Let’s talk about archetypal psychology, a fascinating and controversial area of analytical psychology that was pioneered in large part by the great Carl Jung.
We look at archetypes, how Jung discovered them, how to discover them in yourself, and how archetypal psychology works.
I’m all about application, not just knowledge. So we won’t just sit in our armchairs while stroking our chins and contemplating grandiose theories. We get our hands dirty, digging down into our psyche to discover the hidden patterns that govern it.
Ready? Let’s start by talking about archetypes.
What are Archetypes?
Think of archetypes as universal personalities or character templates that show up in our behaviour, personality and culture. They aren’t personal to anyone, yet we can all access them.
According to the strict Jungian view of archetypal psychology, archetypes are apersonal, non-anthropocentric, unmanifest. Though they come out in our behaviour as different subpersonalities and in our thoughts as voices or internal characters, by themselves they don’t exist in a concrete form.
On a practical level, think of them as packets of thought, emotion and behaviour that forming a recognisable character or personality trait. I like to think of them as templates for human behaviour and personality that appear and repeat in many different forms.
The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure—be it a daemon, a human being, or a process—that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . .
Carl Jung
In culture, we represent archetypes using characters like the Hero or the Villian. They often seem to be stereotypes or cliches. Any particular example is just one expression of the larger background archetype that gives rise to them.
Archetypal characters are found all across the world in movies, stories, tales and music, and there is enormous similarity in archetypes between cultures.
You might like to read my series of articles on the archetypes.
Where do Archetypes Live?
A key Jungian insight is that archetypes are inherited: they’re not mere personality traits that we build as we grow up, rather they are universal, timeless patterns of thought that act through us and through human culture, beyond our conscious control.
To include this in a framework for archetypal psychology that also allowed for personal unconscious, Jung coined the term “collective unconscious”, and this is where archetypes are stored.
Jung’s three-level model of the psyche is as follows:
- The Conscious Mind: our subjective experience of our mind, emotions, drives, wishes, fears, and so on.
- The Personal Unconscious: all our stored material, including everything we’ve ever experienced, along with repressed traits.
- The Collective Unconscious: all the stored material of all humankind, including the archetypes.
That is, the archetypes occupy a deeper position than the personal unconscious in the sense that they guide and constrain our individuality. They come to us by virtue of our being human, in a way that we can’t control.
How Jung Discovered Them
Some would say Jung’s empirical methodology is one of the great weaknesses of his work. But in my opinion, it’s one of his great strengths.
Jung was an avid empiricist: he looked deeply into his own mind and inner workings, and those of his patients, to find new psychological phenomena and create explanations for them.
He did so because he wanted to help patients to live a better life. He acknowledged that he was a patient himself, struggling to understand the human condition. Many of his theories in archetypal psychology and other areas come from his direct encounters with patients and himself.
In the case of archetypal psychology, as Jung drilled down into his dreams, he realised that certain characters repeatedly appeared to him. He also saw patterns in mentally ill people as they shared their issues with him, so universal that they couldn’t be solely attributed to those individuals and their personal history.
He put the pieces together and concluded that there were universal patterns or images that we inherit through the collective unconscious and that guide much of our behaviour, thought, emotion and personality.
To explain them, he looked to mythology and tale and saw that certain characters repeatedly emerged in them. He believed that each type of character comes from a specific archetype that exists in the collective unconscious.
We express those archetypes in our own behaviour and personality, and the work of archetypal psychology is to discover, reintegrate and heal these archetypal expressions.
How to Discover Them in Yourself
Once you’ve learned about the most common archetypes, it’s time to start looking for them in yourself. As Erik Eriksson said, this requires “playful seriousness and serious playfulness”. It can be easy to grab on too tightly to these once you learn about them. See them as another tool in your kit for self-understanding and self-knowledge.
The general strategy is to identify subpersonalities, which is one of the main methods Jung used to discover the archetypes in himself and in patients. He believed that many of our subpersonalities are archetypal in nature, beyond our personal unconscious.
A subpersonality is a cohesive packet of thought patterns, emotions and behaviour that differ from your usual self-sense and personality. Look closely enough, and you’ll find a whole cast of subpersonalities in yourself.
There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the forms of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.
Carl jung
Self-Observation
First, look at your dominant subpersonalities in broad areas of life like work, family and leisure. Compare these selves to who you are when you’re alone, with nobody to please and nobody to push your buttons.
Look closely, and you’ll find a whole heap of subpersonalities there. Some are confident, some are timid. Some feel superior, some feel inferior. Some are dominant, some are submissive. Some are happy and laid-back, some are uptight.
Get a nice inventory of all these subpersonalities and just become fascinated with them. Watch how fluid your identity is, and how much you change according to the surround.
Now, look for subpersonalities that appear briefly and in very specific situations. For example, my anger and rage comes out when I’m making pancakes and they stick to the pan. I get really, really wound up when that pancake doesn’t cleanly separate from the bottom. Rarely ever do I feel that way in other circumstances.
It’s quite a silly trait and a silly example, but it shows you how fine-grained subpersonalities go. Observe yourself and see how much you change over the course of the day, week, month and year. It’s fascinating, like a theatre show that you’re not just watching but living, breathing and embodying every moment.
Dreams
Jung relied heavily on dreams throughout his career and they were another of his main methods for discovering the archetypes. He believed that the subconscious regularly sends material up to the conscious mind so that it could be seen, understood, and reintegrated.
In dreams, our everyday self-sense and Persona are largely offline, as are our defense mechanisms, meaning the subconscious is more easily accessed. Thus, this is one of the main channels through which subconscious material presents itself to us.
Look specifically at your dream characters, your in-dream subpersonalities and the overall emotional tone of your dreams. Combine these, and you’re on your way to uncovering the archetypes that show up in them.
Some dream elements are highly personal; others less so. As a rule of thumb, highly personal dream elements, such as places you’ve been, or people from your past, are from your personal subconscious.
Elements that seem apersonal, like a place you’ve never been to, or people and characters you’ve never seen before, are from the collective unconscious and some are archetypal in nature. Be warned: this is just a guide. There are many shades of grey here.
Look particularly for dream elements that repeat night after night. These point you to areas that you ought to start integrating promptly.
Examples of Archetypes
There are hundreds of archetypes. I encourage you to start trying to identify them in yourself. Look for a recognisable pattern or character that points to a universal motif or structure.
Jung proposed four main archetypes, and they guided much of his subsequent therapeutic work:
- The Persona
- The Shadow
- TheAnima or Animus
- The Self
The Persona is the kind, moral, sane, upstanding facet of our personality that we show to the world. We adopt it at work, when meeting new people, or when trying to impress.
The Shadow is the opposite of the Persona: it is the buried, hidden aspects of our personality that we don’t show to the world. Only those who are close to us see the Shadow regularly.
According to Jung’s classic definition, which I have extended in my article on Anima and Animus, the Anima is a man’s repressed feminine side, while the Animus is a woman’s repressed masculine side.
I disagree that the persona, shadow, anima and animus are archetypes. They are archetypal in the sense that all human beings have them, and they tend to centre around certain themes depending on society and epoch. But they are also highly personalised.
Our personas, shadows, animae and animi are idiosyncratic, forged and molded by our life histories, rather than uni-faceted characters that act through us all uniformly. There is no one Persona, or Shadow, or Anima and Animus. On a practical level, there are many Personas, many Shadows, and many Animae and Animi.
Opposite of every shadow is a persona
Hal Stone
Besides, we can hardly claim that social and antisocial traits are universal in nature. Every society in every epoch has very different social norms. A Persona trait in one would be a Shadow trait in another, or in the same society at a different time in history.
What is Archetypal Psychology?
Archetypal psychology is both a theory and a therapy. We’ve already looked at it as a theory, but what does it look like in practice?
Jung’s approach to therapy based on archetypal psychology was to help patients identify and reintegrate various levels of themselves until reaching the end-point: the realisation of the Self:
- Uncover, heal and reintegrate the Persona;
- Uncover, heal and reintegrate the Shadow;
- Uncover, heal and reintegrate the Anima or Animus.
- Identify and live out the Self.
In this way, he offered a clear path for his patients to follow towards full flourishing, authenticity and contentment. It wasn’t just a quick solution to an immediate problem but an inspiring path of growth and self-actualisation.
His methodologies for achieving this included dream analysis and active imagination.
You might like my video on key insights into the shadow.
Strengths of Archetypal Psychology
Though archetypal psychology has downsides, in my opinion it has plenty of merits too.
For one thing, it takes into account the influence of the collective. It’s not nature or nurture, it’s both. It’s not all about our personal history: the collective plays a role too. Jung’s work goes a long way to breaking down the artificial divide between individual and collective.
It tells us that though our personal unconscious is real and important, we inherit a lot of collective traits that are beyond our control. As Ken Wilber shows us in his theory of the Four Quadrants, the individual and the collective dance together. One cannot exist without the other.
This is therapeutic in and of itself. It takes the pressure off. We don’t need to believe that we are creating our mental patterns, as the self-help field tends to overly emphasise, nor do we need to take our inner world so personally.
His theory of the Shadow, Persona, Anima, Animus and Self, along with that of the collective archetypes, opens up the doors. We aren’t just a simple ego trying to repress and deny our childhood oral, anal and sexual desires, as Freud would have it.
Instead, Jung goes beyond Freud’s blatant reductionism and tells us we are multifaceted, multilevelled, complex personalities. Jung shows us the range of our subpersonalities and helps us to objectify them, to see them as things we have, not as things we are.
I also like his theory because it’s based on first-person empirical discovery. He did also incorporate his therapeutic work, but it seems that no concepts made it into his theories unless he had directly observed the underlying psychological phenomenon in himself.
As a practitioner of meditation, a discipline in which you can only advance by having profound direct experience, this is deeply refreshing to me. All too often, I get the impression that psychologists have a very poor awareness of their own psychology, which is ironic.
They espouse their theories but have never looked deeply into themselves to confirm, deny, validate or disprove those theories. This is only inflamed by our obsession with book smarts, PhDs and memory-based, curricula-abiding exams.
Finally, Jung offers a clear endpoint for all of our work with archetypes and the hidden sides of our character. That is to embody the Self archetype, which essentially means we become wise, purposeful, compassionate, authentic.
It’s not just about curing one specific illness or overcoming one life issue. It points us to a greater vision of who we can be in the long run, beyond any temporary issue that we’re grappling with. I think this is sorely missing in grassroots medicine, psychiatry and psychology.
Weaknesses of Archetypal Psychology
My main criticism of Jung’s archetypal psychology is that it somewhat fails to take into account the stages of human development. While Freud was obsessed with the levels of human development, particularly the most rudimentary ones, it seems that Jung failed to incorporate them.
It seems he puts all archetypes on the same level, as though they were all of equal standing, and doesn’t discuss how we likely act out different archetypes as we develop psychologically, biologically and socially. His theory would be more complete if it accounted for growth and development.
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The post Archetypal Psychology Explained first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post Archetypal Psychology Explained appeared first on Deep Psychology.
