Archetype Revisited

'Archetype: A Natural History of the Self', first published in 1982 was a ground-breaking book; the first to explore the connections between Jung's archetypes and evolutionary disciplines such as ethology and sociobiology, and an excellent introduction to the archetypes in theory and practical application as well. C.G. Jung's 'archetypes of the collective unconscious' have traditionally remained the property of analytical psychology, and have commonly been dismissed as 'mystical' by scientists. But Jung himself described them as biological entities, which, if they exist at all, must be amenable to empirical study. In the work of Bowlby and Lorenz, and in recent studies of the bilateral brain, Dr Anthony Stevens has discovered the key to opening up this long-ignored scientific approach to the archetypes, originally envisaged by Jung himself. At last, in a creative leap made possible by the cross-fertilisation of several specialist disciplines, psychiatry can be integrated with psychology, with ethology and biology. The result is an immensely enriched science of human behaviour.