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We see this same division between the values of `Father' and `Mother' in the way people's political views tend to change over the years: that general human tendency to follow the pattern summed up in the maxim of Huey Long, the one-time governor of Louisiana, that `every man's political career reads like a book, from left to right'. When people are young, unsettled, just starting on the ladder of life, they are more inclined to take a `feminine, `below the line' view; to be idealistic, to feel deeply the injustices of the world, to rebel against what they see as the constraints of discipline, established convention and the stern values of `Father'. When, as they grow older and more mature, they themselves become more established, with more experience of the world, they are inclined to take a more masculine, `above the line' view. Idealism gives way, as they would see it, to realism. They come to appreciate the conservative values of discipline, tradition and order. They at last see the point of those values of `Father' (not least because they may well have been through the educative experience of being a parent themselves). It was this familiar shift taking place in people's psychic perspective which gave rise to Bernard Shaw's famous dictum that `anyone who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, anyone who is not a conservative at forty has no head'.3

In psychological terms, of course, these two opposing views are simply the two halves of the same whole. To make up the archetype of totality, the Self, each needs the balance of the other. And the more one-sided people's political view becomes, the more they are likely to see the other side in terms of caricature. The right-winger sees the left as `dangerous anarchists', `raving Bolsheviks', `bleeding heart liberals', out to destroy all social order. The left-winger sees the right as `vicious tyrants', `racist reactionaries', `Fascist pigs', whose only concern is to oppress the defenceless and underprivileged. This is not to say that each side may not have justification for its view. But because by definition this kind of division arouses the human ego, each side tends to end up projecting the shadow of its own one-sidedness onto the other. This is why nothing is commoner in political conflict than `the fallacy of the halftruth', whereby politicians finds it much easier to identify the weaknesses in the position of their opponents than to recognise the deficiencies in their own.

What happens in the archetypal version is that it shows what is necessary for the two sides to become in some way reconciled. The egocentricity and blindness of those exercising power above the line is redeemed by their recognition of the selfless values represented by those below the line. The whole community can thus be brought together in unity. This may, according to the archetypal pattern, be what ought to happen. What in the real world is more likely to happen is that the two sides remain locked in conflict. Those above the line continue to abuse their power; and in extreme cases this may eventually provoke in those below the line a dream of rising up in an attempt to overthrow the power of their oppressors by force. This is because, in the real world, those below the line are not necessarily just embodiments of the selfless redeeming values, as they are in a story. They may well become just as much possessed by collective egotism as those above the line. However genuine and justified their demands for truth, justice and compassion may originally have been, these may no longer be entirely selfless and absolute. In becoming politicised they have also become sentimentalised, hi-jacked by the collective ego to justify its drive to power.

It is here we see the emergence of that Utopian revolutionary mindset, as in Marxism, which comes to see the existing power structure as so oppressive and corrupt that it is beyond redemption. It must be torn down altogether and replaced by a new one. In their fantasies the revolutionaries become