‘You’re the nearest thing I have to a father’
The maturation of masculine consciousness is shaped in Star Wars by the relationships and elisions between the archetypal presences of Spirit, Father and Shadow. The characters of Obi Wan, Yoda, Vader, the Emperor, Qui Gon, Anakin and Luke all exhibit the functions of at least two of these archetypal values. It is the instability in the function of these characters, among other things, that points to their archetypal qualities and therefore to the more complex possibilities opened up by the narrative.
Luke has relationships with a succession of father figures in Episodes IV-VI as he develops his masculine identity: starting with the repressive Uncle Owen, he moves on to Obi Wan and Yoda, struggles against his true father, Vader, and completes his progress by making a powerful relationship with him. Anakin’s relations with father figures are more ambivalent – in one sense, as the product of a virgin birth, he is in total denial of the Father and this again connects to the perpetual theme of rebellion. His remark to Obi Wan that ‘you are the nearest thing I have to a father’ follows Obi Wan’s rueful (and accurate) prediction that Anakin will be the death of him. The whole Jedi Order represents to Anakin the father that refuses to let him succeed to power, with Obi Wan as the chief focus of his resentment for being, among other things, ‘overly critical’. Their relationship, before its final collapse, settles into a more comfortable, less fraught fraternal model. Anakin’s final and most destructive fathering is from Palpatine, the Sith Lord who becomes Emperor through coopting Anakin’s extraordinary powers. The Emperor’s ability to spot and exploit psychic weakness, in this case Anakin’s secret desire for his mother and sexual relationship with Padmé, is what makes him powerful and dangerous. His apparently open and direct appeal to Anakin in Episode III, ‘I need your help, son’ is the only time Anakin is addressed so frankly and warmly by a father figure and he is naively helpless to resist. Jedi fathering, by contrast, is dictatorial, disciplinarian and frigid. Where the Jedi are distant and assert status, the Emperor is intimate and flatters. Where the Jedi demand celibacy, the Emperor tells Anakin that in alliance with him Anakin can save his wife. In tempting Anakin to revenge himself on the older men who keep him back by destroying their Order and usurping their power the Emperor is himself the archetypal Father who exploits and controls the son for his own ends – the Father who sends a nation’s sons to war or puts them to work in life-shortening heavy industry. The Vader who wants to make an alliance with his son so that they can rule the galaxy, and is prepared to destroy him if he refuses, is also a reflection of this Father – the Father who also feels sexual jealousy of the Mother in the Oedipal conflict. Anakin, as the future Vader/Dark Father, expresses this ambivalence to his children in his shocking slaughter of the ‘younglings’ the children in training at the Jedi Temple.
Where Luke is, as ever, compliant with the Father’s function to separate him from the Mother, Anakin’s story in Episodes I-III is the model for a psyche that fails to come to terms with the Father archetype. In resisting the Father’s power to separate him from the Mother, Anakin himself is overtaken by the archetype to become the Dark Father that haunts the whole saga; and yet over the whole cycle he is the character who finally unites the Father’s, possibilities and brings peace to what remains of the family. One of the possibilities of the Father that’s therefore opened up in Star Wars is that of his contradictory and unpredictable nature, explored at some length by Jung in his Answer to Job[1]and of finding a stable ground for making relationship with him: in Star Wars he is characterised almost always by a Kleinian split between Good and Bad. The immaturity of the central consciousness and the vastness of the Father potential makes it almost impossible to understand him as a whole until the very end of Episode VI.
The splitting off of the Bad Father also provides a route into the narrative for the Shadow, encompassing both the negative elements of the Puer Aeturnus (an archetype with which the character of Anakin in particular is associated), of the Spirit and the Father himself. Jung described the Shadow, very significantly in this context, as the ‘dark side’ of the personality: ‘a man who is possessed by his Shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps.’[2] Anakin, standing in the light of his own talent and falling into the trap of his own loss and ambition, is possessed by the Shadow (Palpatine), and as such precipitates the fragmentation of galactic stability and the loss of all he loves, in particular his relationship with the soul through Anima – in other words, psychosis. This relationship between the Emperor and Vader articulates well the dialogue between the personal complex and the archetypal power that animates it. It is appropriate that Luke is the only character apart from Vader to meet the Emperor face to face; it means that he, as ego, has insight into the relationship at the heart of the Dark Side. For the other characters in the films Vader is the evil Empire incarnate. But we, and Luke, know that it is Sidious/Palpatine that is the ne plus ultra of the Shadow in Star Wars, an hermaphroditic figure associated with death and dark rebirth, most clearly in his twisted birthing of Vader on a planet of the darkest maternal power. In this act, the Shadow is animating the Bad Father, providing an archetypal vessel and energy for Luke’s personal father complex. The Shadow gives shape, identity, even personality to the darkest personal contents. As Shadow the Emperor manifests his will through the darkest elements of the individual psyche, which enable him to move in, to possess: ‘strike me down with all your hatred, and your journey towards the Dark Side will be complete’. His presence is demonic, his threat is to psychic autonomy and the stability of the Self represented by Anakin and the Republic, both of which he subjects to his will.
Jung insisted that the Shadow is an essential and eternal part of the psyche: ‘the darkness that clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams.’[3] Yet the apparent message at the end of Episode VI is that the Shadow can and should be destroyed. It is here that the structure of the epic becomes significant. Lucas began with the end; the destruction of the Emperor is followed, in our experience of the films, with his slow rise to power. And his assumption of imperial control is followed by the story of its defeat. And so on. This is a repeating struggle, not a linear narrative that moves from cause to consequence. Star Wars is a cycle of struggle, with, among others, the Shadow that is an eternal component of every psyche. More than that, after Episode III we are left wondering whether the point is, after all, that Vader’s fall and possession by the Shadow is necessary. Without Vader the Emperor cannot be destroyed; without Vader, Luke has no quest.
All these possibilities of the Father and the Shadow are then overlapped by the Spirit. The Jedi, the Sith and the Skywalkers all have in common their connection with the Force, the ‘ancient religion’ that the rest of the galaxy abandons in the course of the epic. The Jedi embody the positive characteristics of Spirit: the wise old man, hobgoblin or woodsprite who brings maturity, urges reflection on the situation in which the psyche finds itself, warns of dangers to come and provides the means to deal with them. In Star Wars Spirit brings balance to the phallic power of the masculine identity, expressed by sabre-wielding fighter pilots Luke and Anakin, and involves at its core a balanced and spiritually informed relationship with the power of the collective unconscious, the Force. Only this knowledge enables the Jedi to bear their phallic weapons with precision and power. In this respect these figures are key to successful completion of the quest. But the Shadow qualities embodied in the Emperor and Vader are also in part the negative aspects of Spirit: possession by a sense of zealous mission; an extension of the personality beyond the personal, in other words the acting out of personal hate and anger on the rest of the world on an epic scale; the loss of free will and fragmentation of the personality that has been overwhelmed.
Between the three broad archetypal principles, therefore, is constellated a wide variety of possibilities for the questing male consciousness, psychic possibilities that encompass transcendent wisdom, invasive darkness and every relationship to power that comes in between, all in the context of relating to the unconscious (the Force). The difficulty of the quest is not therefore simply the pain of separation and the overcoming of fear of the Father; it involves negotiation of all these possibilities and the need to find, somewhere among them, conscious identity – all the while knowing that identity could prove horrifying rather than unifying.
[1] Ibid.
[2] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 9:I, para. 222.
[3] Ibid.
The maturation of masculine consciousness is shaped in Star Wars by the relationships and elisions between the archetypal presences of Spirit, Father and Shadow. The characters of Obi Wan, Yoda, Vader, the Emperor, Qui Gon, Anakin and Luke all exhibit the functions of at least two of these archetypal values. It is the instability in the function of these characters, among other things, that points to their archetypal qualities and therefore to the more complex possibilities opened up by the narrative.
Luke has relationships with a succession of father figures in Episodes IV-VI as he develops his masculine identity: starting with the repressive Uncle Owen, he moves on to Obi Wan and Yoda, struggles against his true father, Vader, and completes his progress by making a powerful relationship with him. Anakin’s relations with father figures are more ambivalent – in one sense, as the product of a virgin birth, he is in total denial of the Father and this again connects to the perpetual theme of rebellion. His remark to Obi Wan that ‘you are the nearest thing I have to a father’ follows Obi Wan’s rueful (and accurate) prediction that Anakin will be the death of him. The whole Jedi Order represents to Anakin the father that refuses to let him succeed to power, with Obi Wan as the chief focus of his resentment for being, among other things, ‘overly critical’. Their relationship, before its final collapse, settles into a more comfortable, less fraught fraternal model. Anakin’s final and most destructive fathering is from Palpatine, the Sith Lord who becomes Emperor through coopting Anakin’s extraordinary powers. The Emperor’s ability to spot and exploit psychic weakness, in this case Anakin’s secret desire for his mother and sexual relationship with Padmé, is what makes him powerful and dangerous. His apparently open and direct appeal to Anakin in Episode III, ‘I need your help, son’ is the only time Anakin is addressed so frankly and warmly by a father figure and he is naively helpless to resist. Jedi fathering, by contrast, is dictatorial, disciplinarian and frigid. Where the Jedi are distant and assert status, the Emperor is intimate and flatters. Where the Jedi demand celibacy, the Emperor tells Anakin that in alliance with him Anakin can save his wife. In tempting Anakin to revenge himself on the older men who keep him back by destroying their Order and usurping their power the Emperor is himself the archetypal Father who exploits and controls the son for his own ends – the Father who sends a nation’s sons to war or puts them to work in life-shortening heavy industry. The Vader who wants to make an alliance with his son so that they can rule the galaxy, and is prepared to destroy him if he refuses, is also a reflection of this Father – the Father who also feels sexual jealousy of the Mother in the Oedipal conflict. Anakin, as the future Vader/Dark Father, expresses this ambivalence to his children in his shocking slaughter of the ‘younglings’ the children in training at the Jedi Temple.
Where Luke is, as ever, compliant with the Father’s function to separate him from the Mother, Anakin’s story in Episodes I-III is the model for a psyche that fails to come to terms with the Father archetype. In resisting the Father’s power to separate him from the Mother, Anakin himself is overtaken by the archetype to become the Dark Father that haunts the whole saga; and yet over the whole cycle he is the character who finally unites the Father’s, possibilities and brings peace to what remains of the family. One of the possibilities of the Father that’s therefore opened up in Star Wars is that of his contradictory and unpredictable nature, explored at some length by Jung in his Answer to Job[1]and of finding a stable ground for making relationship with him: in Star Wars he is characterised almost always by a Kleinian split between Good and Bad. The immaturity of the central consciousness and the vastness of the Father potential makes it almost impossible to understand him as a whole until the very end of Episode VI.
The splitting off of the Bad Father also provides a route into the narrative for the Shadow, encompassing both the negative elements of the Puer Aeturnus (an archetype with which the character of Anakin in particular is associated), of the Spirit and the Father himself. Jung described the Shadow, very significantly in this context, as the ‘dark side’ of the personality: ‘a man who is possessed by his Shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps.’[2] Anakin, standing in the light of his own talent and falling into the trap of his own loss and ambition, is possessed by the Shadow (Palpatine), and as such precipitates the fragmentation of galactic stability and the loss of all he loves, in particular his relationship with the soul through Anima – in other words, psychosis. This relationship between the Emperor and Vader articulates well the dialogue between the personal complex and the archetypal power that animates it. It is appropriate that Luke is the only character apart from Vader to meet the Emperor face to face; it means that he, as ego, has insight into the relationship at the heart of the Dark Side. For the other characters in the films Vader is the evil Empire incarnate. But we, and Luke, know that it is Sidious/Palpatine that is the ne plus ultra of the Shadow in Star Wars, an hermaphroditic figure associated with death and dark rebirth, most clearly in his twisted birthing of Vader on a planet of the darkest maternal power. In this act, the Shadow is animating the Bad Father, providing an archetypal vessel and energy for Luke’s personal father complex. The Shadow gives shape, identity, even personality to the darkest personal contents. As Shadow the Emperor manifests his will through the darkest elements of the individual psyche, which enable him to move in, to possess: ‘strike me down with all your hatred, and your journey towards the Dark Side will be complete’. His presence is demonic, his threat is to psychic autonomy and the stability of the Self represented by Anakin and the Republic, both of which he subjects to his will.
Jung insisted that the Shadow is an essential and eternal part of the psyche: ‘the darkness that clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams.’[3] Yet the apparent message at the end of Episode VI is that the Shadow can and should be destroyed. It is here that the structure of the epic becomes significant. Lucas began with the end; the destruction of the Emperor is followed, in our experience of the films, with his slow rise to power. And his assumption of imperial control is followed by the story of its defeat. And so on. This is a repeating struggle, not a linear narrative that moves from cause to consequence. Star Wars is a cycle of struggle, with, among others, the Shadow that is an eternal component of every psyche. More than that, after Episode III we are left wondering whether the point is, after all, that Vader’s fall and possession by the Shadow is necessary. Without Vader the Emperor cannot be destroyed; without Vader, Luke has no quest.
All these possibilities of the Father and the Shadow are then overlapped by the Spirit. The Jedi, the Sith and the Skywalkers all have in common their connection with the Force, the ‘ancient religion’ that the rest of the galaxy abandons in the course of the epic. The Jedi embody the positive characteristics of Spirit: the wise old man, hobgoblin or woodsprite who brings maturity, urges reflection on the situation in which the psyche finds itself, warns of dangers to come and provides the means to deal with them. In Star Wars Spirit brings balance to the phallic power of the masculine identity, expressed by sabre-wielding fighter pilots Luke and Anakin, and involves at its core a balanced and spiritually informed relationship with the power of the collective unconscious, the Force. Only this knowledge enables the Jedi to bear their phallic weapons with precision and power. In this respect these figures are key to successful completion of the quest. But the Shadow qualities embodied in the Emperor and Vader are also in part the negative aspects of Spirit: possession by a sense of zealous mission; an extension of the personality beyond the personal, in other words the acting out of personal hate and anger on the rest of the world on an epic scale; the loss of free will and fragmentation of the personality that has been overwhelmed.
Between the three broad archetypal principles, therefore, is constellated a wide variety of possibilities for the questing male consciousness, psychic possibilities that encompass transcendent wisdom, invasive darkness and every relationship to power that comes in between, all in the context of relating to the unconscious (the Force). The difficulty of the quest is not therefore simply the pain of separation and the overcoming of fear of the Father; it involves negotiation of all these possibilities and the need to find, somewhere among them, conscious identity – all the while knowing that identity could prove horrifying rather than unifying.
[1] Ibid.
[2] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 9:I, para. 222.
[3] Ibid.
posted by Ask my Animus at 11:33 AM
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