A review of a volume, specifically Sections II-V of the CW9i on archetypes, can at first glance appear superfluous. Jungian theory has been summarized, evaluated, and expanded upon by numerous works over the years. However, in the context of training new analysts, we take up a volume afresh and ask how does material, in this case written from 1934 to 1954, work today? From this perspective, different chapters illustrate both the strengths and potential limitations not only of Jung’s work but also within the field of Analytical psychology itself.
Interpersonal vs. Intrapsychic . The chapter on the Mother archetype in part focuses on the positive and negative mother complex through various mother-daughter relationships. A useful if not necessary addition to this description is, however, increasingly being taken up by the Jungian world. Writings on early infant-child development facilitate an expansion of an interpersonal-relational definition of “mother” to an intra-psychic, psychological one. The outer, concrete mother’s capacity to contain and digest primitive, inchoate affect, for example, represents an intrapsychic capacity to process unconscious affect and content (its lack, conversely, subjecting the individual to an experience of being overwhelmed and devoured by these same primitive, unconscious forces).
Splitting The Field . Jung’s chapter on the Trickster archetype was written as a psychological commentary for Paul Radin’s book on The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. Jung’s emphasizes the compensatory function of the trickster who in opposing the ruling principle relativizes traditional authority and order. Psychologically, the trickster represents the “counter tendencies in the unconscious” which stand in a complementary or compensatory relationship to consciousness (CW9i §468-9). Jung’s later writing, however, takes an important further step in seeing the fairy tale trickster and giant as forming two halves of an unconscious whole; as Jung notes, little tom thumb, has a “dangerous double nature … he is also the ogre himself” (CW12 §84). Uniting seemingly opposing tendencies (parallel to seeing the “co-dependent” as the functional half of the alcoholic) requires an expansion of our view of what we are treating. In this context, the unconscious material has a specific quality of primitivity (represented by the giant) that must be taken into account if it is to be transformed and integrated.
Personification and Concretization . Jung’s chapter on the archetype of the Spirit illustrates not only a danger in his own writing but in subsequent generations of Jungians’ interpretation of Jung and his work. The concept of archetypes itself is a concretization, our best effort at understanding something inherently process oriented, something psychological. But because these processes are abstract and difficult to define, they are often initially seen through their projection onto the interpersonal field. The image of Spirit as wise old man is easily accessible. The difficulty rests in the next step, the movement to a psychological, analytical, point of view: spirit as an objectification or psychological understanding of the events in our lives and aspects of ourselves.
CW9i Sections II-V on the various archetypes is a provocative approach to material that is inherently more complicated (as Jung himself knew). Our responsibility as instructors (to our trainees) and as analysts is to take this initial work and think further about its implications and meaning so that our own understanding of this material does not become mired in oversimplification and misunderstanding.
REFERENCES
Jung, C.G. (1981). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW9i). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C.G. (1980). Psychology and Alchemy (CW12). Princeton: Princeton University Press.