Jung

by Phil Goss

  Archetypal phenomena are not ‘inherited’, therefore, in the sense of an image, idea or experience being passed down from our forebears. Rather, the potential for each of us to experience something archetypal is inherited, because the innate archetypal structures lie in us, waiting to find their form in our lived experience. When they do so, they link across body and mind, as well as instinct and image, affecting us at every level. This can be described as ‘…an inherited mode of psychic functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg… and the eels find their way to the Bermudas, in other words it is a “pattern of behaviour”’ (Jung, 1976, para. 1,228).

  Spotlight: The roots of the word

  The etymology of the word ‘archetype’ can help us get hold of the significance of the word: ‘arche’ from the Greek meaning original and ‘type’ meaning to copy or stamp. The ‘original’ form lies in wait within us, and we can get ‘stamped’ by the original archetype where experience, instinct or image brings it to life. So, when we fall in love, for example, the potential for this to happen lies within us, but it needs a person and the event of meeting them for this ‘original’ potential to be realized.

  These patterns of behaviour most obviously translate in human terms to stages of development, which we all either pass through or have the potential to. Birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age and death are the obvious examples. Some archetypal life experiences, such as parenthood, will not be experienced by all, but are nevertheless archetypal templates which humanity shares with the natural world.

  Other ways in which archetypes can be brought into life include manifestations via role, for example, in domestic terms, roles such as mother, father, sister, brother; or, in more generic and cultural terms, roles such as hero, victim, wise old man/woman, scapegoat, and so on. Archetypes come to life inside us, too. Jung identified the archetypal figures of psyche, as we have been finding out about in the previous chapters: ego, self, persona, shadow, anima, animus. One could also describe an array of feeling states as archetypal, as we can all experience them: love, hate, happiness, sadness, anger, boredom, etc. Bodily states likewise: sleep, alertness, tension, relaxation, illness, health. More conceptually and imaginatively, there are also archetypal realizations in religious and magical forms (as found in the myths, stories and fairy tales of different cultures and religions): gods, goddesses, demons, fairies, monsters. Other kinds of archetypal manifestation are to be found in the world of nature: the four seasons, the solar and lunar cycles, and so on. Archetypal influences can therefore be found all around, and within, us.

  Spotlight: Peter Pan as Puer aeturnus

  An archetype Jung saw as an important influence on some people is the ‘eternal child’ (Puer aeturnus in its male form, and Puella aeturna in the female). This is the archetype of the child who always wants to stay that way and never grow up. Some adults, Jung believed, get caught like Peter Pan, in a kind of psychological ‘Neverland’, where they want to stay for ever and avoid the responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. The positive side of the archetype is the availability of playfulness and creativity.

  The notion of archetypes can also be mapped across to scientific studies, as we shall see in Chapter 16. The key point in terms of understanding how influential, though unseen, archetypes are in our lives is conveyed here:

  ‘archetypes are not only disseminated by tradition, language, and migration, but… they can re-arise spontaneously, at any time, at any place and without any outside influence.’

  (Jung, 2003, p. 12)

  Spotlight: Reflective exercise

  To help you grasp and apply the notion of ‘archetypes’, try the following:

  1 Find a quiet space and sit comfortably with your eyes closed, taking slow, deep breaths.

  2 Allow your mind to clear.

  3 Hold in mind the idea of finding a fictional character you are drawn to or react strongly to (from a film, TV, a book or a play).

  4 Once you have found this figure, slowly open your eyes.

  5 When you are ready, draw or write something on paper which reflects this character.

  6 Be spontaneous about it (it does not matter about ‘being artistic or not’; it is the process of revealing something on the edge of your conscious awareness that matters).

  7 Spend a few minutes reflecting on why this character has the impact on you they do.

  8 What features, attributes, values and failings do they have? Notice if any of these show through in your personality, relationships and ways of experiencing life. Play with the idea that these may be archetypal influences which structure at least some aspects of you.

  9 If you need a tool to help you end the activity and come back into the ‘day-to-day’, write two lists – first, ‘How am I similar to this figure?’ and second, ‘How am I different from them?’ The second should help remind you that the chosen figure is not you.

  This activity, and the examples given above, should have shown you the ubiquity of archetypal influences in our lives. Where they become more insidious and powerful within the psyche, they are very difficult to contend with because they are drawing on elemental energy which, through its very elusiveness, can present us with the illusion that we are in control of our feelings, thoughts and behaviours, when in fact we are not master of our own house. This latter description accurately applies to the situation where we are in the grip of a complex, charged with archetypal energy. This link between archetype and complex will emerge more clearly as we explore the nature and influence of complexes, below.

  ‘The Wounded Healer’

  Jung applied the archetypal notion of ‘The Wounded Healer’ to psychotherapists. He drew on the Greek myth of Chiron, who sustained an incurable injury after Hercules fired an arrow at him and, to overcome the pain he suffered, he decided to provide healing to others. Jung saw this as a very important archetypal principle, which therapists need to stick with in two respects:

  ✽ Firstly, this is important from the point of view of not denying or avoiding their own wounds when they are activated by interaction with an analysand.

  ✽ Secondly, Jung pointed out the risk of an analyst becoming inflated by their capacity to heal and overvaluing themselves in a potentially dangerous way. The wound, which reminds the therapist of their weakness and vulnerabilities, provides a good antidote to this and so helps them stay grounded and balanced in their view of themselves and their work.

  Research (Barr, 2006) has demonstrated Jung’s belief that people train to be psychotherapists principally because of the psychological wounds they sustained earlier in their lives, which then generates a compensatory wish to tend to the wounds of others. Barr found that 79 per cent of therapists she asked via a questionnaire had experienced a wound (e.g. abuse, bereavement) earlier in their lives.

  This archetypal term utilized by Jung is now in common parlance across professions that have a healing function, not just counselling and psychotherapy. The term has even been adopted in another way by Jungian thinker Robert Romanyshyn (2007), who has written about the wounded researcher, as being relevant to the explorations of unconscious influences arising from psychological wounds sustained during our lives. He argues these provide a valuable resource to open up the deeper influences on us as we research areas of study which we find ourselves drawn to. In this sense, the unconscious plays a key role in choices researchers make, not just psychotherapists.

  Complex and its influence on the psyche

  As we have seen, Jung’s work on the word-association tests he carried out at the Burgholzi moved his thinking towards trying to find a way of describing what happens when strong emotions grip the psyche, sometimes tipping people into states of disorientation or despair. The use of the tests strongly suggested the presence of unconscious processes which have great power over the human mind, as these processes seemed to be able to block access to thoughts and memories as well as overwhelm with feelings. He would come to the view that, whatever we cal
led it, something powerful was able to take charge of our psyches and determine how we responded to life and its various challenges. Somehow a kind of autonomous ‘other’ is able to set up shop in us and expose us to emotional influences leading us into irrational and sometimes self-destructive patterns of behaviour.

  Jung plumped for the term ‘complex’ to describe this somewhat mysterious influence, as it captured its literal complexity and influence. So how might we try to describe what a complex is and how it links to the archetypal? Samuels et al. (1986, p. 34) provide us with a clear definition as a starting point:

  ‘A complex is a collection of images and ideas, clustered around a core derived from one or more archetypes, and characterized by a common emotional tone. When they come into play (become constellated), complexes contribute to behaviour and are marked by affect, whether a person is conscious of them or not. They are particularly useful in the analysis of neurotic symptoms.’

  This helps to establish the picture of a complex as containing a mix of influences and factors, underpinned by archetypal influences that provide its deeply rooted core in the psyche. One way to envisage how pervasive a complex is is to use the metaphor of the moon again. As it orbits the earth, we can imagine the moon as the ego and the earth as self. When ‘all is right with the world’, the ego is in a balanced relationship to the self, literally ‘in its orbit’, taking heed of its place in relation to the ‘bigger’ celestial body of the self. If you then imagine a rogue planet, moon or asteroid coming in close to this balanced dyad, the gravitational pull of the ‘space invader’ is going to throw this balanced set-up out of kilter, pulling the ‘moon’ ego towards it (see the diagram below). This is how a complex interrupts the natural rhythm of the ego–self dynamic, pulling the ego as well as the link to self (the ‘ego–self axis’) out of synch and allowing the psyche to become strongly influenced, if not dominated, by the complex. This is a way of envisaging how ‘other’, and autonomous, a complex is.

  The impact of a complex on ego and self

  We will look at some examples shortly, but to further enunciate the model described in the quote above we can identify the following key factors at work to create the conditions for the formation of a complex:

  1 Current influences and situation

  2 Environmental and historical influences

  3 Predominant personality traits

  4 Archetypal energy, which constellates problematically when 1–3 come together

  The good doctor

  A middle-aged man was devoted to his work as a doctor, partly because he genuinely felt ‘called’ to provide a healing role to others, but also because it seemed to fulfil a need in him to be valued and praised by people. At times there seemed something a little narcissistic (or self-promoting) about this. He would enjoy coming home from work and recounting to his partner what everyone he had helped that day had said about him. She got a little fed up with this and told him to ‘get over himself’. This provoked a huge outburst of anger and hurt from him. His over-sensitive anima problem was linked to a mother complex. He had been born and raised in India and his mother had doted on him as a growing boy, while his father had been barely present, serving in the military so away a lot of the time. When he was eight his sister was born and his mother shifted the focus of her attention more on to her baby, although she was still affectionate and admiring towards him whenever she could be.

  For him, though, this change had been significant and difficult. Although he knew his mother still loved him, he was no longer the only apple of her eye. He developed strategies to get her adoring look and approving words whenever he could, and if she was being particularly attentive to his sister, he would do things like pick flowers or vegetables in the garden and bring them in, unbidden, to his mother. Or he would offer to look after his sister so his mother could have a rest. There was almost a sense of him trying to fill his father’s shoes, and his love for his mother ran very deep, something which his partner now found difficult at times, especially when he would compare his mother’s care for him to hers. He would do this sometimes when he slipped into negative anima and felt she was not appreciating the importance of the work he did for his patients. Here, one could see the environmental and developmental impact of his childhood around both the real and the internalized relationship he’d had with his mother. This was a key influence on his mother complex.

  Another influence in a complex is personality type, an area we will look at in detail in the next chapter. Jung came to the view people were dominated by certain registers of functioning. In this case study we are considering a man who seemed dominated by his feeling function. He tended to experience the world, and especially relationships, through this function. When situations became highly charged, his thinking and perceptions of others became dominated by feelings. This explains his seeking out of a feeling of being valued or prized as ‘special’, as well as his over-reaction to not getting such responses.

  There are also factors in the present which activate the complex. In this case study, whenever his need to be praised was not assuaged, this man seemed to be taken over by very sensitive, touchy, reactions; a kind of regressed protest against the unavailability of the delicious feeling of being adored by mother.

  Finally, underneath these three factors is the archetypal core of the complex: ‘mother’ as a kind of goddess whose love this man must have. Jung wrote about this version of ‘the great mother’ in terms of how important it is, for a man in particular, to be ‘delivered’ from her, something which the doctor described in the case study was apparently far from achieving. Remember again, though: we are not describing archetype as ‘thing in itself’, more as something archetypal which structures experience of life via the complex and generates the emotional tone of the complex, which in this case was an over-sensitive response to hurt.

  Archetypes, complexes, analysis

  Jung initially called his overall approach ‘complex psychology’ because he saw his discovery of the workings of the complex as fundamental to the way in which analysis operates to address the underlying unconscious dynamics in it. Dissolving the analysand’s dominating complex or complexes is a key task of analysis. Although he later shifted his stance and decided upon ‘analytical psychology’ to give it a more general title and reflect the breadth and depth involved in working with psyche, it is fundamentally the unveiling and analysis of the complex that characterizes the focus of therapy.

  Spotlight: Cultural complexes?

  Post-Jungian thinkers have built on Jung’s interest in the collective and his observations about how whole communities and nations can find themselves in the grip of a complex (which then leads to all kinds of problems). An obvious example would be those movements of the twentieth century dominated by an overpowering set of principles and/or a powerful leader who embodied these. Fascist and communist ideology, as embodied for instance in the Nazi movement and Hitler in Germany, or the Cultural Revolution of Mao in China, are obvious examples. Joseph Henderson (1903–2007) posited such phenomena as ‘cultural complexes’, which are formed in a layer of the collective unconscious and able to activate chain reactions in how people respond to political and social influences. Singer and Kimbles (2004) and others have built on Henderson’s concept, to apply this to a range of current political, economic, social and cultural phenomena.

  Key terms

  Archetypes: Undefinable and ubiquitous ‘essences’, which nevertheless structure human experience, such as via life stages or roles.

  Complex: A powerful, autonomous influence that forms in the human psyche from current and past influences, personality factors and an archetypal core. This also has a common emotional tone, which strongly influences how a person responds to circumstances and relationships.

  Personality type: A constitutionally generated influence that influences a person’s way of experiencing, and relating to, themselves, others and the world (see Chapter 9).

  Dig deeper

  Barr,
A. (2006), ‘An investigation into the extent to which psychological wounds inspire counsellors and psychotherapists to become wounded healers’, University of Strathclyde, accessed at http://www.thegreenrooms.net/wounded-healer/

  Jung, C. G., ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’ in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW9i (London: Routledge, 1968)

  Jung. C. G., The Symbolic Life, CW18 (London: Routledge, 1976)

  Jung, C. G., ‘On the Concept of the Archetype’ in Four Archetypes (London: Routledge Classics, 2003)

  Romanyshyn, R., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind (New Orleans: Spring Books, 2007)

  Samuels, A., Shorter, B. and Plaut, F. (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (London: Routledge, 1986)

  Singer, T. and Kimbles, S., The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2004)

  Fact-check (answers at the back)

  1 What are archetypes?

  a The ubiquitously shared human images, instincts or behaviours themselves

  b The unknowable essence of patterns which get structured in image, instinct or behaviour

  c The knowable essence of our instinctive and behavioural reactions to images