Setting the stage—As the 20th Century Turns ∆RC[in6]

In this section, we will look to the time of the turn of the Twentieth Century and see as van den Berg does “how the world was gathered” (metabletics). Equipped with the knowledge of the planetary archetypes, we can notice how the archetypal themes that we just explored play out in culture, since these planetary archetypal complexes, especially Uranus-Neptune and Uranus-Pluto were active during this time. The turn of the Twentieth Century was a time of tremendous change, promise, and turbulence—with the birth of depth psychology, chaos theory, quantum physics, film, and more. Two of our cultural pieces, Disneyland and Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964) both look back to the turn of the century, and so we will spend quite some time here.

A Celebration of Certainty?
Science and Technology Take Center Stage
Social Sciences Shine
The Quantum Comes to Light as Chaos Creeps In
The Dawn of Depth Psychology
** Freud’s Foundations or Firsts
** Jung and Flournoy and the Importance of Psyche’s Myth and Play
Childhood Comes of Age
Ain’t We Got Fun?
Lights Camera Action —The Film Industry Begins
** The First Films—The Magic of Méliès
** The Dream Factory Starts Production and a Star Is Born
Famous Comings and Goings—Fads, Fancies, Art and the Sports Scene
Some Sad Shadows

A Celebration of Certainty?

The turn of the Twentieth Century was a remarkable time that saw the beginnings of many important fields: depth psychology, quantum physics, chaos theory, and the film industry. Berry (2003) describes it as “a time of Promethean energy,” of progress, confidence, and stability with many advances in many branches of science and technology. Berry remarks wryly “We thought that everything was certainly certain, and able to be scientifically solved.” Indeed Lord Kelvin implied that in essence, everything that could be known was, in principle at least, already known (Peat, 2002). Yet amidst all that certainty, Berry tells us, an enantiodromia awaited.

Enantiodromia is a splendid word Jung used, which Ellenberger (1970) tells us originated with Heraclitus, and literally “means return to the opposite” (p. 713). Enantiodromia refers to a “characteristic phenomenon that almost always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time, an equally powerful counter position is built up, which . . . subsequently breaks through the conscious control” (Sharp, 1991, pp. 50-51). This harkens back to the archetype of archetypal dynamics in the previous discussion of chaos theory and the reiteration of the eternal return, thus, we can expect chaos to come out of all this certainty and order, as seeds of the opposite are sewn: like in the yin/yang symbol of the Tao, where a small circle of light is found on the dark side and a small circle of dark is found on the light side. This is exactly what happened, as both Berry and Peat have pointed out. This back and forth movement and play of opposites will be evident in many contexts.

Science And Technology Take Center Stage

Several scientific discoveries and breakthroughs occurred around the turn of the Twentieth Century in a variety of fields, and many technological marvels made their debut as well during this intensely prolific period.

Scientific discoveries abounded as things unseen were revealed: Roentgen discovered x-rays in 1895, Becquerel discovered the radioactivity of uranium in 1896, J. J. Thompson discovered the electron in 1897, and the Curies discovered radium in 1898. The electrocardiograph or EKG was invented in 1903, enabling us to chart the rhythms of the human heart.

Transportation took us faster, farther and higher than ever before. We took to the roads in automobiles, Daimler invented the gasoline-powered automobile 1889, and the first automobile to be produced in quantity was the Oldsmobile in 1901. The first Harley Davidson motorcycle hit the road in 1903, and although Henry Ford formed Detroit Motor company in 1899, the Model Ts did not start rolling off the assembly lines until 1908. Zeppelin invented the rigid dirigible airship in 1900, and the Wright Brothers took to the skies in 1903 at Kitty Hawk.

In 1902, Congress authorized the Panama Canal, although it was not finished until 1914. Teddy Roosevelt visited the canal in 1906, marking the first time an American President ever traveled outside the country. The first reinforced concrete bridge was constructed in 1893, while the first concrete high rise was built in 1903 in Ohio. In New York, the first segment of the subway opened in 1904. Speaking of digging and things below the ground, Evans, an archaeologist, discovered evidence of a Minoan civilization in Crete.

In 1908 Frank Bursley Taylor hypothesized that “the crunching together of continents could have thrust up the world’s mountain chains” (Bryson, 2003), however, because he was an amateur geologist, no one took him seriously. In 1912, Wegner, at the University of Marburg in Germany hypothesized based on fossil evidence, that all of the world's continents had once been a single landmass which he called Pangaea. Thus, the beginnings of what would become plate tectonics in the 1960s was proposed, although it would not be accepted and proved until later in the century.

We were communicating like crazy since Tesla invented wireless communication in 1893, and five years later with 30 related patents in 1898, he invented poly-phase alternating current (AC). To the joy of couch potatoes everywhere, Tesla also invented the remote control in 1898, although television would not be invented for decades. Marconi also pioneered wireless telegraphy and radio signals in 1895, and sent the first wireless message across the Atlantic in 1901. Marconi and Tesla feuded over waves and currents, with Marconi championing direct current DC. Europe following in Marconi's footsteps, while the United States instead adopted Tesla’s AC, which is why our appliances do not work over there! Electric lights allowed us to see in the dark –with the first power grid lighting up in 1901. In 1900, speech was first transmitted by radio, in 1902 the first faxed photo was transmitted, and in 1904, the first music radio broadcast occurred. Luckily, aspirin was invented, too, for as Berry (2003) reminds us the world became a much noisier and faster place, and was playing havoc with our nerves.The seeds of the computer were present at the turn of the century, too, for in 1896, Hollerith created the Tabulating Machine Company which used punch cards to process data faster, which changed its name in 1911 to Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which would later become IBM. The radio vacuum tube, which would later be used in computers, was invented in 1904.

Beginning with the invention of the zipper in 1891, which helped people put things together by intertwining opposite sides, inventions around the house included Gillette’s disposable razor blades in 1895, the electric stove in 1896, the paper clip in 1901, the electric vacuum cleaner in 1907, and the electric washer in 1908. The first electric refrigerator would not be available for home use until 1913. Bakelite cookware and rayon also appeared on the scene in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, and Kodak provided a way to capture it all, for in 1900, they introduced the Brownie camera; flash photography was invented around this time, too.

Social Sciences Shine

In the social sciences, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology appeared on the scene in 1900, calling us back to the things themselves. Max Weber wrote his best-known work in 1904-1905: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism spoke of disenchantment. Weber’s Economy and Society was published in 1913, which discussed three kinds of authority, traditional, bureaucratic and charismatic. Hansen (2001) notes that Weber's concept of pure charisma was very close to Turner’s later notion of antistructure.

Franz Boas in 1896, would influence generations of upcoming anthropologists with his theory of cultural relativity, which saw all cultures as being of equal value. Boas believed that different cultures should be studied from a neutral point of view and be understood on their own merits, instead of being judged from the perspective of another culture. Boas was an early denouncer of racism, and he felt that there were no superior or inferior cultures, because these value judgments were culture-bound and ethnocentric. Lucien Levy-Bruhl's How Native’s Think was published in 1910, and the now familiar concept of participation mystique hails from there.

Totemism was in the air at the turn of the century, too, and many works were written about it. Frazer, of Golden Bough fame, wrote an article on Totemism for Encyclopedia Britannica in 1885, and later, in 1910, a four-volume set called Totemism and Exogamy. Frazer was an armchair theorist and did not go out into the field. Lang, a critic of Frazer’s was influenced by van Gennep. Lang wrote Social Origins in 1903 and The Secret of the Totem in 1905. Freud wrote Totem and Taboo in 1913.

In 1908, Arnold van Gennep published Rites de Passage, explicating our eternally returning theme as it applied to rituals in different cultures, identifying rites of separation, transition, and reincorporation. This book would not be translated into English until 1960. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew, wrote Primitive Classification in 1903, and Durkheim addressed totemism also in Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912. Lévi-Strauss, born in 1908, would later write about totemism in the 1950s and 1960s. Max Ernst, who inspired Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage, was born in 1891.

The Quantum Comes To Light As Chaos Creeps In

Lord Kelvin was in for a shock, because not long after he made his now infamous comments about everything already being essentially known, Max Planck discovered that light comes in discrete packets called quanta. This discovery turned physics on its head and led to the birth of quantum physics where probability and not certainty reigns. Uncertainty would soon become the rule with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but that would not happen until the mid 1920s. Niels Bohr was born in 1885, and was coming of age as the century turned, and Einstein graduated from Zurich Polytechnic Institute in 1900, too. Werner Heisenberg was born a year later in 1901, and was a toddler at the time, that Einstein took his imaginal ride on a beam of light which inspired his special theory of relativity.

Just before the turn of the Twentith Century, Poincaré discovered that the solar system might not be stable, as he got the intial peek into chaos when he contemplated the “three-body problems.” From Poincaré’s work would emerge non-linear dynamics, a.k.a. chaos theory in the 1960s. From Peano curves, in 1890, and Koch islands, in 1904, would emerge the initial ideas about fractal dimensions and iteration. Another little known discovery of Poincaré’s which is sure to send Starbucks stock soaring: according to Poincaré, there’s nothing like a little coffee and caffeine to stimulate those synapses, which, Briggs and Peat (1999) confirm:

Poincaré found black coffee helped his creative processes. He compared his thought to those hooked atoms imagined by the Greek philosophers. When his mind was in repose, nothing much happened, but when it was charged with energy, the atoms collided and interlocked until they generated new stable forms. (p. 24)

The Dawn of Depth Psychology

Freud’s Foundations or Firsts

Depth psychology had its formal beginnings around the turn of the Twentieth Century, too. Henri Bergson, intuiting what the future held, declared in 1901:

To explore the unconscious, to work in the subterranean of the mind with especially adequate methods, this will be the main task of psychology in the opening century. I do not doubt that fine discoveries will follow, as important perhaps as have been in the preceding centuries those of physical and natural sciences. (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 321)

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