Mis/takes

Archetype, Myth and Identity in Screen Fiction

Terrie Waddell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781583917213
• eBook ISBN: 9781135449698
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Mis/takes departs from the bulk of screen discourse by applying Jungian and Post-Jungian ideas on unconscious processes to popular film and television. This perspective offers a rich insight into the way that various myths infiltrate popular culture.

By examining the function of psychological motifs and symbols in cinema and television, Terrie Waddell opens up another way of thinking about how identity can be constructed and disrupted. Mulholland Drive, Memento, The Others, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, Spider, Intimacy and Absolutely Fabulous all lend themselves to this approach.

The close analysis of these films/programs are guided by a number of core archetypes from trickster and Self to incest and the grotesque. The book's four parts reflect these dominant patterns:

• Jung, trickster and the screen
• Mistaken identities, self-deception and the undead
• Redeemers, bad dads and matricide
• Excesses of the sad and the sassy

Mis/takes gives readers a chance to engage with screen material in an original and subversive way. This study will be of great interest to Jungian analysts and students of film, cultural studies, media, gender studies and analytical psychology.

Part I

Jung, trickster and the screen

Chapter 1

Analytical psychology and myth

The bigger picture

I don't know where ideas come from, but I think there's a big ocean of ideas and once in a while those ideas pop into our conscious mind and we, you know, go from there.

David Lynch, David Lynch Interview (2001)

It has to be said that depth psychologies are a leap of faith. If the unconscious is ‘all that I am that I don't know I am’, we can really only make informed guesses about its content and function no matter how ‘scientific’ its pioneers and contemporary theorists claim/ed to be. Jung's analytical psychology, popularly distinguished from Freudian psychoanalysis by its theorization of the archetype and the collective unconscious (or objective psyche), has often been targeted, by academia in particular, as one of the greatest leaps. Although Jung repeatedly refers to himself as ‘an empiricist’ and ‘a scientist’ throughout the eighteen volumes of his Collected Works, I would argue that the creative and spiritual insight of the ideas he left us has more punch than their science. Analytical psychology's concentration on the cross-cultural and timeless language of images, filtered through art, myth, religion, dreams, and unconscious projections, also lends itself to the analysis of cinema and television.

This chapter initially focuses on the contentious tenets of analytical psychology central to Mis/takes, while the later section looks at the relationship and import of myth to screen imagery. Despite some of his more awkward theoretical positions, particularly his essentialist views on gender and sexuality, Jung was one of the most progressive thinkers of his day, groomed to be Freud's heir, but sacrificing the mantle to develop his own insights into the spiritual dimensions of the psyche largely overlooked in psychoanalysis. As I'll argue throughout this book, the sacred, mythic and archetypal are inescapable givens of many contemporary and classic screen stories. Because of this it's difficult to understand why the application of analytical psychology to these ‘texts’, or what might just as easily be thought of as recycled myths, has been so overshadowed by the logos (rationality) of Freudian and post-Freudian (predominantly Lacanian) psychoanalysis. The films and television programs in Mis/takes have been carefully chosen to illuminate specific aspects of Jungian and post-Jungian thought, and because of this they inevitably illuminate our mythic past. Rather than seeing tired repetitions of traditional myth and clichéd projections of archetypal patterns, what we're able to extract from each visual text is the absolute relevance of the archetype as it reworks and morphs its way into contemporary imaginings.

Jung's model of the psyche

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) specialized in psychiatry at the University of Basel. This led to his appointment as a training psychiatrist at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler, where he focused on the treatment of dementia praecox (an early term for schizophrenia). Jung sent Freud (1856–1939) a copy of his Diagnostic Association Studies (CW 2) in 1906 after being inspired by The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), but their ensuing intellectual, professional and intensely emotional ‘father–son’ relationship ended bitterly in 1912, when all communication virtually stopped. It was then that Jung published his Theory of Psychoanalysis (CW 4), a repudiation of Freud's fundamental theories.

In 1913 their links were inextricably severed as Freud worked to remove Jung from his presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association and oust him from editorial responsibilities (Gay 1995: xli). The intellectual rifts between them were complex, but principally centered around Jung's questioning of Freud's theorization of the unconscious and libido. For Freud, the unconscious was largely a depot for repressed, once conscious material unacceptable to the ego. He formulated the libido as purely sexual in nature rather than, as Jung thought, understanding sexuality to be one of many expressions of this ‘psychic energy’ (Freud 1914, 1920).

While initially fracturing the psyche into three distinct areas, conscious, preconscious and unconscious, Freud finally consolidated his now familiar super-ego, ego and id configuration with the publication of The Ego and the Id (1923). Here he argued that ‘all that is repressed is Ucs. [unconscious], but not all that is Ucs. is repressed. A part of the ego, too … may be Ucs’ (Freud 1923/1961: 18). The id, the unknowable, unconscious site of instincts and drives (or ‘the passions’ as he put it) partially merges with the ego, conscious perception and reason. He likened these states to a rider (ego) directing and restraining a powerful horse (id). The super-ego or ego-ideal, a ‘supra-personal’ plane of the ego that he saw functioning as a moral arbiter, completes this triadic structure. In 1912 though, Jung began to modify the basic principles of psychoanalysis by theorizing the ego as the center or archetypal heart of consciousness, the personal unconscious as the repository for suppressed, personal material, and the objective psyche (unconscious) as the transpersonal, culturally collective site from which consciousness emerged (CW 5).

The notion that there existed a distinctive area of the psyche innately interconnected with consciousness dates back to the ancient Egyptians. St Augustine's (AD 354—430) ‘I cannot grasp all that I am’ was merely an articulation of this idea (Stevens 1990: 11). The work of Gottfried von Leibniz (1646–1716); the philosophies of nineteenth-century German thinkers Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900); The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1868) by Eduard von Hartmann; the research of hypnotists Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), Pierre Janet (1859–1947), Joseph Breuer (1842–1925); and psychologists Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Theodore Flournoy (1854–1920), cultivated notions of unconscious functioning that paved the way for Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology (Stevens 1990: 12–16). From this classical and complex history of ideas, Jung defined his model in this way:

I would like to emphasise that we must distinguish three psychic levels: (1) consciousness, (2) the personal unconscious, and (3) the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious consists firstly of all those contents that become unconscious either because they lost their intensity and were forgotten or because consciousness was withdrawn from them (repression), and secondly of contents, some of them sense-impressions, which never had sufficient intensity to reach consciousness but have somehow entered the psyche. The collective unconscious, however, as the ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation, is not individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to animals, and is the true basis of the individual psyche.

(CW 8, para. 321)

Jung embraced both logos and mythos (imagination, intuition and story) to develop a rounded philosophical and psychological position that attempted to fuse the rational and scientific with the creative and spiritual functions of the psyche. As Laurence Coupe (1997) explains, while classical antiquity flourished through mythos, this didn't discount logos opposition to mythic thinking. It wasn't until the Enlightenment that reason was privileged. Coupe laments modernity's push to ‘demythologize’ taking comfort in the transgressions of artists who push the mythological envelope, particularly during postmodernity where he claims that, ‘we have witnessed, not a retreat from myth, but a much more pervasive sense of myth’ (Coupe 1997: 19).

When Jung presented his work to the medical and academic community during the rise of modernity (with all its Enlightenment-hangover), the frustration it caused his peers and contemporaries, who saw the spiritual slant on his theories as unscientific philosophies, is really not surprising. His desire for scientific authenticity continues to take a backseat to his acute (postmodern) recognition of the spiritual and mythic dimensions of psychological processes. It's a legacy that, as David Tacey (2001) writes, is unfortunately attractive to ‘New Age’ movements quick to abridge and appropriate Jung's complex (and sometimes inconsistent) theories for their own purposes. Those more critically, clinically and academically engaged in Jung's work, though, can be divided into overlapping streams. The three categories Andrew Samuels developed in 1985 are still the most relevant: the Classical school, largely uncritical of Jung's theories; the Developmental school, privileging personal development and links with psychoanalysis; and the Archetypal school, interested in the primary nature of the archetypal image (Samuels 1985: 15).

Archetypes, instincts and complexes

The concept of the archetype is central to Jung's version of the objective psyche. He wrote of visions arising from the unconscious via dreams and fantasies that constellated into patterns similar in content to the interconnecting strands of myth. In 1912 Jung called the phenomenon primordial images (and archetypes in 1919), interpreting them as patterns of thought and behaviour universally common and recurring rather than features of personal memory. Samuels extends this idea of universality and collectivity by adding ‘depth and autonomy’: ‘The primordial images are like fountains, subsequent imagery is derived from them. And primordial images have a certain independence, can pop up in the mind without warning in dream, daydream, fantasy or artistic creation’ (Samuels 1985: 24). This concept also applies to media and cinema, and of course we can relate it back to the introductory citation where David Lynch talks about an ‘ocean of ideas’ that can ‘pop into our conscious mind’ every now and then.

Jung's theory of collectively inherited psychological motifs, a term he often used to characterize archetypes (CW 9i, para. 309), was developed from his association with patients at the Burghölzli Hospital, extensive research into myth, and self-analysis that took a more acute turn after his traumatic split with Freud. The images present in dreams, art, literature and religion were, to Jung's thinking, primordial and shared. He began to articulate with more clarity his theory of ‘a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche’ (Jung 1963: 185) from a dream where he imaged himself descending various levels of a house, each recalling an earlier period of history than the last.

The notion of a priori images was posited long before Jung in the form of Plato's original ideas: ‘in some cases the name of the idea is not confined to the idea; but anything else which, not being the idea, exists only in the form of the idea, may also lay claim to it’ (Plato 1992: 102). Elizabeth Grosz's (1994: 5) claim that Plato ‘sees matter itself as a denigrated and imperfect version of the Idea’ suggests that these ‘ideas’ can be understood only in terms of the Cartesian mind/matter binary. In an archetypal reading, Plato's notion of the ‘idea’ is similar to Jung's archetype. The ‘forms’ or matter that Grosz believes is demeaned by Plato can be understood as that through which the idea is realized. In the context of Jung's thought, the ‘idea’ (archetypal content) takes precedence over the vehicle in which it is conveyed to us (matter, bodily images, symbols, characterization, behavioural patterns). In this type of reading, matter is not denigrated, but understood as an active means of expression (if a secondary one) through which psychological energies resonate. Grosz however, inadvertently puts forward a moot point for post-Jungians (taken up later in a discussion of James Hillman's position); that is, which takes precedence, the archetype or the archetypal image?

Allusion to archetypal structures can also be found in Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) notion of an a priori perceptive form in which sensory information is categorized (Samuels 1985: 23). Kant's thinking, along with the writings of Spinoza, Plato and Schopenhauer, significantly contributed to the theory of archetypes (CW 8, para. 275–277). In 1946 Jung differentiated between the archetype and the image that housed it, arguing that the archetype is not the image but a nucleus from which subsequent images arise (Samuels 1985: 25). The ‘image’ is a projection of the archetype, an invisible, universal component of the collective unconscious, whereas its imaginal representation is determined by social and historical influences. Jung distinguished the terms this way: ‘We must, however, constantly bear in mind that what we mean by “archetype” is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualizations of it possible, namely the archetypal images and ideas’ (CW 8, para. 417).

With his theorization of predetermined patterns of thought tempered by social and environmental factors, he saw the mind as matter; a biological structure like the body, genetically determined and programmed, yet open to variation through cultural and environmental factors. Walter Shelburne (1988) draws attention to the difference between Platoic ideas and archetypes by arguing that the former are ‘eternal and unchanging’ whereas the latter are ‘a natural part of the developing human organism’ (Shelburne 1988: 67). While Jung claimed that archetypes constitute a ‘psychological instance of the biological “pattern of behaviour” ’ (CW 11, para. 222 ff. 2), Shelburne cautions against accepting the notion that all human experience is archetypally patterned. This kind of thinking, he argues, places the whole concept of the archetype in danger of ‘being over generalized into triviality’ (Shelburne 1988: 40). Samuels succinctly sums up what Jung meant by the archetype in the following three generalized categories:

(a) archetypal structures and patterns are the crystallisation of experiences over time. (b) They constellate experience in accordance with innate schemata and act as an imprimatur of subsequent experience. (c) Images deriving from archetypal structures involve us in a search for correspondence in the environment.

(Samuels 1985: 27)

This issue of the genetic and biological nature of collective behaviours brings up the question of how archetypes are differentiated from instincts. In its most superficial form, these structures can be understood as analogous energies. Archetypes have a psychological and biological root, and instincts might be seen to operate on a purely physiological level. The archetypes therefore regulate instincts by directing the expulsion of instinctual energy. For Shelburne (1988: 46), the development of human consciousness facilitated the separation of the instinct from the archetype, unlike animals where (to his way of thinking), archetypes and instincts remain interwoven.

In his interpretation of Jung's instinct/archetype distinction, Shelburne emphasizes that the ‘tension’ between unconscious psychological drives and the way that these drives are channeled, realized and modified through archetypal processes, need not necessarily be a source of conflict. Jung's desire for the psyche to work toward a sense of integration, harmony and balance suggests that base instinct, and the transformation of the instinct, be understood as ‘forces of tension’ that function to balance and develop the human personality (Shelburne 1988: 48): ‘The archetype, as a glance at the history of religious phenomena will show, has a characteristically numinous effect, so that the subject is gripped by it as though by an instinct’ (Jung CW 5, para. 225).

Paradoxically, Jung repeatedly emphasized the unknowable nature of archetypes: accessible only through metaphor (CW 9i, para. 271). He imagined them as intertwining with each other and rising to consciousness when activated by personal or collective experiences. Casting the archetype externally (projecting) onto people, characters, races, subcultures and objects (although the central means of realizing these patterns) should not, according to Jung, be thought of as a way to disown archetypal material (CW 9i, para. 160). By this, he was talking about the unproductive and regressive act of expelling, via projection, these internal motifs instead of trying to work through their implications. When archetypes present themselves in a personal (non-collective) context, Jung referred to them as complexes, and rather than writing of them as communicated through the ‘image’, in 1911–1912 he began to use the Latin term imago (CW 9i, para. 89).

Jung's concept of the complex (the mother-complex for example, discussed in Chapters 8 and 9) refers to: ‘a collection of images and ideas, clustered round a core derived from one or more archetypes, and characterized by a common emotional tone’ (Samuels et al. 1986: 34). The mother-complex then is woven around the way that the mother archetype is fused with personal experience, one's own mother, experiences of mothering, fantasies of mother/ing, and possibly a number of other archetypal motifs. According to Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister:

Jung opposed ‘monolithic’ ideas of personality, proposing that we have many selves or sub-personalities and that it is the complexes which constitute these minor personalities...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Jung, trickster and the screen
• PART II Mistaken identities, self-deception and the undead
• PART III Redeemers, bad dads and matricide
• PART IV Excesses of the sad and the sassy
• Bibliography
• Film references
• Television references
• Index