ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype - 2008 Issue 2

The birth of a child, the death of a parent are occasions which activate the archetypal substrata which support our common lives. To recognize universal themes when we go through such initiatory experiences grounds us in a process larger than these personal events; they give consolation in moments of crisis as well as support in the daily repetition of the ordinary events of livings. We are thrown into the vortex of the human process; we, ourselves, becomes events in human history, perhaps anonymous, but none the less essential to its evolution in a particular time and place. These events take us beyond the personal into the great chain of being of which we are a part. The positive accomplishments and the negative aberrations are parts of the evolutionary process and we must accept them all as factors in the equation. One reason, beyond pure human sympathy, that child abuse may evoke such outrage is that it is racial suicide, for we are the agents of the renewal of the race, and the violation and sacrifice of a child is an obscene denial of one's responsibility in the process.
 
These initiatory events are preserved and recalled in the symbolic structure of our psyches. Such structures are configurations of images precipitated from the unconscious by the feeling and affect associated with such events, those encounters with other persons and with institutions which are the part and parcel of the minutes and hours of the passing days.
 
For many people such configurations are derived unconsciously from the cultural and religious institutions in which they live; they may not be aware of the generating energy and feelings which the symbols both preserve and evoke, nor of their sources in the cultural and collective unconscious. As each person becomes more aware of those symbols which have numinosity for him, he can begin to recognize which of them evolve from his own personal associations with occasions and persons, and which arise from the deeper layers of the psyche. Since an archetype itself exists within the unconscious, it is unconscious also. As we know about electricity only from its manifestations, so we only know of archetypes from the images which they generate in dreams and in our mental and physical behavior patterns. An increase in energy around a configuration of events and our reaction to it provide clues for us to recognize that an archetype has been touched. It is all too easy, because of the immediate power of an event to be caught in the moment and to believe it as a total statement of reality. If, however, we can recognize the moment as only one manifestation in a specific form, we can relate it to similarly generated moments for other persons in other times and places. The archetypal patter, the underlying energy then becomes visible and recognizable. An Archetype (a pattern of energy) crystallizes out of the unconscious. The patterns are expressed in symbols and by amplification of those symbols we can find the layers of meaning which every symbol carries. Because of this layering a symbol always carries connotative values; it is not a one to one equivalent.
 
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