The quest and psychoanalysis

From a psychoanalytic view the quest is often interpreted as a metaphor for the journey to maturity and separation from infantile identifications. In the Freudian model it describes the Oedipal crisis and its resolution by repression of desire for the mother and entry into the world of the father. But for Jung the Oedipal story was in itself a symbol for the ego’s lifelong relationship with the unconscious, a cyclical relationship of closeness and separation:

‘Because man has a dim premonition of this original situation behind his individual experience, he has always tried to give it generally valid expression through the universal motif of the divine hero’s fight with the mother dragon, whose purpose is to deliver man from the power of darkness. This myth has a “saving,” ie therapeutic significance, since it gives adequate expression to the dynamism underlying the individual entanglement. The myth is not to be casually explained as the consequences of a personal father-complex, but should be understood teleologically, as an attempt of the unconscious itself to rescue consciousness from the danger of regression. The ideas of “salvation” are not subsequent rationalisations of a father-complex. They are, rather, archetypally pre-formed mechanisms for the development of consciousness.’[1]

This explanation references two useful ideas for the analysis of texts: that there is a set of pre existing ‘archetypal’ forms that emerge in human expression; and that there is a relationship between these archetypes and the psychic experience of the individual. Jung proposed that archetypes arise from the contents of the ‘collective’ unconscious, a separate layer of the psyche from the personal unconscious whose contents are unknown to the individual and expressed symbolically through archetypes - a symbol being an approximate expression for something that has no direct expression because it is unknown. 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 that can ultimately be introjected, thus expanding the possibilities of the individual psyche.

Archetypes are slippery, unstable, they shape shift and make their appearances at the least likely times and in the oddest of circumstances:

‘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.’[2]

Rather than having their meaning defined, an archetype can only be amplified, its meanings and resonances circumscribed rather than fully articulated. They 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.’[3] 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.’ [4]

Jung is clear that archetypes feature frequently in myth and fairytale: ‘we can treat fairy tales as fantasy products, like dreams, conceiving them to be spontaneous statements of the unconscious about itself.’[5] Archetypal figures often occurring in fairytales and present in the Star Wars epic include the old man/Spirit, the eternal/miraculous child (also known as the Puer Aeturnus) and the Anima. It is worth pausing on the purpose of the Anima, given her importance for the male psyche. She represents 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. Like all archetypal figures, Anima is independent of the ego, hence her often subversive or uncanny qualities. And she is brought to life in the psyche by love, as Psyche in Greek mythology was paired with Eros. Certainly the relationship with Anima in the Star Wars saga is always tangled, often unsettlingly, with love and desire. The Shadow is also a frequent presence in fairytale as well as an eternal element of the individual psyche, representing the darkest, most hidden of our qualities that are the inevitable partner of our consciously recognised and accepted selves.

The quest itself also archetypal, proceeding as follows: through a series of trials and initiations (often at the hands or through the agency of the Father, for example the father who sends his youngest son away) the boy hero separates from unconscious identification with the Mother (for example through a symbolic dragon slaying) and achieves consciousness, often assisted in mythic representations by Spirit archetypes (wizards, goblins, talking animals). In the fairytale of Star Wars Luke and Anakin exhibit many of the hero archetype’s typical characteristics - ‘the divine generation from a virgin… his flight and concealment, his lowly birth … the wisdom of the …. child …. the breaking away from the mother’[6] - characteristics they share with the great archetypal hero of western culture, Christ. And as the hero the two Skywalkers are ‘first and foremost a self representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness.’[7]

[1] C. G. Jung, Collected Works, trans R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1971), vol. 4, para. 738.
[2] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1975), p.148.
[3] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 9:1, para. 271.
[4] Ibid., para. 160.
[5] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 13, para. 240.
[6] C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, trans R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 54.
[7] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 5, para. 299.