What are archetypes

Since this is the title of tonight's conference, I will begin by clarifying my own use of the term archetype. This is something that both Goldenberg and Miller did in their books, and I believe that,in our definition of the archetype lie the.similarities and also the differences that were at the origin of this panel.

There is a second question, also implicit in the publicity of tonight's discussion: is archetypal psychology an ally or a hindrance to feminism, and should we,as Goldenberg suggests, go back to Freud ?

So let us begin with archetypes.

As I understand them, archetypes are a sort of vestige, in our psychic functioning, of a time when a "divinity" would personify what today we would call a "structure", an "idea" or a "concept".

One can see, in this definition, the influence of archetypal psychology. For exemple, Hillman in his book : the Myth of Analysis, shows how the reference to a concept : let's say hysteria, could well be replaced by a reference to the god Dionysos, since "hysteria" as a concept, has no more no less "reality" than Dionysos. You cannot touch , you cannot see, you cannot put hysteria under the microscope, you have to believe in the concept with the same sort of intellectual belief that the Greeks had for their gods and goddesses. The Greeks, after all, did not believe in their gods with the same sort of faith that we were used to. It is no coincidence that these same people gave the word "myth" a double significance : one as a basic scenario, and the other as a sort of lie, a story that must not be taken at face value, since it is only an intellectual device to understand the world we live in. This second meaning of "myth", parallels the attitude we have today towards a "concept". We use concepts as pratical intellectuel tools, "as if" they really existed, because we get used to them. We believe for example, that "my ego" which is only a concept, is not strong enough and that "it" is really reponsible for my problem at the workplace. From time to time, someone has to point out that our concepts and theories might be a bunch of lies.

So if "a hysteric manifestation" is a concept that has no more reality then a "dionysian manifestation", then the major difference between one mode of expression and the other is the process of "personifying" .

The use of personifying, understood, not as an esoteric come back of an antique religion, but as an evolution of psychology, is, I believe, a way out of a psychology that feminists were among the first to denounce. I am referring here to the tendency in psychology to define a statistically or ideal normal behavior.

In that respect, archetypal psychology is antidote to stereotypical categorisation that feminists believe to be dangerous for women, provided that archetypes are not confused with stereotypes, as is often the case. A stereotype is a repetition without variation, there is no personal interpretation, no personal quality, no inspiration. It means a conformity to a fixed or general pattern, usually in a rigid precise form. It has a standardization effect.

An archetype in the opposite. It is nothing if not given interpretation, content, individuality. It is not fixed, it is a transformative power. It does not categorize, it brings back original links.

This confusion between stereotypes and archetypes, which comes from a confusion between type and class, is at work for example when we use the very rich repertoire of pagan gods and goddesses as "prescribed models" : taken that way polytheism certainly is not a bargain, because instead of the traditional obligation to be a good wife and mother, we would now have to be, on top of that, as sexy as Aphrodite, as athletic as Artemis, as bright as Athena, as constant as Hestia, as sharp as Hecate etc... Compared to that,the "total woman" is a beginner's course.

The "re-personifying" process, as in archetypal psychology, is also linked to another very important cultural movement, which is the topic of Miller's book called "the New Polytheism". This movement towards polytheistic attitude and thinking is crucial to feminism , because it gives a context from which we can rethink the problem of similitudes and differences. This topic is, I think, as central to feminism than what Goldenberg identifies as the "body problem". Our collective values towards the body, could change in the direction that Goldenberg is pointing, and that would be all for the better, but if our frame of mind remains such that there is no way to allow for differences, women, as Simone De Beauvoir pointed out, will remain the "other sex".

( So in a way, we could say that archetypal psychology and feminism are made of the same stuff......)

Freud was the first to acknowledge the fact that it is not possible to understand the complexities of the psyche, without resorting to multiplicity of structure. He proposed his trinity of the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego. When speaking of Eros, Thanatos or Oedipus, he was also resorting to personifying, which did in fact contribute to the success of his theory. Everybody began to "believe" in Oedipus' complex, in Eros and Thanatos , almost unaware that this is a metaphoric device that gives some vitality to a concept. Yet we should not take these personified concepts more litterally than the Ancient Greeks took their divinities.

But Freud, although convinced of the multiplicity of the psyche, and although he occasionally personified his concepts, never admitted that, he was speaking metaphorically and not scientifically.

Freud's attitude, called "scientific monotheism " by some critics, also made him act as if he was really the Pope of the psychoanalytic dogma. Consequently, he felt entitled to refuse Adler, Jung and many others, the right to oppose, contradict him in any significant fashion, if they were to stay in the club of wich he was the only, omnipotent God.

So, the original movement, in psychoanalysis, that had pointed towards the multiplicity of the psyche, was at the same time contradicted by Freud's monotheistic reflex. His monotheism was all the more pervasive that is was not recognized as such.

Jung's psychology took the theory of the multiplicity of the psyche a step further . Jung resorted to the process of personifying in a more consistent way, as he described the archetypes of the Mother, animus, anima, trickster, old wise man, the puer and the senex. But as we can "see through" Freud's theories the latent monotheism, and supposedly disavowed judaism, one can "see through ' Jung's psychology, the hidden christianism, especially in his notion of the self and individuation. Reading Jung is sometimes just like listening to a sermon . That is why I agree with Goldenberg's warning that those who think they made a move away from official religions, might be heading right back to christian transcendence. The junguian description of Self and Individuation certainly has a christian flavor. This is no problem if one finds, in the psychology of Jung, a new psychological dimension to one's christian religious beliefs. But those who made a move away from traditional beliefs, might feel manipulated by a certain use of the psychology of Jung. At one point, I felt, like Goldenberg, the need to stress that Freud really had a point when he wrote "The Future of an Illusion" , and exposed the alienation of religious dependency.

In fact, Jung stood at the frontier between two worlds : born in the Christian faith, and an explorer of the pagan world, his psychology reflected those two influences, and Goldenberg is right to point out the christian influence. But then, in all justice, one must also point out the judaic influence on Freud. It is expressed in his monotheistic beliefs in Science, as if thruth could have only one definition, and it shows also in a very noxious sexism. Freud could not imagine that strength and divinity could have a feminine form.

I agree with Goldenberg that "no feminist can save God", but then one must add that "no feminist can save Freud." It seems that Freud was himself victim to the male judaic obsession with god the father, the very obsession he had denounced. Even his idea of love, which was after all the only domain left to women, was personified by a male divinity. Why did Freud choose Eros, instead of its mother Aphrodite, the great Goddess of libido? Had he chosen to personify love by Aphrodite, instead of Eros, he would certainly not have written that libido is male.

I will not elaborate on the feminist criticism of Freudian psychology, since it has been done by many feminists in the past ten years. I would add to this body of feminist criticism, the chapter in Hillman's book "The Myth of Analysis", that demonstrates how the myth of feminine inferiority was in fact a corner stone of freudian psychology. This myth, of feminine inferiority, was responsible for Freud's belief that the unconscious ( conceived as the feminine part of the psyche) should be pushed aside by conscious behavior and the control of the Ego.

It is as a feminist that I moved away from a psychology that is fundamentally monotheistic, and ego-centered. At that point, the psychology of Jung was a way out of Freud.

But reading Jung, brings us in contact with one of his many definitions of the archetype, in wich he refers to Plato. Doing so, he is making himself prey to every criticism we now address Plato and his theory of transcendental archetypes. Yet, in doing so we must not too quickly identify Plato's conception of archetypes with Jung's conception of archetypes. For example, blames for placing the spiritual center outside the body, as well as the full blame for contempt of the body should go , not to Jung, as Goldenberg would have it, but to Plato's archetypal theory. Plato and Jung differ on a very important point, that is, personifying.

Classical greek culture is responsible for the disembodiment of pagan divinities : what the Archaic Greeks would have called divinities, became with Plato : "ideas", "forms" and "archetypes". There, the goddess Themis became the concept of law, the god Apollo was replaced by an abstract idea of beauty, every god and goddess lost his or her body and became a concept. Plato was fitted to become the main philosopher of Christianism, followed by Aristotle, because not only did he dis-embody pagan divinities, but he also was one of the first (after Parmenide and Xenophane ) to speak of God as a unified, unique concept.

Jung's contribution goes the opposite way : he worked to re-personify, and to multiply the figures of divinities. Hillman and his collegues in archetypal psychology now give to that movement an even more radical twist. From Plato to Jung, and from Jung to Hillman, there is a reversal of perspective about personifying, which is after all the process of giving body to a concept.

I think, as she does, that we loose a sense of our humanity when we are carried away by what she calls "purposeful identities outside of ourselves", meaning a belief in archetypes as if they were transcendental divinities ruling our lives from up there. But when she writes:

If we apply Goldenberg's criticism to Plato, she is certainly right to stress the fact that, whenever there is dichotomy between mind and body, women sooner or later will find themselves on the wrong side, even if we profess to honor the feminine principle.

The problem comes from the way monotheism handles dichotomies: having only one possibility for god, one definition of normality, one image of perfection, that is the process that always put women as the second best, or even worse, on the devil's side of any dichotomy.

I would add to this list of monotheistic problems that having only one sort of feminism is equally bound to dis-adventage women and the feminist movement. The energy for this movement first came and still comes from the deep conviction that our culture must drop its male monotheistic definition of a human being, and adopt a pluralistic definition of humanness. Monotheism is here challenged as much as exclusive maleness.

Some feminists are not so far from this caricatural feminist monotheistic reversal. Their reaction certainly is not without interest if we consider that it is a symetrical response to the patriarchal monotheism.

Today this separatist feminist strategy is being challenged by the opposite strategy: the no-difference tactic, the androgyne mystique. The basic idea is to forget about differences and to stress mostly the similarities between men and women. Men move towards body, and women towards spirit. Elisabeth Badinter, the French feminist historian, just published a book whose title is "L'Un est l'Autre" that is, "One is the Other". In that book she demonstrate how, actually, the tension between the sexes is eased mostly by the fact that there is not much differences left to argue about.

In monotheistic logic, that is, when there only can be "one or the other", I believe she is right. It is, and will remain, a good strategy in many situations of unequal power. "One becoming the other" might be Okay as a tactic, but let us not take it as our final end.

This movement back and forth from separatism to assimilation, from an ideal of "female is beautiful" to an ideal of "androgyny", is a sure sign that we are getting really tired of monotheistic swings between poles.

When Goldenberg speaks for the body, I think she expresses the first type of reaction : "body is all" "body is female" "body is beautiful". She is not, of course speaking of body as dead flesh . She quotes and agrees with Winnicott who wrote that "everything physical is imaginatively elaborated" . Soul is certainly not absent in her theory, but soul is defined as "body visualized", as if body was the first principle that includes everything else. I believe one has to talk for the body when it is looked down in contempt, it is a necessary reflex of equilibrium and one of the task of feminism. But I take it as a strategic position, and not the affirmation of the supremacy of the body, or of femaleness as the only form of divinity.

The main point of my argument tonight is the following :

What is the meaning of Aphrodite without the physical expression of sexuality ? What is the meaning of Artemis without the recognition of our link with the animal kingdom? What is left of Hestia if you do not consider our relation, not only to the body, but also to objects, houses, things, and food. The same is true for male divinities : the agressivity personified by Arès was represented as a red fire burning in the chest, and even Apollo, the most "intellectual" of all Pagan gods, was personified as a beautiful body, his back as straight as a ruler, his hair neetly curled as if each curl was a statement about harmony .

All pagan divinities, before classical philosophy made them silent and disembodied, were each a different expression of the link with the body. These are the archetypes to which Jung was giving a new life, and not the platonic forms. The process of personifying and that of re-establishing the link with the body is even more radical in archetypal psychology. One must not think that because Hillman often speaks in terms of "images, imagination, imagining", one must conclude that his psychology is more "in the head" and less "in the body". Even a physical education teacher knows that he will get nowhere with a student if he does not have, first of all, a good body image.

(Or we could take the example of pregnancy and giving birth. All through this experience, there is no such thing as a body without spirit, no such thing as spirit or soul without body. One is not reductible to the other. Feeling for the new life is more than the "imaginative elaboration of somatic parts" (Winnicott definition of Psyche quoted by Goldenberg). The ambiguity is there all along.)

Our body, the body, needs a rich, complex, multiple set of archetypal images if we are to have any significant link to it. Otherwise, even a crusade for the body can become a head trip. The nursing mother for example, if she is to take full pleasure in this very physical relationship with her child, needs more than a suckling baby and milk in her brest . There has to be in her psyche and in her culture some archetypal representation of Mother and Child, be it the Madonna and the Child, an Earth Mother sculpture with heavy breasts, Picasso's painting of a "nursing woman" , a magazine's publicity she pins of the wall, or simply a mental image that pops up in her mind as she feels the archetypal quality of Mother Nursing a Child.

Here the concept of archetype is used as adjective, and not as a noun. I believe this is, for the time being, the surest way to avoid using archetypes as transcendental categories. Using the adjective instead of the noun should help us understand that the idea of archetypal psychology is to bring back the full range of possible qualities of the psyche. "Bodily" and "spiritual" are among those archetypal qualities and we need not make a definite choice.

That is why I believe archetypal psychology can help us move into action.