Archetype: The dictionary's red-headed stepchild

In the last post I mentioned your personal myth: If your life were a bedtime story, what would it be?

Archetypes are the building blocks of that myth.

They are powerful undercurrents that pulse across cultures, ancestry, art, and our most personal experiences.

The word 'archetype' is usually shoved between its more popular siblings, stereotype and prototype amid vague muttering about Platonic forms. In the ‘type’ family, it is the slightly bipolar creative one everyone wishes would try harder to 'be normal,' like prototype. Whereas stereotypes oversimplify, archetypes invite complexity. A stereotype is a teflon image we use to avoid seeing someone else’s humanity. An archetype is a raw truth common to all humanity.

Great.

Let me start with a disclaimer: This is a kind of prequel to a trilogy. In this post, I'm setting the stage with broad dramatic statements that aren't as relatable as I'd like them to be, but this is a work in progress.

An archetype is a specific potential energy. It is an image/feeling/sense that we associate with what's basically a stock character or story line. Some examples include: mother, father, Self (or God), eternal child (the man-child, or female puella that we’ll have fun with later), the senex, crone, maiden, femme fatale, warrior, queen, king, shaman/priest, child, hero, heroine, etc.

If you've seen it in a fairy tale or Greek myth, you've seen a representation of an archetype. Opera, soap operas, film, celebrity gossip, and our own lives all have more or less the same cast and follow the same patterns. “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”. If archetypes teach us little else, it’s that we're not terribly unique. What's more important is that these characters and stories keep repeating and still have meaning. They resonate with something true inside us.

Case in point: Brangelina continues to fascinate even though it's one of the oldest stories ever told. Angelina plays femme fatale brilliantly while Jen has held onto ingenue even into her 40s. And the women duke it out over a rudderless man-child looking for a more compelling anchor to justify his existence as his beauty fades. As Carrie Fisher noted, it's Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Fisher, and Tony Curtis all over again.

Archetypes are similar to the philosopher Immanuel Kant's "categories of the understanding": pre-existing categories of thought that organize our experience in a specific way so that we have a shared reality. So that we more or less know how the story will end.

These lumps of psychological clay sit at the molten core of our collective unconscious, home to the sum of human psychological and emotional experience. They are given form by our genetic, cultural, ancestral, and personal history. We imprint them with our personal experience and from there comes our sense of what ‘mother’ or 'lover' feels like.

You know you’re in the presence of archetypal energy when you feel it.

This is important:

You SEE a stereotype, but you FEEL an archetype.

Certain people affect us, fascinate us, repel us for reasons we can’t quite explain. Art, music, a story, or a fictional character may grip us so strongly that we feel transformed by it.

Falling in love is a perfect example.

When it happens, we've been swallowed by an archetype. Much more on that later.

How does this help you?

The more aware we are of how archetypes work in our lives, the looser the chains that bind us to the wheel of fate or karma.

Less mystically, ‘fate’ is a natural result of our learned and inherited patterns of gut reactions, memories, feeling, and beliefs. It is written into our muscular and nervous systems as well. These patterns are called complexes - you’ve probably heard of Freud’s oedipal complex... just the beginning.

Archetypes are the core of the complexes that keep us locked in everything from blandly unimaginative to horrifyingly self-destructive patterns: watching a bunch of CSI reruns because you have no idea what you really love, convincing yourself you're happy in a job/relationship/marriage, settling for less than you deserve, demanding more than you deserve because you don't know how to give to yourself, and on and on.

Worst of all, we are blinded to the tremendous creative potential that lies within each of us.

The moral of Oedipus: consciously trying to avoid your fate doesn't work. Saying, "I'll never be like my mom" is pretty much a guarantee that in some way you didn't see coming, you'll end up just like her. As long as your point of reference is mom, you're still in chains. NOT being like mom is an entirely different thing than claiming the space to find out and be who you ARE.

Recognizing archetypes and archetypal patterns builds our capacity to be alert observers of our own lives. We can then make the most of the bits of choice we are given. Addressing this point, one of my grad school profs said, "You've got more power than you think, but less than you want." Hopping off the wheel is the difference between living a regular novel and a Choose Your Own Adventure. Possible outcomes are still limited, but at least you've got options.

So wait, are archetypes friendly building blocks for our heroic personal myths or treacherous sirens luring us to the imprisonment of passionless mediocrity?

Ummm... they're both. That's why they get four posts.

In these next few posts I’m going to break what I've written down. First, I’m going to go deeper into the experience of archetypes in their positive and negative form: a handbook on how to spot an archetype in everyday life. Then I’ll get into how archetypes infuse cultures and permeate the collective psyche: I'll use the man-child example 'cause its fun. And then I'll start to join archetypes with projection and dive into the wonderfully brutal world of love.