Episode Seven: What Is an Archetype?

What is an archetype anyway?

The concept comes from the great psychologist Carl Jung, who was a contemporary of Freud and Adler and who, in my opinion, surpassed them both in his wisdom and depth of insight.

Jung, like Freud and Adler, devoted his life to the study of the Unconscious. He accessed this hidden dimension via dreams and intuition, by the study of myths and legends, and by his observations of and work with his patients over decades.

One of Jung’s monumental insights was that you and I do not enter this world as blank slates. Our psyches are not empty and vacant. Instead, we arrive upon this dimension with certain “software” already encoded by evolution into what Jung called the Collective Unconscious … “wisdom acquired,” so to speak, over the centuries and millennia that the human race has lived and struggled and learned.

One of these items of software is the Archetypes.

The Archetypes exist in our psyches from birth. What are they?

They are “personalities” … larger-than-life proto-personas … of “types” that we ourselves will access as resources and guides (usually unconsciously) as we live and grow.

Examples of Archetypes:

The Divine Child, the Youth, the Virgin, the Wanderer, the Warrior, the Teacher, the Mentor, the Trickster, the Artificer, the Healer, the Madonna … and on upward through the King, the Queen, the Sage, and the Mystic.

I’m a believer in this stuff.

I’ve seen it play out too many times in my own life not to believe. Call me a Jungian. I am.

A few more fascinating attributes of the archetypes:

1. Each archetype comes encoded with its own encyclopedia of knowledge.

Without us being instructed, we somehow “know how to act” as a version of that archetype. Like a wolf knows how to hunt or an eagle knows how to fly, we somehow, informed by the archetypes within our Unconscious, find access to skills and awareness that we didn’t know we had.

In a way, an archetype is like a map in our car’s navigation system. If we unplug the micro-chip for “Eastern U.S.” and insert the card for Italy, suddenly our vehicle knows all the streets and alleys in Rome and Bologna

2. The Archetypes, Jung believed, were universal.

Dig into the psyche of a corporate exec in London or a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon … you will find the same “deck of cards,” waiting to be called upon.

In other words, the Archetypes are one way of preserving and encoding the collective wisdom of the human race acquired over millennia.

3. Each archetype seems to “kick in” in sequence as we grow and mature.

Consider the archetype of the Sage or the Mystic.  Gandalf. Or Merlin. Obi-wan Kenobi. This archetype is waiting for us, embedded deep within our psyches, to empower us when our hair turns white and we’ve garnered seventy or eighty years of life wisdom.

Then there’s the Warrior Archetype.

This is a big one.

The Warrior Archetype kicks in, for men, sometime around adolescence and lasts into our late twenties or longer. (If our speculations about the Amazon women are any indicator, it kicks in for females too around this same time.)

What affect does the Archetype have on us?

All of a sudden we want to strap on a helmet and beat our buddies’ brains out on the football field. We want to drive fast, take crazy chances, hang out with our homies. We want to join the Navy SEALS. The idea of running in a pack of other young bloods appeals to us. We want to jump out of airplanes and blow stuff up.

Simultaneously in this stage of the Warrior Archetype, we feel called to seek out mentors. A coach, a gang leader, a tough old sergeant who will push us beyond our limits and serve as a model for us as we grow.

There’s a wonderful book called King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Gillette and Douglas Gillette that goes into fascinating detail about the male archetypes.

One point Moore and Gillette make – and we’ll go into this in detail in later episodes – is that each Archetype comes with a Dark Side and a Light Side. The Warrior Archetype is no exception. We’ll see, as we talk further about the Spartans, that for all their training in virtue, they could and did go over into some dark and evil stuff.