Dear Keri,
I think you put your finger on one of the major problems with Jungian theory. The confusion over archetypes and complexes is mostly due, I think, to the fact that the Jungians didn't pursue the phylogenetic angle after Jung (or even during his life, I think) until around 1982, when Anthony Stevens published
Archetype (I'm reading the 2003 update of this book now,
Archetype Revisited, and this should have been a revolutionary text in Jungian psychology, yet it was largely ignored or not incorporated). Still, Jungian interest in evolutionary biology didn't really start to stir until the late 1990s . . . and even today only a handful of Jungians have embraced evolutionary biology's contributions. Stevens points out in
Archetype Revisited that of the (at the most) 10 people that have seen (and written about) the overlap in Jungian thinking and evolutionary biology, only two or three are actually Jungian analysts. Most are from other fields.
Bruce MacLennan for instance, who recently stopped by Useless Science to leave a post (after we mentioned his article and Kafiri e-mailed him a question about it), is a computer scientist.
Before I saw your post last night, I was reading Stevens' book and thinking that, even with the recognition that Jungian archetypes have a distinct biological dimension, it's still difficult to decide what to actually call an archetype. I feel you have to go with the one's Jung focused so much on, like the animi, the shadow, the Self, the wise old woman/man, the Mother and Father, the Hero. These are the personifiable archetypes, the "archetypal personages" that are perceived to have numinous Will and autonomy. But there is definitely a hierarchy of archetypes. For instance, the anima, Mother, heroine, and wise woman all belong to the archetype of the Feminine . . . and one finds in the anima work that the anima manifests maternal, heroic, and wise woman qualities at various stages. And, of course, the animus, Father, wise old man, and hero all belong to an archetype of the Masculine.
To make things even more confusing, the shadow is an archetype that, at its core, represents all that is non-ego and potentially threatening to the ego. But the most threatening psychic element to the ego's fixed strategies and sense of identity is clearly the Self, which drives and regulates all libido through the ego. So the shadow and the Self, on a core archetypal level, are inextricable. One of the reasons I often talk about the Shadow-Self or the Self-as-Other.
But wait, there's more!
What we can observe in the animi work is that the animi are emissaries from or representations of the Will of the Self. The animi are also first perceived in or as shadow, and become more and more clearly defined as the animi work progresses. So there you go, the list of the key Jungian archetypes above all boil down to one! Not terribly helpful if we hoped to find some kind of one-to-one correlation between a specific archetype and a specific instinct.
It makes me suspect that the archetypal hierarchies and differentiations we tend to make have a high degree of arbitrariness to them. Eventually, we begin confusing them with typical ego strategies and attitudes. I guess I would favor a definition of archetype that is pretty strict about an archetype showing clear signs of evolution and a clear drive to adapt the organism to its environment (specifically its environment of evolutionary adaptedness). So you mention the Prostitute, but that sounds more like an ego-strategy to me . . . unless you relate it all the way back to the Goddess religions and the Sacred Prostitute or priestess. At that point, though, we are really getting into the archetypal Feminine . . . and so we would lose the sense that the archetype or attitude can somehow symbolize one's personal egoic
ur-strategy.
Which brings us to the difference between complexes and archetypes. I tried to write about this last night, but I was too tired and couldn't make as clear a distinction as I would have liked. Hopefully a night's sleep will have done the trick.
The major confusion between complexes and archetype (in my opinion) is that complexes have archetypes in them. As Jung said, the gods have become diseases in the modern world. Sometimes Jung seemed to downplay the issue that complexes are neurotic in character. Perhaps he wanted to distinguish his theory from Freud's (as Jung surely felt Freud overly pathologized healthy, natural, archetypal forces). Or perhaps he just took it for granted that his readers would not forget that complexes were neurotic in character [His warning quoted in the Lexicon entry in Kafiri's post above not to confuse suffering with illness, though certainly wise, only serves to muddy the issue of complexes, in my opinion. We generally don't become aware of a complex until its "pathological fallout" trips us up. The core of the complex (what I am calling the Wound, to differentiate) is not pathological, but it is usually "tender". It's the reaction
to the Wound, the dissociation of a "splinter-psyche" (which I've called a "maniacally fortified ego-strategy") to deal with the Wound's tenderness that is notably pathological, neurotic, or maladaptive.] But the long and the short of it is that, when stricken with or possessed by an unexamined or unacknowledged complex, we do not live fully. The complex restrains our ability to achieve equilibrium with the environment and therefore generates stress.
I see the process going something like this. We are struck with a primal Wound, some kind of trauma. Something from the outside punctures our ego and leaves a gaping hole in it. The ego's main desire is to protect itself, its sense of identity. It also seeks self-enablement, but I think its primary concern in such pursuits is still defensive. Empowerment is fortification. The ego is concerned with its coherence more than anything else. But trauma blasts through the ego's coherence like a large asteroid that penetrates the Earth's atmosphere, slams into the crust, and radically disrupts the climatic ecosystem on which all life on the planet depends.
The ego is then "broken" to some degree, and when the ego is broken, the Self (via the super-adaptive instinct, in my theory) self-regulates and tries to encourage a re-strategization that will rebuild ego-coherence in such a way that the ego will function efficiently as an organ that adapts the Self's libido to the outside environment. But the ego has other plans. The ego sees its coherence ruptured and wants to patch up this wound with a "perfect strategy" that will never allow such wounding again (or it wants to "splinter off" the Wound, imprisoning it in a kind of fortified, impenetrable Alcatraz). Of course, there is no perfect strategy for ego-fortification, because the healthy ego is extremely plastic and adaptable. Building a fortress around the Wound makes for a very rigid, crusty scar that won't flex at all. But the ego believes in abstract things like perfection. "First response" is almost always containment, and we'd like to think we can forget about what is contained . . . but it's never so simple.
The ego constructs its initial defensive strategy unconsciously and reflexively. It is a kind of adaptation, but not an effective one on the long-term. We don't like to look into our Wounds. It's very painful . . . and when we find ourselves compulsively reliving our traumas, it prevents us from living effectively. The ego is a short-term thinker, but healing from trauma takes very long-term strategies. Also, we do not have the ability to control our Wounds and devise a clever, longer-term strategy. We react instinctively to damage to our ego-coherence (fight/flight or paralysis/concealment). We can't reason ourselves into a detachment from our Wounds. To pay attention to them at all is to writhe with pain (to be thrown into a fight/flight type of defensive response). So the rigid, fortifying/splintering ego-strategies fall into place around the Wound. Anything to make the pain stop, to get containment. And eventually we can get back to some form of living.
But the form of living we get back to is usually stunted in someway. We tend to follow life paths that takes us as far away from the Wound as possible, away from situations in which the fortress around it might come under attack. In this kind of behavior, we atrophy pieces of ourselves . . . and this is maladaptive or neurotic. The autonomous or splintered piece of psyche that characterizes the complex is a dissociation.
The complex then is largely characterized by our maladaptive fortification or concealment strategy. Sometimes tiptoeing around our Wounds (or trying to live "on the lam" from our Wounds) can upset our behavior so much that we manifest severely neurotic symptoms. This is accelerated because the Wound is actually a battleground where a war still rages. The war is between the Self's instinctual libido to self-regulate or heal and the ego's mania for fortifying the Wound. It becomes an arms race, because the Self is compensatory and powerful, so the ego fortifies with increasing, defensive mania (and Alcatraz gets bigger, crazier, and dangerously over-populated). The ego perceives the Self's attempts to open up the Wound (by breaking down the favored ego-strategy or "busting out" the imprisoned libido) as a reenactment of the primal wounder. The Self is seen as the demon who struck the blow come back to finish the job and pray on the weakness and vulnerability of the Wound.
But of course, the Self's Will is actually aligned against the neurotic, maladaptive ego-strategy and doesn't want to destroy the organism. But as this arms race reaches a severe level, the individual's ability to live a functional life is drastically undermined.
That's sort of an over-view, but now let's look at the "mythology" of the complex. I touched on this (albeit rather incoherently) in my first post in this thread. I'll try to do better this time. The two major "armies" in the complex are the maladaptive ego and the Self. The ego just can't recognize that the Self's presence is meant to heal the Wound, because the process of healing is a long-term process. The ego wants to be able to snap its fingers and have done with. Also, the Self's attempt at healing requires breaking off the "scab" of the ego's fortified defensive strategy (which in essence, would reopen the Wound or reassociate it with the coherent psyche). The Self isn't, I think, terribly concerned that this "organ" of living is wounded. What it opposes is the atrophy of this region created by the ego's fortification strategy. The Self wants libido to be able to flow through here again. Some fundamental restructuring may be necessary to get libido to flow. The "leg" may never work like a never-wounded leg. There will always be a limp. But even with a limp, the leg is being used, and it will adapt to usage with its limp.
I like to think of how amazingly graceful three-legged dogs can be. Without excessive egos to get in the way, dogs that lose a leg adapt pretty well. I have a poem that uses this image and, now that I think of it, really says a lot about working with complexes (my specific complex being the stranger/shadow/scapegoat as the poem expresses): "
Self-Portrait in Canine".
In the mythology of the complex we are led to recognize that the ego's mania for fortification requires the image of the wounder to be always active (even if unconscious). Although this image gets projected onto the Self as mentioned above, it really belongs to the ego. This is the Demon. One of the neurotic aspects of such ego-fortification is that the fortification itself engenders the Demon. For every maniacal attempt at fortification, we give power to the Demon. What this means is that, in trauma, we don't only become the victim, we become the Demon. This is generally well-understood even outside of Jungian thought. It is even glimpsed in pop psychology. The victim and the Demon are one.
In Jungian terms, the personal shadow. That aspect of the ego that the ego can't accept as part of it's identity.
The First Step of Healing the ComplexEventually, we recognize that the complex has possession over us and that this is damaging our ability to live fully . . . and that it is irrational. We see that this dynamic (maniacal ego-fortification) is in some sense arbitrary and that it isn't really a healthy way of dealing with the Wound. We might at this point decide to go into therapy (or find "treatment" in some sort of ideological discipleship, or try our hands at self-analysis). By bringing this first light of consciousness to our complex, we provide the Self with an opportunity to slip a little "self-regulating virus" into the ego's strategization.
The hero is born. The ego will partially identify with the hero. The hero will initially seem to be the ego's new-found power to defeat the Demon. That is, the ego has recognized that the Demon is somehow illusory or irrational . . . and the strength of the hero can capitalize on that weakness. With the birth of consciousness (regarding the make-up of the complex) as his/her sword, the hero descends into the Hell of the complex looking for a showdown. Of course, there will be many obstacles along the way, riddles to solve, minor battles to win, increasing consciousness and courage to find. But should the hero prevail, s/he will eventually come to the Demon.
But as I sloppily tried to say in my first post, the Demon ends up being a shadow twin of the hero, a mirror image. This is the hero's recognition that the ego and its fortification strategy are responsible for engendering the Demon supposedly being defended against. Sometimes the showdown between the hero and the Demon is portrayed as a match between equals, a fight to the death. But fairly frequently, the Demon turns out to be a weakling . . . and the hero must then come face to face with his/her own terribleness in the heroic desire to destroy the Demon. That is, the hero learns that the real and more powerful demon is in him/herself, in the heroic rage and mission, and becomes aware that the hero's quest is based on self-opposition.
At this point, the hero is also capable of making a differentiation. In this shadow, in the Demon, there is not only the ego's projection of its wounder, but also the compensatory Will of the Self. The Demon glows with the numinousness of the Self. The hero must make a Cut, differentiating the adaptive Self from the projected egoic Demon. In fairytales, this is typically portrayed as the rescue of a princess or maiden that had been taken captive by the Demon. The princess is the anima, representing the instinctuality of the Self.
In many stories, the demon is not so much killed as depotentiated . . . as the shift of focus moves onto the anima figure. The real quest, as it turns out, is not to kill the demon, but to save and unite with the anima. In fairytales that involve a heroine, the prince in need of rescue is usually not a "maiden in a tower". Rather, he has been enchanted (usually by a witch) and trapped in some kind of animal or monstrous form. The quintessential tale would be Beauty and the Beast. The Beast-animus needs to be redeemed by revaluation, not saved directly. But it's the same theme, psychologically-speaking.
When the hero on the journey into the complex is able to make the redemptive differentiation between the Demon and the Self-as-animi, a new surge of energy enters the healing process. But the Demonic complex still exists well after the Demon is deposed or depotentiated. Like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter stories, he is vanquished overtly, but his remaining essence seeps inside the hero. The remainder of the hero's quest to heal the complex and reanimate the atrophied psychic organ with instinctual libido is in many ways a battle of the hero with his/her own heroism.
The reason for this, although perhaps not at first apparent, is actually quite logical. The hero is an instinctual gift from the Self (that "self-regulating virus"). It is an archetypal model for ego re-strategization, but it is not the ego, per se. After vanquishing the Demon, heroism becomes a problem. The ego would love to use its new hero-power to fortify its defense strategies (as the hero seems to have originally gone on the quest in order to save the fortification of the ego). That way, the ego could conquer everything in its path . . . the perfect defense. But this is not the Will of the Self. It isn't adaptive. The Self "sent" the hero to get the ego to realize that the ego needs to reconstruct its strategies flexibly in order to facilitate the adaptive flow of libido from the Self into the world. Over-identification with the hero-as-conqueror is an inflation, is maladaptive.
This is what the animi work is about. The relationship with the animi is dissolving. The heroic will of the ego is dissolved. As the animi work progresses, the heroic ego finds itself more and more committed to the Will of the Self (through its emissaries, the animi). The hero learns to surrender to the Self via the dissolving love of the animi . . . until, in the finality of the coniunctio, the heroic ego sacrifices its conquering heroism and allows itself to be conquered by love, but the possibility of a new, Third Thing, a new birth that combines the ego and the Self in one "mission".
More "biologically", this is a process of further divesting the ego of its inflexible, defensive strategies, bringing it to a new kind of strategy formation dynamic that is "super-adaptive" rather than rigid and brittle and splintered off. The ego learns here that its strategies are always highly arbitrary, and that therefore, they are not "True", they are not even particularly important
in themselves. They are really only fictions. The goal of super-adaptivity is not to believe in or literalize these fictions (making them rigid and totemic), but to understand that the fiction-making process of ego-strategization can be applied flexibly and creatively in the attempt to best adapt the Will of the Self to the outside environment. This super-adaptive, highly plastic, self-creative fiction-making is what I mean when I use the term "Logos". Logos is the language of ego-making that is designed to facilitate the instinctual libido rather than serve the coherence of the ego.
But even as the Logos is learned/created, no magic cure materializes. The three-legged dog still has only three legs. But now, where the Wound was struck, libido can flow. Logos can retell the story of the Wound, mythologizing it in a way that enables the Wound to be seen as (and function as) constructive and life-giving. We become aware that the "healing" of such a Wound or complex is not the removal of the Wound or even the pain from the Wound, but a reorientation of the Wound to an adaptive sense of living. And only fiction or Logos or creativity can allow this to happen.
We can see a pantheon of archetypes in this process: shadow, hero, animi, wise old man/woman. These archetypes (and perhaps others) are, thus, "in the complex", but they manifest in different ways in different stages. In the above, I have basically just called the instinctual force encompassing these specific manifestations, the Self. But this usage of the term "Self" is as a category.
To return back to your mentioning of the Prostitute as core archetype for your personality, I think we are looking at the complex that composes your main ego-strategy (especially as it fortifies your Wound and seeks to keep your ego coherent) . . . or perhaps a splinter-strategy used to relate to specific situations that might aggravate your Wound. You wrote, "I've sacrificed (or "sold") a lot (maybe all) of myself for what I felt was survival." That is an ego-strategy . . . but deeper in the complex is what has been lost with this sale of self, what has fallen into the shadow (under control of the Demon) and can still be redeemed. But redemption requires heroism. Perhaps in the shadow of the Prostitute there is a Demonic pimp or madame that tells the ego it must use the Prostitute strategy in order to survive. But here, the Demonic ego is prostituting you, selling you, assigning you a limited value or a limited purpose.
To find the instinctual archetypes within, you would have to identify the Demon and set off on the heroic quest to confront it. Another element of the Prostitute might be that erotic relationality is given over to the distancing ritual of "trade". So there may be, behind the Demon, an animus figure that enables a revaluation of Eros in which no price is placed on it. Pricing Eros is a way of protecting oneself from the vulnerability Eros requires for true intimacy to happen. Intimacy might show us our Wound, our weakness . . . or it might disappoint us because we have cloaked it in an artificial fantasy . . . for instance, a satisfaction fantasy, i.e., what can intimacy give me? How does intimacy "pay"? But it doesn't, of course. That's the wrong dynamic.
Maybe intimacy's true gift is that it lets us be frail and vulnerable and uncertain. It allows spontaneity without judgment. It allows Otherness without defense against it . . . because we know/trust that Otherness to respect and not conform or use us. But intimacy also accepts the Other's will without feeling that that will is violating. Desire itself is fragile at its core. It wants the dormant or forgotten pieces of self (usually those buried in the Wound beneath the complex) to run with life, I think. Only in this lost part of the self can we have true intimacy, only there does intimacy matter enough to really be called intimacy . . . and so that intimacy is like water that flows through the dry riverbed, taking the shape of the channels the Wound has left.
And that makes it very difficult to be intimate when a complex has not been "healed" or re-mythologized/reanimated. When the complex is still demonic and possessive, it will force us to manipulate any flow of intimacy/Eros directed at the Wound into a defensive structure: a habit, a routine . . . some way of distancing and controlling Eros in line with the fortified ego-strategy.
The re-mything of the complex has to allow the waters of intimacy to wash over the Wound. The water might sting a bit, but it also makes us feel alive. We are then using the complex and the Wound to relate to others and to life. Living in intimacy is appropriately tender and raw. If we are abused in the place where the Wound is, we might recoil or act out unconsciously . . . but then (if we have worked productively with our complex) we will pretty quickly be able to relax and recognize that life just snuck in and made us feel "real". Our whole being was animated, electrified . . . and the experience, despite some pain, was profoundly meaningful.
This happened to me shortly before I opened this forum. I fell into a scapegoating experience that ground salt in my Wound and sparked up my complex, but it ultimately gave me a great deal of meaning and set me on a truer path or "righted" me . . . and I'd like to think I have been applying this meaning adaptively here at Useless Science. But if that experience hadn't triggered my complex, nothing would have been catalyzed or learned. I wouldn't have been able to reactivate libido and move into a new project that channeled it creatively. It was because I chose to learn how to make my complex adaptive that I ended up benefiting from the experience (even if the experience itself was superficially ugly or destructive).
Yours,
Matt