Standard disclaimer: Not a psychologist or psychiatrist. Just an opinionated reader with a keyboard.
Previous installments in this themed series:
If you’ve just come in, you should read the backlist first. Otherwise, what follows will not make a lot of sense. The comments are, as always, the best part.
Tonight, we’re discussing archetypes in action, what they do, what they signify—because they’re not discrete objects in themselves; they’re more like signposts pointing a way forward. Archetypes are not images. They’re the structures of thought that stand behind the images, the scaffolding that makes the image vital and alive.
Take, for instance, the image above. For the last five weeks, my illustrations have all been of the ouroboros or the dragon, an alchemical image that signifies the beginning and the end; the Alpha and Omega (and yes, in the Christian as well as the Platonic one); all primal matter; the individual, whole and complete; all the world. It means all these things, and more. It’s something that, even if you’ve never looked at alchemy, you instinctively know. It’s a powerful symbol, not because anyone has ever actually seen a dragon devouring itself, but because you cotton to the idea instinctively. It comes from a place deep inside, deep in the mind; it comes from the unconscious, and it’s common to all people.
That’s why it’s an archetype, and a decent archetype of archetypes. Commonly inherited structures of thought.
Most archetypes revolve around initiations. And if you think about ceremonies of initiation, whatever they may be: birth, adolescence, adulthood, marriage, parenthood, middle age, death—all have particular frames around the ceremonies that mark passage from one part of life to another. The decorations on the frames might vary—for instance, bat mitzvah is different from first communion is different from circumcision—but all initiate children into a new status as adults within their respective belief structures. It’s the fact that the child must undergo a kind of trial and emerge as an adult that matters, not the form that the trial takes. And some trials are, of course, more extreme than others, but all of them are trials. It’s the initiation itself that’s archetypal.
Judging from the comments of the last few weeks, I think we’re pretty clear on what archetypes are. They’re not just discrete things that merely represent something else. They signify a process. Jung called that process “individuation,” and by it (I think) he meant a coming to terms with all parts of the psyche in order to be whole. That in itself is a constantly ongoing process, and so a psychically-whole person is one who constantly negotiates with shifts in the self.
This is not as woo-woo as it sounds. It simply means that a healthy person is aware of change, and works to accommodate it.
Jung spent his life developing a language to chart the unconscious. It led him to all kinds of places, some of them still off-limits to “serious people” (I’ll take psychic phenomena for $1000, Alex), but he was fearless in investigating and trying to explain all of it. Jung is also particularly valuable to artists and writers, as his explanations of the unconscious have given us a vocabulary and a toolkit, a way of understanding, what we do as creators.
If you read Jung’s writings, Psychology and Alchemy is not the place to start, but once you have the principles in hand, it’s a fascinating read. In it, Jung explains the entire process of individuation in terms of alchemy—not the vulgar “lead into gold” variety, but the philosophical spiritual process deeply rooted in Gnosticism and explicable by obscure and confusing hermeneutics (and if you understood that sentence on a first read, you’re ready for Psychology and Alchemy.) In the early pages of the volume, Jung discusses one of the things that most worried him as a pioneering psychologist—that in treating patients, in isolating their neuroses, the doctor might make their condition worse, and exacerbate their suffering. To his great relief, he reported, he found that patients would stop consultation for a great many reasons, but that, once started, their treatment never ended.
[O]ccasionally one meets such patients again after several years and hears the often highly remarkable account of their subsequent development. It was experiences of this kind which first confirmed me in my belief that there is in the psyche a process that seeks its own goal independently of external factors, and which freed me from the worrying feeling that I myself might be the sole cause of an unreal—and perhaps unnatural—process in the psyche of the patient. (1, p. 5, emphasis mine)
Not that this work is easy, because obviously it’s not. It requires the patient’s fearless confrontation of the self, and acceptance of what might be there. But Jung’s experience told him that, once his patients had a vocabulary by which to understand the symbols in their dreams and fantasies, their feet found the path toward what he called individuation.
And it’s not a straight path, or an easy one:
It is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors. It is on this longissima via that we meet with those experiences which are said to be ‘inaccessible.’ Their inaccessibility really consists in the fact that they cost us an enormous amount of effort: they demand the very thing we most fear, namely the ‘wholeness’ which we talk about so glibly and which lends itself to endless theorizing, though in actual life we give it the widest possible berth. It is infinitely more popular to go in for ‘compartment psychology’ where the left-hand pigeon-hole does not know what is in the right. (1, p.6)
[leathersmith, I promised you a bit more about the caduceus, and behold! it’s the path itself]
Jung’s “longest road” ends, in alchemical terms, with spiritual gold: the fully individuated human being, one who navigates the twists of life’s path with full awareness. Obviously, this is by definition an ongoing thing, a process of becoming.
So, where do archetypes come in? They’re the path’s markers. In Symbols of Transformation, after Man and His Symbols and Memories, Dreams and Reflections, a good place to start getting at the meat of the man’s theories, Jung describes the process of individuation as the meeting of archetypes. The first one you meet, and the one through which everything else will come, is the Shadow.
The Shadow is that part of yourself you repress, the icky and dark parts of the self. If you would come to wisdom with any part of you, you must accept the whole person you are, according to Jung. The Shadow stands on the threshold of the unconscious, and it conducts everything through itself. In dreams, the shadow appears as the animus/anima—the “other” component of the personality, the unrecognized sibling, the unacknowledged self. Other archetypes, vividly figuring in fairy tales—the stepmother as trespasser that threatens the order of the family, father as ineffectual and blinded, wolf as predator, hero as...well, hero, virginity as shield, treasure and weapon (there’s a reason why vagina dentata is a thing)—these are all constructions that clothe archetypal structures, structures that govern different phases of life.
I feel rather that going on much more is just going to be restating what’s already been said. In Jung’s theories, what’s important is that these things are recognized and recognizable, that his process is less analysis than understanding of the psyche, and realizing that understanding changes as the person changes.
How all of this works in fiction is where we start next week, how fantasy literature is especially equipped to harness the Jungian model of psychology, along with a few ideas about timeliness. Why Jung, why now?
A Couple of Notes From Last Week’s Dream Analysis
Last week I got sidelined by personal stuff, but wanted to follow up on a few comments regarding dreams. Jung was especially careful about dream analysis, and circumscribed his own analysis with a fair number of warnings.
Why the focus on dreams: because dreams are messages from the unconscious and the subconscious. They’re compensatory forces to the psyche. If something is out of whack and you really don’t want to recognize it, you will dream about it. The psyche is very much like a shark: stop swimming and it drowns.
For another thing, Jung was a big advocate for dream notebooks. The very act of writing down a dream does two things. First, as you write, you tend to recover more detail. The transcription itself is an act of recovering memory. Second, the habit of writing the dream influences your unconscious and subconscious, as CathyM noted in her comment, over time, you’ll remember more and more.
Jung also didn’t analyze individual dreams. He analyzed dreams in context, noting they developed over time. A single dream held little meaning; its value came as it related to other dreams. A single dream might be striking or memorable, but its real worth is best evaluated as part of a package. Over time, dreams reveal progress, a travel-journal, if you will. It’s the progress that interested Jung—that progress is movement toward individuation.
Finally, the whole idea that a given symbol is the same for everyone is utter bunk. Although archetypes underpin symbolism, their appearances are affected by culture, time and the dreamer’s own personal symbolic system. For that reason, Jung decried things like dream dictionaries and especially abhorred one-to-one correspondences. Which is why a cigar is occasionally just a cigar, but can also be...well, you know the rest.
References
1. Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, R.F.C. Hull, ed. and trans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, Bollingen Series XX, Vol. 12, 2nd ed, 1968.