Gary Clark

University of Adelaide · Discipline of Medicine

This book reevaluates Carl Jung’s ideas in the context of contemporary research in the evolutionary sciences. Recent work in developmental biology, as well as experimental and psychedelic neuroscience, have provided empirical evidence that supports some of Jung’s central claims about the nature and evolution of consciousness. Beginning with a hist...

In this article we seek to integrate theories of music origins and dance with hominin fossil anatomy and the paleoecological contexts of hominin evolution. Based on the association between rhythm in music, dance and locomotion, we propose that early bipedal hominins may have evolved neurobiological substrates different from other great apes due to...

In this essay I reassess the scholarship on Jung’s reception of Kant and the influence of German biology and the Naturphilopshen on his thinking. In the extant literature on Jung and Kant it has been argued that Jung misread Kant. I argue that this position is based on a limited understanding of Kant’s work, one which fails to consider Kant’s theor...

In this chapter, Gary Clark discusses the evolutionary ideas of Erich Fromm. He argues that Fromm’s theories provide a unique means of reconciling the concepts of cultural specificity and universalism that seem to divide scholars in the humanities and the biological sciences. Adopting the Hegelian concept of a second nature associated with human co...

ABSTRACT Findings from evolutionary neuroscience suggest that the human brain consists of ancient primary process affective systems and more recently evolved secondary process systems. This duality has been compared to Jung’s concept of an archaic or collective unconscious shared by all humanity and a more recently evolved form of ego consciousness...

Throughout the hominin lineage brain size is believed to have increased threefold – increase which, it is argued by some researchers, results in the enhanced brain power that distinguishes humans from any other living being. However, as we demonstrate in this article this supposed increase is the result of comparing the species mean of contemporary...

In this article we provide evidence that evolutionary pressures altered the cranial base and the mastoid region of the temporal bone more than the calvaria in the transition from H. erectus to H. sapiens. This process seems to have resulted in the evolution of more globular skull shape – but not as a result of expansion of the brain in the parietal...

In this essay, I outline an approach to analytical psychology based on the emerging disciplines of psychedelic neuroscience and psychedelic assisted therapies. During the 1950s Jung made brief comments on the use of psychedelics in traditional cultures and therapeutic contexts. I analyse these comments in the light of consequent research in the fie...

In this chapter I interpret Jung's visions in The Red Book in the light of psychedelic and evolutionary neuroscience. I argue that The Red Book is an exemplar of the visual capabilities of the human brain. Not so much the visual capacity to see the external world, but the internal capacity to create emotionally rich visual imagery that provides mea...

In this article I discuss the relationship between analytical psychology and theories of human social evolution. More specifically I look at debates in evolutionary studies and anthropology regarding the priority of matrilineal social structure in the emergence of Homo sapiens. These debates were occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth...

In this paper we analyse the possibility that the early hominin Ardipithecus ramidus had vocal capabilities far exceeding those of any extant non-human primate. We argue that erect posture combined with changes in craniofacial morphology, such as reduced facial and jaw length, not only provide evidence for increased levels of pro-sociality, but als...

In this paper we analyse the ontogeny of craniofacial growth in Ardipithecus ramidus in the context of its possible social and environmental determinants. We sought to test the hypothesis that this form of early hominin evolved a specific adult craniofacial morphology via heterochronic dissociation of growth trajectories. We suggest the lack of sex...