ABSTRACT
Both Freud and Jung were pioneers in the development of new models for understanding the human mind, models which they explored together until the traumatic rupture of their personal and professional relationship in 1913 (Hayman 1999:163-4). One of the points on which they initially agreed was the idea that the human mind contained innate structures which play a large part in determining the way we perceive the world around us and which organize and give meaning to the multitude of information which our senses receive every second of our lives. This concept was revolutionary for its day, in that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, most psychologists thought the human mind was a tabula rasa with no innate content, structures or processes, and that it was entirely shaped by the environment. This behaviourist view also included the belief that ‘the subjective inner states of mind, like perceptions, memories, and emotions, are not appropriate topics for psychology’ (LeDoux 1998:25). Stevens (2002) has coined the striking phrase ‘psychic agnosticism’ to describe this doubt that the psyche even exists, a position certainly adopted by one of the most famous behaviourists, B.F.Skinner, when he said that ‘the question is not whether machines think but whether men do’ (Pinker 1997:62). Both these aspects of behaviourism became increasingly untenable in the mid-twentieth century, in the face of the information-processing approach of cognitive science and the exploration of possible innate mental processes by evolutionary psychologists (Dennett 1995; Fodor 1983; Pinker 1997; Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1992).
