This is kind of a Nature vs. Nurture thread. I'm not taking an extreme opinion, opinion though. My only opinion is that humans are not born as a blank slate. That doesn't mean that their lives aren't heavily influenced by their environment, but that it is also influenced by "genetic programming" - or as Jung would call it, the Collective Unconscious.
We're studying Jung right now in Psychology and Literature, and if I've ever gotten pissed at you and told you that "OF COURSE WE'RE A PART OF NATURE! Go study psychology, and you'll see what I mean." Well, I finally found my basis. (wh00!) I'm not going to get ugly about this. For me, this debate is not about arguing beliefs, but arguing opinions. (Recently quelled, because I took an oath not to debate/argue about religious matters among other things.) So I'm not going to bite your head off or get really angry with you. I have a source of which to gather facts to support my opinion. Counter me and teach me a thing or two with sources of your own.
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First, lets start with the Collective Unconscious and Archetypes. I'm quoting from <u>JUNG A Very SHort Introduction</u> by Anthony Stevens. (A book from class. Any typoes there is just my lousy typing, so please excuse.
Quote:
What Jung was proposing was no less than a fundamental concept on which the whole science of psychology could be built. Potentially, it is of comparable important to quantum theory in physics. Just at the physicist investigates particles and waves, and the biologist genes, so Jung held it to be the business of the psychologist to investigate the collective unconscious and the functional units of which it is compased - the <i>archetypes</i>, as he eventaully called them. Archetypes are 'identical psychic structures common to all' (<i>CW</i> V, para. 224), which together constitute 'the archaic heritage of humanity' (<i>CW</i> V, para. 259).
Quote:
They were <i>collective</i> in the sense that they embodied the <i>general</i> characteristics of a thing, but they were also implicit in its <i>specific</i> manifestations. The human fingerprint, for example, is instantly recognizable for what it is on account of its unmistakable configuration of contours and whorls. Yet every fingerprint has a configuration unique to its owner, which is why those who turn their hands to burglary must remember to wear gloves if they wish to escape detection and arrest.
And this was not just Jung's idea. There have been paralleling theories in other areas of science.
Quote:
Many other disciplines have produced concepts similar to the archetypal hypthesis, but usually without reference to Jung. For example, the primary concern of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the French school of structural anthropology is with the unconscious <i>infrastructures</i> which they hold responsible for all human customs and institutions; specialists in linguistics maintain that although grammers differ from one another, their basic forms - which Noam Chomsky calls their <i>deep structures</i> - are universal (i.e. at the deepest neuropsychic level, there exists a universal [or 'archetypal'] grammer on which all individual grammers are based); an entirely new discipline, sociobiology, has grown up on the theory that the patterns of behaviour typical of all social species, the human species included, are dependent on <i>genetically transmitted response strategies</i> designed to maximize the fitness of the organism to survive in the environment in which it evolved; sociobiology also holds that the psycho-social development in individual members of a species is dependent on what are termed <i>epigenetic rules</i> (<i>epi</i> = upon, <i>genesis</i> = development; i.e. rules upon which development proceeds); more recently still, ethologically oriented psychiatrists have begun to study what they call <i>psychobiological response patterns</i> and <i>deeply homologous neural structures</i> which they hold responsible for the individual patients in response to variations in their social environment. All these concepts are compatile with the archetypal hypthesis which Jung had proposed decades earlier to virtually universal indifference.
Tomorrow, a peer has promised to print out the information on a male child that had a botched circumcision. The parents decided to just remove his penis and raise him as a girl. So he had a sex change and was raised as a girl. The end result was suicide. But for more details, I'd have to have more information, which I will have tomorrow. Yety.