Archetypal Psychology Research Articles

Punishment and Forgiveness: A Phenomenological Analysis of Archetypal Leadership Patterns and the Implications for Educational Practice

Archetypal psychology suggests the possibility of a punishment archetype representing the unconscious preferences of human beings as a species about what constitutes appropriate ways for leaders (students, teachers and educational leaders) to correct followers who do harm to others. Mythological analysis compared God’s process of punishment, in the Abraham myth, with the theories of Scheler (1973), Kierkegaard (1987) and modern management theory about punishment. While modern theory focused on a contingent tit-for-tat relationship between doing harm and reprisal for it, God used punishment and forgiveness to reestablish effective moral relationships between the harm-doer and the harmed persons. God always forgave harm done to himself, and generally punished harm done to others but then forgave unilaterally, without waiting for Abraham to improve. If students and educators are unconsciously predisposed to expect that punishment is a long term educational activity intended to allow the harm-doer to atone, repent and re-establish effective working relationships with harmed persons, then the focus of modern punishment theory on intimidation will be ineffective and generate unconscious resistance.

Betrayal and friendship

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between friendship and betrayal. Both are perceived to involve dynamics that can have a major impact in organizations, but both have tended to be under researched.Design/methodology/approachThe paper brings together ideas from psychoanalysis (object relations theory), archetypal psychology, and the history of ideas (the friendship tradition). It also uses a case study to explore how the emerging framework applies in reality.FindingsThe exploration led to the conclusion that betrayal may have its roots at the same deep level of the psyche as friendship and they may, therefore, be equally fundamental developmentally.Originality/valueThe paper opens up an important area for further study and application. It is intended to give status to two experiences that are of great importance to managers and managed, leaders and led, consultants and students.

The search for meaning: a short history

Preface: When Meaning Becomes a Question 1. Introduction PART I. CLASSICAL SOURCES OF MEANING 2. Myth and Meaning 3. Philosophy and Meaning 4. Science and Meaning 5. Postmodernism and Meaning PART II. CONTEMPORARY SOURCES OF MEANING 6. Pragmatism and Meaning 7. Archetypal Psychology and Meaning 8. Metaphysics and Meaning 9. Naturalism and Meaning 10. Conclusion Appendix: How Meaning Affects Our Sense of Right and Wrong Notes Bibliography Index

The Leadership Archetype: A Jungian Analysis of Similarities between Modern Leadership Theory and the Abraham Myth in the Judaic–Christian Tradition

Archetypal psychology suggests the possibility of a leadership archetype representing the unconscious preferences of human beings as a species about the appropriate relationships between leaders and followers. Mythological analysis compared God’s leadership in the Abraham myth with modern visionary, ethical and situational leadership to find similarities reflecting continuities in human thinking about leadership over as long as 3600 years. God’s leadership behavior is very modern except that God is generally more relationship oriented. The leadership archetype that emerges is of a leader that develops his/her follower by reliably maintaining a vision, behaving according to firm ethical values even when it weakens the leader’s authority, accepting suffering when the follower is unreliable, and always forgiving even when the follower behaves with hubris in an attempt to overthrow the leader. If God’s leadership principles were mandatory in management, many dysfunctional leaders would be disqualified and many of the negative consequences of poor leadership might be averted.

Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Disability Based on the Hephaestus Myth

Over the last 20 years disability scholars have analyzed representations of people with disabilities as they appear in literature, myth, art, film, media, and other cultural artifacts. This research can contribute to the development of a new archetypal psychology of disability. Archetypal psychology uses mythical and poetic modes of discourse to deepen our understanding of lived experience and behavior. The stories associated with the Greek god Hephaestus are among the earliest representations of disability. His image is pervasive and spans the Western imagination from the ancient Greeks to the present. Thus, a detailed study of this myth is a logical starting point. Archetypal images from different historical eras, and disciplines, co-exist in what C.G. Jung called the "collective unconscious" where they can be compared and contrasted with each other. The Hephaestus myth helps to organize many shared images of disability into meaningful patterns that can inform our understanding of disability in contemporary culture.

Anorexia dreaming: A case study.

A case study is presented focusing on a dream of a severely anorectic woman. The dream occurred at a point when the disorder had become life threatening. The dream is discussed in terms of its significance in the dreamer’s experience, its implications for the use of dreams in psychotherapy, and its relevance for the broader literature on psychopathology and dreams. Archetypal psychology’s aesthetic, and phenomenological approach to dreams is presented as a framework for understanding the ongoing significance of significant dreams such as the one presented here.

UNDOING FORGETFULNESS: Chiasmus of Poetical Mind – a Cultural Paradigm of Archetypal Imagination

This paper tries to investigate the problem of memory through one of its most intriguing patterns – chiasmus – reflected in old poetry, sacred texts, philosophy and theology, visual arts, as well as biology. It aims to search for some provisory explanation of why man was able once to acquire such excellence in memorizing internally thousands of lines of poetry, whereas now memory is expelled outside the human body and mind in a mere digital file. Contrasting the so-called “wish-dream for immortality” of the contemporary post-human body, this paper takes another path and looks into some old cosmologies and visions in which chiasmus constantly emerged as an enduring cultural paradigm with ontological relevance. Spanning from Plato to Christian theology, up to the contemporary Neo-Platonism of archetypal psychology, this paper hopes to put forth, if not a theory, at least a vision about man and cosmos, cosmos and man, a chiastic epiphany in which the body and the material world partake both of the sacred.

Spirituality and Archetype in Organizational Life

Abstract:Spirituality is an undeniable human need and is thus the subject of increasing interest among management scholars and practitioners. In this article, we propose using archetypal psychology as a framework for understanding the human need for spirituality more clearly because it provides important insights into spirituality and organizational life. Because most spiritual needs reside in the deepest aspects of the self, an archetypal approach helps us recognize not only that we have spiritual needs but alsowhywe have them. We present three common archetypes and their implications in a management context. That is followed by an application of the archetypal approach to some of the more spiritually corrosive aspects of organizational life and a discussion of the implications of archetypes as a source of motivation.

A PLACE FOR THE AESTHETIC IN EXPERIENTIAL PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY

This article highlights archetypal psychology as a theory that is in some ways consistent with experiential personal construct psychology (EPCP) and may contribute to the theoretical and practical elaboration of EPCP. Archetypal psychology's view of the imaginal (the aesthetic) is discussed and related to EPCP's notions of reverence, symbolism, and ROLE relationships. The clinical importance of an aesthetic perspective is discussed, and the ways in which EPCP theory affords a place for the aesthetic are detailed. Special focus is given to some specific suggestions for cultivation of the aesthetic perspective in both the clinician and the client in the therapy relationship.

Genesis, structure, and meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and rivers without end

This reading of Gary Snyder's book-length poem from its evolution in the mid 1950s to its publication 40 years later traces the work's origins, as well as its themes and structure. It includes references to No drama; East Asian landscape painting; the rhythms of storytelling; chant and song; Jungian archetypal psychology; world mythology; Buddhist philosophy and ritual; Native American traditions; planetary geology; hydrology and ecology. The author examines such personal and cultural influences on Snyder's work as his travels in Asia and his association with the beat movement of the 50s.

VISIONS OF THE DEAD: IMAGINATION AND MOURNING

Contemporary research recognizes the existence of an ongoing attachment between the mourner and the deceased. This research tends to focus on the subjective aspects of the attachment--the mourner's memory and emotions. A complementary perspective is offeredby archetypal psychology, which considers the deceased to exist outside the mourner'ssubjectivity as an autonomous image. This approach is illustrated by an exemplary case: a woman named Verda who experienced the death of her twin sister, Vera. Their account suggests that Verda's mourning derives from her encounters with Vera's continuing imaginal presence.

The significant dream as emblem of uniqueness: The fertilizer does not explain the flower.

Recent, renewed attention to “big” or significant dreams calls into question many widely held assumptions about dreams. This essay focuses on the assumption that dreams can be accounted for in terms of the dominant emotions and concerns of the dreamer at the time of the dream. That assumption is found to be inadequate to account for at least some significant dream experiences. Archetypal psychology's aesthetic, phenomenological approach to dreams is presented as providing an instructive, illuminating alternative for understanding the on-going significance of significant dreams.

The Death of a Strong, Great, Bad Man: An Ethnography Of Soul Incorporation

ABSTRACTThe paper is a detailed description and interpretation of the death of a Yagwoia‐Angan great killer‐warrior and of two soul‐incorporation rites performed in the period preceding the interment of the corpse. The interpretive framework is a synthesis of existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and archetypal psychology articulated through the cosmo‐ontological specificities of the Yagwoia life‐world. The paper elucidates the dynamics and originality of the Yagwoia sense of the world as a self‐generative bodily totality (world‐body) which incessantly reproduces itself through its internal constitutive parts, individual humans and their group‐containers. This dynamic is simultaneously self‐devouring and self‐copulating. Its most apposite characterisation is the archetypal image of ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. Following the ontological clarifications of the Yagwoia‐Angan life‐world the main theme of the paper unfolds as a hermeneutic synthesis of concrete ethnographic descriptions and critical interpretations of the Yagwoia existential process made manifest in concrete experiences and practices of the living and the dead.

A Review of Jesus : A Psychological Biography

Capps's book uses historical, sociological, and psychological methods to probe the personal identity and self-understanding of Jesus. This reviewer suggests that historical, sociological, and psychological methods are modes of discourse that are modern forms of myth. “Myth” is understood as any narrative form that is used, and/or taken for granted, as a way of self-understanding and understanding the world. These disciplines are useful critical tools with which to explore the text and its world, but they do not guarantee knowledge about the past. As modern modes of discourse they create narratives (i.e., myths) about the past, that for us are preferred epistemological pathways. Jesus Christ is the ultimate model of the God-person relationship in the Christian west. Therefore, any serious attempt to render a realistic portrait of Jesus using contemporary modes of describing reality has the possibility of effecting a profound transformation of the images of God and Jesus. This then can transform our own relationship with God. The value of Capps's book is not in any knowledge it might give us about Jesus, but in the transformation it can effect within the reader, and the author, of central religious images. Psychoanalytic and developmental theories are limited in their explanatory effectiveness because they are materialistic and personalistic (reductive). The analytical psychology of Carl Jung and the archetypal psychology of James Hillman are proposed in order to add a transpersonal dimension to Capps's approach to the personality of Jesus.

Significant dreams: Bizarre or beautiful?

The literature on highly significant dreams is filled with references to the bizarreness of their content. On the other hand, the concept of beauty is rarely if ever mentioned in relation to these dreams. Grounded in archetypal psychology's tenet that psychological life is aesthetic life, this article argues that the enduring, even life-long, influence some dreams have on the dreamer's life may be better approached through the idea of beauty than through the idea of bizarreness. The argument builds on Hunt's (1989, 1995) theoretical model of the nature of consciousness and dream multiplicity with its emphasis on cross-modal synesthesia as well as on insights provided by Scarry's (1999) recent essay on beauty. A detailed account of how one composer's work was profoundly influenced by his most significant dream is presented to illustrate this aesthetic approach to understanding the on-going significance of significant dreams.

Jung's Psychology in the Light of his ‘Personal Myth’

The central argument of this paper is that Jung conceived his archetypal psychology as a locus of therapeutic deep-self narratives that in principle afford each and every one a chance to look for a satisfying personal myth that consoles us and gives meaning and depth to our lives as it imposes an archetypal pattern upon our historical existence which might otherwise seem intolerably defective and meaningless. In his memoirs he created a universal, ‘archetypal model’ of his own life, which he narrated as if it were a mythical story of a hero confronting the powerful forces of the Collective Unconscious in his search for the Holy Grail of psychic and spiritual renewal. Jung's depth-psychological mythification of man signified an escape from the pathogenicity of historical time to the timeless glamour of personal myth.

Rituals: the 'soul' purpose.

Nursing has, perhaps unknowingly, given recognition to the importance of maintaining the client's normal rituals and patterns of day-to-day activity on admission to hospital. To make the client feel more at ease, comfortable and relaxed, care is aimed at adhering to their usual routine. To this end, the client's bedtime rituals, toileting habits and many other of their daily routines are explored during the hospital admission process or initiation ceremony to the ward. As nurses, we place great meaning on trying to maintain these rituals and routines for the client, recognizing that keeping a sense of normality may be of great importance. It seems almost paradoxical then, that it is we nurses who criticize ourselves for compulsively adhering to what are described as ritualistic ways of working; which it has been said, are of seemingly little value both to the client's own healing process and nursing itself. In a recent paper the notion that ritualized practice had no place in nursing and made a case for the defence of rituals was challenged. This paper expands this theme further, exploring the symbolic and ancestral necessity for rituals, drawing upon archetypal psychology to help illustrate the potential hazards for the nursing milieu of dismissing rituals without fully understanding their latent purpose.

C. G. Jungo kolektyvinės pasąmonės koncepcija

Straipsnio tikslas – išdėstyti ir analizuoti C. G. Jungo kolektyvinės pasąmonės koncepciją. Autorės teigimu, šios koncepcijos naujumą ir reikšmę sudaro tai, jog ji leidžia susidaryti žmogaus fenomenologinio pasaulio išsamesnį suvokimą. Aptariamos sąmonės, ego, asmeninės pasąmonės, kolektyvinės pasąmonės sąvokos. Kolektyvinė pasąmonė yra už individualios psichikos ribų išeinanti paveldima struktūra. Jos turinys negali būti tiesiogiai perkeliamas į sąmonę, jis gali būti atpažįstamas tik nubrėžiant paraleles tarp jo ir atitinkamų mitologinių motyvų. Sinchroninių reiškinių fenomenas traktuojamas kaip bandymas atskleisti psichikos ir materijos tarpusavio ryšius. Archetipų psichologija pateikiama kaip jungiškosios psichologijos nauja postmodernistinė kryptis. Teigiama, kad kolektyvinės pasąmonės koncepcija buvo reikšminga filosofiniu, psichologiniu ir metodologiniu aspektu, aptariami jos ryšiai su egzistencializmu, struktūralizmu, fenomenologija. Aptariama kolektyvinės pasąmonės koncepcijos kritika: ji kritikuojama daugiausia racionalizmo ir determinizmo atstovų kaip ambivalentiška, prieštaringa ar nehumanistinė, propaguojanti iškreiptą dvasingumą.

How Much Jungian Theory Is There in My Practice?

This non‐clinical paper consists of the author's subjective and personal value judgements on theory and practice. He discusses nine topics: I) What is analysis and why do people seek therapy? 2) Dangers of reification and hypostatizing: reinforcement of narcissistic defences and schizoid unrelatedness. 3) The problems of archetypal psychology and amplification. 4) The cultural and political aspects of the unconscious psyche, and the value of studying the philosophical background to the psychodynamic approach. 5) Criticism of the classical Jungian over‐emphasis of the intrapsychic at the expense of the interpersonal. 6) Psychosomatic healing through experience and interpretation of psychosomatic identity in the transference/countertrans‐ference; idea of the ‘animating body’. 7) Dangers of theoretical hndamentalism and crusading among Jungian schools: envy and intolerance. 8) The need for the analyst to have enough good objects. 9) An acknowledgement of theoretical influences other than Jung on the author's practice; although Jung's ideas facilitate a personal pluralism ‐ the spirit of Jung.

Mark Twain: Protagonist for the Popular Culture by Marlene Boyd Vallin

340 WesternAmerican Literature a weight and consequence of new things.” Michael Heffernan finds The Teeth MotherNaked at Last to be “uncompromising,” “frequently unbearable”because of Bly’s insistence on writing a “nightmare poem” about the “barbarities of American wars.”Joyce Carol Oates, in her review of the same volume, calls Bly “intellectual and relentlessly emotional.” Several reviewers identify Jungian influences in Bly’s poems. For instance, Stephen Kuusito, in his review of Iron John, calls Bly a “popularizer of archetypal psychology,”whose heroic archetype “restores men to the center of the cosmological drama.” The longer essays present, quite naturally, a broader and deeper examina­ tion of Bly’s work, both poetry and prose. Their attention ranges from the earlier capturing of the essence of particular landscapes (through “deep im­ ages”), to Jungian shadows on the 1970s political landscape, to the Jungian “soul-making”in IronJohn. The volume closes with a short excerpt from Richard Sugg’s Robert Bly in which Sugg places Bly “squarely within the American Romantic tradition”and identifies Bly’s ultimate importance as, through Bly’s own “psychic journey,” redefining theAmerican poet. The composite of all selections is appropriately represented by Sugg’s finaljudgment that Bly’s “ultimate achievement... is in awakening, even inspiring, his audience with a sense of human community.” All this is a heavy burden for one literary artist to carry. However, the selections in this volume convince the reader that Robert Bly manages that burden very well. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University Mark Twain: Protagonist for the Popular Culture. By Marlene Boyd Vallin. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1992. 208 pages, $49.95.) Marlene Boyd Vallin’s study is the eighteenth book in a series titled Great American Orators, organized by Bernard K. Duffy and Halford R. Ryan. In the “Series Foreword,”Duffy and Ryan state that “The idea for a series of books on great American orators grew out of the recognition that there is a paucity of book-length studies on individual orators and their speeches.” This assertion establishes the first of numerous expectations that Vallin’s book fails to meet, since there is scarcely enough here to qualify this as a book-length study (64 of the 208 pages comprise Vallin’s discussion of Twain; the remainder is mostly a collection ofTwain’s speeches, which is the best part of the book). Such dearth would perhaps be a minor flaw in a book that offered some­ thing significantly new to Twain scholarship, butVallin’s book falls short here as well. Many of the critical insights and rhetorical analyses of Twain’s “works of oratory”are no more than critical commonplaces shared across the table in any Twain graduate seminar: “Twain was critical ofthe practice ofcivilizing. Civiliza­ Reviews 341 tion corrupts, distorts reality, and encourages hypocrisy.” Beyond this, Vallin offers such insights as “Twain’s use of the ship metaphor seems to indicate his sense of individualism. We are all pilots of our own ships, with the free will to chart our own courses.”And these “profundities”are themselves quite few and far between. Vallin sets forth many large (and some potentially interesting) claims, but she presents very little development of or evidence for her assertions. For example, she claims that “the focus of Twain’s performance was on the audi­ ence, specifically the interaction between speaker and listeners,” but no real discussion of this idea or analysis of Twain’s speeches with this point in mind ever materializes. We are led, by the editors of this series, to expect “a complete analysis of a speaker’s rhetoric,” which will investigate “speech invention, style, delivery, organizational strategies, and persuasive effect” for the “public address scholar,”but Vallin’sbook falls far short ofthat aim. Myrecommendation is that you go see Hal Holbrook instead. MICHAEL HOBBS NorthwestMissouri State University New Voicesin Native American Literary Criticism. Edited by Arnold Krupat. (Wash­ ington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. 555 pages, $79.00/$34.95.) In Arnold Krupat’s introductory unapologetic apology, he explains that presenting a volume of eclectic essays on Native American literatures is still useful and necessary even though some academics may prefer more “post”minded approaches. New generations of students, new sources...