When you are in the grips of the archetype, you don’t have it; it has you. Carl Jung

Here I explore whether I own my identity or whether it owns me, for if I cling on too tightly to an identity it may over control my behaviours. I am guided here by understandings gained from Shamanistic views of the psyche, of Jungian psychology and of ourselves; in that sometimes we cannot do anything other than act out the story or identity we cling to.

In the First Nation (America) story of The Scorpion and the Turtle; the scorpion asks the turtle for a ride across the river as ‘I cannot swim’

The turtle fears being stung and is reassured by the scorpion that if he were to sting the turtle, then they would both die and so, the turtle is persuaded to carry the scorpion across the river.

Half way across the scorpion does indeed sting the turtle and upon being asked ‘why? by the turtle ‘for now we both die’ the scorpion replies: ‘its in my nature.’

Our insistence on holding onto an identity, for our personalities and behaviours to be seen as consistent can lead to scorpion behaviour: we are bound to destroy others and ourselves.

It is this adherence to identity that leads us to understanding of archetypes, for archetypes are our meta or ruling ideas on identity.

When looking at different cultures Jung found there were common themes in patterns, stories and images. He found that these same mages also appeared in the dreams of patients and from these observations he developed his theory of a collective unconscious and of archetypes.

Jung suggested the existence of a conscious and an unconscious mind; consciousness being the part of our minds we know directly; where we think, feel, sense and sense intuition. 

The unconscious is where our thoughts, feelings, urges and other information reside that are difficult to bring to consciousness.  This is where our experiences that do not reach consciousness, experiences that are not congruent with who we think we are and other information that is repressed exists below our everyday idea of self.  

The contents of the personal unconscious can become available through hypnosis, guided imagery and dreams.  Although not directly accessible, material in the personal unconscious is created there during our lifetime and many of our decisions are determined by unconscious factors.

The collective unconscious is where Jung places our personal psyche within the evolutionary process, as much of the collective unconscious is inherited.  It does not come from or built by our current environment. Instead it is the part of the mind that is determined by heredity. This is created by evolution and links us to the past of the human species and our evolution as an organism and thus our present form is but a link in the chain of human evolution. 

The collective unconscious is different from the personal unconscious in that it is inherent rather than built up by our life experiences.

Jung suggests archetypes pre-exist in the collective unconscious of humanity, because they repeat themselves eternally in our psyches as human beings determining how we see our world and how we behave, they are the elements in our psyche which express themselves as dream or fantasy images.

These are within us and they are part of our inheritance as human beings, residing as energy within the collective unconscious as the psychological life of all peoples everywhere. 

As such, they are inside us and they are outside of us; we can meet them by going into to our dreams or fantasies and we can meet them by reaching out to our myths, legends, literature and religions.

Archetypes can be a pattern such as a story or they can be iconic figures characters and universally symbols across cultures.

The word archetype comes from the Greek ‘Arche’ meaning first and type meaning imprint or pattern.  Archetypes then, are first figures that are universally recognised as a type or types across all cultures, they are psychological patterns that form the basic blueprint for dynamic counterparts of the human personality.  

Within this Jungian understandings of the world, the Shadow is the dark side of our Psyche and is everything that doesn’t fit into the Persona. The Persona meaning here our mask of identity: how we wish to be seen in the world and how we interact between our true selves, others and our environment

The shadow is our refused or unacceptable characteristics that don’t go away; we stuff them away inside or repress them and they often can or will, if ignored, begin to take on a life of their own. 

We learn from a young age that there are certain ways of thinking, being and relating that are not acceptable in our culture and so we stuff them into our shadow place. We hope that they will stay there but often they leak out or present themselves in our unconscious behaviours.

This more easily seen in the Animus; which is the masculine nature in the unconscious of a woman, the contra sexual soul image. How a woman’s inner image of masculinity finds expression and the Anima, being the feminine nature in the unconscious of a man; the contra sexual soul image, the image of the feminine internalised in the male psyche.

It is easier to recognise how each of us male or female contains within us the opposite of our gender. So too do we contain shadow: it is our holding within us the possibility o f doing other than the ‘good’ that we do.

Psychic energy that is not owned or dealt with takes a dark or shadow form and begins to take on a life of its own.  There is a shadow side to all Archetypes: the shadow side to the warrior is the tyrant, the villain, who uses their skills for power and ego enhancement and whereas the Adventurer quests after truth and purity, the shadow Adventurer is controlled by pride, ambition and addiction to thrills.

We can use the term shadow in a more general sense for it is not merely the dark side of a particular archetypal pattern or form as wherever our Persona is, Shadow is also.  Wherever good is, evil also exists; we hold both within us.

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We first recognise the shadow in our personal unconscious in all that we deny or repress: power, greed, cruelty, murderous thoughts, unacceptable impulses and wrong or difficult actions.  All the evil things by which human beings justify bad behaviours or do to other beings is shadow. 

Shadow is unconscious and as it is unconscious we can only know it only indirectly, projection, just as we know the Archetypes of Warrior, Seeker and Lover.  We encounter our own shadow in other people, things and in the places where we project it.

The shadow isn’t out there at all; it is inside of us: we (can) only know it is inside us because we see it outside. We would not be able to recognise it otherwise. 

Shadow projections hold a dark and difficult attraction to us; for we discover where the bad stuff really is: in him, in her, in that place, out ‘there’ for others and ‘things’ hold for us what we wish to deny about ourselves.

If there really is such a thing as evil, what most of what we see as evil, particularly collectively, is but our shadow projecting ours out onto another: ‘we would not recognise it in another unless we have it within ourselves’

The difficulty is separating our projections from reality. As we can only do that when we discover where our own projections end and as our shadow is projective, especially in terms of archetypes like evil: when you are in the grips of the archetype, you don’t have it, it has you.

Evil or difficult archetypes can be termed Daemon or Daemons, these are the driving forces of our spirit/ual energy that leads to the creative formation of our individuality. It is by what we repress as much as what we allow out into the world about ourselves that creates who we are. It is our drive to repress our shadow or  ‘badness’ that forces us into denial and forces us into doing ‘good’ things to compensate for our shadow that leads to our individual identities or individuation. Individuation here meaning; becoming an individual and becoming our own selves, apart and separate from others.

The Shadow is the neglected qualities of our personality in the conscious process of integration, consisting of partly repressed, partly unlived traits which, for social, ethical, educational or other reasons, we exclude from conscious experience and have fallen in to unconscious. The shadow is in a compensatory relation to consciousness; it can therefore function positively as well as negatively.

There are four famous forms of archetypes numbered by Jung:

The Self

The Shadow

The Anima or female archetypes

The Animus or male archetypes

These are played out as

Father

Mother

Hero

Warrior

Martyr

The Divine Couple

The Child

The Superman

The Hero

The Great Mother

The Wise Old Man

The Trickster

The Seeker

The Adventurer

As a young man I fully explored and inhabited the rebel archetype and there may be some traces of this left still. I rode motorcycles, gew my hair and hung around  with motorcycle gangs. The delightful irony and perhaps joy of this is how conventional I was in being unconventional; I was exploring my animus archetype, by being a warrior, the trickster and  a rebel. By not wishing to conform to standard stereotyping of male’ness I instead applied another male stereotype to myself…perhaps understandably I found this parallel male universe lacking too.

I offer this example to illustrate how utterly confounding I find Jungs understanding of archetypes, that there is no escape. We cannot be anything but what we are, humans with our assigned gender and limited choices of behaviours. No matter how hard we try to escape our human boundaries, our archetypes or inbuilt understanding of roles can only rein us in and we will eventually conform.

I eventually tired of being harassed by the police and by others who recognised my choices within themselves and rather than identify chose to persecute. (or was it that I chose to stop persecuting myself?) Here again Jung offers us our own redemption; that by paying attention to what we project outward we can bring an end to our suffering by owning this as our own shadow projected onto the world, rather than thinking that the world is doing this to us. 

I chose other archetypes to explore, that of citizen, father, being part of a divine couple and perhaps by writing this, that of  wise old(er) man.

I initially chose wise old man by becoming a teacher, a trainer and as a facilitator of groups. But first I had to explore the archetypes of apprentice, learner or student and of seeker.

Surprisingly I found a better venue for my rebel part amongst academia, there are many back row girls and boys who wanted to examine their behaviour from the teachers point of view. They chose to rebel in school because they knew how to conform and now they could use both experiences to try and offer something more within the classroom than the lacklustre effort offered to them, or so they told me. There are as many rebels within academia as there are tricksters; those who try to point out ridiculousness and inconsistencies between what we say and what we do.

Neil Benbow

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