Archetypes
Archetypes, some of which are described above in the section about Carl Jung, are symbols used in almost every dream in some way or another. In this section, let’s look at what these particular archetypes are. The following excerpt is from the book Dream Work (1983) by Jeremy Taylor: “Just as there are basic patterns, or archetypes, of biological form, so there are also basic structural patterns to the human psyche. Each person is an absolutely unique physical specimen, while at the same time embodying the same basic physical structure shared by all human beings. So it is with the psyche. Each one of us embodies the archetypes of the objective psyche, or "collective unconscious," in our unique and personal fashion, while still repeating the same basic pattern shared by all human beings.
“Understanding the archetypes and how they interrelate is a complex and subtle task without apparent end. The archetypes are reflected both as personal, interior categories of experience, and as collective patterns of history and culture. Very briefly, some of the major archetypes often encountered at the beginning of dream work are:
Persona - the part that shows, the "mask" - analogous to the skin - made up of our choices about how we
wish to be perceived, individually and collectively.
Shadow - the part that is denied and repressed, the dark, scary, "immoral," unpredictable, and unconscious/unknown part of ourselves.
Light & Darkness - archetypes of consciousness and unconsciousness-the quality of light in dreams is most
often a metaphor of the extent to which the main theme of the dream either is or is not already
known and acknowledged in waking life.
Animus & Anima - the man inside a woman, and the woman inside a man respectively, figures representing
our deepest intuitions and feelings about the opposite sex.
Trickster - a figure representing human consciousness itself-simultaneously knowing and foolish,
overblown, yet the source of all the gifts of culture.
Divine Child - a figure representing new consciousness and self-awareness-born amidst trouble, yet most
often surviving with its miraculous powers and the aid of Divine sources.
Animals - figures often representing instincts and natural drives-elements of life that are vital but not yet
consciously differentiated, creatures and servants of Divine sources.
Great Mother - Mother Nature, Mother Earth, cyclic time, the divine perceived in feminine form, the
feminine principle[s]-multiplying, dividing, nurturing, bringing forth all life, and simultaneously
condemning all to inevitable death.
All-Father - the thunderer, the law giver, linear time, the divine perceived in masculine form, the masculine
principle[s]-abstracting, constructing, judging, and calculating with objectifying will.
Spirit Bird - a figure representing and embodying communication with the divine-unites the realm of the sky
with the plane of the earth.
Wise Old People - the figures representing the oldest and wisest and most loving possibilities of our being-
figures sometimes referred to as "mana-personalities."
Willing Sacrifice - a figure representing and embodying the increasing consciousness of interior and exterior
oneness-the One dividing itself into the Many, and the many in the act of dying to rejoin the One.
Mandala - an image uniting the circle and the angular figure exhibiting radial symmetry and a defined
centered image of harmony, beauty, balance, order, often used as a visual aid in meditation/worship.
Spiral - image of evolution-the spontaneous archetype of cyclic, repeating rhythmic processes occurring amidst the
forward flow of time-visible at all scales and levels from the shape of galaxies to the DNA helix.
Perilous Journey - image of life and being alive, often a sea journey, a descent into the earth, or into a
labyrinth, the journey to the land of the dead, the search for treasure, wisdom, immortality.
Death & Rebirth - in the realm of dream and myth, as in physics, energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Each
dream death is a liberation of psychic energy from specific form and is linked inevitably with a new birth.”
(end of excerpt, Dream Work (1983) by Jeremy Taylor)
Symbols and archetypes have lived throughout time in every culture, in every race, and in every individual that has ever walked the Earth. This is why legends across cultures are so similar. There must be something more to symbols than physical experience. Perhaps symbols and archetypes are something instilled into the human experience from the spirit worlds long before humans ever set foot on the Earth. Gary K. Yamamoto, in his book Creative Dream Analysis (1988), says, “Symbolic language allows stories to be passed on with minimal distortion. Symbols are usually very concrete. They are not dynamic as are abstract thoughts or philosophies. Their meanings change little with time.”
John Layard has a lot to say about archetypes in dreams in his book The Lady Of The Hare (1988). This book follows a patient through her exploration of re-occurring dreams about hares. She had no conscious knowledge about the mythological nature of the hare, but her dreams reflected all the associations with the hare that were common in the archetype of the hare. The four associations are 1) its sacrificial nature, 2) that it is a willing sacrifice, 3) its bright eyes, and 4) the whiteness so often associated with the hare. Layard attests to the possibility that archetypes live in our collective unconscious, and this is why someone like his patient, with no conscious knowledge of their attributes, can have dreams that are perfectly in conjunction with common traits of any given archetype. This is unconscious knowledge that is available to us all in the collective unconscious.
In The Encyclopedia Of Psychic Science (1966) by Nandor Fodor, the author quotes Letourneau, who wrote Bulletins et Memoires do la Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris: “Certain events, external or psychic, which have made a deep impression on a person, may be so deeply engraved upon his brain as to result in a molecular orientation, so lasting that it may be transmitted to some of his descendants in the same way as character, aptitudes, mental maladies, etc. It is then no longer a question of infantile reminiscences, but of ancestral recollections, capable of being revived. From that will proceed not only the fortuitous recognition of places which a person has never seen, but moreover a whole category of peculiar dreams, admirably coordinated, in which we witness as in a panorama, adventures which cannot be remembrances, because they have not the least connection with our individual life.”
Jeremy Taylor, in Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992), quotes Greek therapist Evangelos Christou: “It is not so much that the archetypes are in us. The more important truth is that it is we who are surrounded by and immersed in the archetypes.” Taylor goes on to say that the archetypes are capable of evolution, just like humans. The personal work of the individual influences the development of archetypal forms and goes into the collective unconscious mind. “This may sound very theoretical, but I believe that ‘ordinary people’ do this psycho-spiritual work of evolution on themselves and the archetypes every day… Every person who succeeds in breaking the ‘trance’ of conventional attitudes…manages to break the chain so that these attitudes and self-limitations are not passed on to the next generation. In this way, the individual dreamer contributes in a most profound and real way to the liberation of all people, and the planet as a whole… Our individual triumphs and defeats…feed back into the realm of the archetypes, in the same way that the archetypal energies embodied in our dreams and myths influence our waking lives.”
The fact that we dream in symbols and pictures is based on the fact that this is the universal language of all beings. This was the first “language.” Even in our conscious mind we think in symbols and pictures. This is the only language that is common among all people, no matter what language they speak or write. In Elsie Sechrist’s book Dreams: Your Magic Mirror (1968), it is stated, “We dream in symbols because we tend to think in symbols or pictures at the conscious level. If someone mentions your wife or husband, you immediately picture a human face rather than the word wife or husband. Man first learned to write by using pictorial images… Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of symbology is that it is universal language, teaching and preserving permanent basic truths. What shorthand is to words, symbology is to ideas.”
Archetypes are in every one of our stories and these stories abound in every culture. Many movies and TV shows depict the most famous of all the archetypes, the hero on an adventurous journey of triumphing over evil. The book The Art Of Daydreaming (1995), by Veronica Tonay, looks at how archetypes play a crucial part in the stories that influence young people in the media arena of entertainment. “The fact that the huge world interest in television, movie or popular music personalities has become a mammoth industry in itself attests to the great need all of us have for a constellation of ego ideals or alter egos, whose adventures we can follow and whose fates we can share vicariously. For relatively young persons such fantasies and identifications form a critical part in the molding of their personalities and of the direction of their goals, as well as their aesthetic tastes.”
In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious as well as his other works on dreams, Carl Jung provides us with a Jungian archetype definition as well as example, such as the hero archetypes and the shadow self, each a powerful tool for understanding the mind.