Naturalized Domination via Recapitulation Theory

The recapitulation theory builds the psyche as a vertical column: archaic deposits below, rational achievements above, and Indigenous peoples mapped onto the lower strata as living fossils of childhood. Jung (1967) makes this explicit when he proposes that “infantile thinking and dream-thinking are simply a recapitulation of earlier evolutionary stages” (CW 5, para. 27). The implication is structural. To go deeper into the psyche is to go backward in evolutionary time, and to go backward is to become more “primitive.”

Gould (1977) tracks the political cost of this architecture. Under recapitulation, “if adults of lower races are like white children, then they may be treated as such, subdued, disciplined, and managed” (p. 126). Weikart (2004) traces the same logic through Haeckel, who arranged facial profiles from European to gorilla with colonized peoples as intermediary steps, captioning that “the differences between the lowest humans and the highest apes are smaller than the differences between the lowest and the highest humans” (p. 106). The psyche modeled by recapitulation is a hierarchy that naturalizes domination.

An alternative would replace the column with a non-hierarchical field. Imagine the psyche not as geological strata but as coexisting modes of awareness: directed thinking, somatic thinking, and imaginal thinking, not ranked on an evolutionary ladder but held in dynamic tension, the way a forest holds canopy and root system as equally necessary structures. Jung may have hinted at this (1967) himself when he cites Ferrero: “The fundamental laws of the mind remain the same, at least during the short historical periods of which we have knowledge” (CW 5, para. 35). If the laws are the same, the ranking inevitably collapses. What recapitulation calls regression may be a type of modal recognition: not an earlier stage but a mode of consciousness never surplanted by environmental influences, only devalued.

ReferencesGould, S. J. (1977). Ontogeny and phylogeny. Harvard University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1967). Symbols of transformation (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 5). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1952)

Weikart, R. (2004). From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary ethics, eugenics, and racism in Germany. Palgrave Macmillan.

References

Gould, S. J. (1977). Ontogeny and phylogeny. Harvard University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1967). Symbols of transformation (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 5, 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1952)

Weikart, R. (2004). From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary ethics, eugenics, and racism in Germany. Palgrave Macmillan.