Interlude: Why Archetypes for Your Better Endings?

Socrates had a wonderful admonition for us all: “Know Thyself.” He buttressed this with a fuller statement: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” While not everyone might equally agree with the second of these postulates, most would agree that there is much value in a life well lived and that we learn more about ourselves as we experience life’s treasures, including hard times as well as easier, happier times.

Carl Jung is largely credited for his recognition that getting to know our Selves involves much more than simply looking into a mirror.  We are each of us inherently multiple in the sense that we develop different sub-selves as we gradually take on roles and responsibilities in the process of forming a sense of our IDENTITY, both consciously as public personas and privately and unconsciously as well.

 

Becoming a social self in a community of others entails adopting ‘typical’ role identities, and as an anthropologist I would say that Jungian (and other) ARCHETYPES relate to these role personas both consciously and unconsciously. So as we become an individual we develop certain facets of our identity corresponding to specific sorts of situations. We draw upon universal or collective “archetype” images as we develop these outer and subjective personas. A parent may take on ELDER LEADER and/or NOURISHER points of views and attitudes, for instance, a spouse expresses LOVER traits, a soldier enacts a WARRIOR role, a doctor the HEALER, etcetera. All human societies include a stock in trade of several primary role modalities which are psychologically available for identity construction and expression. These also may become aberrated or may take on “Shadow” traits in our unconscious psychological makeup.

What Jung prescribed for all of us is to seek to better INTEGRATE our archetypal persona influences in the process of becoming fully mature, self-actuating, INDIVIDUATED persons. As Jung himself pioneered for us as a role model (see his RED BOOK and articles about active imagination), he has encouraged us to get to know our archetypal animating energies as vital aspects of our greater Self or Soul. I call this your Ensemble Cast of Mythic Archetypal Characters”. In my forthcoming book (hopefully 2016) YOUR LIFE PATH, I focus part of a self-discovery toolkit around understanding 12 Universal Archetypes that were used by the late Dr. Charles Bebeau and his wife Nin at the Avalon Archetype Institute, based on Sumerian mythology and Jungian principles.

With this blog this year I am presenting one archetype per month and aligning that with a “Life Metaphor” that connects with that archetypal energy. Getting to Know YOURSELF as an integrated Whole comprised of various persona dimensions in key situations in your life can definitely help you to achieve your own BETTER ENDINGS.

You can aim to fulfill all aspects of your Self, not just one or two at the expense of others (thereby leading to internal conflicts or frustrated “parts of Self”).  What Life Dream would help you to do that? This will be our topic for August as we celebrate and explore the NOURISHER Archetype and the Life Metaphor Life is a Mountain with Vistas.

I invite you to stay tuned and join the Adventure. 

I always welcome your Comments and Stories.

 

 

All of You

Here’s a simple tool you can use to identify your own primary archetypal persona influences: simply make a list of your various social roles.  Parent, friend, spouse, doctor, teacher, artist, writer, etcetera; these are social roles you occupy. List your main roles (I’ll fill in mine as an example for you):

Primary roles

• Pet parent
• Teacher
• Writer
• Spiritual practitioner
• Friend
• Family member
• Single home owner

Next then, consider the following classes of universal persona archetype forms:

ELDER LEADER   ARTIST  TEACHER

LOVER     IDEALIST    COMMUNICATOR

WARRIOR  GOLDEN CHILD   HEALER

NOURISHER   DESCENDER   MYSTIC

Can you associate each of your ROLES with one or more of these twelve archetype figures? E.G.:

Archetype role associations

Pet parent  :  NOURISHER

Teacher : TEACHER

Writer  :  COMMUNICATOR

Spiritual  :  MYSTIC/ IDEALIST

Friend   :  NOURISHER

Family  :  COMMUNICATOR/ NOURISHER

Single home owner : DESCENDER

The archetypal influences you have just identified (with regard to your own list) are what I call your Archemes in LIFE PATHS. You learn how to appropriately occupy and enact a social role by drawing upon or assimilating to character traits of these collective archetypal figures.  As you assume or behaviorally enact these archetypal role types, you embrace these identities on both conscious and unconscious levels at the same time. That means, once you have identified with one of these archetype personas, they are always part of you, even unconsciously while you are expressing other modes. And if you have experienced tension or emotional inhibitions with respect to any of your Role identities, this can create archetypal “shadow” traits that might dog your footsteps and interfere with your sense of self-confidence or competence.

Knowing that your archetypal influences are largely associated with your primary roles in life can help you recognize your own character strengths and weaknesses as well as your self-limiting qualities. Also thinking of your Archemes as an “ensemble cast of Allies” can help you bring together your various role-“guises” to forge and express a more unified Self.

So after identifying your Archemes, you can also look at what strengths you draw from these influences (and you can understand some of your challenges, too).  How can you combine some of your strengths across these archetypal forms to pursue a major goal, one that will benefit from having  “all of you” activated rather than one ‘part’ or another?

E.G. Designing life after retirement [Readers: You can consider your own Major Goal similarly]

Teacher traits:  part-time teaching if needed; continuing with life maps coaching and workshops;

Communicator traits: continue with writing/ publishing;

Nourisher traits: Move closer to family, care well for pets, maintain & expand friendships;

Descender traits: Create space for solitude, contemplation

Mystic traits:  Share ideas in new location, form groups, etc.;

Idealist traits: Go for it! (fulfill Life Dream, travel, beautify environs and home!)

COMBINED:  “service” orientation in all areas.

In sum, as Socrates reminded us all: “KNOW THYSELF!”

I invite your insights and stories!

Your Helpful Archetype Allies

When I was a senior in high school in New York state (Lewiston, NY), our English professors came up with a great idea for that year.  Called “Universal Man”, the study year was segmented into a series of 3 or 4 week modules each on a different theme. Man the Lover, Man the Prisoner, Man the Seeker, Man the Adventurer, Man the Thinker, etcetera (now it would be Man or Woman…), was the basis of the themes. For each module we would choose relevant literature to read and we would write about it, plus we would reflect on that aspect of our own lives as well. Only many years later would I come to appreciate that these themes were “archetypal” in nature.  I really enjoyed that year’s English program. It helped me see how all these threads or energies interweave within everyone, giving us special qualities from each perspective.

Each archetypal character MODE has a unique viewpoint and stance in our overall Psyche. Some are more active and others are more suppressed, depending on the situation or context. This week I am inviting you to choose one of your own archetypal sub-selves to get to know better and to enlist in your adventure toward achieving a meaningful life goal. Since goals are usually related to some active role or career that we are already engaged with, let’s begin by selecting a goal associated with a role with which we are highly identified at this time. (For example, for me right now, it is my Writer/Author role that carries the most poignant goal; that of publishing LIFE PATHS.) So, after identifying your ardent goal related to some active role in your life, you can then identify an archetypal member (or more than one) from your unconscious ‘ensemble cast’ that could be most helpful aligning with you as you advance toward realizing your goal.

I will repeat Sunday’s lineup of archetypal character modes below. Which of these is most closely connected with the Role and Goal you are interested in strengthening?

Elder Leader: Strength mode—strong authority figure, self-confidence, director, leader; Shadow mode—harsh authoritarian, strict, imposing

Lover: In Strength—romantic intimacy, self-sacrificing, passionate; In Shadow—over-attachment, selfish desires

Warrior: In Strength—fighter for a good cause, courage, blazing new paths; In Shadow—attacker, domination or exertion of power

Nurturer: In Strength–Caregiver, gentleness, supporter, giver of consolation or understanding; In Shadow—stingy, over-protective, undue worrier

Artist: In Strength—expressive, talented performer/artist, creative, innovator; In Shadow—blocked creativity, inhibited, introversion, negative fantasy

Idealist: In Strength—High ideals, far-ranging vision, traveler, manifesting change; In Shadow—frustration, feelings of persecution, criticism, over-perfectionism

Golden Child: In Strength—charismatic, mover and shaker, destined for success, generous with largesse; In Shadow—overly controlling, vain, needs to be onstage or center of attention, fickle

Descender: In Strength—introspective, reflective, thoughtful, cocooning; In Shadow—depression, self-restriction, hiding, avoidance, introversion

Teacher: In Strength—imparts knowledge with enthusiasm, studious researcher, reader, notetaker, patient instructor, coach; In Shadow—overly didactic, my way or the highway, micro-manager, overbearing

Communicator: In Strength—public speaker, writer/author, workshop presenter, interpersonal communicator, promoter, a good listener; In Shadow—tight-lipped, withholding viewpoint, holding ideas close to chest, suspicious, or overly extroverted, “rabble rouser”

Healer: In Strength—doctor or nurse, concern with diet and exercise, natural energy, implementing positive change; In Shadow—masochism, perpetuating pain or sense of fatalism

Mystic: In Strength—seeker, prayerful, contemplation or meditation, dreamer, focus on cosmos, monk-like, alchemy; In Shadow—addictive personality, dwelling in Darkness, isolated hermit, withdrawn

Have you identified one or more potential character allies? Next then, I invite you to engage with this archetypal aspect-of-Self in an active imagination and/or in a journaling DIALOGUE. Get to know this energetic part of yourself. What are his or her own goals for you? What are their greatest loves, fears, worries, hopes? How and when do they show up for you? How are they part of the ROLES you enact day to day? When and why do you sometimes suppress them or why do they sometimes retreat?

How can they help you to realize your Goal?

As a sample, while I find many of the 12 archetypes have qualities essential to my current goals as a writer/author, I want to get to know The Healer better this week, because I think that is a part of myself to which I do not give enough room overall in my life. I catch from the character description that Healer can be helpful with “implementing positive change” and has a quality of “natural energy”. I feel the need for a second wind lately to help circumvent some of my own habitual self-limiting attitudes. So I seek out HEALER as an ALLY on this leg of my journey.

First then, dive Down into the Deeps of your personal unconscious realms. Do not expect your archetypal sub-selves to necessarily come “up” to your world of consciousness to meet with you. You can use an active contemplation or meditation mode to “sink” into an imagistic realm that you share with your archetypal cast.

LW: Is one I can call Healer present here? Can we talk?

H: I am here.  How are you?

LW: Worried. I feel like I’ve been sabotaging myself lately; I need a dose of some positive self-confidence for taking the next big—or small—step. I am scared.

H: Why then is it me you seek help from? Why not some of the Others? Elder Leader or Artist, or Descender even?

LW: I feel I need your Healing energy to help me assuage self-doubt in order for me to be more empowered to communicate from a greater strength of awareness.

H: Who injured you? When?

LW: Wow! You are right, this goes way back to my father and others who led me to inhibit or to subdue my sense of confidence in life overall. Better to stay in the shadows they would tell me. Be silent; don’t make waves. The world will beat you down if you stick your neck out, they would say.

H: There is more. What did your father say that inhibits you so deeply? He is down here still you know, both as what you call Shadow and as Strength. Do you want to see him?

LW: …not right now. I remember several disparaging remarks, most of which I don’t want to include in the public blog…so I’ll reflect upon them privately instead.

H: What do you need a healing for then?

LW: For hiding from him all these years—or the Shadow side of him. I am still grateful for the rest and I know he ‘meant well’ and had his own dragons affecting him.

H: What do you need from me?

LW: Just to be with me as I forgive him. To be my Ally as I take a step to communicate ‘forward’ this week. I need you to acknowledge the purpose I aim to fulfill with this goal.

H: Many others can benefit; the time has come to release this child of yours into the world.

LW: Will you mid-wife then?

H: Yes if you will allow me to.

LW: Please.

H: Then remember to BREATHE, okay? Breathe and review where things are at. Breathe and communicate forward.

Enough from me. I hope that the process is clear for how you can engage with your own archetypal parts of Self. I invite you to do so. Identify a goal that matters to a role you seek to strengthen in your life right now. Identify an archetypal part of Self that could help you. Get to know that archetypal persona and invite that one to serve as an Ally.

I encourage and look forward to YOUR insights and STORIES!

Who Are You Now? (and a poem, “Miraculous Surrender” by iithinks)

We establish LIFE THEMES, or recurring types of situations and events, as we wend our way through life, and this thematic warp and weave of our distinctive lives varies a lot from person to person. Where one person might establish a life of Global Travel and Adventure, another might live primarily dedicated to Service activities, or someone might center their commitment around Children and Grandchildren as their most vital LIFE THEMES.  We each compose an arrangement of several LIFE THEMES that weave through our lives, daily.

 

Life Themes are the basis of how we learn and express our social ROLES.  Family roles, Work or Career roles, Relationship roles all require us to develop certain skills and strengths, and slightly different “social personas” that best enact or present these different roles in relation to our major Life Themes. A Doctor, for example, develops a “bedside manner” in the role of Doctor that calls upon specific attitudes and strengths. How we succeed with a Role, or how difficult it might be to succeed with a Role, can affect the development of our total personality and our outlook on life.

Later I will present the point of view I use with the Life Maps Process that these Life Theme based ROLES might be directly connected with what Carl G. Jung and James Hillman would call your personal unconscious Archetypes.  For now it is enough to see how your Life Themes allow you to develop different aspects of your personality and your “presentation of Self”.  A person may be a Doctor—carrying herself or himself appropriately in that role as a Healer, say—as well as a Parent, which evokes a different set of helpful attitudes and behaviors. Different Roles might even bring about some conflicts in our personal representation of Self; as when a Teacher is also the Parent of a child in his or her classroom.

So I am inviting you to identify your Life Themes this week, using the life mapping tool presented Sunday or in the right panel of this week’s blog. Then ask yourself, “What ROLES have I developed in relation to each Life Theme?”

You could make a list of corresponding Themes and Roles, as follows, for example:

LIFE THEME                SOCIAL ROLE

Education                     Teacher (or, Student)

Religion                         mystic or seeker

Work                            (leader, or writer/artist, etcetera)

Family                           Mother/Father, Daughter/son/sister/brother

Relationships                Spouse, Lover, Friend, etcetera)

These are only some possible Life Themes and Roles that might relate to them. I encourage you to discover and reflect on your own. Feel free to share your insights or stories!

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I would also like to share with you a beautiful poem today by the brilliant blogger/ poet iithinks, called

MIRACULOUS SURRENDER

Surrender
In patient faith
Let yourself be guided
To miracles dwelling within

Surrender
Wave the white flag
Turn yourself to nothing
Become what lies beyond your dreams