The Collective Unconscious in the Room (Part 2)

Notes From Training (Part II)

When Archetypes Start Directing the Session

By the time I finished writing the first page on the collective unconscious, I felt very grown-up about it: archetypes as deep templates, myths as cultural memory, everything neatly framed and referenced. Then I went back into my next week of sessions and realised something slightly unnerving: it isn’t just that people carry archetypes; sometimes it feels like archetypes carry people (Jung, 1981).

Clients would sit down, tell me a story that was utterly personal to them, and some quiet part of my mind would whisper, “I’ve seen this one before.” Not in a dismissive way, but in the sense that this pattern has been walking around the human world for a very long time, and today it has chosen this room to rehearse its next scene. That’s when Jung’s idea of archetypes as “autonomous” began to feel less like theory and more like a clinical weather report (Jung, 1966).

When the Pattern Wants Something

On the surface, clients often say things like, “I don’t know why I keep doing this,” or, “I swore I wouldn’t get into this situation again, and here I am.” If I listen with a Jungian ear, it sounds less like random self-sabotage and more like something in the psyche trying to finish a story it started a long time ago (Jung, 1981).

The person who keeps falling for unavailable partners might be unconsciously re-staging the child reaching for the distracted parent, or the exile trying to get back into the city. It looks like “dating trouble,” but it feels more like a myth that refuses to accept the previous ending and is still searching for a different one (Campbell, 1949).

Another person keeps finding themselves under harsh authority: punishing bosses, rigid systems, relationships with lots of rules. On one level, it’s “stress at work” or “another controlling partner.” On another level, it’s an ongoing negotiation with the inner King, Judge, or Father who promises safety in exchange for total compliance (Eliade, 1963).

I don’t say to people, “By the way, you’re currently possessed by an archetype,” because I enjoy having clients and would like some of them to come back. But inwardly, I make a note: the biographical details are unique; the emotional choreography is suspiciously familiar (Jung, 1964).

The Session as a Small Theatre

One of the rude discoveries of training is that the archetypal drama does not stay neatly in the client’s life; it wanders into the therapy room, pulls up a chair, and starts rearranging the furniture (Jung, 1964). A client talks about a love triangle, and suddenly I feel protective of them and irrationally annoyed with the other two people I have never met.

In another session, someone describes a critical, intrusive parent, and without quite realising it I start trying to prove that I am the opposite: endlessly understanding, never disappointing, the “good” figure at last. If I don’t slow down, I get drafted into roles: Rescuer, Judge, Betrayer, Perfect Listener, Absent Father. The archetypal pattern does not just want to be described; it wants to be played (Jung, 1966).

This is where countertransference becomes less of a mysterious therapist word and more of a stage direction. When I feel an urge to rescue, punish, impress, seduce, or confess that seems slightly too intense for the situation, it’s usually a sign that the script has been handed to me and I’ve started reading my lines. Supervision is basically the place where I come back afterwards and say, “So… I think I got cast again” (Ogden, 1994).

Repetition as Myth, Not Stupidity

Freud talked about the “compulsion to repeat,” the way we recreate painful situations instead of avoiding them, as if some part of us is stubbornly unconvinced by common sense (Freud, 1955). Seen through a Jungian lens, repetition starts to look less like stupidity and more like myth: the psyche repeating a pattern that hasn’t yet been fully seen, grieved, or transformed (Jung, 1981).

Clients will say, “I feel like I’m cursed,” or, “It’s the same story with different people.” Shame usually follows: I must be weak; I must be broken. Depth psychology offers a kinder translation: something in you is loyal to a very old scene and hasn’t yet worked out another way to live it (Jung, 1966).

Attachment theory drags this idea down to earth in a helpful way: we tend to seek what feels familiar, not what is good for us. If closeness once meant unpredictability or emotional hunger, part of us will keep drifting towards that pattern because it feels like “home,” even when home hurt (Bowlby, 1969).

In the consulting room, repetition often shows up as clients testing the same edge again and again: cancelling, arriving late, pulling away just when things get close. On paper it looks like “non-compliance.” In the transference, it looks more like the archetype of the Abandoned One checking whether this relationship will end like all the others. My job is to name the pattern without humiliating the person living inside it (Ainsworth et al., 1978).

When the Archetype Knocks on the Therapist’s Door

It would be very convenient if archetypes only showed up on the client’s side of the relationship and treated me as an objective, myth-free professional. Unfortunately, I also have a history, a family, a nervous system, and a full set of unfinished stories. Archetypes love material (📄 there is erotic transference and archetypal erotic transference something I will talk about soon), and I arrive with plenty (Hillman, 1996).

There are clients who light up my inner Hero, the part that wants to rescue everyone and send them home with a neatly resolved narrative. There are others who press on my Orphan: the part that wants to be liked and fears being found inadequate. And occasionally a client wanders in who speaks directly to my own longing to be seen or chosen, and suddenly the room feels much warmer than usual (Jung, 1966).

When an archetypal pattern in the client meets a complementary pattern in me, sparks can fly. This is one way erotic or “special” transference and countertransference sneak up: the personal chemistry sits on top of a structural match, like two myths finding each other attractive. The danger isn’t that feeling exists; it’s when both people unconsciously agree to let the myth run the session (Mitchell, 1988).

Here again, supervision functions like a slightly stern but kind dramaturg. Instead of framing it as “fate,” I’m encouraged to ask, “What in me is responding so strongly to what’s in them?” Hillman’s idea of the daimon a shaping force in character and calling helps me treat these moments less as romantic plotlines and more as invitations to know my own psyche better (Hillman, 1996).

Shrinking the Archetype Just Enough

If I get too excited about archetypes, everything becomes mythic and nothing is accountable. Adultery turns into “Eros,” cruelty becomes “Shadow work,” burnout is “a rite of passage,” and actual human consequences quietly vanish from the story. That way lies trouble, and possibly a fitness-to-practise hearing (Turner, 1969).

If I throw archetypes out completely, everything becomes behavioural: a list of cognitions to challenge and habits to change. There’s usefulness in that, but something gets flattened. The tragedy and depth of what people carry starts to feel like a set of bad routines to break with enough willpower and worksheets (Mitchell, 1988).

The sweet spot, for me as a trainee, is to hold both: to sense that a client is walking an ancient path and to stay close to the very specific details of their actual life this body, this family, this housing situation, this nervous system. Myth gives scale; attachment and trauma frameworks give precision and responsibility (Bowlby, 1969).

Jung’s famous line, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” has quietly become a working motto (Jung, 1981). My task is not to delete archetypes like some dodgy app; it is to help people recognise when a pattern is driving the car from the back seat and to move it, gently, into conversation.

Listening for the Story Beneath the Story

Training hasn’t stopped me listening to the literal story who said what, which event followed which, but it has shifted how I listen. I find myself tracking the shape of the narrative: is this a tale of exile, of initiation, of betrayal, of sacrifice, of the clever trickster slipping through impossible gaps? (Propp, 1968).

Clients rarely say, “I identify strongly with the Wounded Healer archetype.” They say things like, “Everyone comes to me with their problems, and I’m exhausted,” or, “If I stop being useful, I’m scared nobody will stay.” Somewhere underneath those sentences is a casting decision: my role is to save, not to need (Campbell, 1949).

When we can notice the “role” together, something loosens. The point is not to banish the archetype no more caring, no more courage but to widen the cast list. Maybe the Wounded Healer is allowed a day off. Maybe the Tragic Lover is allowed a relationship that doesn’t require a catastrophe to feel “real.” This is where Rogers’ deceptively simple emphasis on empathy and acceptance does its quiet work: people relax enough to experiment with being more than one character (Rogers, 1961).

Where This Leaves Me as a Trainee

At this point, I don’t feel like a master of archetypes. I feel more like a junior stagehand who has finally realised that there is a director in the wings. Some days I catch the pattern early, name it gently, and something genuinely shifts. Other days I realise, about forty-seven minutes too late, that the myth has been running the session and I have been enthusiastically playing my assigned role (Jung, 1964).

Those are humbling hours, but they are also the ones that teach the most. They show me exactly where my own unexamined stories still live and how quickly I can be recruited into someone else’s drama when those stories are touched. Training, it turns out, is partly about learning theory and partly about discovering just how porous your own psyche actually is (Jung, 1966) ; (Hillman, 1996).

The consolation is that the work is rarely boring. To sit with another human being and sense, beneath the details, how an old pattern is trying to move through their life and to help them find a less destructive way of living that pattern feels like a privilege, even on the days when my own archetypes are in a mood. If Part I was about discovering that the collective unconscious exists, Part II is about discovering that it also has opinions. My developing task is not to obey every one of them, but to hear them clearly enough that I can say, with the client, “This story has been running us for a long time. Do we still want it to?” (Jung, 1981) ; (Campbell, 1949).

References

• Ainsworth, M.D.S., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E. and Wall, S. (1978) Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books.
• Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Eliade, M. (1963) Myth and Reality. New York: Harper & Row.
• Freud, S. (1955) ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, in Strachey, J. (ed. and trans.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 1–64.
• Hillman, J. (1996) The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Random House.
• Jung, C.G. (1964) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books.
• Jung, C.G. (1966) Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Jung, C.G. (1981) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9 (Part 1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Mitchell, S.A. (1988) Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Ogden, T.H. (1994) ‘The analytic third: working with intersubjective clinical facts’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75, pp. 3–19.
• Propp, V. (1968) Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd edn. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Rogers, C.R. (1961) On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. London: Constable.
• Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.