People

Adolf Bastian - 1826-1905 - Germany

anthropologist and pioneer ethnologist. He studied law at Heidelberg, natural sciences and medicine in Berlin, Jena and Würzburg. He took a medical degree in Prague. As a ship's doctor he traveled to Australia, Peru, the West Indies, Mexico, China, the Malay archipelago, India and Africa. The result of his journeys was Der Mensch in der Geschichte (Man in History, 1860), a study in which he proposed a theory of cultural evolution which anticipates, and may have sparked, Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious.

 

Encyclopedia Entries

Columbia Encyclopedia

1911 Britannica

Questions of 

coined term psychic unity: 

Bastian noticed certain Elementargedanken, or "elementary ideas," which appeared in almost all cultures and religions of the world. Bastian concluded that all humans must have the same basic mental processes, and that this conformity of psychology produced similar responses, in different cultures, to similar stimuli, modified only by Volkergedanken or "folk ideas." 

Reading

Der Mensch in der Geschichte (Man in History, 1860)

Writing available on the net

Commentaries

Quotations