Jung proposed that physical place also generates an influence on the unconscious:
The foreign land assimilates its conqueror .... Everywhere the
virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to
sink to the level of its indigenous inhabitants. Thus, in the
American, there is a discrepancy between conscious and
unconscious that is not found in the European, a tension between
an extremely high conscious level of culture and an unconscious
primitivity. This tension forms a psychic potential which endows
the American with an indomitable spirit of enterprise and an
enviable enthusiasm which we in Europe do not know (Jung, CW
10, par.103).
Jung’s thesis receives support when we consider the first generation of
Australian convict offspring, the Currency Lads and Lasses. Manning Clark describes
their parents as individuals who were severely disadvantaged not just socially but
also because of disease, poor nutrition, poor hygiene and personal resources (Clark,
1962:94–95). Yet their native born Australian children, defying the Mendelian laws
of genetics and behaviourist theory were, according to the first hand observations of
Commissioner Bigge and others at the time:
... generally tall in person, and slender in their limbs, of fair
complexion, and small features ... capable of undergoing more
fatigue ... less exhausted by labour, than native Europeans and
for the most part are easily distinguishable - even in more
advanced years - from those born in England (Ward, 1958:80).
Russel Ward attributed such change to a feeling of “ ... being at home, of
belonging in the country” and cites reports of their prowess in all manner of sports,
a unique larrikinism and, above all, their intense display of being Australian (Ward,
1958:88-91). Conversely, if the relationship between ego consciousness and place
is one of repulsion or where the original spirit of place has been deformed, then
place may exude a malevolent or manifestly perverse spirit. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani
describes this process in her mythopoeic narrative, The Saddlebag (2000), thus:
Constantinople was a cruel city which changed its face each night
so as never to allow its inhabitants the complacence of thinking
they lived in it. For roads and alleys shifted, buildings died and
were reborn elsewhere, and nothing was what it had been the day
before in Constantinople. I t was one of those cities that take root
and live on their inhabitants rather than the other way around,
spreading labyrinthine alleys in the mind (Nakhjavani, 2000:89).
Such a process was also described by cohort reader 1 when she
acknowledged instances in mythopoeic literature where place draws together its