’s generative
grammar as an analogue to Jung’s theory of archetypes. Anthony Stevens,
for example, is quite categorical when he remarks that Chomsky’s theories
support the notion that ‘the acquisition of speech is archetypally determined’
(Stevens 1990, p. 82). Chomsky was, and remains, an enormously important
figure in modern linguistics, and in the 60s and 70s his ideas swept the field.
The core of his argument, and what makes him appealing to Jungians, was
that there had to be innate structures in the brain that defined a set of syntactical
rules – a deep grammar – common to all languages. Absent such structures, he
argued, we could not account for the apparent ease and rapidity with which
young children in all cultures learned their native language (Chomsky 1965).
What Chomsky did not do is offer an evolutionary account of how these brain
structures came to exist. Chomsky’s student, Steven Pinker, has undertaken to
make this case, and, in collaboration with Paul Bloom, has probably done the
best job one could within the neo-Darwinian framework (Pinker & Bloom
1990; Pinker 1994). However, there are problems, and they have to do not
only with language but also with the genetic assimilation of any system of
symbols. In what follows, therefore, I want to present a critique of Chomsky’s
position from an explicitly Baldwinian point of view. By focusing on the work
of Deacon it is not my intention to give Deacon unique standing in the debate
regarding evolution and language. A host of other commentators are increas-
ingly critical of Chomsky, and have proposed alternatives to his notion that
the acquisition of language requires preexisting syntactic knowledge lodged
in some organ of the brain (see for example Elman et al., 1996; Karmiloff &
Karmiloff-Smith 2001; Kaye 1979). Deacon’s use of Baldwin, however,
provides the particular kind of traction that will allow us, I believe, to better
understand the uses that may be made of Baldwinian thinking in relation to
Jung. Similarly, by focusing on a dispute in linguistics it is not my intention to
neglect other areas where evolutionary theory plays a role in understanding
human behaviour. But the importance of the symbolic in psychoanalysis and
analytical psychology does privilege issues in linguistics. One does not need
to be a Lacanian to believe that there is an important link between our under-
standing of language and our understanding of the unconscious.
Although Chomsky’s theories have been the subject of controversy from
the beginning, notably by other former students such as George Lakoff
(Lakoff 1987), it has taken Deacon’s astute analysis to bring home the most
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604 George B. Hogenson

fundamental problem with Chomsky’s innatism. Deacon’s argument is simple.

If a trait is going to establish itself in the genome under natural selection,
particularly in the genome of the entire human race, then the environmental
conditions that drive selection must be stable over long periods of time.
Natural selection does not take place in relation to abstractions derived from
an academic analysis of the environment, but rather in relation to the actual
regularities encountered in the world. But, Deacon points out, the most
fundamental elements of language, insofar as they are actual aspects of the
environment and not linguistic abstractions, do not meet this criterion, and it
is therefore impossible for evolution to assimilate fundamental syntactic
structures as traits coded in the genome. Simply put, there are just too many
different ways in which various languages express something as fundamental
as the noun part/verb part distinction for the brain to contain neurological
structures that can account for them all. Additionally, languages change very
rapidly compared to evolutionary time scales, and so even if we posit a
common proto-language, it is unlikely that it would have been stable enough,
long enough, to work its way into the genome. As Deacon remarks:
The universal attributes of language structure are by their nature the most variable
in surface representation, variably mapped to processing tasks, and poorly local-
izable within the brain between individuals or even within individuals. Therefore,
they are the least likely features of language to have evolved specific neural supports.
Those aspects of language that many linguists would rank most likely to be part
of the Universal Grammar are precisely those that are ineligible to participate in
Baldwinian evolution! If there are innate rules of grammar in the minds of human
infants, then they could not have gotten there by genetic assimilation, only by
miraculous accident.
(1997, p. 333)

Deacon’s alternative to Chomsky is explicitly Baldwinian. Rather than posit

the existence of innate structures in the brain that generate grammatically
formed languages in children, he argues, we should first look for brain struc-
tures that have the level of generality necessary to support the surface structures
of any language. These structures largely have to do with the neurophysiology
of the speech and auditory faculties, and the peculiarities of memory that
support the learning of complex and idiosyncratic systems of signs. Ironically,
for example, poor short-term memory in children seems to fit this requirement
better than the developed short-term memory and fairly accurate transfer to
long-term memory characteristic of adults. We should then look at language,
and the actual processes of learning language, to see how they have co-evolved
to work well with the evolved brain structures. Indeed, Jerome Bruner, another
pioneer, along with Chomsky, in the anti-behaviourist development of cog-
nitive science, has pointed out that children do not simply begin to spontan-
eously generate grammatical language but rather go through a very particular
learning process heavily dependent on stereotypical interactions with their
parents or care-givers (Bruner 1990). Deacon, along with researchers from a
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The Baldwin effect 605

variety of other fields, such as theoretical roboticist Horst Hendriks-Jansen

(Hendriks-Jansen 1996) and developmental psychologists Ester Thelen and
Linda Smith (Thelen & Smith 1998), argues that it is really these stereotypical
learning processes that are more likely to be stable over time and space, and
that the Baldwinian co-evolution of language and brain relies on them to estab-
lish our linguistic abilities. Languages do in fact exhibit the deep structures
of grammar that Chomsky attributes to them. But those structures are not to
be found in some specifiable neurological structures in the brain. Rather, lan-
guages have structures like the noun/verb distinction because the brain does
have structures that make this form of categorization more efficient for learning
and using the language. In fact, Deacon continues, different language groups
may well have developed the distinction independently of one another because
they had to if they were going to survive in the Baldwinian co-evolutionary
process of adapting to the ‘environment’ created within the human brain.
Deacon explains this point as one of convergence in evolution:
I believe that recognizing the capacity of languages to evolve and adapt with respect
to human hosts is crucial to understanding another long-standing mystery about
language that theories of innate knowledge were developed to explain: the source of
language universals. Grammatical universals exist, but I want to suggest that their
existence does not imply that they are prefigured in the brain like frozen evolution-
ary accidents. In fact, I suspect that universal rules for implicit axioms of grammar
aren’t really stored or located anywhere, and in an important sense, they are not
determined at all. Instead, I want to suggest the radical possibility that they have
emerged spontaneously and independently in each evolving language, in response
to universal biases in the selection processes affecting language transmission. They
are convergent features of language evolution in the same way that the dorsal fins
of sharks, ichthyosaurs, and dolphins are independent convergent adaptations of
aquatic species.
(Deacon 1997, p. 115f)

Conclusion
Baldwinian theory and Jungian psychology
I began this paper by arguing that it is a mistake to view Jung as a Lamarckian
in his thinking about evolution. The basis for this argument was the recog-
nition of Jung’s familiarity with and uses of two of the most prominent anti-
Lamarckians of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, James Mark Baldwin
and Conway Lloyd Morgan. I then showed that Baldwin and Lloyd Morgan
overcame the arguments of the neo-Lamarckians by explicitly integrating
the workings of mind, or consciousness, into the evolutionary process. Given
Jung’s already established theoretical commitments regarding a phylogeny of
the mind – the object of complaints by Freud – we would expect him to
embrace this point of view, which I believe he did. That much said, it is still
worth reiterating a point made above: I do not want to argue that Jung was
necessarily a consistently self-conscious Baldwinian in his evolutionary thinking.
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606 George B. Hogenson

Indeed, Jung’s interest in and familiarity with the intricacies of evolutionary

theory was relatively limited, in large measure, I suspect, because a fully
developed evolutionary theory was not essential to the elaboration of his
system of psychology. This again in contrast to Freud, who consistently
recognized the central role Lamarckism played in the development and
elaboration of his system. Jung did, however, believe that evolution played an
important role in the development of the psyche, and, to the extent that he was
familiar with both Baldwin and Lloyd Morgan, his thinking on evolution
should not be peremptorily confused with Lamarckism simply because he saw
a conjunction between the psychological and the material. To the contrary, it
was precisely this conjunction that would have been underwritten by his
reading of Lloyd Morgan and Baldwin.
Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has, of course, become an issue of
central concern in contemporary psychology and psychiatry (see for example:
Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby 1992; Stevens & Price 1996; McGuire & Troisi
1998; Pietikainen 1998; Hogenson 1998; Stevens 1998), thereby making the
interpretation of Jung’s relationship to evolutionary theory of far more central
concern than it was in Jung’s time. In this context, this paper may be read as
an introduction to a Baldwinian understanding of Jung that seeks to make use
of his familiarity with Baldwin and Lloyd Morgan as a point of departure for
further developments in theory and practice.
But there are consequences that derive from a Baldwinian reading of Jung
that Jung may not have fully appreciated, given the relatively limited attention
he paid to the details of evolutionary thinking, and that call into question
certain assumptions about the nature of the archetypes and the collective uncon-
scious commonly shared by Jungians. Recalling Terrence Deacon’s comment
that ‘the universal rules or implicit axioms of grammar are not really stored or
located anywhere’, I believe that it is possible that the same may be said of the
evolutionary foundations of the archetypes. Put boldly, the argument in this
paper leads one to conclude that the archetypes of the collective unconscious,
as either modular entities in the brain or as neo-Platonic abstractions in some
alternative ontological universe, do not exist, in the sense that there is no place
where the archetypes can be said to be. Innate modularity for the meaningful-
ness of myths and symbols, the notion that archetypes fall within the same
frame as Chomsky’s language learning module, falls to the same criticism as
Deacon brings against Chomsky. The surface manifestation of symbols and
myths, of the narratives, which form the basis for the human sense of meaning,
are as variable over time and space as the languages in which they are trans-
mitted. As Dumezil, Eliade and many other comparative mythologists have
acknowledged, there are indeed deep structural resemblances in many of the
world’s myths. But the same scholarship that provides this confirmation of
Jung’s fundamental insight also presents us with such a welter of differences
on the surface that claims for a straightforward evolutionary basis for the
common structure is rendered extremely problematic, if not impossible of
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The Baldwin effect 607

realization. By the same token, highly abstracted models of the archetypes –

neo-Platonic or otherwise – fall prey to the fact that abstract structures derived
from the analysis of form do not provide the environment necessary for
evolutionary assimilation. The world is not made up of logical structures, but
rather of concrete instances of actually occurring entities that place adaptive
demands on the organism.
So does this mean that we should give up the battle and join the forces that
think that Jung’s archetypes are nothing more than the mystical mumbo-
jumbo of a deluded cult leader? To the contrary. Let me again be bold. Do
the archetypes of the collective unconscious exist? Of course they do. They
have to, or we truly would inhabit Nimrod’s kingdom after Yahweh destroyed
the tower and confused the languages. For the confusion of languages would
also be the confusion of stories, of our basic human narratives, and we can,
however imperfectly, understand one another’s stories. But the archetypes do
not exist in some particular place, be it the genome or some transcendent
realm of Platonic ideas. Rather, the archetypes are the emergent properties of
the dynamic developmental system of brain, environment, and narrative. The
theoretical roboticist, Horst Hendriks-Jansen, captures the spirit of this point
of view when he writes:
The synthesis of activities, producing the emergent pattern, cannot be paralleled
in a corresponding synthesis of neurological correlates or mathematical character-
izations. Interactive emergence means there exists no overall formal description of
the high-level phenomenon, though its pattern will be clearly recognizable within the
context of the creature’s environment.

(Hendriks-Jansen 1996, p. 228f)

What does this point of view indicate for theory building in analytical psy-
chology? To me, it is precisely in the work of Terrence Deacon, Horst
Hendriks-Jansen, Ester Thelen and others, that the opportunity presents itself
to move forward in our understanding of the theory of archetypes. A revolu-
tion is taking place in cognitive science, in the movement away from ever more
complex and intricately ramified modular or ‘programme’ based models of the
mind, and toward models based on the emergent properties of dynamic, com-
plex, interactive systems. This process parallels important changes taking place
in our understanding of evolution, and the mechanisms that actually shape our
biological being in the world (for a discussion of this point of view in relation
to the theory of archetypes see the recent paper by Saunders and Skar [2001],
‘Archetypes, complexes and self organization’). It is my expectation that these
new avenues of research – situated robotics, dynamic systems theories of
development, the neuro-anatomy of symbolic processes – all of which share
important affinities with Jung’s interest in Baldwinian evolution, will radically
alter what we see in human development and psychopathology, thereby
providing us with new insights into Jung’s theories about the nature of the
human psyche. We may then find, for example, that archetypal theory really
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608 George B. Hogenson

is compatible with evolutionary and developmental theory, even that both a

theory of evolution and a theory of development are necessary to sustain the
theory of archetypes. But it will not be development as we have been taught to
think of it either in largely Freudian terms or by classical infant observation.
Nor will the evolutionary processes that underpin the theory be those
embraced by evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists. Rather, the
presence of simple patterns of perception and action, and species typical forms
of interpretation, embedded in the typically human environment of symbolic,
narrative interaction will be seen to give rise to the immense beauty and
complexity of the great myths of our species.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article interroge l’idée que C. G. Jung aurait appuyé sa théorie des archétypes sur
le modèle de l’évolution de Lamarck. Cette idée est mise en cause à partir du fait que
Jung connaissait et s’appuyait sur les écrits de James Mark Baldwin et Conway Lloyd
Morgan, qui étaient tous les deux des opposants connus et fervents de la théorie néo-
Lamarckienne à partir d’un cadre de référence néo-Darwinien. L’article donne ensuite
les grandes lignes du modèle de l’évolution proposé par Baldwin et Lloyd Morgan, qui
est maintenant connu comme l’évolution baldwinienne ou effet Baldwin. Dans ce modèle
les facteurs psychologiques sont explicitement vus comme essentiels au processus
d’évolution. Pour finir l’auteur passe en revue l’utilisation de la pensée baldwinienne
dans les théorisarions contemporaines relatives au langage et autres systèmes sym-
boliques, et avance des hypothèses quant aux implications qu’ont l’influence des
modèles baldwiniens sur la construction théorique en psychologie analytique.

Diese Arbeit stellt Überlegungen an zur Behauptung, daß C. G. Jung ein Lamarcksches
Evolutionsmodell verwandte, um seine Archetypentheorie zu unterstützen. Dieser
Behauptung wird widersprochen auf der Grundlage von Jungs Vertrautheit mit und
der Verwendung der Schriften von James Mark Baldwin und Conway Lloyd Morgan,
die beide auf neo-Darwinistischer Grundlage bekannte und machtvolle Gegner der
neo-Lamarckschen Theorie waren. Die Arbeit beschreibt dann in Umrissen das
Entwicklungsmodell, das von Baldwin und Lloyd Morgan vorgeschlagen wurde,
bekannt geworden als Baldwinsche Evolution oder der Baldwin Effekt. Dieses Modell
verwendet explizit psychologische Faktoren als zentral für den evolutionären Prozeß.
Schließlich wird ein Überblick gegeben über den Gebrauch Baldwinschen Denkens
in zeitgenössischer Theoriebildung hinsichtlich Sprache und anderer symbolischer
Systeme. Vorschläge hinsichtlich der Implikationen Baldwinscher Modelle für die
Theoriebildung in Analytischer Psychologie werden unterbreitet.

In questo lavoro viene presa in considerazione l’affermazione che C. G. Jung abbia

usato un modello evolutivo Lamarkiano a sostegno della sua teoria degli Archetipi.
Tale affermazione viene contestata sulla base della familiarità con e dell’uso degli
scritti di James Mark Baldwin e di Conway Lloyd Morgan, entrambi noti e accaniti
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The Baldwin effect 609

oppositori della teoria neo-Lamarkiana, a partire da e all’interno di una impostazione

neo-Darwiniana. Il lavoro delinea quindi il modello evolutivo proposto da Baldwin e
da Lloyd Morgan, divenuto noto come evoluzione Baldwiniana o come l’effetto
Baldwin. Tale modello considera esplicitamente i fattori psicologici come centrali nel
processo evolutivo. Viene infine riesaminato l’uso del pensiero di Baldwin nelle
teorizzazioni contemporanee sul linguaggio e su altri sistemi simbolici e si suggeriscono
possibili implicazioni dei modelli Darwiniani sulla costruzione teorica della psicologia
analitica.

Este papel considera la afirmación de que C. G. Jung usó el modelo evolutivo

Lamarkiano para escribir su teoría de los arquetipos. Este es retado sobre la base de
que Jung estaba familiarizado y usaba los escritos de James Mark Baldwin y Conway
Lloyd Morgan, que eran ambos connotados oponentes de lateoría neo-Lamarckiana
desde un marco neo-Darwiniano. El trabajo por lo tanto destaca el modelo evolutivo
propuesto por Baldwin y Lloyd Morgan, el cual ha venido a ser conocido como la
evolución Baldwiniana o el efecto Baldwin. Este modelo explícitamente observa a los
factores psicológicos como centrales para el proceso evolutivo. Finalmenmte, se revisa
el uso del pensamiento Baldwiniano en la teorización contemporánea en relación al
lenguaje y otros sistemas simbólicos y se hacen sugerencias en relación a las implica-
ciones de los modelos Baldwinianos en la construcción de la psicología analítica.

Note
1. Around the turn of the century there were two lines of thought in biology that have
since fallen into disrepute. One was Lamarckism, or more correctly neo-Lamarckism,
and the other was recapitualsionism, proposed in particular by the German biologist,
Ernst Haeckel. Recapitulationism is unquestionably an important issue in understand-
ing Jung’s thinking – and even more so that of some of his close followers such as Erich
Neumann – but requires its own detailed examination. The present paper confines itself
to the question of Lamarckism in Jung. For a detailed discussion of recapitulationism
see Gould 1977. For a discussion of Neumann’s recapitulationism, and the problems it
poses for Jungian theory see Giegerich 1975.

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[MS first received November 2000; final version April 2001]