Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2013, 58, 258–277

Analytical psychology and the ghost of

Lamarck: did Jung believe in the inheritance of
acquired characteristics?

Ritske Rensma, Middelburg, Netherlands

Abstract: Whether Jung was a Lamarckian or not has always been a hotly debated
topic, both within the post-Jungian community and amongst scholars with an interest
in Jung in the wider academic community. Yet surprisingly few substantial pieces of work
have been dedicated to it and, to my mind, no one has yet managed to do justice to all the
subtleties involved. The scholars who have claimed that Jung is a Lamarckian have, for
the most part, oversimplified the debate by failing to discuss the passages in which Jung
appears to be defending himself against Lamarckism; the scholars who have defended
Jung against Lamarckism, however, have as a rule not adequately dealt with the question
of whether these passages actually get Jung off the hook. This paper will attempt to correct
this imbalance by putting forward four key passages spanning Jung’s career that all
represent conclusive evidence that Jung was indeed a Lamarckian. After discussing these,
it will then deal in detail with the passages in which Jung appears to be defending himself
against Lamarckism, making the case that they do not represent a defence against
Lamarckism at all and have therefore generally been misinterpreted by many scholars.

Key words: archetype-as-such, Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary

theory, inheritance of acquired characteristics, Jung, Lamarckism

Introduction
In his controversial book The Jung Cult, Richard Noll has the following to say
about Jung’s theories:

Jung and his theories have remained well outside the established institutional worlds
of science and medicine, as they have been regarded, with justification, as inconsistent
with the greater scientific paradigms of the twentieth century.
(Noll 1994, p. 6)

A very common perception of Jung’s work which, if true, would certainly prove
Noll’s point, is the notion that Jung was a Lamarckian. Lamarckism is a theory

0021-8774/2013/5802/258 © 2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12008
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 259

of evolution named after its founder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829),

which holds that evolution takes place because organisms pass on ‘acquired
characteristics’ to their offspring. Lamarckism as a theory is thoroughly at
odds with what for some fifty years now has been the dominant paradigm
in evolutionary thinking: neo-Darwinism. According to the neo-Darwinian
outlook, organisms only inherit information present in the genes, and since
it does not acknowledge any mechanism through which so-called acquired
characteristics (traits only developed during a lifetime, such as strong
muscles or memories) can end up in an organism’s genes (genes being static
during an organism’s lifespan), there is absolutely no way that acquired
characteristics could be passed on. As Richard Dawkins puts it in his
best-selling book The Selfish Gene:

Genes [. . .] indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly
one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge
and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your chil-
dren by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes’
way of preserving the genes unaltered.
(Dawkins 1989, p. 23)

Jung frequently claimed that the innate structures of the mind which all of
us inherit are related to certain highly typical experiences which are common
in every human life, for example having a mother, a father, or relating to
the opposite sex. Making such a claim is not necessarily a Lamarckian
position–many neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychologists have also concluded
that such innate structures exist. What Jung also claimed, however, was
that the frequent repetition throughout our ancestral history of these experi-
ences has somehow ‘engraved’ or ‘imprinted’ (both terms are used by Jung
in various texts present in the Collected Works) them on to the innate base
of our unconscious. Such statements, which seem to hint at a belief in the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, at the very least have a Lamarckian
‘ring’ to them.
These passages represent a dimension of Jung’s work which scholars who
are critical of Jung’s ideas have drawn on to make the same point that Noll
makes in the opening quote of this article, namely that Jung’s ideas are
flawed and out of touch with current scientific developments. Because evolu-
tionary theories which rely on the inheritance of acquired characteristics are
out of date, Jung’s entire body of work is out of date, too. Examples of
scholars who have made such claims are Percival (1993) and Pietikainen
(2003). The fact that Jung believed in the inheritance of acquired character-
istics and was therefore a Lamarckian, however, has also been posited as
fact by scholars favourable to Jung: examples are McDowell (2001) and
Haule (2010).
But was Jung really a Lamarckian? Answering this question is not as
straightforward as it may appear, as there are also a number of passages in
260 Ritske Rensma

Jung’s work in which he appears to be defending himself against Lamarckism.

An example of this is the following passage:

[The archetypes] are in a sense the deposits of all our ancestral experiences, but they
are not the experiences themselves. So at least it seems to us, in the present limited state
of our knowledge.
(Jung, 1916 / 1928 / 1935, para. 300)

Here, Jung seems to be distancing himself from Lamarckism, by claiming

that his archetypes, although ‘deposits’ of ancestral experience, are not a
simple memory of the actual experience. Rather, they merely represent
the innate potential for having a similar experience, which is not a position
that most neo-Darwinian evolutionary thinkers would frown upon.
Drawing on passages such as this one, several scholars have argued that
Jung was not a Lamarckian. Claims to this effect have been made by
Jacobi (1959), Storr (1973), Samuels (1985), Clarke (1992), Palmer
(1997) and Stevens (2002).
Whether Jung was a Lamarckian or not has always been a hotly debated
topic, both within the post-Jungian community and amongst scholars with an
interest in Jung in the wider academic community. Yet surprisingly few substan-
tial pieces of work have been dedicated to it, and to my mind no one has yet
managed to do justice to all the subtleties involved. The scholars who have
claimed that Jung is a Lamarckian have, for the most part, oversimplified the
debate, by failing to discuss the passages in which Jung appears to be defending
himself against Lamarckism; the scholars who have defended Jung against
Lamarckism, however, have as a rule not adequately dealt with the question
of whether these passages actually get Jung off the hook. I will attempt to cor-
rect this imbalance by putting forward four key passages from throughout
Jung’s career that, to my mind, all represent conclusive evidence that he was
indeed a Lamarckian. After discussing these passages, I will then deal in detail
with the passages in which Jung appears to be defending himself against
Lamarckism, making the case that these passages do not represent a defence
against Lamarckism at all, and have therefore been misinterpreted by many
scholars. I will finish by reflecting on the implications of these findings for the
post-Jungian community in the last section.

Who was Lamarck?

When the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) is mentioned
nowadays, it is mostly as the evolutionary thinker who got it wrong. While
Darwin is still celebrated as a great intellectual hero, Lamarck is widely
portrayed as a crackpot theorist who believed that acquired characteristics
could be inherited, a belief which from a modern vantage point seems naïve
to many people. This perception of Lamarck, however, is distinctly unfair
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 261

according to many writers who know his work well. The eminent Harvard
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote with admiration about Lamarck,
describing him as a ‘fine scientist’ (1992); the science journalist Michael
Balter has called him ‘one of the great scientists of his age’ (Balter 2000).
Darwin himself also recognized the importance of Lamarck, writing the
following about him in On the Origin of Species:

Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention.
This justly celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801. [. . .] He first did
the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all changes in the
organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous
interposition.
(Darwin 1897 [1859], p. xv)

Few people seem to have read Lamarck’s original works, which is perhaps the
reason why there are some common misperceptions about his ideas. One of the
most widely spread misperceptions is that Lamarck believed in a direct cause of
hereditary changes in organisms by the environment. As Mayr (1972) has
pointed out, however, Lamarck never claimed anything to this effect. Although
the environment does play an important role in Lamarck’s view of how
evolution occurred, it only produces changes in organisms in an indirect way.
This is perhaps best explained by one of the most famous examples of how
Lamarck explained the way evolution worked: that of the giraffe’s long neck.
Giraffes, as the by now somewhat clichéd way of illustrating Lamarck’s ideas
goes, have long necks because during their lives their ancestors stretched
their necks to reach high leaves, making them slightly longer because of
the repeated stretching. This longer neck was passed on to their offspring,
who then also stretched their necks, subsequently passing on their even longer
necks to their offspring. Therefore, giraffes nowadays have very long necks–the
result of a long, cumulative process of inheriting acquired characteristics from
previous generations.
Needless to say, this process of passing on acquired characteristics can only
begin when the giraffe finds itself in an environment where eating leaves from
high branches is a necessity. This feature of the environment produces in the
organism a certain need (besoin in Lamarck’s own words), namely to reach
the leaves. It is in response to this need that the acquired characteristic of a
longer neck is produced, which is then passed on to the next generation. It is
therefore not a matter of the environment producing changes in a passive
organism. Instead, Lamarck stated that use or disuse caused certain parts of
an organism’s body to enlarge or shrink. This principle, that of use or disuse,
he called ‘The first law’ in his book Philosophie Zoologique. The second law
was that such changes are inherited.
Another common misconception about Lamarck’s ideas is that they are a
kind of polar opposite to Darwin’s ideas, with which they are completely
incommensurable. This, too, is inaccurate. Darwin himself, as a matter of fact,
262 Ritske Rensma

sometimes relied on Lamarckian ideas to explain certain phenomena.1 The clear

separation between Lamarckism and Darwinism was only established when
Neo-Darwinism came about, the combination of Mendelian genetics and
Darwin’s principle of natural selection which is prevalent today (it is also
commonly referred to as the ‘modern synthesis’). In this article, however,
I will use the terms ‘Darwinism’ and ‘Darwinian’ to reflect the position of
neo-Darwinism, which means that the terms, as I use them, do represent a
position which is incompatible with Lamarck’s ideas.

Jung’s psychological Lamarckism

At first glance, the passages in Jung’s work which have been labelled as
Lamarckian by some scholars may seem to be of a wholly different order from
Lamarck’s claim about the origins of the giraffe’s neck. In Lamarck’s example
of the giraffe’s neck becoming longer and longer, the mechanism of inheriting
acquired characteristics is used to explain why a part of an organism’s physical
body changes throughout multiple generations. Jung was most certainly not a
Lamarckian in this particular manner, as there are no passages in his work at
all where he relates the evolution of the body to a similar mechanism of evolu-
tionary development. Jung was primarily interested in the evolution of the
psyche, which he felt was just as much a product of our evolutionary history
as the body is. It is in relation to this topic that we find Jung making claims
which have been labelled Lamarckian. As we have already seen, Jung often
seemed to rely on the inheritance of acquired characteristics when discussing
this evolution of the psyche, and it is for this reason that he has been accused
of being a Lamarckian. In the context of Jungian scholarship, then, the term
‘Lamarckism’ does not refer to a position which is identical to that of Lamarck
himself. Rather, it is used to refer to any theoretical position which relies on the
belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It is this definition of the
term Lamarckism which I will adopt in this paper.
Although it is my impression that the kind of Lamarckism which Jung is
accused of–which, because it relates Lamarckian ideas to the evolutionary
history of the psyche, one could choose to label ‘psychological Lamarckism’ -
has been rarer than Lamarck’s own ‘physiological Lamarckism’, there have
nevertheless been other famous thinkers who have relied on it, the most famous
example probably being Freud. In both Moses and Monotheism and Totem and
Taboo Freud put forward a theory which relies on the inheritance of acquired
characteristics to a certain extent. In Totem and Taboo, for example, Freud
argued that the Oedipus complex has its origins in a single historical event, which
1
Darwin adopts what is basically a Lamarckian position, for example, with his concept of the gem-
mule, part of his larger theory of pan-genesis (1921 [1868]). Needless to say, this position is not La-
marckian in the sense that it is completely identical with Lamarck’s own position, but it does clearly
rely on the belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 263

he claimed took place in prehistory. According to Freud, a ‘band of brothers’ at one

point rose up to kill their father, in order to gain sexual access to their mother and
sisters. Overcome by guilt, they made a taboo out of the reason behind their
patricide; this guilt, in turn, gave rise to the practice of what Freud referred to as
totemism. What makes Freud’s usage of this hypothetical scenario Lamarckian
is that he claimed that the memory of this event, along with the accompa-
nying guilt, was inherited by subsequent generations, up until the present
day. The reason we don’t all have access to this memory, according to
Freud, is because each and every one of us represses it; nevertheless, it lies
ready to hand in the unconscious of all human beings, and has influenced
the way our cultures have taken shape, particularly in the case of religion.
That this is Lamarckian is very clear, as there is no other way of accounting
for the inheritance of a memory which once belonged to a small group of ances-
tors other than through relying on the inheritance of acquired characteristics
(a memory, needless to say, being an acquired characteristic). Jung, however,
made it clear time and time again that he did not believe that what we inherit
from our ancestors can be related to specific ancestral memories. Jung referred
to the concept of an inheritable memory as a ‘memory image’, and he made it
clear time and time again that he did not believe that such a thing existed: ‘I
have never yet found infallible evidence for the inheritance of memory images’,
he writes for example in ‘The relations between the ego and unconscious’
(1916 / 1928 / 1935, para. 300). As we have seen, however, Jung did frequently
state that he believed that the experiences which have been repeated over and
over again throughout our ancestral history have somehow been ‘imprinted’
or ‘engraved’ into the innate roots of our psyche. These innate roots, needless
to say, are what in Jungian language are called the archetypes of the collective
unconscious, and there are several passages in the Collected Works in which he
relates these archetypes to the experiences of our ancestors, calling them, for exam-
ple, ‘the deposits of all our ancestral experiences’ (1916 / 1928 / 1935, para. 300).
In Psychological Types, Jung puts it as follows:

[The archetype] can be conceived as a mnemic deposit, an imprint or engram (Semon),

which has arisen through the condensation of countless processes of a similar kind. In
this respect it is a precipitate and, therefore, a typical basic form, of certain ever recur-
ring psychic experiences.
(Jung 1921 / 1960, para. 748)

And elsewhere in the same text:

These archetypes, whose innermost nature is inaccessible to experience, are the

precipitate of the psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line; the accumulated
experiences of organic life in general, a million times repeated, and condensed into
types. In these archetypes, therefore, all experiences are represented which have
happened on this planet since primeval times. The more frequent and the more
intense they were, the more clearly focused they become in the archetype.
(Jung 1921 / 1960, para. 659)
264 Ritske Rensma

Passages such as these have been called Lamarckian by many different

scholars, for one very simple reason: Jung gives the impression in them that he
believes that acquired characteristics can be inherited. When he states that the
archetype is a ‘deposit’ or an ‘imprint’ of ancestral experience, the implication
seems to be that Jung thought that whenever an ancestor had a certain experience,
a tiny little mark was made on his unconscious, which was then passed on to the
next generation. The repetition of this process–‘a million times repeated’, as
Jung puts it in Psychological Types–has enlarged this mark to such an extent that
it has now become an innate structure of our collective unconscious, with consid-
erable influence on our psychological functioning.
But do these passages really prove that Jung was a psychological Lamarckian?
This is much harder to establish than is the case with Freud, as the latter openly
admitted that he believed in the inheritance of acquired psychological characteris-
tics in Moses and Monotheism (1967, p. 127). In Jung’s case, however, it is much
more unclear what he really means. Calling the archetype a ‘deposit’ or an ‘imprint’
of experience, after all, certainly sounds Lamarckian, but what if Jung didn’t mean
it that way? As there are no passages in Jung’s work in which he openly admits–or
denies–that he is a Lamarckian, this is certainly a possibility that needs to be taken
into account. Several scholars have indeed made claims to this effect. Stevens
(2006, p. 76), for example, has written that ‘in Jung’s defense, it can be argued that
he used such terms figuratively rather than scientifically’. In my opinion,
however, Jung did not use the Lamarckian-sounding terms in these passages
figuratively: rather, there is more than enough evidence that he did believe
in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It is to that evidence that we
will now turn in the next section, in which I will deal with four key passages
which all show that Jung believed in an evolutionary mechanism which
relies on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The passages are from
texts from 1921, 1933, 1943 and 1958, and therefore show that Jung
adopted a Lamarckian stance throughout his career. Even though all of
these passages also clearly show that Jung subscribed to different
Lamarckian ideas than Freud did, the evidence is nevertheless clear: a belief
in the inheritance of acquired characteristics lies at the root of how Jung
viewed the origins of the collective unconscious.

Evidence for Jung’s Lamarckism

The first piece of evidence for Jung’s belief in the inheritance of acquired
characteristics can be found in the second passage from Psychological Types I
quoted above, and stems from 1921. In that passage Jung stated that in the
archetypes ‘all experiences are represented which have happened on this planet
since primeval times. The more frequent and the more intense they were, the
more clearly focused they become in the archetype’ (Jung 1921 / 1960, para. 659).
The clue here is in the notion that certain archetypes are more dominantly present
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 265

because the experiences which they relate to have been intensely experienced. From
a Darwinian perspective, such a statement does not make sense at all. It is certainly
true that many Darwinian evolutionary psychologists have stated that innate
structures for dealing with common experiences like finding a mate or nurturing
children exist2; however, whether such an experience was intense or not is irrelevant
from a Darwinian point of view. Only the fact that the innate structure related to
dealing with the experience gave our ancestors an adaptive advantage is relevant,
not the intensity of the experience. Only from a Lamarckian perspective does such
a statement make sense: an experience which has been experienced as intense could
be seen as leaving a larger or more dominant ‘imprint’, which in turn gets inherited.
Jung also writes in this passage from Psychological Types that in the archetypes
‘all experiences [my italics, RR] are represented which have happened on this
planet since primeval times’. This statement is also incompatible with modern ways
of thinking about evolution. From a Darwinian perspective, namely, only some
experiences leave their mark on the innate structure of the psyche (albeit in an
indirect way, because the innate structure for dealing with the experience has become
a general trait through natural selection); only by subscribing to a Lamarckian
perspective can one make the case that all experiences have left their mark.
This evidence that Jung thought along Lamarckian lines in Psychological
Types is further strengthened by the fact that Jung aligns himself in this book
with a thinker who is notorious for having been a Lamarckian: the German
biologist Richard Semon. Jung refers to Semon in the first passage from
Psychological Types quoted above, in which he states the following: ‘[The
archetype] can be conceived as a mnemic deposit, an imprint or engram
(Semon)’. Semon’s concept of the engram comes from his book The Mneme
(1921), in which he put forward his ideas about how memory works in human
beings. In this book, Semon argued that stimuli which are remembered leave a
physical trace behind in the nerve tissue of the organism’s brain. Semon then went
on to claim that such memory traces–or engrams, as he called them–were inher-
itable, which is very clearly a Lamarckian position. Perhaps because of this explicit
Lamarckism, Semon is somewhat of a forgotten figure by now, but he seems to have
had somewhat of an influence on Jung, especially in the early stages of his career.
The fact that this line of influence exists, needless to say, can’t be taken as direct
evidence that Jung was a Lamarckian too. The possibility exists that Jung was
simply unfortunate in aligning himself with a thinker who was soon to be
discredited for his Lamarckian ideas, without fully believing in all of the ideas
which Semon subscribed to himself. Given the evidence stated above, however,

2
I don’t mean to claim here that evolutionary psychology is a homogenous whole, with every
scholar subscribing to the same point of view. I’m aware of the fact that there are differing theories
within the field, as well as of the fact that the field as a whole has been criticized. If, in the following
pages, I contrast Jung’s statements with what a hypothetical ‘Darwinian evolutionary psychologist’
might say, I do so only to illustrate that Jung’s statements do not make sense from a Darwinian
perspective–but do make sense from a Lamarckian perspective.
266 Ritske Rensma

I don’t think that is the right conclusion at all. Jung most definitely thought
along Lamarckian lines in this period of his career, and although the fact that
he references Semon doesn’t fully prove this hypothesis, it does certainly lend
strong support to it.
The second text which I would like to offer as evidence that Jung thought along
Lamarckian lines is related to his ideas about race and stems from the 1930s. In
this period Jung for some time defended the position that there exists not only a
collective unconscious, which is present in all human beings, but also a racial
unconscious, which is different for each race. Jung made statements about this
topic primarily in the 1930s–I have found no such statements from the 1940s
or later. Some of the statements which Jung makes when discussing this idea of a
racial unconscious have distinct Lamarckian overtones. The passage which I would
like to offer as evidence for this comes from his Visions seminar from 1933, in
which he says the following about the German racial unconscious:

The remains of ancestral life which are found in the [German] unconscious consist in
what the ancestors have done; there are memories of riding in carts, of using weapons,
so one must necessarily do something similar, in order to put those ancestral memories
into practice.
(Jung 1998 [1930–1934], p. 977)

This passage is a strange one, as it appears as if Jung is defending the Freudian

stance of the inheritability of individual memories in it. We have already seen,
though, that Jung stated explicitly throughout his career that he did not believe
that we can inherit individual ancestral memories. Presumably, then, Jung does
not mean that he believes we inherit a specific individual memory of riding in a
cart or using weapons, but only the instinctive preference for doing the same.
Nevertheless, such a statement can never be defended from a Darwinian
perspective. What a Darwinian evolutionary psychologist might claim is that
we inherit a ‘learning bias’ for solving a host of adaptive problems which our
ancestors struggled with. What a Darwinian evolutionary psychologist would
never do, however, is to claim that innate structures exist which are related to
specific man-made objects such as carts or weapons. There is simply no known
mechanism through which the experience of such objects could end up being
part of the innate structure of our minds. Only from a Lamarckian
perspective does such a belief make sense.
The third piece of evidence which I wish to put forward comes from a text
which is hard to date: ‘On the psychology of the unconscious’, published as
part of Collected Works 7. Jung originally wrote it in 1916, then rewrote it
many different times in later years. The final version was written in 1943, and
it is this version which has become part of the Collected Works. In his foreword
to this edition, Jung states that when he wrote it, ‘a number of inadequacies
could be eliminated or improved, and superfluous material deleted’. I take this
as evidence that Jung felt that this version of the text accurately reflected his
thinking at that point in time, which is why the Lamarckian passage which it
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 267

contains is for me evidence that Jung was still a Lamarckian in 1943. The
passage in question reads as follows:

One of the commonest and at the same time most impressive experiences is the apparent
movement of the sun every day. We certainly cannot discover anything of the kind in the
unconscious, so far as the known physical process is concerned. What we do find, on the
other hand, is the myth of the sun-hero in all its countless variations. It is this myth, and
not the physical process, that forms the sun archetype. The same can be said of the phases
of the moon. The archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same
or similar mythical ideas. Hence it seems as though what is impressed upon the
unconscious were exclusively the subjective fantasy-ideas aroused by the physical process
[my italics, RR]. We may therefore assume that the archetypes are recurrent impressions
made by subjective reactions.
(Jung, 1916 / 1918 / 1926 / 1936 / 1943, para. 109)

The key sentence here is the penultimate one: ‘Hence it seems as though what is
impressed upon the unconscious were exclusively the subjective fantasy-ideas
aroused by the physical process’. What Jung is claiming here goes directly
against the current Darwinian way of thinking, in that he states that what he
calls ‘subjective fantasy-ideas’ have left an impression on the innate structure
of the unconscious. This is a claim which does not hold up if one thinks along
neo-Darwinian lines. A Darwinian evolutionary psychologist could claim that
we inherit innate structures which give rise to similar fantasy-ideas as our
forebears (in fact, this is what Darwinian post-Jungians like Anthony Stevens
argue is the case). What is not possible, however, is that fantasy-ideas leave
an ‘imprint’ which is then inherited: that is only possible if one believes that
acquired characteristics can be inherited, and Jung makes it very clear indeed
that he believes this in this passage, calling the archetypes ‘recurrent impressions
made [my italics, RR] by subjective reactions’. The line of causality which Jung
puts forward in this last sentence is distinctly Lamarckian: subjective reactions
make an impression on the unconscious, which in turn gets inherited. Jung,
then, was rather clearly a Lamarckian in the early 1940s as well.
The last piece of evidence which I want to deal with in this section comes
from a letter Jung wrote to the British Jungian analyst Michael Fordham in June
1958. Fordham had written to Jung on May 30, 1958 to ask him what his views
were on heredity, indicating that he was concerned that Jung’s views on the
subject didn’t appear to match the by then commonly accepted neo-Darwinian
theories. Jung wrote back on the 14th of June 1958 and indicated that he shared
what he called ‘the ordinary view about it’, and that he therefore believed that
‘individual acquisitions under experimental conditions are not inherited’ (Jung
1973, p. 450). He added, however, that he thought this could not possibly be
true in general, ‘since changes in individual cases must have been inherited,
otherwise no change would have come about in phylogenesis’. It is clear from
this statement that Jung still had a distinctly un-Darwinian understanding of
how heredity worked at that time. In the Darwinian account of evolution,
268 Ritske Rensma

change occurs even though no individual changes are passed on, through the
natural selection of character traits brought about by random gene mutations.
The position which Jung takes in the letter, despite his claim that he shares ‘the
ordinary view’ of inheritance, still relies on the notion of the inheritance of acquired
characteristics, in that he claims that ‘changes in individual cases must have been
inherited, otherwise no change would have come about in phylogenesis’. The letter
to Fordham, then, makes it blatantly clear that Jung had no problem at all with
putting forward such Lamarckian notions of inheritance as late as June 1958. As
Jung died only three years later, it seems to me highly unlikely that he still changed
his mind after that. This leaves us with only one possible conclusion: Jung relied on
a Lamarckian understanding of how evolution works throughout his career.

The case against Jung being a Lamarckian

If this is so clearly the case, however, then why have so many scholars argued
that Jung was not a Lamarckian? As I already pointed out in the introduction to
this article, there are not only passages in Jung’s work which sound Lamarckian;
there are also passages in which Jung appears to be defending himself against
accusations of Lamarckism. Several different scholars have argued that these
passages (of which I will give an example in a moment) show that Jung was not
a Lamarckian. Arguments to this effect have been made by Jacobi (1959), Storr
(1973), Samuels (1985), Clarke (1992), Palmer (1997) and Stevens (2002).3
The most well-known defender of this ‘non-Lamarckian Jung’ is probably
Anthony Stevens, who makes the case that Jung managed to defend himself against
accusations of Lamarckism in several of his works. In a book chapter from 2006,
for example, he phrases his argument for this position–which all the scholars
mentioned above have developed roughly along the same lines - as follows:

[It] was not until the publication of his essay ‘The Spirit of Psychology’ [. . .] that he
finally freed himself of the Lamarckian taint, making a distinction between the deeply
unconscious and therefore unknowable and irrepresentable archetype-as-such (similar
to Kant’s das Ding-an-sich) and archetypal images, ideas and behaviours that the
archetype-as-such gives rise to. It is the archetype-as-such (the predisposition to have
certain experience) that is inherited, not the experience itself. This proposition is fully
in accord with modern biological usage and is no more Lamarckian than the statement
that children are innately disposed to acquire speech or to run on two legs.
(Stevens 2006, p. 77)

3
To this list I should add myself as well, as in my book The Innateness of Myth (2009) I also
defended this particular interpretation of the concept of the archetype. After doing a lot more research
on the topic, however, I have come to the conclusion that it does not hold up to scrutiny. This
change of mind does not affect any of the major arguments of the book, though, as the section about
Jung’s Lamarckism represents only a very small part (the book’s main topic is Joseph Campbell’s
reception of Jung’s theoretical framework, arguing that Campbell underwent several drastic shifts
of opinion regarding Jung’s overall merit).
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 269

Stevens points to a very important and dominant theme in Jung’s writings in

this passage, namely Jung’s claim that the biological, inherited dimension of
the archetype–which Jung ultimately came to call the archetype-as-such in
his 1946 paper ‘The spirit of psychology’4–is not an inherited idea or image,
but an abstract ‘form’ or blueprint, which can give rise to several different
images and ideas (which will be similar, but probably not completely identical).
It is this archetype-as-such that is inherited, not the archetypal images and ideas
which this biological base gives rise to. Although Jung only used the name arche-
type-as-such from 1946 onwards, the basic idea which he tried to express by using
this term is apparent in writings from throughout his career. In a speech given at the
1938 Eranos conference, for example, Jung put it as follows:

Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an archetype is determined in
regard to its content, in other words that it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an
expression be admissible). It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are
not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only
to a very limited degree.
(Jung 1938 / 1954, para. 155)

According to Stevens and the other ‘anti-Lamarck scholars’ (my term for the
group of scholars mentioned above, who have all defended Jung against
Lamarckism in a highly similar way), passages like this one prove that Jung
was not Lamarckian. The argument which they provide for this rests on an
important presupposition: that there is only one possible way of accounting
for the evolution of the psyche in a Lamarckian way. According to this
presupposition, a Lamarckian would never claim that what we inherit from our
forebears is merely an abstract ‘form’ which makes it likely that we have
similar–but not identical–experiences to our forebears; instead, a Lamarckian
would–as Freud did–claim that we inherit the memory of their actual experi-
ences. A Lamarckian, according to these scholars, would therefore hold that what
is inherited from our forebears is already determined in regard to its content, to use
Jung’s phrase from the quote above: since we inherit the actual memory of their
experiences, what we inherit are specific images and ideas, and not an abstract
form or blueprint which can give rise to similar images and ideas. Since Jung made
it clear that he believed in the inheritance of exactly such an abstract form, and not
of a mirror image of a specific ancestral memory, he cannot be a Lamarckian. As
Stevens puts it:

It is the archetype-as-such (the predisposition to have a certain experience) that is

inherited, not the experience itself. This proposition is fully in accord with modern
biological usage and is no more Lamarckian than the statement that children are
innately disposed to acquire speech or to run on two legs.
(Stevens 2006, p. 77)

4
Published in CW 8 as ‘On the nature of the psyche’.
270 Ritske Rensma

At first glance, this argument may seem convincing, which goes a long way
towards explaining why it is so prevalent. If we examine this argument in the
light of what has been discussed in this article so far, however, we can come
to see that it is not a valid argument at all. Although the ‘anti-Lamarck’ scholars
are correct when they claim that Jung did not subscribe to the kind of psycho-
logical Lamarckism which Freud defended, in which an actual memory of an
ancestral experience is passed on, they are incorrect when they claim that this
proves that Jung is not Lamarckian. What they have proven is that Jung was
not a psychological Lamarckian in the same sense that Freud was; however,
since this is not the only ‘psychological Lamarckian’ position, they have not
given conclusive evidence that Jung was not a Lamarckian. As Jung’s own writings
clearly show, it is perfectly possible to claim that we do not inherit specific
ancestral memories, while at the same time also subscribing to an evolutionary
mechanism which involves the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Jung
indeed subscribed to both these ideas, sometimes even referring to both in the
very same passage:

Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the
form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing
merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.
(Jung 1936 / 1959, para. 99)

This passage makes it very clear indeed that a different kind of Lamarckism
exists than the one the ‘anti-Lamarck’ scholars have in mind when they try to
defend Jung against the Lamarckian accusation: a Lamarckism which at the
same time subscribes to inheriting acquired characteristics and to the belief that
what we inherit are not actual ‘memory images’ (Jung’s term) but instead what
Jung calls ‘forms without content’. What Stevens and the other ‘anti-Lamarck’
scholars have completely overlooked is that it is not the nature of what is
claimed to be inheritable which establishes whether a thinker is a Lamarckian
or not (in the case of Freud and Jung, an actual ancestral memory versus merely
an innate disposition to have the same experience), but whether the evolutionary
mechanism the thinker in question subscribes to relies on the inheritance of
acquired characteristics or not. Only by pointing out that Jung did not
subscribe to such a mechanism can the ‘anti-Lamarck’ scholars acquit Jung
of Lamarckism. This should be the focal point of the debate, not whether
Jung believed in innate ideas and images or not.
As I hope to have made clear, however, Jung most certainly believed in a
mechanism of evolution which relies on the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
This fact does not rule out the possibility, of course, that Jung didn’t only think
along Lamarckian lines, but that he combined Lamarckian and Darwinian ideas.
This was once a common position, which we find not only in Darwin’s own work
but also in the work of such staunch defenders of Darwinism as Ernst Haeckel. If
this were true in Jung’s case, then we would expect to find evidence in his writings
that he sometimes thought in terms of adaptation, of certain characteristics offering
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 271

an organism an environmental advantage, which in turn explains the fact that these
characteristics are now prevalent. I believe that such passages can indeed be found
in the Collected Works, for example when Jung claims that consciousness arose
because it gave our ancestors an evolutionary advantage (Jung 1927 / 1931, para.
695). This leads me to think that Jung was not anti-Darwinian as such, but drew on
both Lamarckian and Darwinian ideas depending on the context. The Lamarckian
passages, however, do seem to form the majority.
Such an approach would have been typical for Jung, who was notoriously
eclectic in his interests and in the thinkers he drew inspiration from.5 Although
Jung does not appear to have been influenced by Lamarck himself, it is certainly
obvious that he drew inspiration from thinkers who subscribed to Lamarckian
ideas. I have already mentioned Richard Semon, but the above mentioned
Haeckel also appears to have influenced him.6 Given the fact that there are also
Darwinian passages in the Collected Works, it should come as no surprise that
Jung also took inspiration from Darwinian thinkers. As Hogenson (2001) has
pointed out in this Journal, for example, Jung was also strongly influenced by
James Mark Baldwin and Conway Lloyd Morgan. Unlike Hogenson’s claim,
however, I do not think that the fact that Jung took inspiration from these
Darwinian thinkers strengthens the supposition that he was radically opposed
to Lamarckian ideas. For instance, Jung draws on the work of Baldwin in
Psychological Types (Jung 1921 / 1960, para. 518)–the exact same text in which
he also compares his concept of the archetype to the ideas of the neo-Lamarckian
thinker Richard Semon.7
As I already indicated above, many people nowadays think of Darwinism
and Lamarckism as two completely incompatible systems of thought. In the
early stages of Jung’s career, however, this distinction was by no means clear-
cut. The currently accepted paradigm of neo-Darwinism–otherwise known
as the ‘modern synthesis’–was only established in the twenties and thirties, by
which time Jung had already developed many of his core ideas. The real
acceptance of neo-Darwinism on a large scale only took place in the fifties

5
For a good overview of Jung’s many different influences see Sonu Shamdasani’s excellent Jung
and the Making of Modern Psychology (2003).
6
The most important area where I see Haeckel’s influence in Jung’s work is the former’s so-called
‘biogenetic law’, which can be summarized as ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. Even though it is
now largely discredited, examples of Jung putting it forward as fact can be found throughout the
Collected Works.
7
Hogenson’s second argument against Jung being a Lamarckian is that Jung does not subscribe to
the Freudian notion that individually acquired instincts or memories can be passed on completely
intact to the next generation. As the section on Stevens and the other ‘anti-Lamarck’ scholars has
made clear, however, this is not the only possible Lamarckian position. Hogenson is correct in argu-
ing that Jung did not subscribe to the Freudian type of Lamarckism; however, as there are other
possible positions, this finding does not logically lead to the conclusion that Jung was not Lamarckian.
As I hope to have shown in this paper, there is more than enough evidence that Jung was Lamarckian,
even though he definitely wasn’t in the same camp as Freud in this regard.
272 Ritske Rensma

and sixties, and by then it was too late for it to have any really lasting influence
on Jung. Jung’s focus by then was on completely other areas of investigation
(for example alchemy and synchronicity), and when people in his inner circle
who were more up to speed with developments in biology tried to broach the
topic of Lamarckism, Jung appears to have been rather dismissive of their
concerns. The biologist Adolf Portmann, for example, was highly concerned
about the passages in Jung’s work which sounded Lamarckian in tone, saying
the following in an interview:

I was under the strong impression that not many of the biological and physical
chemical experiences of our modern time entered into his thinking . . . He had come
from the first great adventure of Darwinism; he had turned, as I see it, away from
the extreme forms of Darwinism to a more Lamarckian way of thinking, and this
was, I think, a more or less ever-present background he never discussed . . . A discus-
sion about a notion like “archetype” is impossible when you do not consider the
new biological facts of hereditary connections with the environment, or of the instinc-
tive life of animals, and of the instinctive residuums in man. To find out exactly what
the thinking of Jung was in this respect seems to me of a very great importance, but the
work has not yet been done.
(Shamdasani 2003, p. 266)

When Portmann dealt with this topic in a paper, however, Jung was highly
critical of it, going so far as to say that ‘it was hopeless trying to explain
archetypes to people who had no direct experience of the material, and that
he wished scientists would sometimes ask him before plunging in blithely in
fields they didn’t know anything about’ (ibid.). Even though Jung had admitted
to Portmann a few years earlier that he ‘was no longer at home in modern
biology’(ibid.), it appears that he had no motivation to inform himself about
new developments in the field, and that he remained committed to the outdated
evolutionary ideas to which he had subscribed throughout his career.

Conclusion
Needless to say, I am not the first scholar to come to the conclusion that there
are Lamarckian passages in Jung’s work. Other scholars before me have made
similar claims, but in my opinion no one has as yet argued the case for it in a
satisfactory way. Scholars who classify Jung as a Lamarckian tend either to
make the offhand comment that this is the case without giving any kind of
evidence at all, or focus only on one or two passages without dealing with the
possibility that Jung could have changed his mind somewhere along the way.
As Jung, by his own admission, changed his mind a lot, this seems to me to
be a serious shortcoming. For the most part, other scholars have also failed to
show why the passages which appear to be a defence against Lamarckism are
not, in fact, what they appear to be. Since so many scholars have drawn on
these passages to argue that Jung was not a Lamarckian, it seems to me that
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 273

these cannot be overlooked. Here I must give credit to Percival (1993), who is
the only scholar I’m aware of who has pointed out before me that the
passages in which Jung claims that the abstract archetype-as-such is not
‘filled in with content’ and not a re-echo of an ancestral memory do not
prove that he was not a Lamarckian. What Percival has failed to do, however,
is to offer substantial evidence that Jung remained committed to this position
throughout his life. Where he also falls short, for me, is in the conclusions he
attaches to his findings. Percival’s article about Jung’s Lamarckian bent is
called ‘Is Jung’s theory of archetypes compatible with neo-Darwinism and
sociobiology’, and it is highly critical of Jung. Percival makes the case in it
that Jung’s Lamarckism disqualifies him from being of any relevance today:
now that neo-Darwinism has become the dominant paradigm, a thinker
who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics can only be of
historical interest.
For myself, I think that that conclusion is rather premature. It hinges on the
hidden presupposition that a theory can only be of use if it is unblemished in
its entirety. If any of its constituting parts are discredited, the whole should be
discredited too. The example of Darwin himself relying on Lamarckian ideas,
however, shows that that particular understanding of scientific progress is not
a correct one. No one these days would claim that Darwin’s ideas are of no
value because of the Lamarckian passages some of his books contain; therefore,
Lamarckian passages in Jung’s work do not by necessity lead to the conclusion
that all his other ideas are useless too. Problems with Darwin’s own ideas do not
disqualify the neo-Darwinian project; by the same token, problems with some
of Jung’s ideas do not disqualify the possibility of a post-Jungian position.
If Jung had subscribed to Freud’s version of Lamarckism, which holds that
it is possible to inherit an actual memory from one’s ancestors, then yes,
analytical psychology would have been in big trouble indeed, for it is impossible
to account for such an inheritance using modern scientific theories. Jung’s
archetypes, however–which he was at pains to point out are ‘forms without
content’, and not individual memories–can be accounted for in terms of
modern scientific ideas, as the work of a great many post-Jungian scholars has
shown (quite often in the pages of this Journal).8 This project, then–to relate the

8
Books relevant to this topic have been written by Stevens (2002), Knox (2003) and Haule (2010).
Important articles have been written by–amongst others–Tresan (1996), McDowell (2001), Knox
(2002, 2009), Hogenson (2005), Merchant (2009) and Goodwyn (2010). There is as yet no consen-
sus amongst these scholars as to how Jung’s concept of the archetype should be related to contem-
porary scientific models, with some focusing on a model of the archetype which puts emphasis on its
innateness (for example Stevens) and others focusing on what has been called an ‘emergent/develop-
mental’ model of the archetype (for example Knox). All these scholars share my opinion, however,
that Jung’s ideas are still relevant, and worthy of being brought into the twenty-first century (for a
good overview of the different positions within the debate, see Merchant (2009)). Needless to say,
there have also been scholars who have argued that Jung’s ideas cannot be related to contemporary
ideas. Examples of this position are Percival (1993) and Pietikainen (2003).
274 Ritske Rensma

concept of the archetype to modern scientific ideas–isn’t undermined by the

conclusions of this article at all. It merely shows that, like Darwin’s own
theories, Jung’s ideas are in need of an ‘update’ in some areas, and need to be
brought into the twenty-first century.
It is not the aim of this paper, however, to make suggestions as to the
exact nature of this update. Rather, its aim is to bring closure to another
debate: did Jung believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics or not?
As I hope to have made clear, there is more than enough evidence to support
my claim that he did. As the passages I have offered in support of this claim
stem from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, there is also more than enough evidence
to suggest that Jung did so throughout his career. Even though I do not feel
that this in any way disqualifies the work being done by post-Jungian
scholars today, I do strongly believe that it is important for post-Jungians to
acknowledge this ‘blemish’ on Jung’s track record. In order to be taken
seriously by the wider academic community, it is important that post-Jungians
acknowledge the full spectrum of Jung’s heritage–the positive aspects, but
the negative also. One does this not by focusing only on what is respectable
and compatible with modern science. Just as it is important that the more
unfavourable parts of Jung’s biography are discussed openly and honestly, so
those aspects of his theoretical framework that haven’t stood the test of time
also need to be acknowledged. Failing to do so brings with it the risk of making
the post-Jungian community look cultish and secretive, which in the end serves
only its critics.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Que Jung soit Lamarckien ou non a toujours été un sujet de vifs débats, autant dans
la communauté post-Jungienne que chez les chercheurs s’intéressant à Jung dans la
communauté académique en général. On peut s’étonner du fait que, jusqu’à présent,
peu de travaux aient été consacrés à ce sujet, et à ma connaissance personne n’a
encore réussi à faire honneur à toutes les subtilités que cela implique. Les chercheurs
qui ont prétendu que Jung était Lamarckien ont, en grande partie, simplifié le débat à
l’extrême, en omettant de discuter des extraits dans lesquels Jung semble se défendre
de Lamarckisme; cependant, les chercheurs qui ont défendu Jung de Lamarckisme, ne
se sont en règle générale pas confrontés à la question de savoir si ces extraits tirent
vraiment Jung d’affaire. Cet article va tenter de corriger ce déséquilibre en mettant en
avant quatre extraits clés recouvrant la carrière de Jung, qui concluent tous à l’évidence
que Jung était en effet un Lamarckien. Après avoir discuté de ces extraits, il examinera
dans le détail les extraits dans lesquels Jung semble se défendre de Lamarckisme, en
expliquant pourquoi ces extraits ne représentent pas du tout une défense contre du
Lamarckisme, et ont par conséquent été en général mal interprétés par de nombreux
chercheurs.
Analytical psychology and the ghost of Lamarck 275

Die Frage, ob Jung Lamarckist war oder nicht, stellte, sowohl innerhalb der post-
jungianischen Gemeinde wie auch unter Wissenschaftlern der weiteren akademischen
Gemeinschaft mit einem Interesse an Jung, immer einen heiß debattierten Punkt dar. Doch
überraschenderweise wurde dem nur wenig substantielle Arbeit gewidmet und aus meiner
Sicht hat es bis jetzt noch niemand vollbracht, all den hierin enthaltenen Feinheiten
Gerechtigkeit widerfahren zu lassen. Diejenigen Wissenschaftler, die behauptet haben, Jung
sei Lamarckist, haben zum größten Teil die Debatte dadurch übervereinfacht, daß sie es
unterließen, jene Passagen zu berücksichtigen, in denen sich Jung selbst gegen den Vorwurf
des Lamarckismus’ verwahrte; Jene Wissenschaftler dagegen, die Jung gegen den Vorwurf
des Lamarckismus’ verteidigten, haben regelmäßig verabsäumt sich adäquat mit der Frage
zu beschäftigen, ob diese Textstellen Jung wirklich aus der Klemme bringen. Dieser Beitrag
wird versuchen, dieses Ungleichgewicht dadurch zu korrigieren, daß vier Schlüsselstellen
aus Jungs Karriere angeführt werden, die allesamt schlüssige Belege dafür liefern, daß Jung
in der Tat Lamarckist war. Im Anschluß an die Diskussion dieser Passagen wird im Detail
auf jene Stellen eingegangen, in denen sich Jung selbst gegen den Vorwurf des Lamarckismus’
wehrt und dabei nachgewiesen, daß diese Textteile keineswegs eine Verteidigung gegen den
Lamarckismusvorwurf darstellen und folglich generell von vielen Wissenschaftlern fehlinter-
pretiert wurden.

Se Jung fosse lamarckiano o no è sempre stato uno scottante argomento di dibattito, sia
all’interno della comunità post-junghiana che fra gli allievi interessati a Jung nella comu-
nità accademica più ampia. Eppure sorprendentemente pochi lavori sostanziali sono stati
dedicati all’argomento, e secondo me nessuno è finora riuscito a rendere giustizia a tutte
le sottigliezze implicate. Gli allievi che hanno dichiarato che Jung è lamarckiano hanno
per lo più ipersemplificato il dibattito, mancando nel discutere i passaggi in cui Jung sem-
bra difendere se stesso contro il Lamarckismo; tuttavia gli allievi che hanno difeso Jung
contro il Lamarckismo non si sono adeguatamente confrontati con la questione se questi
passaggi abbiano realmente liberato Jung dalla trappola. In questo articolo si tenterà di
correggere tale squilibrio presentando quattro passaggi chiave che attraversano la car-
riera di Jung e che rappresentano tutti la conclusiva evidenza che Jung fosse Lamarck-
iano. Dopo aver discusso tali passaggi si tratteranno dettagliatamente i passaggi nei quali
Jung sembra stia difendendosi contro il Lamarckismo, provando che tali passaggi non
rappresentano affatto una difesa contro il Lamarckismo, e sono stati quindi general-
mente mal interpretati dagli allievi.

Был или не был Юнг ламаркианцем – этот вопрос всегда оставался горячей
темой для дискуссий, как внутри пост-юнгианского сообщества, так и среди
исследователей из более широкого академического круга, интересующихся
Юнгом. Однако на удивление мало солидных работ были посвящены этой
теме, и, на мой взгляд, никому еще не удалось отдать должное внимание всем
присущим этой теме тонкостям. Те специалисты, которые утверждали, что
Юнг ламаркианец, по большей части чересчур упрощали спорный вопрос,
не будучи способными обсудить те пассажи, в которых Юнг защищался от
попыток приписать ему ламаркизм; те же исследователи, которые защищали
точку зрения о том, что Юнг не имеет отношения к ламаркизму, как правило,
276 Ritske Rensma

неадекватно справлялись с вопросом о том, действительно ли данные пассажи

могут снять с Юнга подозрения. Данная статья делает попытку исправить
дисбаланс; в ней приводятся четыре ключевых пассажа из трудов Юнга,
написанные по мере разворачивания его карьеры, и каждый из них является
решающим свидетельством того, что Юнг и вправду был ламаркианцем.
После обсуждения этих отрывков в статье подробно будут рассмотрены те
места, в которых Юнг защищается от приписывания ему ламаркизма, и будет
доказано, что эти места вовсе не являются защитой от ламаркизма и, следо-
вательно, обычно оказываются ошибочно проинтерпретированными многими
исследователями.

Siempre ha sido un tema ardientemente debatido si Jung era o no Lamackiano, tanto por
la comunidad postjunguiana y entre los estudiosos de Jung dentro de una más amplia
comunidad académica. Sin embargo, sorprendentemente, se han realizados pocos traba-
jos substanciales se han dedicado a este tópico, y en mi criterio ninguno ha hecho justicia
para manejar las sutilezas involucradas. Los estudiosos que sostienen que Jung es
Lamarckiano han, en su mayoría, sobre-simplificado el debate, por evitar los escritos
donde Jung parece defenderse contra el Lamarckismo; los estudiosos que defienden a
Jung del Lamarckismo, sin embargo, tienen como regla no lidiar adecuadamente con
la pregunta de si estos párrafos realmente liberan a Jung de su enganche. Este trabajo tra-
tará de corregir este desbalance trayendo al frente cuatro escritos definitorios que
demuestran en forma concluyente que Jung era de hecho Lamarckiano. Después de
discutir estos escritos, trabajaremos aquellos escritos con los cuales Jung aparenta
defenderse del Lamarckismo, evidenciando que ellos no representan una defensa contra
el Lamarckismo, y que han sido malinterpretados por los estudiosos.

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[MS first received April 2012; final version November 2012]