[Music]
Today I'd like to talk to you about the
Jungian theory of archetypes. The Jungian
theory of archetypes was a theory
developed by Carl Jung.  He
was a student of Sigmund Freud.  They had
a falling out and I'm not going to go
into the details of how that happened
but he ended up developing his own
theories of the unconscious, quite
distinct from what Freud had come up
with. What he found after
considerable thought and study was a
thing called "the collective unconscious"
Now, there's no scientific proof that
there is such a thing as a collective
unconscious. It's simply a theory that
organizes a lot of human behavior and a
lot of aspects of human psychology into
a single unitary whole.  A lot of writers
have interpreted Jung's theory as
implying that there are gods and
goddesses that are somehow
resident in each of our minds, as
we participate in the collective
unconscious. Men are told that they
are the repository for at least four
archetypes. According to one author, these
archetypes are: King, Warrior, Magician and
Lover. Other interpretations of Jung's
idea have included heroes as well as
semi divine beings that somehow come to
the earth to save everyone (heros).
Heracles, sometimes called Hercules, was
one of these. Jesus was one of these. the
Buddha was one of these. There are
people who ask us to accept that we
recognize them as heroic images because
we have a template in our head that
tells us when we are being heroic. At the
same time, there are also female
archetypes and these include, most
importantly, the mother, the Maiden the
Crone and the healer.
We're asked to recognize that these
archetypes live in each one of us and
somehow guide our behavior.  My answer to
that is pretty simple -  Charles Darwin. In
fact, that's one of the reasons that this
video is titled:  "Archetypes: Carl
Jung meets Charles Darwin" and that's
because I want to offer a pretty simple
hypothesis.  If there is such a thing as a
collective unconscious and if there are
such things as archetypes that are
somehow resident in
the human psyche, they have to have come
from our evolutionary history.  Every
aspect of humanity; every behavior, every
trait, every habit, every survival
strategy -  all of them come from the need
for our species to survive and to
contribute to our evolution.  If a human trait
doesn't help us survive, it's not going
to be preserved. At least that's the way
it was in our early evolutionary history.
nowadays, I'm afraid we preserve lots of
things that are not really so good for
our survival, (and here's a) case in point.
What's the advantage of having
templates that help us recognize
divinity, and the various different
shades of divinity? The answer is
pretty simple.
they help us help other people.  A lot of
today's writers who deal with archetypes
are telling us that the archetypes
allow us to become who we're "meant to be"
so that when a woman has a baby for
example, the more she identifies with the
mother archetype, the better off she'll be
and the better a mother she'll be.  Another one
tells us that every woman needs to
recognize the Crone or the old wise
woman, so that she can "own herself" -
identify herself - with her wisdom and
somehow allow it to come out more fully.
People who believe in archetypes tell us
that all deities; all gods and all
goddesses, correspond to the different
archetypes, so that, for example, the Hindu
god Ganesha is a hero, a sort of warrior
type, and we find the same presence in the Greek
god Ares, the Roman god Mars, the Yoruban
deity called Ogoun. The mother goddess,
for example, is somehow identified with
the moon.  (All of these are identified
with different planets), and she is the
same as Lakshmi in Hinduism or Juno in
Roman mythology or Hera in Greek
mythology.  Then the old wise woman is
said to correspond to Kali in Hinduism
to Hecate in Greece, Sekhmet in Egypt and
so forth.  This part *does* make a lot of
sense to me. If human beings have a kind
of template, telling them what the ideal
human types are, it can give people
something to live up to.
But what's the evolutionary advantage in
believing yourself to be "like unto a god"
or like unto a goddess, and the answer is
that I don't believe there is any
advantage there, and that compels me to
come to a different interpretation of
Jungian archetypes.  Archetypes are not
gods and goddesses that live within all
of us.
Archetypes are templates; "recognition
templates" in our brains that allow us to
see divinity, nobility and purity,
sanctity and holiness in other people,
here's one of the best-known architypic
images from the Western world.  The
Virgin Mary, also called the "Blessed
Mother". I actually like "Blessed Mother"
better than "Virgin Mary" because I don't
like the idea that women have to be
virgins in order to achieve some sort of
sanctity, and because what sanctifies the
Blessed Mother is not that she's a
virgin -  it's that she's a MOTHER, so if a
mother were to think of herself and her
infant and somehow see something divine
or sacred in it she will have thought
about herself as a sacred being and
thinking of ourselves as deities as
heroes as leaders and so forth has a way
of breeding arrogance.  In our
earliest evolutionary history, when we
first appeared as a species, we lived
according to tribal mores tribal
traditions, and tribal rules. Of course, none
of these rules were written down.  None of
them were codified into scriptures.
people had an instinctive (intuitive) feeling for
what was right and what was wrong, and
when those instinctive feelings went
off-track, the people around them would
guide them back onto the path that they
needed to be on.  It's not so much a path as a
way of relating to other people.
Arrogance and self-importance
are simply a bad idea in most tribal
cultures.  If a woman is overconfident in
her wisdom, and her ability to brew herbs
to make medicines, she's liable to
either let one of her patients fail - die,
or she might actually kill them.  What I
think makes more sense is for individual
people to grapple with low self-esteem,
lack of confidence, uncertainty, and a
lack of confidence that made them
second-guess their own actions before
they took them, [to] think over every action
three times before they actually decide
that it's a good idea and they should
act on it.  Carpenters have a saying
"measure twice, cut once"  If you're
confident in yourself, as a deity - if you
think that you're an instance of a god
you're very likely to make a mistake.
Gods don't make mistakes, but you do, so
if you're a young
man, and you identify with the hero
archetype, then you think of your actions
two or three times.  When you come back to
your people, when you return to your
village, come back to your tribe with the
food that you have hunted and you throw
down the antelope before all the people,
and help them to stay fed; help them to
eat, then you're much more likely to be
regarded as a hero but if you take your
own heroism for granted, before you start
hunting or right while you're hunting,
you're liable to be a little less
careful, and instead of you impaling the
antelope on your spear, you might just
get impaled on their horns. What makes
more sense to me for the Jungian theory
of archetypes, is to turn it on its head,
at least compared to today's authors, and
contemporary psychologists who work with
Jung's theories.  Instead of seeing a
goddess or a God in yourself, see them in
other people.  When we look at
When we look at
tribal societies, that's largely what we
find.  We don't see people
acting out the low self-esteem or the
lack of confidence that makes them think
their actions through several times
before they act.
What we do see is that the tribes treat
people who have accomplished something
as though they were temporarily Gods or
demigods heroes or what have you.  The
woman has a child, and holding her
newborn baby in her arms, she worries
will there be postpartum infections that
could kill her.   She'll wonder if she can
take care of her baby well enough.  Does
she handle the child gently enough? Will
her milk be enough? Will there be enough
food in the village for her to stay fed
so that she can continue to feed her
baby? Lots of doubts appear and every
possible scenario for things going wrong
will eventually run through her head so she's
better off, and her child is better off,
if she has some doubts, but that's not
the way the tribe responds.  The tribe
celebrates the birth and treats the
woman who has given birth, especially to
her first child, as though she is a
heroine. She has given the tribe another
person, a girl who will grow up to have
more babies, and the tribe "shall flourish
from the number of its population" or
she's given birth to a
boy, and that boy could grow up to be a
hunter, who feeds his people.  He could be
a warrior who defends his people, and as
a result, the tribe has a better chance
of surviving.  A better chance of staying
together.  When people think of
themselves as gods and goddesses, or as
as heroes and heroines, as Chiefs and
wise people, as shamans, as wise old crones
they get arrogant, and they're prone to
make mistakes, but when they're seeing
through the through the lens of the
templates implied in the Jungian theory
of archetypes,
then those who do well for their tribes
and do well for their people get
rewarded more and encouraged to go out
and repeat the same action.
But, think of what the action consisted
of for the person who carried it out. If
it was a hunter ... Yes, they may have thrown
the spear that brought down the antelope
when they were hunting (I've never been a
hunter in the wild so I can't really
tell you too much about it) but when the
people think of the action, they think of
the hunter coming back with the meat
with the protein, and everyone sings
their name: "So and so is a great hunter.
look what he has brought. We will eat for
two days because of us because of this.
Let all the women sing his name; let all
the men honour his spear"  These kinds of
recitations and songs are common in
tribal cultures, where people who do good
things are appreciated, but when the
hunter remembers the same event, he'll
remember (fro example) that once he went in and he
didn't have a proper grip on his spear
and he couldn't throw it. There are going
to be lots of things that went through
his mind, and for the hunter those are
part of the action, too.  The people see the
meat.  The hunter thought; the hunter
remembers the planning, the foresight, the
skill, the care and caution that went
into his hunt, [and] that allowed him to come
back not victorious, but successful.  And
the people eat, the women sing his name,
all the guys pat him on the back and say
"well done!" That night, everyone
goes to bed on a full stomach. The people
see him as a hero so he doesn't need to
see himself as a hero. He sees himself as
an imperfect hunter, who had an excellent
chance of coming home with nothing, but
his people don't see him that way. They
see the skin of the antelopes stretched
out in a frame, ready to be made into
clothing, they see the meat
hanging over their fires.  I'm going to
give you my brief summary of the Jungian
theory of archetypes.  Archetypes are not
gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines, and wise
people that live inside us.  Archetypes
are templates that allow us to see those
beings those entities in *other people*.
We sense the presence of the hero in the
successful hunter.
He doesn't sense it in himself. We sense
the presence of the great mother goddess
in the woman who has just given birth to
a child.  She doesn't see herself that way.
She worries whether or not her child
will grow up to adulthood. We don't see
ourselves as the chief, the king of
heaven, [like] Zeus or Indra.  When we hear a man
speak in a tribal council and his words
are regarded as wise, he wonders how he
could have put it better.  He wonders if
he was really as convincing as he wanted
to be, but in the end, standing up to
speak, holding the Talking Stick in [a]
tribal council, he wonders if he did the
best job he could, but the people were
convinced by his argument, so they see
him as a wise man. They [might] see him as a
potential chief. We don't see archetypes
in our selves because they don't exist in
our selves.  The lens that allows us to
look through the archetypes to see other
people, and see them as heroes, heroines
wise people, shamans
Crones.
[it's like] a one-way mirror.  We can see other
people through those templates, but when
we start using them to look at ourselves
we can become arrogant, and arrogant
people make mistakes.  In our early
evolutionary history, we couldn't afford
that many mistakes.  Someone who saw
themselves as imbued with the power of a
god or a goddess, [or] an eternal spirit
[or] anything like that - when we see ourselves
as more or better than we actually are
[while living] in a tribal context - we threaten the life
of the tribe. But, when we see them in
other people, we help the tribe to
survive.  So that's my summary of my
interpretation of archetypes and the
collective unconsciousness and Jungian
psychology.  {However], if it hadn't been for the
work of Carl Jung
I probably wouldn't have been able to
arrive at this hypothesis and yet in
terms of the most important theory for
understanding human beings in science
today - Darwin's theory of evolution - I
certainly would not have been able to
realize that tribal living means so much
more than simply living together
it also means having the capacity to
love one another so completely that the
reality of the person is ignored for a
time and we see only what is best in
them and that means that the young woman
who had a difficult birth, or the hunter
who had a difficult hunt, are still
motivated to go out and do it again and
if needs be, die in childbirth or give
their life as they try to take down
another antelope to feed their people.
We're evolved to get along with one
another
we're evolved to be of service to one
another and the "self"-centered
interpretation of the Jungian theory of
archetypes where we're encouraged to
identify ourselves as gods or goddesses
doesn't help with that.
So [for me] the real message of the theory of
archetypes for people in their
day-to-day lives is as simple as
this: appreciate the people around you.
See the best in them.  Encourage them to
repeat their good actions.  Ultimately we
are evolved to love one another,
to respect one another, and look at
*them* [not ourselves] through the lens of the archetypes
that exist in our minds to [help us] admire them.
Thank you.
[Music]
