Four Archetypes

FOUR ARCHETYPES

from
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung
VOLUME 9, PART I
BOLLINGEN SERIES XX

Mother
Rebirth
Spirit
Trickster

C. G. Jung

With a new foreword by
Sonu Shamdasani

Translated by R.F.C. Hull

BOLLINGEN SERIES

COPYRIGHT © 1959, 1969 BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION

FOREWORD TO THE
2010
EDITION COPYRIGHT
© 2011
BY SONU SHAMDASANI

PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
, 41
WILLIAM STREET,
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
08540
PRESS.PRINCETON.EDU

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Edition, 1970

Paperback reissue, with a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani, 2010

Extracted from
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
, Vol. 9, part I, of the
Collected Works of C. G. Jung
. All the volumes comprising the
Collected Works
constitute number XX in Bollingen Series, under the editorship of Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler; executive editor, William McGuire.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2010934718
ISBN: 978-0-691-15049-9

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

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FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION

INTRODUCTION

I

Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype

Translated from “Die psychologischen Aspekte des Mutter-Archetypus,”
Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins
(Zurich: Rascher, 1954).

1. O
N THE
C
ONCEPT OF THE
A
RCHETYPE

2. T
HE
M
OTHER
A
RCHETYPE

3. T
HE
M
OTHER
-C
OMPLEX

I
. The Mother-Complex of the Son
. —
II
. The Mother-Complex of the Daughter
:
a
. Hypertrophy of the Maternal Element
,
b
. Overdevelopment of Eros
,
c
. Identity with the Mother
,
d
. Resistance to the Mother

4. P
OSITIVE
A
SPECTS OF THE
M
OTHER
-C
OMPLEX

I
. The Mother
. —
II
. The Overdeveloped Eros
. —
III
. The “Nothing-But” Daughter
. —
IV
. The Negative Mother-Complex

5. C
ONCLUSION

II

Concerning Rebirth

Translated from “Über Wiedergeburt,”
Gestaltungen des Unbewussten
(Zurich: Rascher, 1950).

1. F
ORMS OF
R
EBIRTH

2. T
HE
P
SYCHOLOGY OF
R
EBIRTH

I
. Experience of the Transcendence of Life
:
a
. Experiences Induced by Ritual
,
b
. Immediate Experiences
. —
II
. Subjective Transformation
:
a
. Diminution of Personality
,
b
. Enlargement of Personality
,
c
. Change of Internal Structure
,
d
. Identification with a Group
,
e
. Identification with a Cult-Hero
,
f
. Magical Procedures
,
g
. Technical Transformation
,
h
. Natural Transformation (Individuation)

3. A T
YPICAL
S
ET OF
S
YMBOLS
I
LLUSTRATING THE
P
ROCESS OF
T
RANSFORMATION

III

The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales

Translated from “Zur Phänomenologie des Geistes im Märchen,”
Symbolik des Geistes
(Zurich: Rascher, 1948).

I
. Concerning the Word “Spirit.”
—
II
. Self-Representation of the Spirit in Dreams
. —
III
. The Spirit in Fairytales
. —
IV
. Theriomorphic Spirit Symbolism in Fairytales
. —
V
. Supplement
. —
VI
. Conclusion

IV

On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure

Translated from part 5 of
Der Göttliche Schelm
, by Paul Radin, with commentaries by C. G. Jung and Karl Kerényi (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1954).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

READING JUNG AFTER
THE RED BOOK

With the publication of
Liber Novus
—Jung’s
Red Book
¹
—a new chapter opens in the reading of Jung’s works. For the first time, one is in a position to grasp the constitution of Jung’s work from 1914 onward, and to trace the intimate connections between his self-experimentation and his attempts to determine the typical features of this process through his work with his patients and translate his insights into a language acceptable to a medical and scientific public. Thus, reading
Liber Novus
brings with it the task of rereading Jung’s
Collected Works
—much of which appears in a wholly new light.

In the winter of 1913, Jung embarked on a process of self-experimentation. He deliberately gave free rein to his fantasy thinking and carefully noted what ensued. He later called this process “active imagination.” He wrote down these fantasies in the
Black Books
. These are not personal diaries, but rather the records of a self-experimentation. The dialogues that form these active imaginations can be regarded as a type of thinking in a dramatic form.

When World War I broke out, Jung considered that a number of his fantasies were precognitions of this event. This led him to compose the first draft of
Liber Novus
, which consisted of a transcription of the main fantasies from the
Black Books
, together with a layer of interpretive commentaries and lyrical elaboration. Here Jung attempted to derive general psychological principles from the fantasies, as well as to understand to what extent the events portrayed in the fantasies presented, in a symbolic form, developments that were to occur in the world.

Jung recopied the manuscript in an ornate Gothic script into a large red leather folio volume, which he illustrated with his own
paintings. The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved by enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology.

Between 1916 and 1928, Jung published a number of works in which he attempted to translate some of the themes of
Liber Novus
into contemporary psychological language. In 1928, the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of the Taoist alchemical treatise
The Secret of the Golden Flower
, inviting him to write a commentary. Struck by the parallelism between the imagery of the text and some of his own mandalas, Jung finally decided to set aside his work on
Liber Novus
and not publish it. Instead he devoted himself to the cross-cultural study of the individuation process, focusing on medieval alchemy in particular, using parallels with his own material as a means to present the process in an indirect and allegorical form. Until now, this has presented formidable challenges for readers outside of Jung’s inner circle.

In his major 1912 work,
Transformations and Symbols of the Libido
,
²
Jung argued that beneath the surface of modern consciousness, the mythic forms of antiquity continued to have a subterranean existence, surfacing in dreams, fantasies, and delusions. He called them primordial images, and interpreted them as symbols of psychic energy, depicting its typical movements. In 1919, he used the term “archetype” to describe these forms. In his self-experimentation, Jung was studying the myth-making of the human mind, which led him to a new appreciation of the significance of myths and fairy tales. In Jung’s view, at the deepest levels of subjectivity we come across what is quintessentially human and common to all mankind. A maiden in a fantasy explained to him that “the fairy tale is the great mother of the novel, and has even more universal validity than the most-avidly read novel of your time. And you know that what has been on everyone’s lips for millennia, though repeated endlessly, still comes nearest the ultimate human truth.”
³
He had
been conventionally seeking the “uncommon truths,” and yet she explained to him that “Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed contain the wisdom that you seek.”
⁴
Jung came to see the task of individuation as being one of coming to terms with the accumulated past of human inheritance, in other words, with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. From the 1930s onward, he embarked on a series of studies of the phenomenology of particular archetypal forms and their psychological significance, at times implicitly referring to his own self-experimentation in a disguised form. An example occurs in the essay “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales,” in this volume.
⁵
Jung noted: “In a modern series of visions in which the figure of the wise old man occurred several times, he was on one occasion of normal size and appeared at the very bottom of a crater surrounded by high rocky walls; on another occasion he was a tiny figure on the top of a mountain, inside a low, stony enclosure.”
⁶
Jung is referring to the appearance of Elijah in his fantasies,
⁷
and to Philemon. Such a figure, he notes, appears in situations where guidance is needed and one is without resources, and spontaneously arises “in the psychic space outside consciousness that comes about spontaneously when conscious thought is not—or is no longer—possible.”
⁸
Writing in
Scrutinies
, the third section of
Liber Novus
, Jung came to realize that he himself was not the “author” of the work, but that “[p]robably the greater part of what I have written in the earlier part of this book was given to me by ΦIΛHMΩN [Philemon].”
⁹
Philemon, a figure from classical myth and literature, in turn becomes Jung’s guide, his guru, and then the “wise old man” and “archetype of the spirit”—this sequence links Jung’s own fantasies, his reflections upon them, and how this led him to formulate new conceptions of general psychological functioning. Similar connections run through the other papers in this volume.