This blogpost look at the generally accepted affirmation that Jungian analyst John Beebe created two associations between Jung's cognitive functions and the roles that appear in dreams and symbols. As those correspondences already exist in Jung's books, it might be a case of cryptomnesia.
Cryptomnesia is not an easy thing to prove but sometimes facts support this conclusion. Jungian commentators normally credit John Beebe to have associated roles to each position of the Jungian cognitive functions. We know them as follows:
Dominant function Hero
Auxiliary function Parent
Tertiary function Child
Inferior function Anima
In his book, Energies and patterns in psychological type, John Beebe let the reader know that
As the types became more real to me, I became ever more aware of the roles they were playing within my psyche. Following Jung (1926/1989, pp. 56–57; 1963, p. 179ff. and 173ff.), I associated the strong, effective superior function with the archetype of the hero. Tipped off by my dream about the father and son, I added the innovation that the auxiliary behaves like a parent, whether helpful or critical, the tertiary like a child, either divine or wounded, and thus in the language of Jungian psychology a puer aeternus or puella aeterna.¹
We can say that this is not an innovation. Carl Jung has already mentioned those correspondences two times before. The first one in his 1925 Seminar on Analytical Psychology and the second one in his 1951 book AION, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.
In the 1925 seminar, Jung analyzed his vision of December 1913 about Elijah and Salome. The notes of that seminar were published in 1926. Although his rendition of the meaning of each character to his personal cognitive functions is shown with a different angle, he clearly associates that Elijah, the parental and sage figure with his auxiliary Thinking function. He also links Salome, the daughter of Herod Antipas with his tertiary Feeling function.
It is the organizing schema par excellence among the psychic quaternities. In its structure it corresponds to the psychological schema of the functions. (Par. 398)
The four quaternios depicted above are first and foremost an attempt to arrange systematically the almost limitless wealth of symbols in Gnosticism and its continuation, alchemy. But such an arrangement of principles also proves useful for understanding the individual symbolism of modern dreams. The images we encounter in this field are even more varied, and so confusing in their complexity that somekind of organizing schema is absolutely essentialBeebe probably never went this far in his understanding of Jung, but one thing is certain: he did not invent the correspondences of the parent with the auxiliary function and the child with the tertiary function. As he refers to the 1925 seminar book in the same paragraph, it could be a case of cryptomnesia, meaning he read the information which eventually resurfaced as his own idea.
"I myself found a fascinating example of this in Nietzsche's book Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the author reproduces almost word for word an incident reported in a ship's log for the year 1689. By sheer chance I had read this seaman's yarn in a book published about 1835 (half a century before N wrote); and when I found the similar passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra, I was struck by its peculiar style, which was different from Nietzsche's usual language. I was convinced that N must also have seen the old book, though he made no reference to it [little surprise there]. I wrote to his sister, who was still alive, and she confirmed that she and her brother had in fact read the book together when he was 11 years old. I think, from the context, it is inconceivable that N had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story. I believe that fifty years later it had unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind."