What did Jung mean by 'archetypes' and why do I care?

Central to a Jungian approach to narrative and image (and therefore film) is the concept of the archetype; and central to an understanding of what Jung meant by ‘archetype’ is the distinction between his proposed structure of the individual unconscious and that employed by Freud. For Freud the unconscious is formed as a repository for repressed memories, desires and affects. Some of these repressed contents then attempt to re-enter the conscious mind in distorted or disguised form as dreams or neurotic symptoms. The task of analysis is to decode these image or symptoms, returning the hitherto repressed desire to consciousness where it can be dealt with directly. For Freud, therefore, a symbol emerging from the unconscious should be understood as an expression whose manifest meaning conceals a latent meaning that can and should be brought out and concretised in the analytic healing process. An example would be Freud’s tracing of a patient’s dream about her daughter lying dead in a box to her repressed desire, when pregnant, that the foetus would die.[1]

Jung, however, pointed to the persistence of dream images and symptoms after their ‘meaning’ had been exposed. This suggested to him that there was more to the contents of the unconscious than the individual’s assortment of known but denied recollections and desires. The unconscious, he proposed, also contains the unknown: that is, contents that have never been known to the individual consciousness but that may yet emerge. On this basis he posited a dual structure for the unconscious: a layer known as the ‘personal unconscious’, containing the repressed experiences, desires and feelings of that individual; and the ‘collective unconscious’ or ‘objective psyche’, whose contents transcend the boundaries of the personal and are shared by everyone at all times. The collective unconscious, he wrote, is ‘identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.’[2] The contents of this collective unconscious are expressed symbolically - a symbol being an approximate expression for something that has no direct expression, hence his apparently absurd assertion that a penis is a phallic symbol. Material from the collective unconscious has to be expressed symbolically, exactly because the conscious mind has had no previous knowledge of it and therefore has no language for it.

For Jung, this is a teleological process: the imagery expressing these unknown contents is generated by the unconscious in its striving for psychic and spiritual development. It is trying to draw the attention of the conscious mind to new positions and potentials. This development sought by the unconscious takes the psyche beyond the personal into the transpersonal, or spiritual, realm and its goal is, for Jung, ‘individuation’, ‘the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated… having for its goal the development of the individual personality… It is an extension of the sphere of consciousness, an enriching of conscious psychological life.’[3]

The symbolic expressions of the collective unconscious are also referred to as archetypes. An archetype is the outcome of the collective unconscious expressing itself to the conscious mind through inhabiting a pre-existent form ‘that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time.’[4] In other words, archetypal expressions make use of a vocabulary of images that have emerged in human expression repeatedly across human history. A more recent writer about archetypes, James Hillman, puts it another way: archetypes are ‘root metaphors’ that we see, respond to and generate ourselves as a means to interact with the collective unconscious through our own consciousness. ‘They give our psychic functions – whether thinking, feeling, perceiving or remembering – their imaginal life, their internal coherence, their force, their necessity and their ultimate intelligibility. These persons keep our persons in order, holding into significant patterns the segments and fragments of behaviours we call emotions, memories, attitudes and motives.’[5] Archetypes are the characters we are drawn to in books and films, the repeating patterns and persons of fairytales, the meaning and function we ascribe to our behaviours and feelings.

Examples of archetypal figures often occurring in fairytales and present in the Star Wars epic are the old man (Senex), the eternal/miraculous child (Puer Aeturnus), the trickster (Hermes) and the Anima. Anima is for men the most significant of these, representing as she does the ‘soul image’ of masculine consciousness. That is, she represents to the male consciousness the image of that individual’s psyche. Appearing in dreams and fantasies as well as in personal relationships she can personify the male individual’s problems and confusions, the current emotions of his soul, more generally his sense of his own inner life and its importance; she can also connect consciousness with the imagination: ‘she is both the bridge to the imaginal and the other side.’[6] Anima is independent of the ego, hence her often subversive or uncanny qualities. And she is brought to life, argues Hillman, by love, as Psyche in Greek mythology was paired with Eros.

Archetypal forms encompass both positive and negative poles and can be endlessly elaborated. They will be inflected by passage through the individual psyche, the unique pronunciation of a word that’s known to the objective psyche of everyone, everywhere. They can, therefore, and often are, culturally coded and historicised. An example is the use of the cross in Christianity, endlessly mined for ideological, political and moral meaning, repeated and re-presented throughout Christian communities and yet continuing to be an unfathomable and eternally wondrous symbol of myriad resonances, never emptied of personal meaning for the believer. Never, in short, fully defined or finally understood.

The key to identifying images of the collective unconscious, which Jung frequently describes as ‘primordial’, lies in the personal response to the image. Contact with an image of the objective psyche will fascinate even though the image is likely to transcend any personal associations. The image may be non-human or impersonal and indeed can often be abstract, for example a cross or a mandala. The image may emerge from within but appear to have a life of its own, occurring and developing beyond the power of the conscious will – the imagery of space and space travel in David Bowie’s songs, for example, as much as an individual’s lament that she always is attracted to the same kind of man. Quintessentially, symbolic contents will carry large amounts of energy and experience of them will be numinous, ie have spiritual or transcendental qualities: ‘the concentration of psychic forces have something about them that always looks like magic.’[7]

An example Jung cites is that of a woman patient who had formed a transference to him of her relationship with her father. They had identified and discussed this transference but seemed to have reached an impasse in the therapeutic process. They began to discuss her dreams and it became clear her dream imagery repeatedly indicated the patient-therapist relationship. The therapist/father, however, usually appeared in some distorted form: very old, supernaturally large, and often associated with nature. In one dream the therapist figure stood next to the woman on a hill side covered with wheat, he a giant and she tiny. He lifted and held her in his arms, rocking her, as the wind swept over the wheat field and stirred the wheat. The dreams, then, seemed simply to be a representation of the transference, made boring with repetition, of the father-love onto the doctor, with the divine aspects particularly emphasised. All they lacked was the conscious criticism of the survival of this transference, in other words they lacked the sense that there was something ‘wrong’ with the transference. What could be the purpose of this stubborn repetition? On reflection, Jung came to conclude that these dreams were a sign that the unconscious was attempting to reach beyond and through the personal father complex to God, to ‘free a vision of God from the veils of the personal, so that the transference to the person of the doctor was no more than a misunderstanding on the part of the conscious mind.’[8] In this instance, therefore the collective unconscious was reaching through the personal experience to try to communicate something of importance to the conscious mind of the patient: her longing for God.

‘Archetypes’, Jung insisted, ‘are among the inalienable assets of every psyche,’[9] the means by which we all have the potential to develop greater consciousness. Great gift as they are, however, to the quest for personal destiny, archetypes are not easy to work with. As Jung himself had call to reiterate on several occasions, an archetype does not ‘mean’ something else; an archetype constellates a set of possibilities to be made use of by consciousness at a particular moment of need. Archetypes can be difficult to identify, woven as they are into the largest patterns of our behaviours and beliefs. When we occupy ourselves with origins and causes, with growth and change, we are in the archetypal realm of the mother. When we are concerned with love, as are Augustine and Freud and Richard Curtis, we are occupied by an archetype, by Eros or Christ or Aphrodite, depending on how the archetype manifests in us and the face it is showing.[10] Archetypes are slippery, unstable, they shape shift and make their appearances at the least likely times and in the oddest of circumstances. Rather than having their meaning defined, an archetype can only be amplified, its meanings and resonances circumscribed rather than fully articulated. Archetypes are in large degree autonomous; they are not to be integrated into the psyche as personal, recovered contents might be, but rather ‘come to terms with’ by a process of dialogue when they are present. They are not, most importantly, symptoms to be treated but helpful effects that walk alongside us, sometimes all our lives, altering themselves to our particular needs. In analysis the task is not to de-encrypt them and thereby undo them but ‘to dissolve the projections in order to restore their contents to the individual who has involuntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself.’ [11]

Working with archetypes is a process of continual examination of symbolic expressions and translation of current understandings into a different metaphorical system, language; ‘archetypal ideas are primarily speculative ideas, that is, they encourage speculation.’[12] Archetypes can never therefore be emptied of meaning but will always re-emerge in other times and places in a new aspect; ‘the most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it modern dress.’[13] .

This work of amplification is not, as Jung himself glumly remarked, simple; it ‘not only requires lengthy and wearisome researches, but is also an ungrateful subject for demonstration.’[14] By a process of finding analogies for the functional meaning of an image (not analogies for the image itself) we can find a dialogue with archetypal images; but we cannot either aim to define or explain, lest we lose the lineaments of the unknown that is seeking to suggest itself; and nor can we go too far as all archetypal contents are linked and we therefore risk bringing the entire network to the surface and losing sight of the image itself:

‘their tales and their figures move through phases like dramas and interweave one with another, dissolve into one another…. Archetypes are not definitely distinct. One instinct modifies another; one tale leads to another; one God implicates another. Their process is in their complications and amplification, and each individual’s psychic process involves attempting to follow, discriminate, and refine their complications.’[15]

[1] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, transl. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Penguin Books, London, 1991), pp 237-8.
[2] C. G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, publ. in Von Den Wurzeln den Bewusstseins (Zurich, 1954); excerpt quoted in Jung: Four Archetypes, transl. R. F. C. Hull (Routledge, London and New York, 2003) p 2.
[3] C. G. Jung, Psychological Types , transl H. G. Baynes, revision R. F. C. Hull (Routledge, London, 1971), pp. 450 – 452.
[4] C. G. Jung, Collected Works 1964/75; quoted in Don Frederickson, Jung / sign / symbol / film, in Jung & Film: Post Jungian Takes on the Moving Image, eds Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister (Brunner Routledge 2001), p 30.
[5] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (Harper-Perennial 1992), p128.
[6] Ibid., p43.
[7] C. G. Jung, The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, Volume 9i, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Bollingen Foundation, 1959); excerpt quoted in Jung: Aspects of the Masculine, transl R.F. C. Hull, ed John Beebe, (Routledge, London and New York, 2003), p 159.
[8] Ibid., p 85.
[9] C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes, p 17.
[10] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 124
[11] C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes, p160.
[12] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 117.
[13] C. G. Jung, Collected Works 9:1, 1959/68, quoted in Jung/sign/symbol film, Jung & Film, p 36.
[14] C. G, Jung, Collected Works 9:1, 1959/68, quoted in Jung/sign/symbol film, Jung & Film, p 36.
[15] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p148.