C. G. Jung's Archetype Concept

Theory, Research and Applications

Christian Roesler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000475777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

The concept of archetypes is at the core of C. G. Jung's analytical psychology. In this interesting and accessible volume, Roesler summarises the classical theory of archetypes and the archetypal stages of the individuation process as it was developed by Jung and his students. Various applications of archetypes, in cultural studies as well as in clinical practice, are demonstrated with detailed case studies, dream series, myths, fairy tales, and so on.

The book also explores how the concept has further developed as a result of research and, for the first time, integrates findings from anthropology, human genetics, and the neurosciences. Based on these contemporary insights, Roesler also makes a compelling argument for why some of Jung's views on the concept should be comprehensively revised.

Offering new insights on foundational Jungian topics like the collective unconscious, persona, and shadow, C. G. Jung's Archetype Concept is of great interest to Jungian students, analysts, psychotherapists, and scholars.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003058458-1

By way of an introduction to the theme of archetypes, I would like to begin with the following case study, which occurred some years ago in my practice. At the time I was giving psychotherapy to a young man in his early 20s, who had contacted me primarily because of a recurring depression. It emerged after some time and a reluctant disclosure on his part, that along with this depression came a misuse of cannabis. This abuse had gone so far that my client would often spend long periods of the day dozing. He exhibited signs of cognitive disturbances, such as difficulty in concentrating and weakness of memory, which in conjunction with his depression was causing his career to suffer. At seven years old my client had experienced the death of his mother, who had died from blood poisoning as a result of hospital treatment. From then on, he lived together with his father and his much older sister, who took over the maternal role for him in the time that she lived at home. When my client was 14 years old, his father was diagnosed with cancer and it quickly became clear that he would also die of the illness. At this time the client’s older sister had already left home and lived with her partner and her own family, some distance from my client’s residence. My client now had to cope, as a youth, with the slow decline and eventual death of his father and eventually remain completely alone in the now empty home of his parents. The relevant child protection services had decided that he was in a position to manage his daily life alone. My client lived alone in his parental home, cut short his schooling and vocational education, and had been working, at the time that he came to me, for some years as a tradesman. He had left the family home, in which he continued to live, practically the same as how his parents had arranged it. I could not help but think at times that the whole thing seemed more like a mausoleum in which the lost parents could be remembered and less like a place to actually live.

My client’s depression continued to return in episodes, particularly strongly in the time just before the anniversary of his mother’s death. It was obvious that the client had been confronted with these losses far too early in his life and that he had, considering his austere living situation, in no way psychologically come to terms with them. The experience of losing his emotional foundation, of being alone, and the excessive demand of this were surely once more intensified by the premature death of his father. Psychodynamically, the genetic background for his depression can surely be found in these early losses. The excessive abuse of cannabis, with which he would shift himself into a kind of trance-like state, stood for me in this context to be an attempt to recreate a certain closeness to his lost parents. On the conscious level my client rationalised the drug abuse as a libertarian lifestyle choice and emphasised that, even as a youth, he had really appreciated being able to do what he wanted to do. In this way the client had remained in an idealised state of youthful freedom and irresponsibility. Simultaneously my client was clearly suffering from continually depressive emotionlessness, abandonment, and a lack of drive and was struggling with his professional stagnation. He wanted to continue with his education and reach a new level, for which he, however, did not have the energy. We had worked together then for more than a year, which had proved itself to be relatively challenging, because on the one hand the client was vehemently against considering his cannabis abuse critically, while on the other hand it seemed impossible to influence his recurring depressive conditions. A good therapeutic working relationship, however, had developed between us and the client came gladly to the sessions. He also began increasingly introducing topics which he was currently emotionally concerned with to the psychotherapy (for example, current romantic relationships). With this background, my client then had the following dream, which he, visibly agitated, related in the next therapy session:

I am in an unknown country and am treated very harshly by people, whose nationality I cannot determine. They strip me of my clothes and paint on me with a kind of bright paint, or it could also be clay or mud. Then they hit me and poke me with small sticks, which is very painful. They seize my arms and legs and drag me through the dust until finally we come to a kind of altar. On this altar is a big stone with a round hole in it. My whole body is pushed backwards through this hole by the men, which is also very painful. Afterwards, however, the people are very friendly to me; they dance a joyful dance around me, carry me in their arms, and we go to a kind of feast, in which I am celebrated. Now I feel very accepted and euphoric.

The dream, which for an impartial observer seems initially somewhat unique, had a massive impact on me: I was so affected that I could hardly speak. I was engaged at this time with an inquiry into ethnology and the initiation rituals of different peoples. It suddenly occurred to me that my client’s dream described in detail elements of initiation rituals that can be found in different societies, for example in East Africa. If I had not been concerned at this time with the corresponding ethnographical literature, the connection would perhaps not have been so clear to me. What is interesting, is that my client’s dream described with mostly accurate details these initiation rituals, although I can with a limited degree of certainty, say that my client did not possess any related knowledge nor had come into contact with any literature on the subject. Moreover, it was extremely interesting that the initiation process in the dream was in principle exactly the kind that my client in his situation at the time needed. Tribal initiation rituals also serve the purpose of allowing adolescents to transition from childhood to adulthood. The partly painful and also frightening procedures which the initiates must undergo, serve the purpose in the eyes of traditional tribes, insofar as ethnology can reconstruct this, of ‘killing the child in the person’, so as to ease the departure from and the letting go of childish connections, especially to the mother, but also more generally from the original family. Only when the child in the person is put to one side in this way, according to the understanding of ethnology, can the adolescent find the space in himself to get his bearings in the world and to take on both adult values and responsibility in this adult world. Many initiation rituals thus contain the process of a symbolic rebirth or new birth, for example through baptism, through immersion, a submersion in water, in which the old person dies and a re-emergence as a new person, a newborn human, here an adult. In my client’s dream this was being pulled through the stone’s ‘birth canal’ on the altar. The altar in the dream thereby signified that a sort of sacred context was being dealt with. It is also typical of initiation rituals that the initiated person is celebrated after they have withstood the difficult procedures of the initiation, proved themselves to be brave, to have endured pain and fear, as well as their inclusion in the adult community, and for whom ordinarily follows a period of instruction of the rules and knowledge of the elders.

This dream of exactly this point of treatment was for me therefore also so intriguing because an initiation was in effect precisely what was needed by my client. Based on his earlier experiences of loss it was not possible for him in a timely manner to disengage from the people attached to his childhood and to dismiss them. He conserved instead the connection to the parents through the life in their ‘mausoleum’ and continually constructed with his cannabis consumption a sort of trance-like connection to his parents on the other side. The whole thing elevated beyond rationality by the value he placed upon youthful freedom and lack of responsibility. From my position as psychotherapist, what was required here was a bidding farewell to childhood, which of course would have meant diverging from the usual initiation rituals and the mourning of previous losses, as well as a conscious step into adult responsibility for his life.

When I had become conscious of this connection, I explained to my client at length about initiation rituals and their function in different tribes. Even when this made sense to him, it did not of course effect an immediate profound change in him. For me, however, the dream gave a clear indication of the further development and direction of the therapy, and it was also possible to observe that following the dream it felt easier to address more difficult topics with the client, for example the conservation of mementos of his parents or his excessive cannabis consumption. The therapy continued on for about another two years, in which the client finally managed to get to grips with the loss of his parents, overcome his depressive phases, begin a new apprenticeship, and finally move out of his parents’ house and into a more appropriate, smaller apartment. All in all, the result of the therapy was in this way very successful.

The initiation that emerged in my client’s dream and which he had to go through, can rightly be identified as an archetype. This example contains the essential elements which constitute the concept of the archetype: it is a universal model that can be found with a similar structure in all time periods and amongst all peoples; it emerges spontaneously from the unconscious, just as here it does in a dream. Ordinarily it can be assumed that the person has no knowledge or experience of the model and it seems to be almost invested in the person. The emergence of the archetype is connected with a psychological energy which causes a transformation – with the initiation it relates to causing the transition from childhood to adulthood. In this way archetypes, especially in transformation processes, like, for example, in psychotherapy, expose themselves as spontaneous expressions of the mind which bring the blocked processes of the mind back into motion and develop a healing effect. Often the emergence makes one awestruck, which Carl Gustav Jung denoted as ‘numinosum’. Jung formulated the concept of the archetype for psychology. This conception and its further developments, as well as the areas to which he applied his ideas, are the subjects of this book.

2The classic definition and theory of Jung’s concept of archetypes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003058458-2

The term archetype, in combination with the term ‘collective unconscious’ and the individuation process, is surely the central concept of Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology. The archetypes form the theoretical foundations of Jungian psychology. They distinguish it from other schools of psychotherapy and essentially define the specific approach in psychotherapy with its various methods of dream interpretation, working with images and other symbolic material, active imagination, and so on. The concept of archetypes was – alongside personal conflicts – a main reason for the theoretical differences and the resulting separation of Sigmund Freud and Jung, and marks the beginning of the formation of Jung’s own psychological theory (Kirsch 2000).

2.1 Definition

The term archetype is best translated as primordial image (Urbild). For Jung, these images belong to the configuration of the human psyche (Jung’s own publications on the concept of the archetype can be found in volume 9.1 of the collected works). Archetypes are structural elements of the collective psyche and give psychic energy a defined form, which alone is formless and imperceptible. As contentless shaping factors they form the basis of every experience and perform human experiences, ideas, and actions. Archetypes centre around the fundamental and general experiences of life, such as birth, marriage, motherhood, death, separation, crises, and so on. They have the following characteristics:

1. According to Jung’s understanding, archetypes are inherent patterns of experience and behaviour, which he parallels with the instincts of animals (for further discussion of the innateness of archetypes see Chapter 4.3.1). They are a priori forms of perception and organisation of people’s experience of the world, which means they direct and shape the way people encounter their environments. As an example, we could consider the idea that a child is able to see a caregiver as a mother or motherly not only because this person behaves in a certain way, but also because the child possesses a disposition to organise the experience of this person in a certain way, in this case as a mother. Here it is clear that Jung explicitly rejects the notion of behaviourism and learning theory, which at the time was gaining popularity and in the following centuries practically dominated scientific psychology, namely the idea that a child is a ‘tabula rasa’, or a blank canvas. This implies that at birth a child possesses no specific characteristics or pre-structure, but rather that everything, which later constitutes the psyche, comes through experience and learning. Here Jung was firmly of a different opinion and his psychology denotes almost the antithesis of behaviourism. His concept of archetypes purports that people are already shaped at birth by some profound knowledge, as well as in some ways how they organise psychological experience. This notion of the psyche manifests itself over the course of a lifetime in typical human behaviour, for example, the tendency to commit to a partner monogamously, to formalise this through the ritual of marriage, and to start a family on this basis. This basic configuration of the human psyche leads to human behaviour, development patterns, rituals, symbols, and beliefs that are present in all peoples throughout time.
2. This is synonymous with the fact that archetypes are universal and are, therefore, independent of culture and can be found in the same form in the behaviour as well as the beliefs and the inner psychological experiences of all people, regardless of location and at all times throughout history.
3. According to Jung, archetypes are strongly affectively charged, which means that when we experience them, they relate to specific and clearly traceable emotions. It could even be said that they structure and channel emotions. When we have archetypal experiences, we experience these frequently as, to use Jung’s term, ‘numinous’; therefore, they are somehow powerful, sublime, and even frightening. We are in this way overwhelmed by the experience and feel the same sort of reverence as we do when confronted with religious things. The experience appears to be impressive and overpowering, even close to superhuman. A good example of this is the experience of the initiation in my client’s dream, described in the introduction, which made a great impression on him as well as myself.
4. Archetypes are unconscious: they come from the unconscious and impact from the unconscious our conscious experience. Jung even assumes that the archetype is never in itself accessible to human consciousness, only its manifestations in the form of pictures, symbols, and so on.
5. Archetypes are autonomous, above all in relation to consciousness. The conscious Ego can neither make nor control them, but rather they spring from the unconscious, out of which they spontaneously emerge, which directs and structures the impact they have on consciousness.
6. Archetypes express themselves frequently in the form of symbols, but also manifest themselves in the form of human actions and behaviours, social phenomena, and other ways. For an extended account of the symbolic terms in analytical psychology, see Dorst (2014).

An example is the symbol of the cross: representations of the cross can be found as early as the Neolithic period and in many cultures across the world and in a variety of epochs it can be found as a religious symbol, for example, with the Teutons in the form of the swastika (a symbol of worshipping the sun), just as in India, of course as the central symbol of the Christian West, and also in cave and rock paintings of the aboriginals in Australia. In the modern age the cross could also, however, capture the attention of the masses and induce veneration outside of religion, in the form of the swastikas of National Socialism. Evidently the cross expresses something very profound and thrilling, which is difficult to fully grasp with words. This is precisely what characterises an archetype.

At this point it must be emphasised that, for Jung’s classic definition of the archetype, in his fully differentiated conception, Jung points out that the archetype as such is empty of content and only a general structure is represented, which organises content or information. It could also be called a general attractor. To illustrate this aspect, Jung uses the picture of the structure of a crystal: when a solid body crystallises in a solution, the form or structure of this solid object will be unique and individual, but at the molecular level the crystal lattice is always the same.

Their form is comparable with the lattice system of crystal, some of which performs in certain ways the structure of the crystal in the mother liquor (the archetype per se), without itself having a material existence. This existence appears first in the manner of the shooting of ions and molecules. The lattice system determines simply the biometric structure, but not the concrete form of the individual crystal […] and just as the archetype possess […] a invariable central meaning, which constantly only in principle and not in a concrete form, determines how it appears.

(Jung CW 9/1, p. 95)

2.2 Archetypes in the life of the individual

Archetypical models are waiting to manifest themselves in a Personality. They are capable of taking on an infinite number of variations and are dependent on individuals. They exert a fascination, which is intensified by culturally and traditionally dependent expectations. They are, therefore, bearers of a strong and possibly overwhelming quantity of energy, which, dependent on the developmental stage and level of consciousness – is hard to withstand. Archetypes awaken emotions, make us blind to reality, and take hold of the will. Archetypal living means living without boundaries (Inflation). To declare something archetypal can mean a conscious interaction with a collective and historic image, which gives room for the interplay of elementary polarities: past and present, Personal and collective, typical and unique (contrasts).

(Samuels, Shorter & Plaut 1986, p. 48)

This passage from the Dictionary of Jungian Psychology addresses many important aspects of the term archetype. Jung was of the opinion that manifested in archetypes is a transcendental level of meaning for the human existence which wants to be expressed. In this sense, particular archetypes would represent for each person particular issues in their life, which this per...