Revisiting Carl Jung's archetype theory a psychobiological approach

Codes across (life)sciences

The concept of "code" connotes different meanings, intentions, and formalizations. From mathematics and computer sciences to psychology and culture, the term becomes less formal, more diverse, and sometimes appears ambiguous. In biology a growing number of codes ignite a debate about their role in evolution, biocomplexity, and agency, to name just a few. Here, a transdisciplinary group of code scientists attempts to capture the big picture of code research across their fields of interest. In this cross-sectional overview commonalities emerge that may pave the way towards a unified theory of life-based-on-codes. Codes underly cellular processes, perception, cognition, and communication. From ecosystems to human language, codes influence how individuals behave in groups, memorize, learn, and take part in cultural practices. Emotions like aggression, fear, anger, frustration, are important motivators of behaviour modulating mutual communication and sculpting individual experience. The inheritance of experience in form of innate release mechanisms, stereotyped behaviour, or archetypes may have phylogenetic and ontogenetic roots that rely on codes and impact our conscious decision making. Unconsciously, even our dreams draw on codes. In the future, conflation of different coding systems, e.g., from synthetic biology and generative artificial intelligence, will merge biological codes with machine logic and computer language to promote next-level transhumanism. Codes emerge as a currency converter between systems of life and between different scientific disciplines.

The innate story code

Code biology reveals a great many codes beyond the genetic code as integral to biological functioning. Recent scholars have linked the growing field of code biology to analytical psychology, confirming that the encoded information inherited by the human organism is indeed massive and capable of great sophistication. In this discussion, I will expand on this project by showing how developments in embodied cognition reveal a code that links the world of universal emotional responses to common experiences to the world of embodied visuospatial narratives--i.e., the "archetypes" of analytical psychology. Viewed in this manner, archetypes become spontaneous symbolic narratives that symbolize universal emotional responses to typical human environments. Such symbolic narratives aim toward adaptation, and use a universal code that maps such situations to visuospatial narratives, with the adaptor being the human body itself.

Understanding Spontaneous Symbolism in Psychotherapy Using Embodied Thought

Spontaneous, unwilled subjective imagery and symbols (including dreams) often emerge in psychotherapy that can appear baffling and confound interpretation. Early psychoanalytic theories seemed to diverge as often as they agreed on the meaning of such content. Nevertheless, after reviewing key findings in the empirical science of spontaneous thought as well as insights gleaned from neuroscience and especially embodied cognition, it is now possible to construct a more coherent theory of interpretation that is clinically useful. Given that thought is so thoroughly embodied, it is possible to demonstrate that universalities in human physiology yield universalities in thought. Such universalities can then be demonstrated to form a kind of biologically directed universal "code" for understanding spontaneous symbolic expressions that emerge in psychotherapy. An example is given that illustrates how this can be applied to clinical encounters.