"Jung was essentially an evolutionary theorist". These are the words of Gary Clark, a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who has written a book on the intersection of Jungian Analytical Psychology and evolutionary neuroscience.
If you want to learn more about Gary you can check out his book "Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences: A New Vision for Analytical Psychology" (and grab a free PDF of its intro) here. You can also dive into the rest of his work on academia.edu and ResearchGate.
In this conversation, I sit down with Gary to explore the intersection of Jungian psychology and evolutionary neuroscience, examining how recent psychedelic research provides empirical validation for Jung's theories about the collective unconscious and archetypes. We discuss how modern neuroscience, particularly studies of primary and secondary consciousness systems, maps onto Jung's framework of ego consciousness versus deeper archetypal layers. The conversation covers the revolutionary potential of psychedelic research for studying previously inaccessible aspects of consciousness and Jung's prescient evolutionary approach to depth psychology.
⏳Timestamps
00:00 James's Intro
01:07 Opening and situating Gary's work
03:35 Affective Neuroscience and the Primary and Secondary layers of consciousness
09:00 Psychedelics, the numinous and evolutionary theory
22:17 Have we found the (neuroscientific) archetypes?
28:40 Psychedelics and the Collective Unconscious
34:53 Jordan Peterson's Jungian synthesis
36:57 Peterson gets chimpanzees and ancient humans wrong
46:01 Leaving Jung behind: Depth Psychology maturation as a science
58:50 Mapovers between Iain McGilchrist's work and Gary's
1:01:19 What Gary's working on now
1:07:32 Gary's guest recommendation: Erik Goodwyn
