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By Root 5487 0

reason why we, the audience, can so easily identify with this overwhelming sense of attraction is that, whether we are a man or a woman, it triggers off a pattern of response coded into our own unconscious: that gravitational pull between the sexes which is rooted in one of the most powerful instinctive drives we know. But what is significant about this attraction is that it is far more than just a physical impulse. When a man and a woman are mutually attracted this may be because they evoke in each other a whole complex of responses, reaching far down into their psyche, and which can operate on any or all of four levels. It is true that their attraction may simply be physical. But it may also be mental, based on shared interests and values, a'meeting of minds'. It maybe emotional, springing from the feelings and the heart, inspiring love. It maybe spiritual, inspiring a sense of that transcendent dimension we call the `soul'. In an ideal loving relationship, all these levels of attraction may be at work simultaneously. This is because the couple have activated in each other an archetype: one of those complex structures of response programmed into our unconscious which lie latent until triggered off by a specific external stimulus. A man is attracted to a woman because she personifies his anima, that component of his psyche which represents his own inner feminine. A woman is drawn to a man because he evokes that power in her psyche which is her animus. It is equally the power of these archetypal complexes in us which we see at work when they are activated by a story.

However powerful their appeal, the anima and the animus are of course only two of the archetypes around which stories are shaped. Most obviously these also include those which relate to the other central roles in the family drama: those of Father, Mother and the Alter-Ego. We have already seen how this works in terms of the dark figures in storytelling; how instinctively we relate, for instance, to the image of the tyrannical, overbearing Dark Father or the treacherous, oppressive Dark Mother. But each of these represents only the negative aspect of its archetype. Each also has its light aspect, preconditioning us to all those qualities which archetypally represent the role of Father, Mother or alter-ego being acted out positively, in the right way. And these correspond to the light figures whom we may see appearing round the hero or heroine in a story, assisting or guiding them on the way to their goal:

1. The Light Father, or Good King: this is the archetypal father-figure, king or ruler whom we immediately recognise as acting out his role in an ideal fashion. What this means is that he combines the strength of the masculine with the love and understanding of the feminine. He thus represents masculine power and authority being exercised properly and selflessly. In many stories this figure stands in the background to the main action. He may most obviously come to the centre of the stage when the drama is reaching its conclusion: e.g., the mysterious `Minister' who enters at the end of Fidelio to symbolise the overthrowing of the Tyrant Pizarro and the restoration of proper, just authority; or Richard the Lionheart, England's true king, who reappears from his exile abroad at the end of the story of Robin Hood. At the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, we see him as Theseus, Duke of Athens, in the royal marriage which sets a symbolic seal on the resolution of the drama which has been unfolding in the `inferior realm' of the forest.

In other stories where such a figure becomes more directly involved in the action, we are likely to see him playing a role in the hero or heroine's life which is the very opposite of that played by the Dark Father. When the hero of the Arthurian cycle comes into the world as a baby, his true father Uther Pendragon dies, leaving him an orphan. But unlike all those stories where such a gap is filled by a Dark Father-figure, representing the `unrealised value, here the baby is given two versions of a Light Father. First, Arthur is spirited