He disagrees with the functionalist argument that early man sought to explain natural events by anthropomorphising them. Instead, Jung argues that over millions of years, the psyche, like the body, has adapted to physical events in the environment and produced the mythological material out of a participation mystique where the separation of subject and object is not distinct. And it is not the physical phenomena – the thunder or clouds or earthquakes – that remains in the psyche but ‘the fantasies caused by the affects they arouse’ (Jung 1927: par. 331; my italics).
CW 8 estructura y dinamica de la psique
