Phylogenic Memory: Its Role in Disordered Social Functioning

This paper explores the social aspects of phylogenic memory, specifically as process and production, and suggest its role in human society, in particular, in its causal contribution to the cataclysmic events that threaten and destroy societies from time to time. Phylogenic memory is a cause of events such as war and genocide that are also caused by collective agency, with the linking mechanism between the phylogenic memory and the event being the collective mental state. The concept of the phylogenic memory was accepted by Freud, Jung and Halbwachs, and the concept of the collective mental state was accepted by Aristotle, Marx, Le Bon, Durkheim and also by Freud and Jung. A methodology for uncovering phylogenic memory has yet to be established and so remains at this stage speculative, but there is much circumstantial evidence that it exists.