The analyst and psychiatrist Anthony Stevens, who has died aged 90 after suffering a stroke, was distinctive among followers of Carl Jung in looking to evolutionary theory for a basis for the idea of a collective unconscious and archetypes affecting development and behaviour in the individual psyche. Rather than extending the archetypal concept upwards towards a spiritual dimension and inwards into the realm of inner psychic life, Anthony traced it to its biological roots and outwards into the realm of social behaviour.
In his first book, Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self (1982), he compared the findings of behavioural biology with those of analytical psychology – the term that Jung used to distinguish his approach from the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud – in order to illuminate the ways in which the so-called archetypes of the collective unconscious might influence human development in fundamental areas.
