The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [404]
Likewise we instinctively respond to the archetype of `Father' (as in the image of Father Christmas), recognising that his role is to be outwardly strong and masculine, but inwardly open to the feminine, as someone kindly, protective and understanding of those under his care. We can see the `Father' archetype personified in any older man who is in a position of authority; except that again we may see him as the egocentric `Dark Father' when, lacking the softer feminine values, he has become a heartless Tyrant. If his deficiency is the other way, in that he lacks masculinity, he shows himself as an immature Auer aeternus, weak and irresponsible.
For a man no archetype is more powerful than that of the anima, that autonomous element in his psyche embodying the qualities of the feminine. His relationship with the anima is that which determines his responses to the opposite sex, and much else besides. For a woman the equivalent is her relationship to the animus, representing the masculine element in her psyche. Again this determines not just her response to men but also the entire internal balance of her personality.
As an expression of what is the biological goal of the whole instinctive process, we see the power of our response to the archetype of the `Child'. This arouses in us all those selfless emotions which can be triggered off not only by our own offspring, but by the young of almost any kind.
As an expression of our wish to reintegrate our divided nature, however, no archetype plays a more crucially important role in human psychology than that of the Self. It is this which represents the sense of totality we have lost through our emergence from the state of unconscious unity with creation. It is this archetype which encompasses all the others; which we see at work in the impulse of a story (or any work of art) to come to a perfect resolution; and which governs all human behaviour when, in ways large and small, we sense that our actions are springing from another `centre' in our personality beyond that of our own ego.
All these archetypal powers in the human psyche were identified by Jung, from his studies of dreams and myths. What he was thus able to show was how the pictures we see in our heads when we dream represent in symbolic form the archetypal elements in our unconscious, holding up a unique mirror to our inner state. But what even he failed fully to appreciate was just how profoundly this also applies to the whole of the process whereby we imagine stories. In fact the archetypal patterns which shape stories provide us with a much more structured picture of the components of the human unconscious than we can derive from dreams. They show us how all the archetypes fit together as part of a dynamic process. And when we learn how to decipher their significance, we begin to see we how it uses stories, ultimately, to put over one central message, the essence of which can be summarised as follows:
1. Dark and light
One of the first things we all learn to recognise about the characters we see in stories is that familiar distinction between `goodies' and `baddies, heroes and villains. The reason for this division is that it presents to us in symbolic form the split caused in human nature by the separation of ego-consciousness from the selfless unconscious. The chief device the unconscious uses to symbolise this split is by representing it in terms of that central conflict between `dark' and `light.
The `dark power' in stories, as we have seen, represents the power of the ego, most starkly personified in the archetype of the `monster'; which is like a