Archetypal Grief

Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss

Fanny Brewster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415789059
• eBook ISBN: 9781351839556
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Archetypal Grief: Slavery's Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss is a powerful exploration of the intergenerational psychological effects of child loss as experienced by women held in slavery in the Americas and of its ongoing effects in contemporary society. It presents the concept of archetypal grief in African American women: cultural trauma so deeply wounding that it spans generations.

Calling on Jungian psychology as well as neuroscience and attachment theory, Fanny Brewster explores the psychological lives of enslaved women using their own narratives and those of their descendants, and discusses the stories of mothering slaves with reference to their physical and emotional experiences. The broader context of slavery and the conditions leading to the development of archetypal grief are examined, with topics including the visibility/invisibility of the African female body, the archetype of the mother, stereotypes about black women, and the significance of rites of passage. The discussion is placed in the context of contemporary America and the economic, educational, spiritual and political legacy of slavery.

Archetypal Grief will be an important work for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, archetypal and depth psychology, archetypal studies, feminine psychology, women's studies, the history of slavery, African American history, African diaspora studies and sociology. It will also be of interest to analytical psychologists and Jungian psychotherapists in practice and in training.

1

Archetypes of the collective unconscious

The collective unconscious

Archetypes were defined by Jung as forms or patterns as well as an energy force that exist within human consciousness and therefore throughout the human experience, during the time of our existence. In the writing of his book The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ([1959] 1980) Jung felt that he established the idea of an unconscious that had been in development for decades through the work of Freud and others before him. The idea of an archetype had presented itself to Plato centuries ago. In his investigation of the unconscious mind Jung furthered his work by naming the concept of archetypes. From 1933 onward Jung began writing about the unconscious and the archetypes. In describing the unconscious Jung states:

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal.

(CW9i, para. 3; emphasis in the original)

A most significant identification for Jung regarding the collective unconscious was that unlike Freud, Jung did not think of it as the place for only that which was hidden from the conscious ego, and capable of holding only repressed content. Jung believed that the unconscious held the possibilities for a richness that would complement the human ego. This richness included mythologies, dreams, telos and the potential for a deeper understanding of life’s meaning. Jung believed that there was a separation of consciousness in humans, one side with personal unconscious material made up mostly of complexes. On the other side would have been the material of the collective unconscious consisting primarily of archetypes.

In speaking further of the collective unconscious Jung says:

In contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.

(CW9i, para. 3)

It is important to note in the above quote that Jung recognizes that the contents and what he calls “modes of behavior” belong to all men. I would add and all women. I believe his intention was to be inclusive of women; however, with the sometimes mixed words that Jung used to describe women, and the more recent unveiling of gender biases not only on Jung’s writing but also in that of other male writers, it seems important to indicate the explicit inclusion of women.

Jung states, “The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear” (CW9i, para. 6). In more recent times, we have come to recognize this color as the cultural aspect of the archetype showing itself. Jung was careful to examine many different cultures over many decades seeking to find the commonality in the archetypes that was the cause of a universal pattern. One of his major contributions was the recognition of this universal pattern in our mythologies.

Jung is specific about the characteristics of the archetypes, and as several Jungian thinkers have done over the years, he has provided the archetypes with clearly defined attributes. Jung first described such attributes in Four Archetypes: Mother/Rebirth/Spirit/Trickster (CW9i).

One of Jung’s most important and descriptive analyses of an archetype was that of the Self. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung’s autobiography, he details his initial encounter with his own archetypal Self through a dream:

I found myself in a dirty, sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss—say half a dozen. I walked through the dark streets. I had the feeling that there we were coming from the harbor, and that the real city was actually up above, on the cliffs. We climbed up there. It reminded me of Basel, where the market is down below and then you go up through the Totengasschen (Alley of the Dead), which leads to a plateau above and so to the Petersplatz and the Peterskirche.

When we reached the plateau, we found a broad square dimly illuminated by street lights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the center was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and were at the same time the source of light. My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the flowering tree and the sunlit island, and thought, “I know very well why he has settled here.” Then I awoke.

(1973: pp. 197–198)

Jung says of the above dream that it clarified and defined for him all the previous work that he had completed both personally and professionally. He indicated that this dream spoke to his understanding of the center of the psyche, the unconscious as being the Self, and from this dream he was able to recognize this controlling center. Jung’s idea regarding the significance of the Self archetype relates to his firm belief in his own “empirical” studies of the unconscious and archetypes.

The archetypes

Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss introduces us to the archetypes through the language, images and behavior of those victims of slavery who share their stories. Jung states that the archetypes show themselves through our mythology and within the selective culture in which we happen to be born. The behavior of those in this particular case is usually the emotional psychological behavior of grief, mourning and sadness. It will also include anger. These narratives do not belong only to those who lived through slavery but also to those who have spent years thinking and writing about the individuals who witnessed and were a part of African Holocaust—slavery. In fact, these narratives belong to all of us. Contemporary narratives of the descendants living today, who I believe continue to experience the effects of slavery’s legacy, also have the right to a voice in these pages. Perhaps it is important to define all the words in the book’s title. The theme of the book may demand intimacy and close examination of each word of this title.

Jung’s theoretical model of the personal and collective unconscious cannot be discussed without giving consideration to archetypes and culture—Africanist and Eurocentric. Samuel Kimbles in Phantom Narratives: The Unseen Contributions of Culture to Psyche says the following:

I believe there is a group archetype that gets expressed through cultural complex constellations, which are as active in societal contexts at large as they are in our institutional life. This means that analysts’ and patients’ cultural histories, as well as the emergence and functioning of analysis are structured by archetypal dynamics.

(2014, p. 110)

When Jung introduced his archetypes, he provided a good deal of cultural attributes. These European models of culture have dominated Jungian psychology though there have been intermittent connections made to other cultures—yoga and Buddhism, for example. There has been minimal positive reference on Jung’s part to Africanist cultural traditions to any great extent.

The archetypes inhabit our world as we inhabit theirs whether we think of them as patterns, energies, “real” gods or goddesses. These energies inform us about our other selves—not only of the ego, even if we believe that they are no long-lasting innate godly presences, but rather only parts of cognitive brain functioning or mental representatives. Our stories as humans, the mythologies of how we come to live as we do, Jung says have developed from these archetypes, living in psyche, acting through us as we work to become more conscious and conscientious. The results of the presence of archetypes take shape with a cultural mask. The cultural masks of the African diaspora who have followed the Yoruba religious tradition appear in the spiritual practices of Voudou, Christianity, as well as Santeria. In discussing Santeria and the Orisha, the author of Santeria: The Religion, Migene Gonzalez-Wippler says:

Santeria is an earth religion, a magico-religious system that has its roots in nature and natural forces. Each orisha or saint is identified with a force of nature and with a human interest or endeavor …. Oshun symbolizes river waters but is also the patron of love and marriage, fertility, and gold. She is essentially the archetype of joy and pleasure. Yemaya is identified with the sea but is also the symbol of motherhood and protects women in their endeavors.

(1989, p. 4)

Archetypal grief within the context of this writing has to do with a particular type of grief and mourning. I use the word archetypal to signify the long-standing existence of an emotional state related to the energy of archetypes and patterned in a particular form that becomes recognizable in a given cultural environment. This behavior of grief is not just present for a few hours or days.

Rather, I am suggesting that because of the traumatic nature and longevity of this type of grief, due to centuries of American slavery—cultural trauma—it has become powerful and reflective of centuries-long archetypal potentiality that becomes active at a cross-generational level. Furthermore, I am suggesting that this potentiality becomes realized in the behavior and lived experiences of people of color. The historical presence of slavery and its profound effect on African Americans has supported the development of a psychic state showing itself as an ever-present grief through generations.

One characteristic of this archetypal grief is that it is selective—it has surrounded and presented itself to a particular group of women, those women of color—mothering slaves—who have given birth to children, and also those who have not, because the mother archetype is still always available to women who do not participate in becoming pregnant. In this selectivity, the relatedness of suffering connected to slavery and its post-Reconstruction realism is still present in contemporary times. African American women display a particular type of depression, sadness and anticipatory fear directly related to their children. This sadness precludes any conscious idea that they do not want their children to do well. African American women must take on the mantle of savior for their children. This aspect of the mother—birth mother driven by an emotional complex, or by the mother archetype—can be there for any mother. It can be constellated by the cultural complex in the form of protection—some might think overprotection. A cloak of protection for Africanist children is in part due to the legacy of need based on the psychological persecution of African American children since slavery.

It began with their control and threatened removal from their parents at the will of slave owners causing great potential anxiety in enslaved children. It continued in the violence these children had to witness or receive as slaves.

Archetypes, neuroscience and epigenetics

Our view of archetypal psychology has been shifting and changing minimally since Jung first introduced his concept of the archetypes. He could be unclear in his own definitions as related to the location and biology of the archetypes. In following his lead, many Jungians have a view of archetypes as psycho-spiritual entities. There is an acknowledgement in this perspective that archetypes are both a type of energy as well as a pattern—a mode. It is a force that creates a certain type of consciousness by taking shape within the mind/being of humans. This shape-taking ability will conform to the individual (including culture), having an experience of the archetype. Each society will display the archetypal energy and forces in individuals as well as collective groups. The location of these archetypes remains in human consciousness in a way that holds us yet where we are unable to have direct knowledge of their location or an explanation of how they come to and through us. Jung defines them as being a part of our DNA.

They are a great part of what makes us divine. Early references to the archetypes suggest that they are spiritual entities—gods and goddesses, mythological figures that possess emotional tones, psychic attributes that come into human awareness.

The above has been an accepted classical Jungian view of the archetypes for a long time. Other references to the archetypes relate to their imagery making. In Complex Archetype Symbol, Jolande Jacobi says: “By ‘primordial images’ Jung then meant all the mythologems, all the legendary or fairy-tale motifs, etc. which concentrate universally modes of behavior into images, or perceptible patterns” (1959, p. 33).

In more recent times new scientific explorations into human brain functioning suggests that there is a biological underpinning for the continuation of what Jung called an archetypal DNA in human consciousness and the collective unconscious. The idea of an internal mental model has been considered by the Jungian analyst, Jean Knox. In Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind, Knox draws on her understanding of archetypes:

Research, much of it within an attachment theory framework, demonstrates that our expectations of the world are governed not by rules of formal logic but by implicit and explicit mental models which organize and give a pattern to our experience. The archetype, as image schema, provides an initial scaffolding for this process, but the content is provided by real experience, particularly that of intense relationships with parents and other key attachment figures stored in the form of internal working models in implicit memory.

(2012, p. 9)

Knox brings to the discussion her ideas regarding attachment theory and cognitive science views on archetypes. In discussing Jung, Knox says:

Although Jung fully acknowledged the crucial role that personal experience plays in the formation of the unconscious internal world he struggled in his attempt to provide an integrated account of the interaction of real experience with innate psychic content and he did not offer any significant discussion of psychological development in infancy and childhood.

(Ibid., p. 88)

Recent studies in neuroscience indicate that one avenue of “real experience” could be caused by mirror neurons researched by Giacomo Rizzolatti in his study of monkeys in 1992. Rizzolatti and a group of scientists were completing research on the motor function of monkeys. During their study of that part of the monkey’s brain known as F5, they noticed that in a hand-grasping exercise, one monkey observing the movement of another responded in an imitative motor pattern mimicking the pattern of the first monkey. The scientists initially believed that this was an error but as they repeated the experiments, they discovered that the brain function of “imitation” occurred in the brain cells of the observing monkey following the pattern of action in the watched monkey. Rizzolatti discovered over time that the mere suggestion that a future action would occur caused motor neuron cells to fire in at first monkeys, and later in humans during the course of experiments between subject and observers.

An accompanying fact as explained by Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia in Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotion, recognizes that though we can perform an imitative behavior, we may not have intentionality or an understanding of this behavior. In the chapter on “Imitation and Language”, the authors note:

This is not to say that the presence of a mirror neuron system, such as that found in monkeys, is sufficient to explain the emergence of intentional, or even linguistic, communicative behavior. We have seen this when talking about imitation: it is one thing to understa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Archetypes of the collective unconscious
• 2. The mother archetype
• 3. Rites of passage: Life and death
• 4. Slavery as archetype and the prayer of freedom
• 5. Mothering slave and the intergenerational orphan
• 6. African Americans and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Stages of grief
• 7. Grief as anger
• 8. Archetypal grief
• 9. Mother, daughter, son
• 10. The female Africanist body
• 11. Mirror as symbol
• 12. Influencing the archetype
• Summary
• References
• Index