The formative dynamic which led to the origins of the ancient Egyptian state can be illuminated by a consideration of some of the perceptions adumbrated by Carl Gustav Jung in his work on the human psyche and, by accepting some of the insights advanced by him, to understand how Egypt appeared to emerge from a condition not greatly different from that of other late Neolithic societies to a highly sophisticated and complex nation-state in a very short space of time. His work can also contribute to an explanation as to why Egypt has continued to evoke so powerful and immediate a response in the minds of countless individuals over the past five thousand years of human history, especially in relation to the formation of what was to become the Western world. A consideration of the relevance of Jung’s postulates to the development of the archetypal, pristine state which emerged in Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC will demand a review of such issues as the nature of the individual, of individual consciousness and of what may seem the still mistier regions of the collective unconscious as they were relevant to, and affected the lives and attainments of, the early inhabitants of the Nile Valley.
Though such concepts are now part of the familiar jargon of many studies related to man as a social animal, they have not been applied so widely to the study of societies themselves. Yet there is no doubt that the psychoanalytical principles articulated by Jung when applied to the individual can, with qualifications as to scale and the influences of social environment, be applied also to the study of those groups which make up societies and thus to the societies themselves.
The psychological paradigms which contribute most to an understanding of the mechanisms which drive human groups and determine their behaviour, are expressed in Jung’s voluminous writings, explaining his concepts of analytical psychology. This is less dogmatic than the discipline formulated by Freud and his followers; it is more concerned with the effects on the individual psyche of those psychological drives which are common to all humanity at all times and which are universal in their application. Jung sought to identify the common psychic inheritance of mankind and to explain human behaviour in terms of, and as a consequence of, that inheritance.
At various times during his long and remarkably creative life C. G. Jung seems to have felt himself strongly drawn to Egypt. As a boy he had ideas of becoming an archaeologist and developed a precocious interest in Assyriol-ogy and Egyptology.2 There was no faculty at that time for the study of archaeology in his local university of Basle and so he turned to one of the two professions which had always engaged his family, medicine; the other was the Church and hence, perhaps, his lifelong concern with the religious motivation. It is difficult to imagine that Jung would have made so universal a contribution to the understanding of the nature of man, had he become an archaeologist rather than a doctor, one who turned his attention early in his career to the yet infant study of the human psyche. To this study he was to give a particular direction, specifically in the field which has become generally known as ‘analytical psychology’.
Jung’s contribution to the development of a science of human nature was many-levelled. In particular he identified and defined the role of the collective unconscious, the common psychological inheritance of all living humans shared with all humans of the past. He was profoundly aware of the importance of dreaming but he saw the dream as a repository of the unconscious heritage; he was as strongly moved by the repetition of identical or directly related symbols in different ages and cultures.
Although he came under Freud’s influence early on in his career as an alienist, he broke with him over the older man’s insistence on the para-mountcy of sexuality in determining psychological characteristics or disturbance. Jung did not undervalue the importance of sexuality but preferred to relate it to the whole persona, seeing it as a part, not as the whole. Throughout his career he explored regions of human experience which he believed came out of the unconscious. To the Freudian and the rationalist many of these seemed arcane, even bizarre: alchemy, astrology, the foreshadowing of the future by events or dreams, even the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects, all came under Jung’s serene but penetrating and inspired scrutiny. But Jung’s use of such material did not necessarily imply either his acceptance or even his belief in it.
Much more directly than Freud Jung seems to have understood that there was a deep and very special stratum of experience underlying the familiar stereotype of ‘ancient Egypt’. Even in the early years of the century this stereotype was already well formed and it tended to prejudice an understanding of the unique nature of the Egyptian experience, certainly of the experience of the earliest periods. To Freud, responding naturally to his own Jewish cultural heritage, Akhenaten and Moses were the most arresting figures of pre-exilic times;3 he considered, as others have done, that Akhen-aten was the initiator of the concept of monotheism, which seemed, in the intellectual judgment of the time, both to anticipate and to find its fullest flowering in the Old Testament version of the intervention of the divine in human affairs; this view is not unreservedly supported today. Jung on the other hand saw ancient Egypt as providing a unique set of examples of the universality of psychological paradigms. He considered Akhenaten as creative and mystical, whilst Freud saw him also as a vindication of his concept of the Oedipus complex, witnessed by the desecration of his father’s
Monuments.
Descended from solid Swiss Protestant stock Jung was not so God-driven as his Viennese colleague and his recognition of the deep levels of the human consciousness and, in particular, of the collective unconscious drew him on to speculate about pre-conscious levels and the nature of the ‘primitive’. This was a word which Jung employs perhaps a little too freely for today’s taste when speaking of societies which had still, in his time, escaped the full consequence of western cultural expansionism. However that may be, Jung came closer to apprehending the nature of pristine societies than any observer before him. Not only did he appreciate the quality of such societies and of the people who comprised them, but he also appreciated, with exceptional insight, the significance which the understanding of such societies had for the world of his own day.
World History
