What reality, if any at all, stands behind this linking of inner and outer process upon the basis of like appearance? The fact of the regularity and basic invariability of the associated patterns, regardless of epoch or individual, suggests that an objective factor must be common to the soul event as well as to the nature process or object which furnishes the symbol picture. At first, we might be tempted to assume that green for instance, appears as the symbol of growth, simply because it is the color of plants and our mental process associates it with growth on the basis of mere superficial resemblance.
Yet, not only do we associate green with growth but it actually is the color associated by nature with growth, namely in the plant where growth appears in its purest and least impeded form. Whenever green is replaced by a different color it means that growth has come to a standstill, as witnessed in the termination of the plant in the varicolored blossom (seldom green) or in the reverse action of growth, namely wilting. When, in the ascending evolution, the abounding power of growth is restricted by the appearance of a soul life, the green of the plant gives way to the red of the blood, the color of emotion.
Thus our subjective associative processes, far from establishing any arbitrary connections, seem merely to follow what is intuitively grasped as already objectively associated by nature in a creative totality. Even as the symbol is the image and expression, in terms of form and appearance, of specific psychic energies, so is the morphological manifestation or appearance of an object or function in nature the expression and image in the world of sense perception of its intrinsic functional dynamism.
The conclusion is obvious that whenever the two energies, the psychic and the outer one, are linked by the identical morphological image, they must somehow be objectively associated (namely, functionally identical) although this identity manifests itself in, as it were, a different language, depending upon the particular level of expression, in our example in plant growth, soma or psyche.
In our biologic research we have shown little inclination, until now, to consider an objective connection between appearance or morphology and inner functioning. But in terms of strictest biological reasoning there is no real justification to exclude structure, form, color and characteristic behavior from our acceptance as objective manifestations of an inherent force pattern, and, arbitrarily, to limit this acceptance to biochemical properties alone. Inasmuch as the laws of nature nowhere permit any arbitrariness, the morphological and behavioristic appearances of a substance, plant or animal must represent expressions just as characteristic of the intrinsic law of their being as do their chemical and pharmacodynamic properties.
An example might illustrate the practical implications of this assumption. Jung describes the dream of a patient in which he sees a vessel filled with a gelatinous mass and points out that, unknown to the patient, an alchemistic symbol is reproduced there. This symbol is the “unum vas” (one or unique vessel); it contains “a living half organic mixture from which an intermediary between perfect and imperfect bodies (the “lapis’), endowed with spirit and life, will emerge.” In this patient’s case, his unconscious mind, in order to express the “bringing into life” of a new entity in his soul, associated or identified this state of spiritual pregnancy with what “translated” into physical shape would appear as a vessel filled with a gelatinous mass.
That this association is not arbitrary but bears out an objectively set pattern is shown by the fact that the same archetype of form appears, with some variations but identical meaning, in different times, cultures and tradition. It appears as the alchemistic “unum vas,” the hermetic vessel, the vessel from which the homunculus is born, the vessel as the symbol of the matrix, the enveloping element within which things originate and receive form, which therefore is identified with the uterus, but also with the head; as the egg symbolizing the prima materia which is the aboriginal chaos, or the creative cosmos, as the holy grail conferring eternal life and faith and as the “vas spirituale and honorable,” namely the Virgin Mary.
Our enumeration showed that the conceptual symbolic context of the “vas” principle also includes the head as well as the womb and the egg, since these are the physical organs of birth of spirit and body, respectively. At first, we might look at this identification as but an allegorical play. What do we make of the fact, however, that both, head and uterus, are actually morphological replicas of the typical form principle expressed in the “unum vas”? Both, skull and uterus, have the shape of an overturned vessel (our barbarian ancestors even used the skulls of their slain foes as drinking cups). The head contains in its hard shell the soft, gelatinous, structurally little differentiated brain, swimming in the cerebrospinal liquor; the pregnant womb, with its tough, rigid muscular shell, encloses the soft, gradually differentiating gelatinous matter of the fetus swimming in the amniotic fluid.
The same morphological pattern we find expressed in the structure of a flowerbud, a seed and an egg, as well as in the shape and organization of the oyster: a hard shell encloses a more or less gelatinous, undifferentiated body. Moreover, the provings ;and clinical effects of Calcarea ostrearum, the oyster shell (Calcium carbonicum), reveal a dynamic pattern which, in the human organization, specifically affects head and creative reproductive function and the process of solidification and tightening of the structure from the liquid medium; thus lime furthers and maintains the differentiation of form and structure from the undifferentiated, half liquid medium biologically; and, psychically, it is indispensable for the development of consciousness and mental activity.
We cannot but surmise, now, that a basic archetype of form expression or appearance is represented by the pattern of the undifferentiated matter in the shell; wherever in nature this pattern appears, it is not just “symbolic”, but the objective expression of a definite entity or functional force principle. In our example, it operates as creating, form giving and differentiating, be it in the evolution of a psychic personality, as a mental process, as the differentiation and solidification of tissues, or the differentiation of plant, animal or human shapes from the primordial chaos of seed and egg.
From our understanding of this shell forming principle as the lime forces, we are able to make a scientific prediction: everywhere the processes of differentiation and germination, etc., will be dependent upon a proper functioning of the dynamic forces of lime.
Arriving at a general statement from our specific example, we might say that form expression and appearance are objective manifestations of a definite creative entity. The soul process, when it expresses inner happenings in the visual form of the symbol image, repeats and duplicates the formative process of nature. The symbol formation is identical with the nature process; creative nature is the great symbolizer. Soul contents, expressing themselves in the symbols, are identical in their genetic pattern with those physical or biologic processes which are manifest in the same prototype of appearance, namely morphological form pattern.
This being the case, a technique similar to the one used by analytical psychology for the unraveling of the symbol context of a patient ought to be applicable to the interpretation of the morphological, biochemical and pharmacological material. The studies of Natrum mur., Phosphor and Sepia in which this attempt is made seem to bear out this hypothesis.
To the identity of outer substances as medicines, and physical and mental symptoms, we have added the identity of the natural form process in the outer substance as symbol image and of the inner psychic and biologic happening as symbol meaning. We thus have established an identity throughout of a certain archetypal creative functional force principle which brings itself into actual manifestation in the most diversified forms, as the biologic and morphologic characteristics of the various organisms, as the form patterns of the psychic elements as the pharmacodynamic, chemical, biologic and morphologic characteristics of any substance in nature.
We may attempt, now, to find a general phenomenological law into which these facts can be fitted.
The first to undertake the correlation of analogous, yet diverse, phenomena, using the concept of underlying archetypal entities was J.W.Goethe. In contemporary modern science C.G.Jung has demonstrated the “archetypal structure” of the unconscious. We shall see that Hahnemann also, a contemporary of Goethe’s, instinctively applied the archetypal concept.
Goethe, in order to systematize comparative anatomy, proposed the assumption of an “anatomical typus”, namely a basic pattern of an “archetypal animal” (also of an “archetypal plant”) “as a general image in which the shapes of all animals would be contained as potentialities and according to which one could describe every animal in a definite order”. Those qualities which, upon comparison of the different forms, are found similar or common would fashion the abstract image of the archetypus.
