The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [403]
Archetypes: Pictures with a purpose
The evolution of life on this planet has produced countless miracles, from the complex structure of the eye to the even greater complexities of the human brain. But none is more remarkable than this ability of human beings to see organised sequences of pictures in their heads. Even more remarkable, however, is the underlying purpose for which this faculty has evolved.
The real significance of our capacity to imagine stories, as we have seen, lies in the extent to which they emerge from some part of the mind which is beyond the storyteller's conscious awareness. To a great degree stories are thus the product of a controlling power which is centred in the unconscious. The very fact that they follow such identifiable patterns and are shaped by such consistent rules indicates that the unconscious is thus using them for a purpose: to convey to the conscious level of our mind a particular picture of human nature and how it works.
We are of course familiar with the idea that some part of our unconscious has the autonomous power to transmit messages to our consciousness, because it was this which for Freud and Jung lay at the heart of their theorising about why we dream. Our dreams, they suggested, can reveal to us much of what is going on in our psyche below the threshold of consciousness. Nevertheless, it is curious how much of the pioneering work of these two psychoanalysts in opening up our understanding of the unconscious was centred on their study of dreams, without their recognising just how much more systematic a picture of its workings can be derived from analysing the process whereby we imagine stories.
Jung, however, went much further in this direction than Freud, above all in seeing how much of our conscious existence is shaped by archetypes: those shadowy elemental structures built into our unconscious which condition so much of our emotional and behavioural response to the world without our being aware of it. This, his central contribution to our understanding of the unconscious, was one of the greatest intuitive discoveries of the twentieth century, ranking alongside those of Einstein and other nuclear physicists, or Watson and Crick's double helix.
The point about the archetypes is that they constitute a crucial legacy from that process whereby human consciousness split off from our unconscious obedience to instinct. The chief archetypes - Mother, Father, animus and anima, Child - represent all the most basic roles that human beings can be called on to play in that central instinctive process whereby the life of the species is continued, when this is acted out in accordance with the instinctive pattern. But in addition each archetype is two-sided. It contains not only a positive image of how that role should be carried out selflessly in accordance with instinct, but also its negative aspect, reflecting how the intervention of the ego may prevent it being carried out properly.
We are all programmed, for instance, with the set of archetypal impulses surrounding the most basic relationship in all our lives, that with `Mother'. When a child is born into the world, it is the `Mother' archetype programmed into its unconscious which leads it instinctively to bond with one single mother-figure (who may not even be biologically its actual mother). Similarly it is the `Mother' archetype which is activated in a woman as she prepares to give birth to her