When Patterns Start Behaving Like People

When Patterns Start Behaving Like People

*Reflections from a trainee psychotherapist on archetypes as autonomous patterns*

One of the strangest discoveries in my training so far has been this: sometimes it feels less like people “have” patterns, and more like patterns have people. Clients sit down and tell me stories that are utterly their own particular families, specific jobs, one-off relationships and yet a quiet part of my mind whispers, “I’ve met this pattern before.” Not in a dismissive way, but in the sense that something older than either of us is moving through the room.

That’s where Jung’s idea of archetypes as "autonomous patterns" began to make sense to me, not as abstract theory but as something I could literally feel in the transference and countertransference.

Archetypes as Autonomous Patterns

Jung described archetypes as structural elements of the collective unconscious: deep, inherited patterns that organise how we imagine, feel and relate (Jung, 1959). They are not just ideas about roles; they are more like organising principles that generate images, emotions and typical story-lines the Hero, the Lover, the Outcast, the Wise Old Man.

Crucially, Jung insisted that archetypes are autonomous: they behave “as if they were independent personalities” (Jung, 1959). In other words, they don’t simply sit there waiting to be used by the ego. They push, pull, seduce, frighten, and sometimes they hijack a situation. Samuels (1985) talks about archetypes as both psychic structures and culturally mediated stories  shared patterns that are kept alive by myths, films, family scripts and religious narratives, all of which provide fresh costumes for very old dramas.

Hillman goes even further and treats archetypal patterns as “persons” in the psyche not literally, but as a way of respecting their intensity and persistence (Hillman, 1975). Knox (2003) brings this down to earth by linking archetypes with early attachment patterns: repeated relational experiences become deeply encoded, and over time they take on a life of their own, feeling “bigger than personal.”

For me as a trainee, “autonomous” is not a mystical word. It is a clinical one. It describes those moments when everyone in the room starts behaving as if some invisible script is being followed, even when nobody consciously agreed to it.

How Archetypes Show Themselves in the Room

In practice, an archetypal pattern announces itself less with trumpets and more with a "felt sense" that the emotional scale has just increased.

A client describes a rather ordinary disappointment, and suddenly the affect is that of total betrayal. Another talks about a new relationship, and the intensity in the room feels more like life-or-death rescue than mutual curiosity. Someone recounts a workplace disagreement, and I notice that internally I’ve already picked a villain and a victim even though I’ve only heard one side.

These are the hours where I feel less like an “objective professional” and more like a junior actor who has wandered onto a stage where the play started long before I arrived. In supervision, my supervisor will ask, “What role were you being asked to play there?” and it becomes obvious: Saviour, Judge, Betrayer, Perfect Listener, Absent Father. The archetypal pattern doesn’t just want to be described; it wants to be "lived".

Kalsched (1996), writing about trauma, describes how certain inner systems can mobilise like a defensive “myth” that takes over perception and behaviour in order to protect a vulnerable core. Even when we are not dealing with overt trauma, I recognise that flavour: something in the room feels bigger, older, more insistent than the present day story alone can explain.

What Happens When You Name an Archetype?

The really interesting and slightly unnerving question is what happens when you "see" the pattern and begin to name it.

I don’t mean saying to a client, “You are now under the influence of a Wounded Healer archetype.” I mean the more tentative kind of naming that sounds like:

1. “It feels as if you end up in the rescuer position again and again.”
2. “There’s something here that reminds me of being a child waiting to be chosen.”
3. “This attraction feels bigger than either of us personally, doesn’t it?”

Jung said that when unconscious contents become conscious, they lose some of their autonomy, but not their energy, at least not immediately (Jung, 1963). My experience is that, at first, the opposite seems to happen: they "flare up".

A client who recognises, “I keep falling for unavailable people,” often finds themselves pulled even harder towards exactly that kind of person in the following weeks. Another who sees how they cast authorities as tyrants may suddenly feel persecuted by me for very minor boundary-keeping. In my own psyche, once I had language for my “rescuer” tendencies, there was a phase where I wanted to rescue everyone".

Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) would describe this more psychoanalytically as the way in which interpretations can lead to an intensification of the transference: once something is named, the libido floods into it. Freud’s “repetition compulsion” the tendency to repeat painful patterns in the hope of mastering them (Freud, 1920) feels very close to what I see clinically once an archetypal script has been spotted. The psyche seems to say, “Now that we see it, can we finally get a different ending?”

So the first response of the archetypal pattern from where I sit is not to politely bow out. It often "fights for its life".

Bending the Pattern: Ego, Archetype and Negotiation

The more hopeful stage is what I think of as negotiation. Once the pattern has been named and has done its dramatic intensification, there comes a point where ego and archetype begin to “talk.”

Clinically, this looks like clients being able to hold two positions at once:

“Part of me wants to throw myself into this drama again; another part can see exactly where it leads.”

They are still drawn to the same roles saviour, abandoned child, heroic sufferer, seductive other but they can now comment on the pull rather than being entirely inside it. Stein (1998) describes individuation as precisely this kind of dialogue between ego and archetypal factors, rather than simple possession.

In my own work, I recognise negotiation in tiny behavioural experiments. A client who always over-discloses to keep me close tries not to tell me everything and waits to see whether I still stay. Another, who usually disappears after feeling ashamed, names the shame instead of enacting it. On my side, it might mean noticing an urge to be the “perfect understanding therapist” and instead allowing myself to be more ordinary and authentic, even if that risks disappointing the role projected onto me.

Knox (2003) helps by linking these patterns back to early attachment: when I can see that an “archetypal” abandonment fear is also a very real, historically rooted expectation of others, it becomes more workable. The pattern stops being a mysterious curse and becomes something we can feel, think about and slowly modify.

At this stage, the archetype doesn’t vanish. But it begins to bend. The script is no longer the only possible outcome.

Integration: When the Pattern Loses Its Absoluteness

Over time, some archetypal patterns do seem to lose their absolutist demand. The client who always needed to be the Rescuer discovers they can say no and remain loveable. The one who could only feel alive in catastrophic love begins to tolerate steadier, less dramatic connection. The Outcast story relaxes enough that belonging no longer feels impossible.

Seen from the outside, these shifts are often modest: different partners chosen, slightly different responses under stress, fewer all-or-nothing decisions. Inside, they can feel like a change in gravitational pull. Jung’s line “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” (Jung, 1963)  feels less like a clever quote and more like a literal description of what is happening.

Hillman (1975) suggests that we don’t so much “cure” archetypal patterns as find imaginal ways of living with them that don’t destroy us. Kalsched (1996) makes a similar point in trauma work: the defensive inner “myths” are honoured for how they once protected the psyche, even as they are gently revised so that they no longer require self-sabotage or isolation.

From my trainee vantage point, integration looks like clients and myself having a slightly wider repertoire of responses. The archetype remains, but it is no longer running the entire show.

The Temptation to Turn Everything into Archetype

There is a danger here: once you get good at seeing archetypes everywhere, you can start doing archetype-hunting instead of therapy.

I notice this in myself on tired days. A client talks about being let down, and my mind jumps to “Victim”; another is angry, and I mentally label “Warrior”; a third evokes an uncomfortable warmth, and I am tempted to file it under “Lover archetype” and move on. This can be subtly dehumanising. Samuels (1985) warns that archetypal language can either deepen a person’s individuality or flatten it, depending on how it is used.

There is also a moral risk. If everything is mythic, accountability can slip. Infidelity becomes “Eros at work”; cruelty becomes “shadow material”; serious boundary violations are reframed as “soul encounters.” Wachtel (2011) and Kalsched (1996) both emphasise that whatever theoretical language we use, we are still dealing with real people and real consequences. The fantasy that “the archetype made me do it” is as dangerous as “the unconscious made me do it.”

As a trainee, I rely heavily on supervision and on my own therapy to keep this in check. The rule of thumb I’m slowly learning is: if my theory starts to protect me from feeling the ordinary human reality of what is happening, I’ve gone too far into the archetypal clouds.

Personal Conclusion: Living with Autonomous Patterns

So, what have I learned so far about archetypes as autonomous patterns?

First, that autonomy is not just a poetic description. Some patterns really do behave as if they have their own agenda. They call up emotions, fantasies and role-plays that can sweep through a room.

Second, that naming them is both powerful and dangerous. At first, they often react by intensifying as if trying to secure their place. If therapist and client can tolerate that phase without acting it out, then a different kind of conversation becomes possible.

Third, that over time these patterns can bend. They remain part of the psyche’s “furniture,” but they become negotiable rather than absolute. And that shift from being run by a story to being able to talk with it feels, to me, like one of the most sacred parts of the work.

Finally, that as a trainee I am just as subject to these autonomous patterns as my clients are. My rescuer, my hero, my outcast, my lover, my sage they all queue up at the door before each session. My job is not to pretend I don’t have them, but to know them well enough that they don’t secretly seize the chair.

On good days, that feels possible. On other days, I go back to Jung, Knox, Hillman and Kalsched, to my supervisor, and to my own therapy, to remind myself that learning to live with autonomous patterns not erase them is part of what this path is asking of me.

References

1. Bowlby, J. (1988) "A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development". London: Routledge.
2. Freud, S. (1920) ‘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.
3. Hillman, J. (1975) "Re-Visioning Psychology". New York: Harper & Row.
4. Jung, C.G. (1959) "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious". Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9 (Part 1). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
5. Jung, C.G. (1963) "Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy". Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 14. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
6. Kalsched, D. (1996) "The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit". London: Routledge.
7. Knox, J. (2003) "Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind". Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge.
8. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) "The Language of Psycho-Analysis". Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
9. Samuels, A. (1985) "Jung and the Post-Jungians". London: Routledge.
10. Stein, M. (1998) "Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction" Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Company.
11. Wachtel, P.L. (2011) "Therapeutic Communication: Knowing What to Say When". New York: Guilford Press.