The Existential Processing of Archetypes: Some Prospects for Recognition and Elaboration in Existential Therapy

Introduction

The idea of a timeless “collective unconscious” shared among the whole of humanity, one of psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung’s greatest and most controversial insights, influenced the interpretation and acceptance of analytical psychology in both positive and negative ways. Jung’s closest followers, however, paid homage to this theory, having repeatedly seen it reflected in the analysis of their own patients. According to Jung (1969) the so-called collective unconscious is populated by archetypes, universal models of potential patterns of human experiences. The description and elaboration of these archetypal patterns provides a guiding theme for analytical psychologists in their work today. However, their identification and description are often highly subjective, interpretive, and discretional.

As psychologist (and artist) Bertirotti (2015) writes,

Carl Gustav Jung, . . . overcomes the individual vision of his mentor [Freud], putting forward the hypothesis of the collective unconscious, which contemplates the presence of a spiritual substratum common to all humanity. It is . . . composed of archetypes, models of behavior and substance to which all humanity refers. . . These archetypes are embodied in the experiences of all present, past and future human beings, and are the expression of the collective unconscious. . . . However, these archetypes are in a certain sense somewhat mysterious, because according to Jung they are innate, and therefore inexplicably present in all of us.

According to Jung himself (1969):

Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an archetype is determined in regard to its content, in other words, that it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an expression is admissible). It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image . . . is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience. Its form, however, . . . might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. . . . The archetype itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. (p. 79)

In a Kantian dimension, these archetypes can be interpreted not only as a priori images of human emotions but also as a small number of main forms (Gestalten) that make up the whole diversity of visible nature. The aesthetic principles of order and organization described by Goethe (1790/2009) may even be understood as a creative model, a schematized or generalized image providing the means to establish a taxonomy of vertebrate and invertebrate species, as proposed by Owen (1866/2011). Kant, Goethe, and Owen all directly inspired Jung, although they each advocated divergent theories.

Since Jung’s death in 1961, the current understanding of human genetics and neuroscience have undermined the idea that archetypes are “innate” or preexistent in the development of the individual psyche. The question of whether or not it still makes sense today to talk about these supposed archetypes, these intrinsic behavioral models “to which all humanity refers,” is fundamental. We must wonder how they may spread through time and around the world and examine in depth the contrasting hypotheses: either archetypes are, in fact, genetically inherited, innate, and predetermined, or perhaps, contrary to what Jung is widely believed to have thought, can only be passed down through generations via culture.

Addressing this key question, Jungian analyst and archetypal psychologist James Hillman (1980) writes,

The idea that the fundamental and universal structures of the psyche, the formal models of its relational systems, are archetypal models derives from Jung. Like physical organs, they are given to us from birth together with psyche itself (although they are not necessarily genetically inherited) and are only partially modified by historical and geographical factors. These models or archai appear in the art, religion, dreams, and social customs of all peoples, and manifest themselves spontaneously in mental illnesses.

Moreover, as Jungian analyst Hester McFarland Solomon (1999) points out, “It is important to underline . . . that it is not our intention to postulate any neurological basis for archetypal images, nor of the archetypes themselves” (Christopher, Christopher, & Solomon, 1999, p. 64).

Archetypes, Models, and Internal Mental Maps

Among Jung’s contemporary followers, many still embrace the idea of the archetype-as-such. For instance, psychiatrist Anthony Stevens (1983) considers the archetype to be an innate neuropsychic potential that is mentally embodied in the form of archetypal images, motifs, ideas, relationships, and behaviors. According to Hogenson (1994), archetypes are fully emerging phenomena: The “emergence” is based on the notion that within a certain type of system, phenomena can come to life without any precursor state that predicts their appearance. Hillman (1980) identifies the archetypal image as the foundation for his Archetypal Psychology, whereas Knox (2003) states that the archetype-as-such corresponds to the imaginative schema that underlies every single model. However, it is the notion of the static and immutable nature of archetypes that seems to be waning in most critical thought today: “[T]he notion of archetype as a discrete entity within the psyche seems inadequate. Our understanding of archetypes is certainly better if we consider them as experiential modes, tendencies to experience the world and ourselves in particular ways” (Colman, 2017, p. 32).

Archetypes such as gods, mother, travel, home, love, self, time, space, separation, mourning, marriage, and so on, are evident in all cultures throughout history, but their substance and configuration remain highly variable, and subject to the individual’s existentiell (this is the English translation of the German adjective existenziell, from Heidegger (1927/1996), and can be understood as the principles on which the person measures their existential space experiences in their own world). For example, the archetypal figure of the Mother has changed considerably over time. Where she was once the “queen of the house”/victim of the house, confidant/indifferent, welcoming/alienating, and so on, in many societies today, particularly in the West, we have reached a point where, in reality, the mother shares almost the same roles and actions as the father. A modern mother can be social/unsocial, interfamilial/extrafamilial, but she remains strongly rooted in her role as an individual. This new reality for maternal figures could profoundly modify the archetypal image of the Mother for future generations.

Another example is the archetype of the Journey:

We begin to yearn for something beyond ourselves, and become Seekers, searching for that ineffable something that will satisfy. Answering the call and embarking on the journey, we find that soon we are experiencing privation and suffering, as the Destroyer takes away much that had seemed essential to our lives. (Pearson, 1991, p. 21)

Can a simplistic idea or conception of travel still meet the needs of the Jungian archetype today? Most of our travel experiences in the 21st century occur in non-places, existentiell spaces, in which we have certainties, safety, and identity, though we have never before visited them. Most modern travelers merely seek confirmation of previously stored data: They admire buildings they already recognize from 3-dimensional images, having already explored them through computer vision; they explore art galleries they already know; they taste previously identified flavors. Furthermore, many travelers only seek replicas of familiar places, such as shopping centers, streets, parks, and stadiums. The archetype of the Journey as originally conceived of by Jung and his disciples has shifted from the real world to the virtual web, into digital exploration and electronic journeys. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that archetypal instances of the journey can still be experientially reproduced in this new medium.

Essentially, in modern times, the concept of the archetype as evidence of a supraindividual unconscious remains valid, but has lost its historical rigidity and immobility, becoming more fluid, malleable, in constant and continuous movement. The archetype is itself a project, a process that develops as the existentiell experience of the individual progresses; it is the liquid construction of a model that is susceptible to any possible variation according to time and circumstances. The archetype develops in the relationship between individuals and the information they receive. It morphs over time, as does the existentiell world of the individual who is experiencing it; it changes according to different cultures, and the new acculturations of the individual, the group, and the population at large. Within the context of this “design fluidity,” the archetype experienced by an individual maintains a partial uniformity, linked to the relationship that person has with the deeply rooted elements of human behavior, especially our passionate emotional behaviors, which are often instinctive by nature. As Bertirotti (2015) explains,

[E]very attempt to understand the functioning of the human mind and of the actions that modulate its conduct, must necessarily take into account this sphere of anthropological mystery that characterizes our species. It is this sphere that is a source of greatness and human misery, of emotions, dreams and fears, which are not always easily manageable and which connect the today of each of us to the most remote past of our humanity. Everything referring to emotions and affects is prior to reason. Every attempt trying to attribute to reason a primacy over the most ancient part of our brain, the limbic system, is actually just arrogant ambition, because it is not possible to evade the anthropological role played by this primordial part of the brain.

Significant variations in the emotional and experiential organization of the individual’s existentiell space create substantial changes in the fabric of the classically understood archetypes, to the point of minimizing, distorting, and in some cases, obliterating them. Despite these substantial changes, the archetype remains anchored to its role of builder of models, objects (people and things), and is regarded as an oversized reference to specific qualities, nothing else. Indeed, the relationship between model and archetype has been noted for some time. As stated by Walter F. Otto (1951), the great German classical philologist in his classic essay Gesetz, Urbild und Mythos, “The archetype must appear as a mode. . . . Through the archetype that lives in him, the model has the strength to bring to light the spiritual faculty of man” (p. 22).

The concept of archetypes as “models” is valid and viable. In these terms, the “new” archetypes/models strongly influence human existence, and their role cannot be minimized in existential psychology. However, a significant difference between the two concepts remains: While the archetype, according to Jung’s definition, dwells deep in the collective unconscious, the model is partly conscious, and sometimes forcibly influenced by the conscious will or the particular culture consciously chosen by the individual. This subtle yet crucial difference is more conceptual than concrete. In my work as an existential therapist, I have met people deeply aware of their models, as well as those who are absolutely unaware they are relating to preestablished models, behavioral patterns, or archetypes.

Nonetheless, it is not uncommon to come across people who obviously manifest some of the archetypal aspects to which we refer, embodying and living out clearly defined ideas of models, that may at times have even been carefully decided on through a conscious and studied choice, such as certain individuals who make strong “avatars” in their virtual world. The building of a model, or rather, the creation of a model, occurs through a combination of instincts, imprinting, and learning, in response to the psychological need to construct a model that can interact with the existence of each individual world. In this process, emotional and social learning—through which people acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions—plays a fundamental part.

Neurosciences show that the cerebral sites for behaviors related to emotion vary according to context (or maybe we are the ones to ascribe different behaviors to a single “reification”). The role of epigenesis, which makes it possible to modify the phenotypic expression of genomes that develop as a consequence of repeated external circumstances, could also be considered important for the elaboration of archetypical ideas and models. Indeed, in many cases, the study of cognitive processes confirms hypotheses, which had been proposed previously in other fields of research. One of the cognitive processes that could be decisive in the modification and transformation of models and archetypal ideas is the generalization of concepts, images, and ideas. Among the most researched fields in cognitive evolution is that of linguistics. As early as the 1950s, Noam Chomsky (1957) identified two fundamental processes, generalization and deletion—to which Bandler and Grinder (1975a) would later add a third, distortion, a synthesis of the first two—that offered the necessary tools to modify a complex and redundant deep structure of language and transform it into an agile and immediate surface structure of language (Chomsky, 1957). For example, I have no difficulty sitting on a chair, even if I have never seen a chair of that particular design before, that is, I have generalized the concept of chair.

However, such gross generalization can prove fallacious: The models elaborated through this process may be misleading, and the archetypes that derive from it ambiguous. For this reason, the model that should respond to and resonate with the deepest needs of the individual as a general rule may instead be in conflict with their unique experiential reality, emotional motivations, and instinctual desires. For example, the archetype/model of a faithful bride imposes upon Rose, a real female human being, a behavior that opposes her passionate desire for a romantic adventure based on her feelings right here and now. If she chooses to obey the archetype, it could cause her to suppress her desire; while if she decides to reject it, this might satisfy her present complex emotional need, which could, however, ultimately prove ephemeral. Thus, Rose experiences an existential rift. Such intrapsychic conflicts, when not overcome with a constructive readaptation of the models, can generate fractures in the existentiell space of the individual, potentially leading to symptoms of psychopathology.

From the perspective of existential therapy, with its core emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility, the “unconscious resonance” (see also Bollas, 2009) of the archetype or model allows individuals to choose to engage in some of the following evasive tactics: transferring or projecting part of their emotional existence onto some predetermined archetypal idea; hiding their fears, anxieties, and stresses within or behind an archetypal model; and displacing their skills of self-planning onto the archetype, in which case they can mediate their existence within a social or cultural context via archetypes, strengthening their social identity at the cost of authenticity.

But, at the same time, individuals can also choose to: ignore the fact that a certain emotion, sensation of unease, way of living an existentiell singularity or pregnant moment is correlated to an unconscious archetype that they cannot modify; escape from important projects or tasks that could potentially arise from an archetype, due to the desire to avoid feelings of anguish, shame, fear, trepidation, doubt, or performance anxiety; ignore or minimize the alternatives to an idea of an archetype that proves to be idiosyncratic, thus resolving an inner conflict; feel excluded or alienated from those archetypes, or from similar archetypes, which characterize their social or cultural group. And often, we human beings live out all this archetypal drama unconsciously, unaware of our motivations, choices, and responsibility for these choices.

Processing Archetypes in Existential Therapy

As previously suggested, each of the aforementioned existential conditions represents a fertile breeding ground for potential psychological distress. These circumstances illustrate which areas specifically can be the subject of clinical work carried out in existential therapy, work that can be succinctly summarized in the following steps: (1) meeting, (2) narration, (3) concentration, (4) becoming aware, (5) extension of the mental internal maps, and (6) existential clarification. In psychotherapy, the existential analysis of elaboration and reference to one’s own archetypes could play an important role in a particular aspect of what we call the cognitivization, that is, the cognitive process that raises awareness of the circumstances and promotes becoming clearly aware of one’s own existentiell reference parameters—but it may be necessary in all of these aforementioned therapeutic or stages.

The actual language used daily by an individual, regardless of their level of education, has a much more immediate communicative structure than the underlying thoughts and mechanisms. In everyday speech, a “surface structure of language” (Chomsky, 1957) emerges, corresponding to a deep structure that is not always immediately obvious to those who express it. In the methodologies of existential counseling and therapy, my work group and I prefer, as a tool of dialog, the use of a dialogic analysis of awareness. We call this therapeutic approach consciential logoanalysis: a specific communicative tool of language analysis based on the meta-model of Bandler and Grinder (1975b; Brancaleone, Buffardi, & Traversa, 2008), which, in the humanistic tradition of Carl Rogers, refers to the person not as the “patient,” but as the “client” or “customer”:

Logoanalysis is a tool which aims to grant the “customer” access to deep structures of language and thought. . . . The clinician using consciential logoanalysis does nothing but invite the “customer” to look for deeper layers in the phrases expressed in ordinary language; thus, the patient is inclined to reflect and deepen their own feelings about a certain aspect of their own existence. (Buffardi, 2013, p. 33)

With this in mind, we apply one of the fundamental guiding principles of existential therapy: noninvasiveness. As a matter of fact, consciential logoanalysis facilitates the epoché phase of the philosophical “phenomenological reduction” (Husserl, 1913/1982), in which the clinician’s preconceptions are temporarily “bracketed” or set aside, and helps the “customer” to work on her or his awareness of her or his own existentiell world. This practice results in a more concrete and constructive form of interpersonal dialog, as described by existential psychotherapist Ernesto Spinelli (personal communication, May 24, 2014). According to Spinelli, such a dialog takes place when two people are truly talking to each other toward the mutual goal of reaching some common aim; on the other hand, when two people outwardly pretend to engage in a dialog, but, in reality, each rigidly holds fast to her or his own idea or position, that is instead what Spinelli calls a twicelog (in Italian the two words are more similar: dialogo and duologo).

In this internal clarification process, customers will explore “relatedness,” their being “in inseparable relation to everything else” (Spinelli, 2015, p. 16), as well as their “worldhoods” (p. 176) in the four simultaneously experienced existential worlds, the first three described by Binswanger (1944, p. 69) as Umwelt, the “world around” of nature, objectiveness, rules, nomos; Mitwelt, the other actors in the individual’s existential environment, affections, social relations, fleeting encounters, the crowd, the “people”; Eigenwelt, our internal sounding board, personal characteristics, self-reflexivity, subjectivity, and the sensation of individuality; and last, what existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen (2015, p. 25) terms Überwelt, referring to spirituality, creativity, the transpersonal world, transcendence, synthesis, the profound resonance of faith.

Step by step, through the existential analysis of the emotional drives that have influenced the individual’s choices over time, immersing oneself fully in an area where awareness, if it is present, is not complete, customers can make conscious contact with their personal archetypes or models, recognize their current relevance or fallacy, and find or create more appropriate alternatives to resolve their existential difficulties. Subsequently, this allows people to consciously choose and recreate their own life project, a process that inevitably involves the destruction or dismantling of old ways of seeing themselves and the world in order to make way for the new. This new awareness, which supports the revision and expansion of their mental internal maps and/or conscious will, brings them closer to existential clarification. An in-depth analysis of the fundamental assumptions by which clients have chosen and elaborated their archetypal models regarding their basic sense of self in the world, leads them eventually to the crucial identity phase: Archetypes, like models, constitute the existential preconditions for the creation of one’s own individual identity.

However, in many contexts, not only those closely linked to therapies and assistance professions but also in social, political, or philosophical debate, I have seen over the years that while the importance and usefulness of identity is always recognized, its fallacy is frequently overlooked. Identity is fundamentally fallacious, because it is a concept constructed in retrospect to define the limits of what is not identical to me, of what is not identical to my family, to my social group, to my cohort, and so on, and then it is defined only in the encounter with other individuals, with other things, and so on. During the existential analysis of their own subjective sense of identity, clients can and do become more aware of that fallacy concerning identity. Such cognitivization wavers when the dialog meets a moment of existential “crisis” that could potentially be resolved through the rejection of old, anachronistic, or outmoded archetypes, and elaboration of new models sufficient for the here and the now needs of the individual, or in any case, coming closer to their own sensitivity and being in greater harmony with their own wishes. In other words, even in the event of having not found any valid “alternatives” to solve the current existential problem, the mere deeper awareness that some aspects of identity hitherto perceived as autonomous, unchangeable, and therefore, immutable and irresistible, are rather, relatively plastic and subject to revision, alteration, or elaboration—and thus at least in some measure subject to the person’s willful exercise of existential freedom—reduces the danger of archetypes becoming overly limiting, constrictive, and deterministic forces in people’s lives.

Conclusion

If individuals in existential therapy can learn the existentiell models of their own world and become aware of the discrete presence of archetypes that, at least to some degree, may be modified, this profoundly empowering knowledge provides the tools to manage their existentiell worldhood more autonomously in the present and future. That is to say, the existential reelaboration of that client’s so-called archetype could become an instrument of care that improves their quality of life. The primarily descriptive process of existential analysis or therapy helps the individual to readjust and reshape the sometimes limiting model of self and world—despite it being, at least to some extent, “archetypal” in nature—so as to live more authentically, meaningfully, purposefully, and freely, fulfilling the contextual existential needs of the present and yet to be determined future. In this way, existential therapy that practically helps to perceive, recognize, process, and elaborate archetypes or models, promotes the expansion of the person’s internal mental maps, and facilitates her or his sense of freedom and search for new possibilities in life.