Archetype, Culture, and the Individual in Education

The Three Pedagogical Narratives

Clifford Mayes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429752940
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In Archetype, Culture, and the Individual in Education: The Three Pedagogical Narratives, Clifford Mayes presents a unique approach to understanding how Jungian principles can inform pedagogical theory and practice. In a time when what the educational historian Lawrence Cremin called the 'military-industrial-educational complex' and its standardized education are running roughshod over the psyche and spirit of students, Mayes deploys depth psychology, especially the work of Jung, to advance an archetypal approach to teaching and learning.

Mayes demonstrates how catastrophic it is to students when the classroom is governed by forces that objectify the individual in a paralysing stranglehold. He argues that one's life-narrative is significantly impacted by one's narrative as a learner; thus, schooling that commodifies learning and turns the student into an object has neuroticizing effects that will spread throughout that student's entire life. In Part I, Mayes explores the interaction between archetypes and various types of time—ultimately focusing on the individual but always mediated by 'the cultural unconscious'. In Parts II and III, he brings together education with (post-)Jungian and (post-)Freudian psychology, examining transference/countertransference in the classroom; the Jungian idea of 'the shadow' applied to educational processes; Jung's unique vision of 'the symbol' and its importance for educational theory; and Jung's 'transcendent function' as a prime educational modality. Mayes concludes by looking to the future of archetypal pedagogy.

This groundbreaking work in the emerging field of Jungian pedagogy is invaluable reading in Jungian Studies, depth psychological theory, educational theory, and for teachers and psychotherapists.

Part I

The archetype and time

Chapter 1

Narrative, archetype, and the individual

Gaining perspective(s): the necessity of narrative

Our narratives are the stories that we are always authoring, adding to, erasing from, and sometimes radically rewriting in our minds for the ‘creation of coherence’ in our lives (Linde, 1993).¹ Otherwise, we would merely have a log of events, a list of whatever ‘happened to happen’. Let that log be as complete as possible in minutest detail. Exhaustive and exhausting, it would also be meaningless. For if all we have is just a log of events, then there is really no story at all. A log’s mere events do not just automatically form into patterns to provide a perspective on themselves. They do not interpret themselves.

That is what human beings do. We provide the perspectives. We are the ‘meaning-making’ agents. We create coherence in our lives—or not. If one is unable to make any deeper connections in events, then one is in danger of being caught up in what Gebser (1985) called ‘a-perspectival madness’. Such a person is fragmented, unable to make connections. He is inchoate. This epistemological crisis is a feature of certain neuroses and psychoses, and it may, in the final analysis, be at the root of some of them, perhaps even all of them (Wilber, 2000). In any case, without any life-giving organizing narratives, life is devoid of meaning.

Our narratives are our meanings. Without them, a person may all too easily fall into either a lethargic depression—a ‘depressive position’—or into the terror of being fragmented, of shattering, of being persecuted, of ‘falling apart’—a ‘schizoid position’—as defined early in the history of psychoanalytic theory by Melanie Klein (Klein, 1932/1975). Meaning makes connections between parts to establish a pattern. Thus, meaning, essential to the health of the human being, is narratival patternicity.

Not even the hard sciences using their universal language of maths are immune to the need to create narratives.

Take, for example, the idea of ‘goodness of fit’ from the field of statistics. This refers to when the formula describing an anticipated pattern of events is compared against the sequence of the events as they actually turned out. If the discrepancy between what was predicted and what was observed is sufficiently low and there is only a very small mathematical remainder that falls below what random variation would have caused in any case, then there is a significant ‘goodness of fit’, and you can conclude with a certain degree of confidence that the sequence of events is meaningful according to what your formula anticipated. Your formula is meaningful.

Analogously, if the unfolding of sequences of events as we live our lives is close enough to how either our patterns of meaning predicted they would go or, post hoc, if we can find a pattern that does explain how they went, then we have a narratival ‘goodness of fit’ that engenders and reinforces our sense of meaning. I highlight ‘sense’ to imply that a person’s entire grasping of and being grasped by life, a subjective and intuitive inner process, is much more relevant to us as human beings than any objective, mathematical set of formulas could ever be.

Yet even a mathematical procedure like establishing goodness-of-fit has a narratival aspect. And the most subjectively nuanced narrative makes meaning by comparing intuitive impressions and against actual outcomes. Bridging the gap between the subjective and objective domains, our narrativizing in both of our major epistemological modes, subjective and objective, poetic or scientific, evidences our ability, indeed our inner imperative to dwell in various ‘realms of meaning’ (Phenix, 1964).

Even so, there is no maths to describe the love that flows between a mother and her child as they lie in bed together after a day in the park and then, after eating their favourite ice-cream from the same bowl sharing a spoon, they both, finally, gazing into each other’s eyes and stroking each other’s hair, drift off at the same moment to sleep. In what matters most to us in our lives, it is our ‘subjectivity’ that we consult. And rightly so. For meaning is most human when it is most humane, and when it is most humane, it is most ethical. It is the fostering of humane, and therefore, ethical narratives in educational processes that is the purpose of this book.

None of our narratives, however wide-ranging and ethical, accounts for absolutely everything. As for those things that don’t quite fit, we reconcile ourselves to the fact that all our meaning-systems come with a mysterious ‘surplus’. We are not gods. We are limited human beings who are always adjusting our meaning-systems to be more meaningful under the stern tutelage of experience. Either that, or we fall into a pathology that is opposite to the ‘a-perspectival madness’ (‘Nothing is true …’). We then suffer from (and make others suffer from) what we could call ‘dogmatic delusionality’ (‘Only what I believe is true!’).

At any rate, it is our patterning of what happens, in time and over time, that invests life with meaning. And since a pattern of events in one’s life is what constitutes a narrative, then the question of whether or not life is meaningful really boils down to the question of whether a life is a workably coherent narrative. No narrative, no meaning. Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ can thus be translated into the question: ‘Is there or is there not some narrative that can explain all this wild, wicked and, maddeningly confusing stuff going on in Castle Elsinore?’ And of course, that finally translates into the bigger question that is always hovering over us: ‘Can I discover or fashion a narrative that makes sense out of all the pain and disappointment, so much apparently random suffering in my life and everyone else’s, or can I not?’ To be or not to be. To have a narrative or not to have one. That is the question!

Neurosis, seen in this light, is a ‘narratival rupture’, a temporal disconnection between point A in time and point B in time and from both of them to similarly disconnected points W and X (Hamlet laments: ‘The time is out of joint!’). By this view, recovery in therapy is a ‘narratival repair’ with the client ‘rewriting’ an even better narrative than the one before the rupture/breakdown. When that happens, then the patient has learned (Mayes, Grandstaff, and Fidyk, 2019, 2017a). This makes of therapy an educational process. Conversely, educational processes have a therapeutic dimension as I hope to show throughout this book, especially when what goes on at school is enriching the student’s life-narrative (Mayes, Grandstaff, and Fidyk, 2019).²

As for Carl Gustav Jung, he was insistent upon the point that therapy is about crises of meaning. It is not just about happiness. It is not even primarily about happiness. For, the stoical Swiss Jung believed that the goal of psychotherapy ‘is not to transport the patient to an impossible state of happiness, but to help him acquire steadfastness and philosophic patience in the face of suffering’ (1966b, p. 81). Therapy should be about finding meaning and growing in and through difficulty. Neurosis was, in the last analysis, ‘the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning’ (1984, p. 198). And this meaning need not reveal itself in dramatic breakthroughs or result in great achievements in the eyes of the world. Meaning can be a humble thing, and usually is, Jung believed, discovered in the ordinary give and take of daily life (Jung, 1954, p. 45).

Jung’s quiet, stoic tones are reassuring. But Gebser is also right in forcefully characterizing the lack of narrative as ‘madness’; for, the root of neurosis and psychosis may well be a fundamental ‘derangement’ (de-arrangement—i.e., in-cohere-ence) of one’s capacity to narrativize. Human beings need this meaning in order ‘to go on being’ (Winnicott, 1992). At least, they need meaning to go on being in creativity and courage (Frankl, 1967; Tillich, 1952).

Archetypes and meaning in life-narratives

In Jungian psychology, the major way of finding meaning in our life-narratives is through archetypes, which are the central concept in Jungian psychology. The main purpose of this study is to draw these two approaches to meaning together in Part I—namely, the idea of narrative together with the idea of archetypes—as a means in Part II of extending the reach and expanding the scope of my previous work in archetypal pedagogy (2017a, 2017b, 2017d, 2015, 2012, 2005a, 2005b, 2002, 2001, 1998), which heretofore has not incorporated narrative theory in any systematic way.

This synergistic joining of narrative theory with archetypal theory—two fields of study that are intimately involved with the question of meaning—will hopefully result in ever more meaningful ways of shaping, assessing, and improving educational processes so that they are the most deeply and broadly applicable to all the domains of the teacher’s and student’s lives: emotional, cognitive, cultural, ethical, and spiritual. In general, what we will find in Part I, and will then apply to educational issues in Part II is that the more archetypal the narrative, the more meaningful it is; and the more meaningful the narrative, the more archetypal it tends to be. This is why ‘the greatest and best thoughts of man shape themselves upon [the archetypes] as upon a blueprint’ (Jung, 1967b, p. 69). It also accounts for the fact that

whoever speaks in [archetypal terms] speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, whilst at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind.

(Jung, 1966a, p. 82)

An overview of archetypes³

The first thing to note about archetypes is that they are paradoxical. An archetype is like a coin whose two sides are always each other’s opposite. Archetypes contain all that is light in the human experience and all that is dark. They lie at the core of all that is angelic in us and all that is demonic. They are the psychological and ontological source from which ‘mankind ever and anon has drawn, and from which it has raised its gods and its demons, all those potent and mighty thoughts without which man ceases to be man’ (Jung, 1967b, p. 67). At the same time as they are ‘in us’ and ‘at our core’, they are also cosmic realities so distant from anything we can know that they are impenetrable even by our most advanced cognitive faculties and subtlest lines of analysis.

The archetypes are paradoxical as well because they are both so primordial yet also so transcendent that their concentrated energy would simply explode consciousness to smouldering rubble to be in the immediate presence of their overwhelming power, an experience that leads almost inevitably to psychosis (Jung, 1967a). Therefore, they present themselves to us in the secondary, mediated form of archetypal symbols. These symbols, one remove away, as it were, from the core of the archetype, are formations that specially encode the meaning of the archetype as symbols. They are therefore called ‘archetypal symbols’ that convey a manageable portion of the energy of the overwhelming power of the archetype-in-itself so that we can begin to engage with the otherwise entirely inaccessible. Ordinary ways of communicating ideas will never do in bringing us to the zone of the archetypal, where meaning resides in its most concentrated form—and those forms are always symbols.

Only the special power of the symbolic can bring us into the proximity of the sacred. This is because of the primordial and transcendent nature of the archetypes: Being both pre-rational and transrational, they exist primally before speech and cognition in the realm of sheer instinct while at the same time they exist transcendentally beyond the reach of speech and the possibility of any typical forms of cognition in the realm of sheer spirit. Jung thus said that, on one hand, archetypes are ‘organs of the pre-rational psyche’ while, on the other hand, they are ‘categories of the soul’ (Jung, 1978, pp. 67f). Archetypes cover the spectrum of all the major issues and impulses that always have and always will make up the human experience. They are perennial and universal although they dress up in different ceremonial vestments and dance to different rhythms from culture to culture.

In both their light and dark aspects, the archetypes are inherent in every human being. They are therefore ‘collective’. They are also beyond the reach of consciousness—so much so that it is not enough to call them merely ‘subconscious’—as in Freud’s much shallower layer of psyche, the subconscious, where material is personal and therefore recoverable. We must instead call them ‘unconscious’—a stronger term than ‘subconscious’, since we can of necessity never know them directly in their ancient and unreachable depths and heights. Therefore, Jung said that the archetypes reside in the ‘collective unconscious’.

Every statement about the collective unconscious and its archetypes is at best a very rough approximation. We can neither primordially remember nor transcendentally intuit the true scope and full impact of the archetype. Archetypes bracket the possibilities of our consciousness from just before that misty prehistoric threshold where the first truly and uniquely human thought arose, and they go to just beyond that indescribable height where the most sublime reaches of mystical communion with the Divine breaks free of the orbit of human thought and language and disappears into the inexpressible rapture of the saint. This is the other reason we can never experience an archetype directly—namely, that it is also the very organ for knowing upon which all knowledge develops within us. Because we see through it, we cannot see it any more than the unaided eye can see itself or than teeth can bite themselves. One cannot see what enables seeing in the first place or know what enables knowing, for they exist by definition before all seeing and knowing.

Archetypes thus precede and transcend cognition. They are unknowable to us in our present epistemological limitations, yet they are simultaneously that upon which all knowledge was originally built at the unconscious level and towards which all knowledge ultimately strives at a supra-conscious level—neither of which is accessible to us in our present limited condition. The one possible exception to this might be the person who has attained very high levels of yogic awareness so that all conscious thought processes reduce to ‘zero’ and the yogi is left with pure awareness as such. Even then, it is not clear if this pure awareness as such is finally another (although infinitely more refined) state of epistemological self-awareness or if it is actually being in and with the archetypal realm of being-as-such.

Nevertheless, as just noted, we are able to process and interact with the archetype through archetypal symbols. There is no other way for us to even begin to grasp the archetype than by the suggestive, multivalent, intuitive power of symbols. ‘The symbol is the primitive exponent of the unconscious’ while it simultaneously is ‘an idea that corresponds to the highest intuition of the conscious mind’ (Jung, 1978, p. 30). Covering the entire spectrum of human experience, archetypal symbols encode major issues and themes in our life-narratives in such a way that those narratives are infused with the indirect power of the archetype but not overwhelmed by it. The same is true of archetypal narrative-structures, which reflect overarching patterns and unfolding processes over the course of our lives.

Together, archetypal symbols and archetypal narrative structures—basically available to us as they inform dreams, creative processes and products, fantasies, and psychological symptomatology—offer potent yet subtle symbolic and narratival means of examining one’s present life-narrative to make it more complete and creative, clearer and more powerful. One may then live one’s life in ever-widening circles of passion and compassion that include all of life’s dualities as one learns through hard-won experience to reconcile th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The archetype and time
• Part II Towards a unified depth-educational psychology: Mending the Freudian-Jungian rift
• Part III Jung, the symbol, and education
• References
• Index