An omni-useful prerequisite term to assist in the comprehension of the semanto-linguistics of the Systems Biophysics Set is the concept of the "Archetype". This is an idea and word first coined by psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung, a contemporary of Freud. Note that this is not a scientific concept exactly in so far as it (currently) has any way to be measured and made amenable to the Scientific Method?. An archetype is as aspect of the psychical function of the sub-conscious mind and of its "dream-works."
As it has been said that "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution," (Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975)) ...so too,... a great deal concerning human behavior and motives seems rooted in the Jungian Theory of the Archetypes. How might something so "of the psyche" be considered in terms more amenable to the Scientific Method?
From a more organic perspective (and more for the science), it seems logical to assume that as the human specie evolved, something distinct co-evolved with the body. And this alternative set, as real as the distinction we call the "head-versus-body" set,...can be called somato-consciousness or self-other awareness.
Many other species appear to have an aspect of this phenomenon (of self-awareness), but none to the extent of the species human. Many less cellular complex organisms and even a few species of plants have the ability to respond to sudden physical stimuli that mimics the fear-response in humans to some extent difficult to measure. The multi-cellular reef-coral animals in my reef aquarium will retract and ball-up as if terrified of the slightest change about them, and several plant species will fold-up or shrivel or otherwise adjust their postures in a response to a threat and a great many do so with some sort of less active mechanism. Much of these instinctual responses can be traced to pure biochemical interactions...molecules colliding and Newtonian causal consequences.
In regards to the human condition, this multi-million year development (actually multi-billion year) necessarily implicated certain common life-threatening scenarios that the body or "soma" had to adjust to. These are the scenarios all members of the specie had to adapt to or else be killed and eaten. For example, as evolutionary theory postulates among the proto-hominids and australopithecines, there was a many thousands of years period when the need to escape danger contributed to the somato-ontogeny of something called "up-right" posture as typified with the hominid family Australopithicus afarensis and probably several of their 'cousins'.
The fossilized bones of the feet, hip-joint articulations and the cranial-atlas configuration show these changes as the proto-hominid line started to routinely stand to become bi-pedal.
There is no doubt about the advantage this change must have offered in regards to the "fight or flight" reflex which is equally ingrained in the physiology of the species (especially all mammals) as we recognize neuro-physiologic distinction of the autonomic nervous system (ANS): sympathetic nervous system versus para-sympathetic nervous system.
When the animal is not threatened or experiencing pleasure, the parasympathetic neural mechanisms predominate. The individual is comfortable and "laid-back."
With PARA-sympathomimetic physiologic responses, our mouths water with the anticipation of the pleasure: food or sex...
Contrary-wise,... with the sympathomimetic physiologic responses of the brain-body set, our mouths get dry, the blood contracts more to the core, the heart races and we are 'up-tight' and anxious.
When threatened or under the influence of "terror," ... or even just "anxious-worried," ...the sympathetic system predominates.
These, more or less anti-thetical scenarios, evolution postulates, have required not just millions of years to become well-bounded and defined among all the carbon compounds and cellular complexings becoming "bio-form",...it has required billions of years!
Eons have contributed to the "body-electric" and electro-biochemistries of survival. Humans and all that lives as a "components of biosphere Space-Ship Earth"... are all molecularly related in these circuits. Metabolism happens and there are survivors and extinctions.
Evolution teaches that the atom-sets and molecular cooperation-ism of your very physical structure was just such an experiment in time.
Nothing has been an "accident." And, since it can all be re-enacted sufficiently for the intellect and chemically comprehended,...it is not all so miraculous. Inordinately awesome and wonderful, yes, but propably not all so miraculous. This is especially true if there can be other water-worlds among the billions of galaxies which is most likely the case.
Not everything "live" survived during Earth's 4.7 plus billion year trajectory through the 250 or so galactic seasons and the 13 billon year history of both space and time. There were and there are now (in process) and there will be extinctions,... even mass extinctions. We are not ourselves all so safe from this.
The proteins that generally define "physical organism" are not magical energy-events and they require DNA to exist which requires "cell." This is the fundamental "unit" of biophysics. It is should come as no surprise that your physical appearance resembles your parents more than it does your great-grand parents. It is an almost mechanical process of shuffling of the spiral molecule into the channeling of its manifestation relative to the packaging of the cell.
Everyone has millions of ancestors that would look very much like anyone living today,...but few share a majority of certain proteins as you do with your more recent ancestors, namely those of the past tens of thousands of years past. These proteins determine your "conformation" or identically,...your general physical appearance. This is what the geneticists mean when they refer to "pheno-type."
Molecules can only modulate, combine and permutate in very limited ways according to the constraints and laws of chemical combinagorics,... and some of these pathways make the proteins that define who and what we are physically.
A great suprise for the early genetic scientists was the fact that phenotype did not always predict "genotype." This is to say that the molecular facts may not always be all so immediately apparent and physically apparent in how an individual looks. There are things called "recessive genes." Certain genes can go for many generations before being expressed in a new individual. Some of the members of the Royal Houses of Spain, for example, had the gene for a "pathalogic" condition call Hirsutism. Actually, this condition which causes the individual to be quite covered with hair is not all so pathologic. They are usually just as healthy and happy as anyone can be when being extra mammalian in appearance.
As brain size increase and bipedalism became a "somato-formic" norm. The theory (here) of the archetype genesis postulates that the co-evolution of the neuro-psychic mechanisms associated with the body changes obligately encoded the common experiences of the entire specie. It is easier to postulate that something called a "collective consciousness and the archetypes" are defined neuro-molecularly than it is to say that "dreams and thoughts" have a molecular basis. The Cartesian adage "Cogito Ergo Sum" extends beyond the ephemerality of the neuro-cortex,...it is "of" the primitive brain,...it is hypothalamic and essential.
There is an apparent category-set of these common experiences en route to the becoming the "civilized naked-ape." There is not at present any consistent theory about how this notion of an encoding could have come to pass in relation to the know molecular dynamics of brain physiology. We do know that as brain-size increased, there was more complex cortical net-working and enhanced visual cortex physiology. Apparently, and in a manner almost epi-phenomenally self-evident,... the neurophysiology of memory as it correlates to that of vision and the memory of visual scenarios is involved. In the depths of our being,mind-and-body,... we remember the Dawn as well as the Beast of the terrifying and demon-haunted Darkness. This is variously 'poetic' and enduringly archetypal in our societies and in art. It is multiply manifested in all cultures and with a tracery of commonality,...we say such ideas are archetypal for the species human.
For Jung, there was a set of common archetypes that seemed to be recurrent in the psychoanalytic themata of his patients. And a major example was one he called the "Archetype of the Shadow." Implicate in this archetype is the neuro-encoding of a multi-million year ontogenic evolutionary history of the species trying to survive in an often lethally threatening environment. For our ancestors, a threatening thing called the "Unknown" as well as a more or less standard set of the "Terrifying Known" was a moment to moment concern. The consistent "Old-Standard" can be called "The Beast, The Devil..." For many thousands of years this was quite often and apparently the carnivorous felines of the savannah (Saber-Tooth Tigers and their relatives...designed to be a "true" killer in the family of mammals called carnivora.). These first got their start about 35 million years ago in the Oligocene of Europe In the Americas, we find the omni-present respect for the Power of the "Jaguar" among the Aztec and Maya. And only in the last century in parts of India and Asia has the tiger-threat been sufficiently quelched. We might suppose that for a very long chapter in human history disease and pestulence may have held a secondary place among all matters "terrifying and to be feared;"...there were beast lurking in the fields and near the watering holes. And there were other similar "people-individuals and groups" sometimes equally as threatening as those things with hungry fangs,....a sensorium that has endured to this very day of global terrorism. Considering how this idea may have foundations in the evolution of the species human extending back into the multimillenia of somatoform variation in the ontogeny of the more freely bipedal "design for survival",...there may be less of a mystery attached to the origin of the Sphinx. It has sat with an aura of satiated felidine venerability as long as there has been a memory of man ambling across the horizon. This must certainly be more than an "artistic accident or coincidence." However, it is, at present so pre-historic as remain "un-knowable",...a mystery shrouded in time.
There are still incidences of tiger attacks and missing citizens who have become the meals of the beast. At present there are at least five species of man-eating Felidae ('Great Cats') surviving and all of these are descendants if prehistoric viscous beasts of ages past,... some much more huge and massive that anything alive today.
There are no written records of the early humans difficulties with these beast and I do not know of any euro-continental cave paintings depicting these. However, for more recent times and among the relics of the ancient meso-american cultures where both animal and human sacrifice and constant warfare seemed the "stalking-norm," the fang-beast motif abounds.
A common theme for those who claimed by birth-right or otherwise to have the "Power of the Jaguar" were the ones with the real social-economic and military power. They had "conquered the archetypal beast" and had therefore acquire its awesome power. All mortals should fear those of such special status. Fear it as a God made Man. The Olmecs and Maya were the first to stress the jaguar as a "lord of the night,"...the prowler and the guardian. The Aztecs built upon this idea when they assembled the blood-thirsty Jaguar Warriors clans.
This is most clearly expressed in hundreds of objects--rendered in such diverse media as monumental sculpture, carved jade figurines, ceramics, and mosaic pavements--that depict a "baby-faced" human-jaguar motif.
The meso-amercan manifestion of the "Shadow Archetype and Beast that Lurks in the Night" as here suppose to be correlated to an ancient history of psyche-somal human evolution must have originated in the afro-asian hominid lines first and then later emigrated into the West. The very real and also the imaginary "fantastic" bestial threat followed humans wherever they traveled either by duress or desire.
An excellent elaboration of this topic can be found in the book by Barbara Ehrenreich: Author of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.
We can rightly assume that, for several millions of years, the considerably less adept at self-protection early hominids and many thousands of individuals that were the ancestors of us all,...individuals not all so different than we are today (generally smaller in stature),...that the early humans were a prime target of the predatory archeo-Felidae. A delicacy for the fanged-palate. We do not need such a record,...it is encoded in the depths of our soul in the form of the archetype. Walls and the taming of the fire-flame for the night were eventual inventions of an endowed cortex... and the "force" that was the Mother of such inventions was the archetype of the unknown terror.
The history of the human species is one of evading and escaping the "terror." Primitive man had ancestors better adapted to flee the beast and terror by becoming bi-pedal. The "Shadow" still, in a very often suppressed and psycho-analytic way, pursues us. In some ways this gives us strength of ego. Daily we conquer the archetype of the shadow and master our fears or become otherwise under the influence of the archetype. In all our philosophies of "Good-and-Evil", the Archetype of the Shadow in the antithesis of the goodness of the way of light. And so the archetypes have power, function and influence in our lives. They compel us into action and subtly direct our behaviors in ways that are so organically ingrained in our very neuro-somic biophysics that we are not directly aware of their distinct existence. There are several archetypes the Jungian theorist consider as "universal" and we can postulate (as I do here) any number of others. To comprehend the role of the archetypes is to comprehend the long and difficult history of the human specie and to imagine all that must be common to all members at basic and fundamental levels, levels that are part of the brain and also the body. Mind perceives and reflects or "re-collects" these in the visual cortex as an archived trans-historical tracery of a coming into being. The patterns exist in a physical way we cannot fathom, our dreams only gives us a fleeting glimpse of there haunting and powerful presence.
In summary, we recognize both in our dreams and in certain aspects of our conscious behavior the forces of neuro-psychical elements which we suppose have been "enspeciated" or made manifest by the very facts of recaptitulatory nature of the ontogeny of the species endowed with self-awareness. And we call these ideas "Archetypes." Sleeping brains appears to mediate a visual modeling of these as "dream-forms." Witch doctors, high-priests, psychics and the like have known about these "things" for centuries as an occult fact; it is with Jung that the reality of the archetypes of the psychic domain obtained any relevance to the rapidly developing psychological theories of the time. And, more recently, we find perhaps a relevance for these old-ideas in our still demon-haunted and often filled with terror modern world.
This page has served to introduce the reader to the concept of something that might best be termed the "neuro-physiological archetype." To comprehend this, one must have a sense of how the term 'archetype' has been used historically. Here just one aspect of the correlation between the archetype of psychology and any potential to make this somehow "physiologic" has been minimally discussed. Essentially there is a correlation as old as the human form that implicates terror, survival and physiology itself. And we believe there is an Archetypal basis that has paralleled this to the present day. There are many examples of psycho-physiologic Archetype,... but what could be more fundamental than the "set" that has been especially critical to the survival of the species itself. The Shadow exists as part of us all. Some are just more aware of the Darknesses of the Soul.
A first-rate forensic detective is someone who has a special skill and talent for the comprehension of the Shadow-Archetype and its social manifestation variance scenarios.
In certain instances of the psycho-pathologic mind-body-set, the individual cannot function normally within the boundaries of the archetype's impressions and psycho-motive influences. This is generally associated with a conflict of the ID being overly oppressed by a parental Super-ego. An animal-like sensorium of visciousness and revenge must be tempered and controlled and "vented."
The normal and typical rebelliousness that is just a "growth-phase" for the normal personality may become inordinately affected and mal-adapted in the psycho-sociopath.
The "persona" or that aspect of the personality that is "apparently social" becomes perverted in regards to the "cat-and-mouse interplay of predator-and-victim" interplay and transactionalisms. And so the individual begins to indentify with the pseudo-power of the archetypal dark-side. There is Evil in this to the extent that it does indeed reflect the base ontogeny of the entire species as something "proto-human and of the flesh."
An issue of "wild-ness" is not tamed and domesticated in these categories of personality disorders. It is the Archetype mis-represented and the balances are flawed.
We use such terms as "Man's inhumanity to man" to even begin to convey our shock at the actions that may transpire under such influences;... and human monsters that echo the animal nature of the specie archeo-history are the resulting psycho-sociopathies. Where once so much of these as incidences were guarded secrets and occult because of their very shock-value,...we almost daily learn of cases in the news.
Occasionally, there can be organic causes like brian cancers and tumors that contribute to these disturbances.
Educators and others who work with children and adolescents can be informed about certain symptoms that may indicate the early stages in the ontogeny of these pathologies. For example the child that is a violent bully or the one who experiences apparent pleasure in torure or in the killing or harming of pets is a red-flag scenario and warning. No incidence of such behavior should be over-looked and forgotton or taken lightly. In modern life we do not generally place much relevance in the notions of the "exorcism," .... however there are very real and preventable horrors and the force and influence of the archetypes of darkness are quite real in the mind-brains of both individuals as well as groups.
Our violence plagued entertainment media resources are probably not much of a help in these matters.
Again, we have reasons to think that the discoverable and explorable but not all so easily accessible "psychological tool" of the archetypes, do, indeed, have a strong neuro-physiological basis.