From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu 24 Mar 2005 - 16:03:41 GMT
--- Kate Distin <memes@distin.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >Kate:
> >
> >The part of your book where you touch upon memetic
> >recombination has me remembering an essay Jung had
> >written about cryptomnesia (the phenomenon of
> "hidden
> >memories"). The basic idea of Jung's essay is that
> >so-called novelty results from a sort of
> >recombination. He said: "...only the combinations
> are
> >new, not the material, which hardly alters at all,
> or
> >only very slowly and almost imperceptibily." He
> >focuses on how fragments of memory could arise in
> new
> >contexts and points to a passage in Nietzsche's
> >_Zarathustra_ that is strikingly similar to a
> passage
> >in a book, by Justinus Kerner, Nietzsche may have
> read
> >when he was younger. If so, this memory fragment of
> >Nietzsche's recombined with other material as he
> >formed his masterpiece.
> >
> >So if we look at Nietzsche's work as a
> representation
> >or "cultural DNA" could we say that Jung's literary
> >forensics work was a sort of "cultural DNA
> >fingerprinting" which supports the case for Kerner
> as
> >the intellectual father of this particular
> fragment?
> >Jung, while conducting a paternity test, compared
> >passages from Nietzsche's _Zarathustra_ and
> Justinus
> >Kerner's _Blatter aus Prevorst_. Is this textual
> >analysis akin to DNA fingerprinting? If so please
> kick
> >me for the suggestion of such an analogy :-)
> >
> >
> >Ref:
> >
> >Carl Jung. "Cryptomnesia" from _Psychiatric
> Studies_.
> >1957. Bollingen Foundation, New York
> >
> >Jung's work is summarized by Daniel Schacter in his
> >_The Seven Sins of Memory_.
> >
> >
>
> Scott - I don't know about DNA fingerprinting but I
> really like this
> example.
>
I used to have more of a grasp of DNA fingerprinting.
This notion sort of bubbled up from my unconcious
depths I guess. I'm not sure I'd agree with the
analogy. It sort of collided with the ideas in your
book so to speak.
In _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_ Dennett raises the issue
of distinguishing plagiarism from convergence.
Cryptomnesia (sensu Jung) is more of an unintentional
plagiarism, at least for Nietzsche's case. The
similarities between the passages were too striking
perhaps to assume convergence, but Nietzsche probably
didn't look at Kerner's book while writing Zarathustra
and intentionally copy the ideas without attribution.
It may have been a long forgotten chunk of memory that
arose for some reason when writing Zarathustra.
I remember one of my professors admonishing classmates
for the similarity between their preliminary project
work and stuff she found on the internet. Google is a
good tool for this I suppose. That would be more
deliberate a case than with Nietzsche's putative
cryptomnesia.
Then we have the case of Darwin and Wallace, which
wasn't plagiarism in either direction from what I
gather. I'm not sure I'd call it full-fledged
convergence either. It's probably more of a
parallelism where both Darwin and Wallace were
captured in a somewhat identical zeitgeist and based
on similar source materials (familiarity with
Malthus???) and other similar factors stumbled upon
similar ideas wrt evolution. Likely not a case of
Jungian synchronicity as argued by Jung's disciple von
Franz in _Man and His Symbols_ anyway.
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