Healing Psychology, Part K - The Self and its Defense

The previous episode of the Healing Psychology series laid out one of the most important reasons addictions persist - they disable our attention. Just as our biological immune system protects us from biological disease, our capacity for attention protects us from malignancies in our behavior. Disabling our attention gives the green light to bad habits because our attention works like biological immunity.

But … what is immunity, exactly? It is an evolved Protector of the Self. In this episode we’ll talk about the Self. Every living thing evolves a Self through natural selection – simply because living things can’t stay alive without one.

Transcript

In this Episode of Healing Psychology I read (in synthesized voice) the first half of Chapter Nine of my upcoming book, Reimagining Psychology.

Copyright © Thomas O. Whitehead, 2023   All rights reserved

[Introduction]

Welcome to Part K of the multi-part series “Healing Psychology.” In previous episodes, we’ve interpreted addiction and anorexia as habits that have escaped the individual’s control, and have become actual parasitic diseases. Though they begin as normal habits, these wayward behaviors dodge our usual methods of control. They end up repeating themselves over and over, with us as their unwilling hosts. 

In biology, parasites are everywhere you look. Psychology is a part of biology, its mother science. So, we shouldn’t be surprised to find parasitic forms in our behavior, once we know what to look for. Today’s psychology doesn’t support the idea of parasitic habits. But you’re invited to listen … anyway.

[Reading]

Discovering yourself provides you with all you are, were meant to be, and all you are living from and for. [1]

- Carl G. Jung

It’s not hard to grasp why psychology hasn’t reached its full potential. Psychology is a part of biology. Despite this, it’s been trying to explain quirks of animal behavior without applying one of the most important ideas in biology—the concept of disease. Many dysfunctional habits are in reality diseased habits. And the word “disease” isn’t just some kind of metaphor. It’s disease in the true biological sense. Without this critical concept, and other biological ideas of function and dysfunction, behavioral science won’t be able to account for all the phenomena within its domain. And that’s what this chapter is about.

Psychology doesn’t have to remain clueless. Once we grasp how parasites affect their hosts, it’s easy to understand out-of-control habits. That’s because an out-of-control habit functions as a parasite, with the behaving animal as its host. And all parasites evolve ways to disrupt their host’s control over them. In other words, they evolve ways to disrupt their host’s immunity.

Introducing the self

To make sense of parasitic disease and its effects, biologists use three basic concepts: parasitism, immunity, and immune resistance. It isn’t difficult to extend these concepts into behavior and cognition. All three of these concepts relate to the self.

The self is a characteristic of every living thing. An organism’s self empowers it to distinguish between the things that support its continuation, and the things that endanger it. This distinction applies both to the biological self, and to its behavioral and cognitive derivative, the psychological self.  Let’s look at what self means, how it comes to be, how we defend it, and why sick behavior arises when our self-defense fails. This examination will help us see how a diseased behavior can interfere with our recognizing it for what it is, and thus prevent our interrupting it.

What, exactly, is “the self?” To answer, we turn our attention to the way living things work. All lifeforms have something quite important in common. Each and every one of them consists of many semi-autonomous subunits operating under a central governance. In order for something to stay alive, the independent activity of its subunits has to be in balance with their governance.

There’s a chain of influence that extends from the highest levels right down to the lowest—from the body as a whole down to simple chemistry. The body, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says, 

• … is part of a massively complex organism made up of cooperative systems, which are made up of cooperative organs, which are made up of cooperative cells, which are made up of cooperative molecules, which are made up of cooperative atoms built from cooperative particles. One of the most distinctive features of organisms is, in fact, the extraordinary degree of cooperation exhibited by their constituent elements, along with the resulting extraordinary complexity. [2]

Large numbers of cells make up the bodies of complex multi-celled animals like us. The cells are our basic subunits. Each individual cell is, in turn, composed of chemical subsystems—proteins, enzymes, and so on. Those are the cell’s subunits. The molecular systems are made of individual atoms. At every step, from the whole organism down to the lowest chemical reactions, the activities of the subunits are balanced against their governance. That balance is what makes the whole thing “alive.”

Consider this. An organism that is “alive” one moment can be “dead” the next. Life can disappear in the blink of an eye. Does death make the organism’s subunits go away? No. Does death make them stop their activity? No. After death they are still there, and they are still doing things. But now they’re ungoverned. So all that activity degenerates into chaos. Though it may appear that nothing changed at the instant of death, in fact everything has changed. 

What marks the difference between being alive and not being alive, it seems, is that those many subsystems aren't working together anymore. They're no longer under a common governance. The chemicals are still there, but without governance they act completely on their own. The inevitable result is corruption and decay—and that's the opposite of life. The logical conclusion is that life resides in the balance of independent local activity with its centralized governance. 

At every level of life, it’s the subunits that do all the life-sustaining work. Though we don’t consider them alive in themselves, the subunits are the foot soldiers of life. Life depends upon their doing what they do reliably, predictably, and in controlled way. It’s fascinating that seemingly lifeless chemistry becomes ever more recognizably “alive” as we move up the chain from atoms to molecules, to cells, to organs, and then to animals like us.

A fine balance

The balance between the autonomous activity of the parts and their centralized governance is exquisitely delicate. Too little governance is deadly, because without it there is only disorder—each subunit operating willy-nilly, to the detriment of the whole. Surprisingly, too much governance is just as deadly. Because no centralized governance can sense or handle all of the billions of things that must happen in real time on a local level to keep the larger organism alive. A good metaphor is the way an army works: if each soldier had to wait for a general to tell him exactly what to do—when to shoot, and who to shoot—the battle would surely be lost. They need to act under governance, yet independently. 

Only life’s foot soldiers, subunits with boots on the ground, can handle in real time the details that must be handled to keep an animal alive. No central governance could recognize each and every thing that needs to happen at the lower levels. And even if it could, there’s no way it could deal with the enormous number of those life-sustaining activities. So governance that’s too heavy-handed invariably screws everything up. The local work simply must be done on a local level by the local subunits. 

Again, what’s critical is the balance of autonomy and governance. That’s what makes life possible. With that balance, the countless activities of all the subunits work together in an organized fashion to make a single living thing. It’s in this way, and only in this way, that life can continue. In complex multi-celled animals, that balance is indeed precarious.

The psychological self

In creating living things, nature balances the independent operation of local subunits with the centralized governance of those subunits. Now, when we say “centralized governance” what governing agency are we talking about? Both biologists and psychologists call this agency “the self.” If we are to understand how living things manage to stay alive, we have to understand the self, because the self is the beating heart of each and every living thing. Just what is the self?

Author John Ryan Haule says,

• Self is the expression of an animal’s fundamental commitment to life, evident in the way it pulls together all of its component processes in service of the whole… A self emerges from the parts of every organism—precisely insofar as it is a single, unitary animal. Self, therefore, in its most rudimentary form is already present in every protozoan, for each of them is so thoroughly “bent on staying alive” that its many disparate forces seem to marshal themselves in the service of that goal. [3]

Indeed, there is a self at the center of all biological forms. But the idea of self applies not only to our physical bodies, but to our body of habits. Every aspect of our behavior, including our mental life, is governed by a self as well. That’s what keeps our habits working together. As Haule explains,

• Mind emerges out of body, out of the totality of its parts. Every organ, every tissue, every cell, and every protein is a partly anarchic, partly cooperating member of a whole; and the principle of holism that emerges out of the potential cacophony of the parts is the self. [4]

Consciousness theorist Anil Seth expresses the same idea when he says the sense of self we experience is “rooted in a ‘drive to stay alive’” That drive is part of the biological self. [5]

The biological self defines the animal’s biological components and their relationship to each other. What is it? It’s not a physical object, but an inventoryof all the parts of the organism, all the many things and processes that sustain its life. Without that inventory, a living thing couldn’t tell the difference between what’s good for it and what’s bad.  

This distinction is usually conveyed to us as a value-laden feeling, a sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness, a subjective experience of “ease” or “dis-ease.” These good and bad feelings have their origins in what’s going to help us stay alive. Damasio uses the word “valence” for this feeling tone. 

•  [T]he immediate antecedents of valence are to be found in the ongoing state of life in the organism. The “pleasant” and “unpleasant” designations correspond, in a principled manner, to whether the underlying “global” state of the body is generally conducive to the continuation of life… [6]

The organism must be able to tell the difference between things that are part of it, and those that are not. It has to recognize that “this is one of my liver cells,” and “this chemical is a part of me.” It must be able to decide, “I’ll leave those parts of myself in peace. But this other thing here is a cold virus. It doesn’t belong here. I’ll do my best to destroy it.” The body’s self-inventory is the foundation of the organism’s immunity. More on immunity later.

In much the same way, the psychological self is an inventory of the animal’s body of habits. Without that habit inventory, an animal wouldn’t be able to evaluate or guide its own activities. It couldn’t tell the difference between activities that help it—the ones that keep it alive—and those that hurt it. 

The psychological self empowers us to act in ways that are right for us as individuals. Just as there’s valence associated with our physical wellbeing, there’s valence associated with each of our acts, a felt, intuitive sense of “rightness” or “wrongness.” If we were to translate this feeling into words, it might read something like this: “I’m the kind of person who cares about his body, so I won’t take this possibly dangerous drug.” Or a feeling that tells us, “I’m kind to animals, so I won’t kick this annoying cat.” As with the biological self, our habit inventory lets us evaluate our behaviors, and accept or reject them—preferably even before they are translated into action. In psychological terms, these intuitive evaluations are the foundation of our internal boundaries. 

Origins

To survive, each living thing must have a self. And they all do. But where does it come from? Like everything else in the world of biology (and therefore in the world of psychology), the self is a product of evolution. It is assembled through natural selection—the same way hearts, lungs, and livers evolve. Without exception, every species is pressured to build a biological self through variation and selection, for the simple reason that its life can’t continue without one. 

Varieties of an animal with weak selves—those that aren’t good at recognizing and governing their parts—cannot survive, because their subunits aren’t able to pull together as a team. So natural selection eliminates those varieties, leaving the varieties with stronger selves, those equipped to recognize and effectively regulate their parts. In this way, over the generations, the self of each species becomes more and more clearly defined.

Our psychological self—the core of our personal identity—begins with our inherited biological self. That genetic bundle, the same bundle that creates our body, is the starting point. It’s the legacy of our ancestors, one we further develop as we evolve as individuals throughout our lifetimes. Seth says, 

• The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of self, indeed for any conscious experience at all. [7]

As children, we are ruled by all the often-conflicting impulses we have inherited, perhaps lovingly hugging our mother while hatefully slugging our little sister. But we gain consistency in our personal behavior as the felt sense of our own personal self evolves within us over our individual lifetimes. This developing intuitive sense tells us clearly who and what we are as a unique person, and becomes our source of consistency in the face of our varied experiences and life pressures. 

Active arms of the self

The evolved self defines all the semi-autonomous subunits that make up a biological organism. Simply defining them is not enough, though. The self must actively regulate them too. How exactly does it do that? The answer lies in the active arms of the self, one of which is its immune system. The self defines things that contribute to the wellbeing of the whole. The active arms of the self support and regulate its subsystems. The organism’s immune system, one of those active arms, detects, attacks, and gets rid of the things that don’t fit in.

And where does that immune function come from? Again, it’s built up through natural selection. Immune capabilities are a critical part of the biological self. So immunity evolves as the self evolves. Those varieties of the organism without competent immunity fail to eliminate the destructive influences they encounter. Those weakly defended varieties are killed off, leaving only those that are more capable. 

Because immunity truly is a life-or-death matter, enormous selection pressure supports its emergence through natural selection. Even simple one-celled organisms evolve immune functions. And higher organisms like human beings develop incredibly sophisticated defenses.

A complex biological immune system evolved in our ancestors because it protected and preserved the integrity of their bodies, and their bodies’ physical functioning. And a complex behavioral immune system evolved for the same reason: it protects the integrity of their body of habits. [8] Natural selection has equipped each member of our species with a collection of biological and behavioral defense mechanisms. The center of interest here behavioral immunity.

Archetypes

How does immunity work? The most sophisticated of our evolved defenses use “archetypal forms.” The term archetype sounds mystical to some people. But it isn’t mystical at all. It has a precise meaning, one firmly grounded in science. In essence, an archetypal form is a generic version of something that must be made specific before it can be used. An analogy will help convey the idea.

Suppose I’m a history teacher with 50 students in my class. I’ve taught them about the American civil war, and now I want to make sure they absorbed the information. I could go and talk to each one of them individually, to make sure each understands that part of history. But 50 individual interviews would take too much time. Instead, I create a test form. All the students will complete the same test. 

The top of the test form has a blank for the name of the student. The body of the test has 25 questions with multiple choice answers. Each student will fill in their name, read the questions, and circle the answers they think are right. The more they get right, the more they absorbed from my class.

Why am I talking about test forms? Because the blank test is an archetypal form. A blank test is nothing in itself. It’s just an empty form. As long as it's blank, it can't tell me anything about a particular student. Once completed, though, the form becomes something real. Then it provides meaningful information about the student. 

That one blank test, the archetypal form, has been filled out 50 times, and has generated 50 unique products, one for each student. The context of the form’s questions gives meaning to each student’s simple responses. Each completed test is now a measure of how much each student learned. This way of assessing is much more efficient than speaking to students individually. That’s why teachers use tests. 

Nature often uses this “to-be-completed” approach—and for the very same reason: efficiency. Evolution produces archetypal forms and stores them in our DNA as genes, because it’s a super-efficient way to maximize the gene’s usefulness. A single generic gene can produce a large number of different and specific proteins. The way the gene form is "filled out" gives different meanings to the way it is expressed. This multiplies its survival value. [9]

Our human immune function provides the perfect example of this kind of DNA-encoded archetypal form. Human beings have two types of immunity—innate and adaptive. The innate functions are present in us at birth, and operate “as is.” Our adaptive immune functions are also there at birth, but there’s a huge difference. The adaptive functions do not operate as is. They are archetypal forms that must be filled out, specialized, before they can provide protection. 

Your body isn’t born knowing how to heal from this year’s strain of the flu. To be of use, the inherited form needs to be filled out with specific information. It’s as if the body’s born with an abstract concept of immunity to a virus, but that abstraction must be detailed with the specifics of this year’s virus before it can protect us from this year’s virus.

Adaptive immunity is an archetypal function. We all inherit the same archetypal forms. In themselves they provide no working immunity. Rather, they are the generic framework upon which individuals build specific immunities in the course of their lifetimes. The archetypes for adaptive immunity were created during the evolution of our species, and are coded right into our DNA. The archetypes are designed to be filled out with specific information. Their “to-be-completed” design increases the flexibility of our immune defenses immensely.

Objects and instantiation

The best word for fleshing out an archetypal form is “instantiate.” This term is part of the jargon of computer science. In the interest of efficiency, modern Object-Oriented Programming languages (OOP languages) allow the creation of abstract archetypal forms. Programmers call these forms “classes.” An OOP class can filled in with specifics to become a single instance of that class, and the class can be instantiated in a variety of ways. Further, the same class can be re-used countless times. Programmers call the instantiated forms “objects.” So these programming languages are called “object-oriented.”

In designing adaptive immunity mother nature indulged in some sophisticated object-oriented programming. She evolved “classes” (archetypal forms) millions of years before there were any computer programmers. Now each human inherits the adaptive immunity class. Every specific immunity we develop during our lifetimes is an instantiation of that general archetypal class. Each and every one of those specific immunities is, in the OOP sense, an “object.” 

In the course of our individual lives, when we encounter a specific pathogen, we instantiate an inherited archetype as a specific immunity. The result is an object custom-tailored to fight that particular pathogen. Adaptive immunity does not become a working defense until it is instantiated—the generic framework made specific. Immune agents sniff out the invading pathogen’s chemical signature and “remember” it. In the case of rapidly mutating viruses like the flu, the protection lasts only until the virus has changed to the point it is no longer recognized. In response to that new infection (or in response to a new vaccine for that infection) we create a new instantiation of the adaptive immunity class, one that gives us protection against that strain.

Learning

If the way adaptive immunity works makes you think of learning, you are indeed perceptive. There is in fact a close parallel between this individualized biological learning, and our individualized behavioral learning. In both cases, what we inherit are general, species-wide archetypal tendencies. None of those inherited tendencies is a functioning habit “as is.” It's just the framework for a habit, a class. That class doesn’t become an actual behavior until it is instantiated. Each of our specific habits is an instantiation of those tendencies—equivalent to OOP classes. It is through our own experiences that we turn our inherited archetypal tendencies into personal habits that work for us as individuals. 

Both adaptive immunity and habit formation are based on archetypes inherited by all members of our species. During the course of our unique lives, we repeatedly instantiate these inherited archetypal forms. A single archetypal form yields many objects. We build up a set of personalized habits the same way we build up a set of personalized immunities. Every specific habit we develop is an object, a specific instantiation of a habit class. Though the similarity between adaptive immunity and learning is compelling, only a handful of theorists have written about it. [10]  

Jung’s collective unconscious

With inherited archetypal forms firmly in mind, we turn our attention to a topic of immense importance for psychology—Carl Jung’s concept of psychological archetypes. Jung understood evolution by natural selection quite well. He recognized its implications for human perception and behavior. He saw that variation and selection among our ancestors would create a psychological self in the same way that it creates a biological self. Further, he saw that the evolved psychological self is a collection of archetypal forms, a collection passed down to every member of our species. These archetypes are behavioral and perceptual templates that serve as the starting points for each individual element of our psychological life—each of our habits, each of our percepts, and each of our thoughts.

Jung used the term “collective unconscious” to describe the components of our inherited psychological self. It’s “collective” because it’s present at birth within each member of our species, a set of generalized behavioral and perceptual tendencies coded right into our genes. And it’s “unconscious” because we remain entirely unaware that these archetypal forms even exist within us until we instantiate them. 

Our archetypes await our use silently, behind the scenes, below the level of our consciousness. It’s only when they are instantiated that they enter awareness. It’s then, and only then, that they become specific things—the everyday objects we perceive around us, the everyday things we do, and the people we encounter in the course of our daily lives. With instantiation, what had existed only as a form, an unconscious potential, now becomes a conscious item, something in the world of our conscious experience. [11]

Central to Jung’s theories is his recognition that animals are not born as “blank slates” upon which experience writes. Far from it. All animals, humans included, come into the world pre-equipped with an extensive array of these instinct-like archetypal predispositions. Like the inherited forms underlying adaptive immunity, these instinctual templates provide us no benefit until they are instantiated. They aren’t specific habits or specific percepts until all the “blanks” in the form are properly “filled in.” The archetypes upon which those objects are based don’t themselves enter our awareness, because in themselves they don’t correspond to any specific thing in our individual lives. 

Jung made all this clear in his writings, postulating that archetypes are “not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form, and then only to a very limited degree.” As he put it, “a primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience.” [12]

There are as many human archetypes as there are types of human experience. Some of these types are pretty basic. Whenever we perceive an object of any kind “out there” in the world, we are instantiating what we might call a “thing” archetype. There’s certainly evidence that we, like other animals, are born with the instinct to immediately instantiate dangerous things like snakes and spiders. Most “thing” archetypes are more mundane, though, addressing our everyday needs. 

Since we humans are social beings, Jung paid special attention to archetypes that enable social interaction. For example, he lavished attention on the archetype of “the self”  (instantiated as the experienced sense of who and what we are), and “the persona”  (instantiated as the public face we present to others, which might be quite different from the self). 

Here’s an example. Like all social animals, each of us inherits an archetype we might call “friend.” [13] There’s my friend Mikey, and there’s my friend Bob. And here comes my new friend Jacob. I experience each of these guys as a different person, yet each is an instantiation of the very same “friend” archetype, a generic form built right into my DNA. I’m not even aware that the archetype is a part of me. Yet it manifests in concrete form as my friends. Each of my friends is an instantiated object of my internal “Friend” class. They appear over and over in my life, each time as a recognizably different friend, but each an instantiation of the same archetypal class.

So according to Jung, we inherit the elements of our psychological self, an assemblage of primordial perceptual and behavioral predispositions. Where did it come from? Natural selection assembled this vast collection during the evolution of our species. And during our individual lifetimes each of us further elaborates some subset of that collection, adapting them to help us cope with our own personal circumstances. In the process we create our own unique psychological self. 

Here’s something to ponder: each of us is an instantiation of an inherited “self” class, one of the archetypes in the collective unconscious of humanity. Each of us is, in the OOP sense, an “object.” 

Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious is deep stuff. Some theorists have complained that Jung’s ideas “look more like New Age mystical speculation than a scientific contribution to psychology.” [14]But that demeaning characterization is rooted in misunderstanding, and is totally off base. There’s nothing at all mystical about Jung’s archetype concept. [15] The idea is based upon a solid biological principle. It is our failure to grasp this uniquely scientific idea that makes it seem esoteric.

In psychology, as in biology, archetypal forms confer a huge adaptive advantage. They are general forms that can be instantiated over and over, to create as many specific “objects” (percepts, habits, concepts, etc.) as needed. A single inherited archetype can spawn thousands of individualized, unique, specific behaviors. It is precisely this evolved capability that gives human beings their exceptional behavioral and perceptual flexibility. [16]

Jung wrote (in his typically obscure style),

• Human knowledge consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial patterns of ideas that were given us a priori. These need certain modifications, because, in their original form, they are suited to an archaic mode of life but not to the demands of a specifically differentiated environment. If the flow of instinctive dynamism into our life is to be maintained, as is absolutely necessary for our existence, then it is imperative that we should remould these archetypal forms into ideas which are adequate to the challenge of the present. [17]

Archetypal forms in nature

Jung’s concept of the archetype was way ahead of his time. Its advanced nature accounts for part of the difficulty he encountered explaining it to the behavioral scientists of his day. [18]In Jung’s era there weren’t many concepts in circulation that psychologists could use to make sense of the collective unconscious. Strangely, though, almost immediately after his death in 1961 awareness of archetypal forms blossomed in broad swathes of science and technology. Now, in our own era, we have both the scientific evidence and the conceptual tools we need to bring his idea into mainstream psychology.

Since Jung’s day biologists have discovered that the forces of evolution routinely create and exploit all manner of archetypal forms. Evolution favors the development of these customizable forms because they are the most efficient way to adapt individuals to their own specific conditions. Rather than inventing similar forms over and over, natural selection creates “generic” forms that can be tailored to fill individuals’ specific needs. [19]

A good example is the way nature has designed the cells of multicellular organisms. Published in 1969 were two highly influential papers that described the mechanisms of cellular differentiation in multi-celled plants and animals. The authors stressed that cells having very different appearance and function possess exactly the same DNA, but with some specific genes switched irreversibly on, and others switched off. [20] 

In other words, our human DNA is an archetypal form.  Our cell types are so dissimilar that one would think they have completely different genomes. A liver cell, for example, doesn’t look or behave like a skin cell, though it has exactly the same genes. These two cell types have been differently instantiated from the same archetypal class, by using only specific genes from the larger pool stored in our DNA. Sort of like different instantiations of that multiple choice history test. 

Here’s another example, one that bridges biology and behavior. It was in 1965 that Noam Chomsky published an article on the “deep structure” of language. He pointed out that every child is born with an abstract mental structure supporting spoken language, a blank form filled in early in life with the learned specifics of language. That deep structure will become, for example, German, English, or Hindi. We can now recognize that Chomsky was describing an archetypal form. [21]

The notion of archetypal forms was clearly in the air in the 1960s. It probably isn’t a coincidence that the first object-oriented computer programming language was developed in 1962. [22] Several more OOP languages quickly followed. The concepts of class and instantiation of class had been fully developed before 1970.

Let’s consider one more example of an archetypal form in nature. This one is especially relevant to this chapter, because it lies right on the interface of biology and psychology. It’s the way animal instincts are expressed. 

Though we think of animal instincts as rigid, inherited behaviors, they are never actually inflexible. Each inherited instinct is a generic form that must be expressed a little differently in different situations. “Instinctual” and “learned” behaviors are in fact both instantiations of inherited archetypal forms. It’s just that the forms underlying learned behaviors are, by nature’s design, instantiated in a more highly variable way. 

Instinct vs learned habits

Before the 1970s, the dominant behaviorist psychology drew a sharp line between inherited animal instincts and learned behaviors. Behaviorists saw instincts as robotic behaviors that required little to no learning. The behavior itself, they thought, was directly inherited. They claimed learned habits were different. Habits, they said, were not inherited, but acquired individually by each animal through “reinforcement.” They were behavioral patterns written by the animal’s individual experience upon a blank slate of memory. 

But what do we actually see when we look closely at the way instincts become action? Instinctual behaviors are “robotic” only in the simplest of organisms. Their expression in higher animals involves both sensitivity to surroundings and learning. 

Henry Plotkin, who served as head of the Department of Psychology at University College in London, stressed that there's really no line separating instinct from habit. As we shift our attention from lower animals to higher, what we call “pure instinct” fades gradually into what we see as “pure learning.” So instinct and learning are not a dichotomy. They are better interpreted as different sides of the same coin.

Because habit formation is clearly adaptive, wrote Plotkin, “learning itself must be an evolved trait—learning is an instinct, and so there is no possibility of dichotomous thinking.” Instinctive behaviors and learned habits just different points along a continuum that ranges from rigidly reflexive behavior to flexible learned habits. Both are rooted in inherited tendencies, and both require individual adjustment for their expression. It’s just that as animals become more complex, the underlying archetypal form requires greater individual adjustment, increasing its flexibility. 

The difference between instinct and learned behavior lies in the amount of adjustment needed for instantiation. “All behavior modification,” Plotkin emphasized, “whether it be a product of plastic developmental processes or learning, collapses into the singularity of evolved modifiability.” [23]

We can confirm Plotkin’s view through our own experience, for example with domestic cats, which are instinctively territorial. If you have ever adopted a cat, you have seen it diligently explore your house to define a territory for itself. Obviously, though, houses aren’t all the same. Individual cats express that territorial instinct in different ways, depending upon their surroundings. The territorial drive is indeed instinctive, born into every feline. But in instantiating it, individual cats incorporate information from their individual surroundings, through their individual learning.

Here’s something to note. Jung’s contemporaries didn’t dispute that animal instincts are products of natural selection. Since instinctive behaviors are common to all members of a species, they found it easy to accept that they are inherited. But as Jung explained over and over, archetypes are also products of natural selection. They are really just super-flexible instincts, and are also inherited. His sense was that theorists should have understood that conceptual and behavioral archetypes could be created by natural selection, as are instincts, and passed down from generation to generation, as are instincts.

Jung found the psychologists of his day curiously oblivious to the continuity between instincts and learning. His notion of the collective unconscious was rooted in his own awareness of that continuity. Mysteriously, his peers treated his eminently logical, exquisitely scientific, perfectly defensible, rather obvious idea as if it were some kind of ineffable mysticism. Their resistance to a truth he believed should be apparent frustrated Jung to the end of his days. [24] But now, armed with the information that science has accumulated since his death, we are finally in a position both to support his key insights, and to understand why his peers could not share them.

Psychology as biology

Just as there is no line dividing instincts from learned behavior, there is no line separating the inherited biological self from the individually-developed psychological self. One fades into the other as we shift our attention from the history of the species to the individual animal’s history. In its individual development, each higher animal begins with the package of archetypes passed down from its ancestors. During its lifetime that animal further elaborates these archetypes through its own learning. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious was his effort to express this fundamental truth. 

Not many life scientists speak clearly about the continuity between the collective wisdom of an entire species and the individual wisdom of single members of that species. Irun Cohen is one of those who do. He explains that specializing evolved, general biological forms into individual behavior greatly enhances the adaptive value of the species’ ancestral wisdom.

• Two types of learning take place in biologic systems: individual learning and species learning. Each of us lives by the grace of both. The evolution of the species can be viewed as a way the species, through genetic self-organization, learns to survive in a particular environment. We receive the evolutionary endowment of our species through the germ cells of our parents… Each individual begins life with the germline information he or she has obtained through the union of his or her parents, but then the individual goes on to create more specific and more diversified information gleaned from the experience of his or her own private life. This individual learning can be called somatic self-organization… Individual somatic learning extends the evolutionary germ-line learning of the species.” [25]

As Cohen stresses, evolution creates internal images, pre-formed ways of understanding. These images are the legacy of a species. Though the images are in themselves generic items, they are elaborated into specific forms within each individual—objects, events, people, and ideas. The individual animal’s customization of one of these pre-formed images is what psychologists know as learning. Cohen writes,

• Evolutionary images, therefore, are the basis for the individual learning process. The brain has to have a set of basic tools with which to carve up reality into categories before any experience can be registered. Without attention preferences and innate images, we could experience nothing; all would be a confusion of ‘noise’. [26]

Jung would likely substitute the word “archetype” for Cohen’s “evolutionary images.” Were experience not pre-processed, carved into manageable chunks that reinforcement could then assemble into habits, individual learning would not be possible The evolutionary images, the archetypal forms, do that carving for us. 

This is brilliant. Evolution is all about adaptation, adaptation of the species and of the individual. It begins with natural selection across individuals within a breeding population. But evolution continues with the shaping of habits within each individual during its lifetime. 

Individuation

The psychological portion of the biological self is, as Jung so insightfully explained, the ever-so-useful toolkit of archetypes making up the collective unconscious. This gene-based legacy is a jumble of behavioral and perceptual tendencies, a loose collection of forms that indiscriminately supports all aspects of human activity. Some of these tendencies are wonderful, some terrible. Some are kind and gentle, others cruel and violent. 

Despite their variety, and despite the fact that they often conflict with one another, all the items in this toolkit share a feature of supreme importance: at some point in our species’ history, each of the archetypes helped our ancestors survive long enough to reproduce. So natural selection has imprinted all the elements of this smorgasbord into our DNA. Jung himself emphasized the variety and internal inconsistency of this collection, saying “It contains all aspects of human nature—light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly.” [27]

During our lifetimes each of us draws from this set of archetype tools, instinctively selecting and elaborating the specific items evoked by our personal circumstances. In the process, we gradually build up our unique personal selves. Our unending elaboration of archetypes adapts the biological and psychological self with which we were born to our individual situations. In the process we become our personal selves. It’s significant that Jung considered the overarching goal of our individual lives to be the elaboration and perfection of the personal self. The process, which he named “individuation,” is what gives our lives coherence and meaning.  

In keeping with the goal of reconciling psychology with biology, we should note that individuation, a vital psychological process, closely parallels epigenesis, a vital biological process. 

All our bodily cells start out with the same set of genes. But they take on different forms and functions through epigenesis. For each cell type, certain genes are activated, and others deactivated. So the cells end up radically different in their structure and function.  

Something like epigenesis happens to create us as individuals. Each of us inherits roughly the same collective unconscious, the set of archetypes making up the “psychological genome” of humanity. Instantiating parts of this common inheritance through our individuation, we become ourselves, who we are. Each one of us is a mind-bendingly unique product, our individual instantiation of the collective unconscious of mankind.

As individuals, we are so complex—with our differing personalities, behaviors, and perceptions—that it's hard to believe that all the instructions for building ourselves could be crammed into our DNA. But the proof is there. This process may seem so miraculous that it could not possibly be true. But in fact, individuation is no greater a miracle than biological epigenesis, something no scientist doubts. 

Summary

• Our current behavioral science is engaged in a futile attempt to explain diseased behavior without the awareness that habits can become diseased, or that evolution has provided us with behavioral immunity, our means of fighting diseased habits. 
•  Psychology remains clueless about behavioral disease and behavioral immunity for the same reason that an alcoholic remains clueless about the source of his misery.
• A deep understanding of parasitic disease requires that we understand the self and the means by which we defend it.
• All living things must balance the autonomy of their subsystems with a central governance: the governance of the self.
• The biological immune system, the active arm of the biological self, evolved to protect the integrity of the body. The psychological immune system, the active arm of the psychological self, evolved to protect our body of habits.
• The psychological immune system is rooted in our power to focus our attention on our behavior and its consequences.
• The roots of our biological immunity and our ability to form habits lie in our inherited archetypes, something theorist Carl G. Jung termed “the collective unconscious.”
• The concept of the archetype, described in different terms by different theorists, unites psychology with its mother science, biology.
• As Jung and others have noted, each of us is engaged in a lifelong elaboration of our inherited archetypes into what becomes our personal self. Jung called this process individuation.

[post episode]

This episode, Part K, focused on our biological and psychological self, and our inherited means of defending it. In the next episode – Part L – we’ll discuss what can happen when that defense is overwhelmed by parasitic disease. We’ll take a look at a striking parallel - comparing the incubation of cancerous cells and the incubation of out-of-control habits – habits such as addictions.

Please join us.

 [Music Credits] 

“Nightlife” –  Michael Kobrin. 
“Soft rain delicate piano music” – JuliusH

----------------

[1] Jung CG. Quoted from Mind Journal. https://themindsjournal.com/carl-jung-quotes/
[2] Damasio A. The Strange Order of Things: Life, feeling, and the making of cultures. Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2018. Page 67.
[3] Haule JR. Jung in the 21st Century, Volume One. Taylor and Francis, 2010. Kindle Edition. Page 91.
[4] Haule JR, 2010. Page 92.
[5] Seth, A. Being You. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Page 212.
[6] Damasio A, 2018. Page 105.
[7] Seth A, 2021, page 7.
[8] In my opinion, understanding behavioral immunity will empower us to address psychology’s central concern—the nature and function of awareness. The reason why will perhaps become apparent in a moment.
[9] Genes are translated into useful proteins. Genes are often stored as archetypal forms. This means one single gene can be translated into a large number of different proteins, to fill different needs. One dramatic example is a gene of the fruit fly drosophila, from which over 38,000 different protein variants can be instantiated through alternative splicing of its segments. See [Pan Q, Shai O, Lee LJ, Frey BJ, Blencowe BJ. Deep surveying of alternative splicing complexity in the human transcriptome by high-throughput sequencing. Nature Genetics, 2008, 40, 1413-1415.]
[10] Are cognition and immunity different forms of the same thing? Some very smart people see a connection. These include pioneering neuroscientist Candace Pert [Pert C, Ruff M, Weber R, Herkenham M. Neuropeptides and their receptors: A psychosomatic network. The Journal of immunology, 1985, 135, 2, 820-826. Page 824s], systems theorist Fritjof Capra [Capra F. The Web of Life. Anchor books, New York, 1996. Page 176], and theoretical immunologist Irun Cohen [Cohen IR. Tending Adam’s Garden: Evolving the Cognitive Immune Self. Elsevier Academic Press, 2004. Page 58].
[11] You’d think theorists struggling with the “hard problem” of awareness would find it intriguing that inherited archetypal forms—forms encoded directly into our genes—don’t become part of our awareness until instantiated. But they don’t seem interested at all. Their lack of interest is itself intriguing!
[12] Jung CG. Collected Works, Volume 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Routledge Group, 1938. Paragraph 155.
[13] We need not restrict our attention to human archetypes formally enumerated by Jung. He himself termed the variety of instinct-like archetypal forms inherited by animals of all kinds “the proper concern of scientific psychology.” [Jung CG. The Symbolic Life. The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 18, Princeton University Press, 1977. Paragraph 1228, page 518.]
[14] McLeod SA. Carl Jung. Article on the website Simply Psychology, May 21, 2018. Available online at www.simplypsychology.org/carl-jung.html
[15] Jung thought and wrote about a great many things. Some of his other concepts are rather mystical in character. And at times he even speaks of archetypes in a mystical way. These things are confusing. But we need not enter into that confusion here.
[16] The word “exceptional” here is a relative term. It does not imply that humans are free from the limitations imposed by our inherited archetypes. We aren’t. No animal is free to operate outside the bounds of the archetypes built into its DNA.
[17] Jung, CG. The Undiscovered Self: 10 (Jung Extracts). Princeton University Press, Kindle 2010 edition. (originally published 1958). Kindle pages 70-71.
[18] Another part of Jung’s difficulty was that as an introvert he wasn’t very good at expressing things in terms that others could understand.
[19] Though the examples I cite here are well known, I have not been able to find a term already in formal use that ties them together. It could be that so few theorists see the connection that they have yet to invent a term. I apply Jung’s word “archetypal” to the grouping simply because no common term seems to exist.
[20] Newman SA.  Cell differentiation: What have we learned in 50 years? Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2020, 485, 21.
[21] Chomsky N. Persistent Topics in Linguistic Theory. Diogenes. 1965, 13, 51, 13-20.
[22] A special-purpose Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) language called SIMULA was the first to be developed, the initial, rough version in 1962. Developed in the 1970s, Xerox's Smalltalk was the first general-purpose OOP language. ACTOR and Eiffel were also early examples. These days, C++, C#, Python, and Java are widely used.
[23] Plotkin H, 2004. Page 100.
[24] In Jung’s final book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he wrote “I have suffered enough from incomprehension and from the isolation one falls into when one says things that people do not understand.” [Jung, CG. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, 1961]
[25] Cohen IR, 2004. Page 86.
[26] Cohen IR, 2004. Pages 87-88.
[27] Jung CG, 2010. Page 114.