Anthony Stevens (27 March 1933 – 13 July 2023) was a British Jungian analyst, psychiatrist and prolific writer of books and articles on psychotherapy, evolutionary psychiatry and the scientific implications of Jung's theory of archetypes.
Early in his career Stevens did research under the supervision of John Bowlby into the development of attachment bonds between infants and their nurses at the Metera Babies Centre in Athens.
[4] In Archetype, Stevens examines the close conceptual parallelism that exists between the "patterns of behaviour" and their underlying "innate releasing mechanisms" studied by ethology (the branch of biology which studies animal behaviour in the wild) and Jung's notion of archetypes functioning as "active living dispositions" in the human "collective unconscious".
He suggested that together the two disciplines of ethology and analytical psychology could provide the tools required to examine how the human psyche has evolved out of its reptilian, mammalian, and primate precursors to assume the characteristics that are apparent in us at the present time.
In addition to maternal attachment, he used this approach to elucidate such phenomena as xenophobia, puberty initiation, sexual bonding, the developmental programme evident in the human life cycle, and so on, attempting to demonstrate that each had an archetypal basis in the genetic endowment and phylogenetic history of our species.