The Archetype as Instinct and an Element of the Spirit
In 1919, as we have said, Jung used the term archetype for the first time, when he also drew a comparison between the archetype as a structuring factor in the psychic realm, and instinct as an organiser of an a priori nature in the biological realm.
He took as his starting-point “the incredibly refined instinct of propagation” in the
South American yucca moth and the complicated ceremony of fertilisation it performs with the yucca plant.
“The flowers of the yucca plant open for one night only. The moth takes the pollen
from one of the flowers and kneads it into a little pellet. Then it visits a second flower, cuts open the pistil, lays its eggs between the ovules and then stuffs the pellet into the funnelshaped opening of the pistil. Only once in its life does the moth carry out this complicated operation.”21
Such mysterious processes in the animal world, unchanging and constantly repeated, are possible only because of the inborn instinct underlying them in the form of an unconscious disposition, an instinct which organises and shapes these processes as if it possessed a prior “knowledge”.
It is an innate, unconscious knowledge, refined down to the last detail, of the network of connections running through the world.
In exactly the same way, archetypal motifs can be understood as expressing an a priori knowledge, a foreknowing of the behaviour appropriate in the primal situations of life.
Archetype and instinct are unconscious factors that exert an ordering function.
Therein lies their affinity:
“To the extent that the archetypes intervene in the shaping of conscious contents by regulating, modifying, and motivating them, they act like the instincts.”22
From this it is ut a short step to identifying the archetypes with “inherited, instinctive impulses and forms that can be observed in all living creatures”.23
In Jung’s later writings instinct is often used alongside the analogous concept
“pattern of behaviour”.24
By characterising the archetype as an instinct or pattern of behaviour Jung
described only one side of the model, namely its biological aspect.
Its opposite pole is characterised with equal justification as the “authentic element of spirit”.25
As we have seen, the archetype acts as a kind of unconscious “knowledge”, and
furthermore it represents a “spiritual model” in the Platonic sense.
Its “spirituality” is most clearly apparent in the immediate experience of its
manifestations, “an experience of fundamental importance”.26
A man can be profoundly affected by an archetypal content, because its manifestation in consciousness radiates all the power of a numen.
This numinous aspect “deserves the epithet ‘spiritual’ above all else”.27
Jung uses the example of a Protestant theologian who dreamt repeatedly that he was standing “on a mountain slope with a deep valley below, and in it a dark lake.
He knew in the dream that something had always prevented him from reaching the lake.
This time he resolved to go to the water.
As he approached the shore, everything grew dark and uncanny, and a gust of wind suddenly rushed over the face of the water.
He was seized by a panic fear, and awoke.”28
“The dreamer descends into his own depths” is Jung’s interpretation of the descent to the water.
What seizes hold of him and throws him into a panic is hardly the dream image as such, for this is of the utmost simplicity: a gust of wind rushing over the lake.
The numinosity of the image springs rather from the autonomous dynamism inherent in every archetype.29
This manifests itself in the dream as the breath of the spirit, “which bloweth where it listeth”.
But, continues Jung, this is “uncanny, like everything whose cause we do not know – since it is not ourselves.
It hints at an unseen presence, a numen to which neither human expectations nor
the machinations of the will have given life.
It lives of itself, and a shudder runs through the man who thought that ‘spirit’ was merely what he believes, what he makes himself, what is said in books, or what people talk about.
But when it happens spontaneously it is a spookish thing, and primitive fear seizes the naive mind”.30
And Jung goes on, not without a quizzical, sidelong glance at this pillar of theology:
“Thus, in the dream, the breath of the pneuma frightened another pastor, a shepherd of the flock, who in the darkness of the night trod the reed-grown shore in the deep valley of the psyche.”31
The fear bound up with such an experience is commonly the first reaction to an encounter with an archetypal content, which because of its autonomy, and perhaps also because of its strangeness, cannot be consciously accepted as a content of one’s own psyche.
But the archetype gets through in spite of the fear.
“Often it drives with unexampled passion and remorseless logic towards its goal and draws the subject under its spell, from which despite the most desperate
resistance he is unable, and finally no longer even willing, to break free, because the experience brings with it a depth and fullness of meaning that was unthinkable before.” ~Aniela Jaffe. The Myth of Meaning, Page 37-41
