The Trickster
Karl Jung's explanation for the archetypes that surface in cultural and religious literature is that they are the product of what he calls the collective unconsciousness. That thread of consciousness that connects all human beings and cultures around the world. Yet it is not visible to the naked eye, one must look for the signs of it by researching cultures who are long gone and comparing them to each other and our own. Studying it reminds us that all humans are bound together by a common source.
The "Trickster" is an archetype that surfaces in many cultural and religious stories. Each trickster is unique to it's own culture, but all tricksters are bound by certain characteristics no matter what religion they show up in. Anthropologists would argue that each trickster should be evaluated in it's own cultural setting, but in order to see their archetypal value they must be and can be evaluated as a group. Jung would say he is a manifestation of our own collective unconscious. Evidence to support such a claim was found by psychologist John Laynard. In his research on schizophrenia he found the qualities of the trickster surfacing in the disorder (p.54 Euba). This suggests that the Trickster is within all of us just sitting on the borderline of conscious and unconscious though.
So who is this Trickster? He has many forms both human and animal. His physical form seems to be particular to each religion. The best way to view a trickster is by his personality. "[He is] Admired, Loved, venerated for his merits and virtues, he is represented as thievish, deceitful, parricidal, incestuous, and cannibalistic. The malicious practical joker is deceived by just about anybody; the inventor of ingenious stratagems is presented as an idiot; the master of magical power is sometimes powerless to extricate himself from quandaries." (p.67 Hynes and Doty). The trickster seems to be a comedy of opposites. For every good aspect of his persona there is an equal and opposite aspect. In religious stories his role is very diverse. He is the breaker if taboos. He provides comic relief to a religious myth. And he will pull off elaborate schemes to teach a moral lesson or expose the folly of men.
The Trickster shares many attributes with man. In Native American st... ... middle of paper ...
...ard to meeting. This is when they meet the Borg. The Borg are much stronger than the humans and just when it seems that the Borg will destroy the
Enterprise he teleports them back to their end of the universe. Here we see again how the trickster reminds humans that there are many greater powers than them in the universe.
Now that we have seen several examples of the trickster and his ways we have a good way to identify him and understand him. In many ways he is a reflection of the human desire to become more than human. He is also a reminder that humans are just that, humans. The trickster's satire and ridicule serve as both comic relief and reminders of our own obvious limitations as humans. He represents all those parts of our psyche from wishing to fly like a bird to those that wish to rule like a God. It is fascinating to study his attributes with in a collective and within ourselves.
Bibliography
1. "Mythical Trickster Figures", William J. Hynes and William G. Doty
1993 The University of Alabama Press ; Tuscaloosa, Alabama
2. "Archetypes, Imprecators, and Victims of Fate", Femi Euba
1989 Greenwood Press ; New York, New York
As for his character, it reveals that he can find beauty in the smallest things in life, meaning in the smallest revelation, but that he is a down-to-earth man (at the time he relates the story) who canget his point across, but not romanticize things. He expresses things as he sees them, but he sees them in a unique and detailed way. He mak...
The “Little Bird” by Imogen Heap, represents the human effort to hide ugliness. Humans are attracted to beautiful things, yet they themselves are not. Humans are naturally bitter and are without morals; it is society that puts us into place. So human effort is focused on fixing themselves and their surroundings. The little bird symbolizes a metaphysical being that humanity looks towards for help.
A hero, in its simplest form, is an individual who displays valor in the face of adversity, and sacrifices his or her own personal interests to promote the greater good of others. Although Monkey exhibits the former very often throughout “The Monkey’s Story”, he is severely lacking in the latter. He constantly emphasizes his self-importance and his undeniable superiority over both his lowly monkey subjects and the divine beings of Heaven, including the Jade Emperor. If the first definition provided for “hero” is the only one to be considered, Monkey most definitely does embody the archetype of the hero, but with the second included, he no longer does so. Another important idea to establish is that Monkey, when viewed through the eyes of different characters, can be looked upon either positively or negatively. For example, the monkeys residing at the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit see him as their leader and savior, but Heaven’s inhabitants regard him as a trickster and a troublemaker. Although both parties are biased (Monkey led the first to an “Eden” of sorts and has defended them time and time again from evil demons, and the second refuses to believe that any earthly being can their equal or superior), it may be resoundingly proven through textual evidence that Monkey in fact does not fit into the archetype of the hero, but rather is more suited to that of the trickster.
Carl Gustav Jung, “The Principle Archetypes” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 666.
These theoretical concepts developed by Dr. Jung are what caused the hypothesis and negativity of my original consideration of him to be replaced by a deep respect and, in fact, an almost gleeful fascination with his work. I am discovering that quite a few people find that Jung has a great deal to say to them. This tends to include writers, artists, musicians, film makers, theologians, clergy of all denominations, students of mythology, and of course, and many psychologists
Man and His Symbols, edited by Carl G Jung and M.-L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi, Aniela Jaffe, published by Dell Books, non fiction.
It isn't just plain interesting. After his mother died, he was very upset and angry. He wanted to create a living human being- bringing a dead body alive. He wanted to do something that no one else has done. This can be looked at, as a. metaphor saying that, he wanted to make something that even nature hasn't even been created.
Jung agrees with Freud and his thought process of the structural constructs, he disagrees with there only being three parts of the unconscious mind. Jung’s structural construct of the psyche is more in-depth than Freud’s. Jung uses the similar basic construct of Freud and agreeing with the differences in the types of consciousness in the mind. Jung uses the ‘shadow’ instead of the id which is the unknown concepts of one’s personality and the unknown choices that we make based upon good and evil side of everyone. In other words, our shadow which resides in our unconscious mind are the ‘skeletons in our closet’ which can be described as the unwanted and the rejected thoughts that we have by our ego and our
Jung’s subjective nature as well his speculative beliefs in his experiences attempts to discover the relation between objective truth (real), psychology, and spirituality (supernatural). He placed tremendous value on the meaning of personal and collective dreams. Jung considered them prophetic and visionary for the collective nature. Conclusively, Jung’s understood the self as the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning. Jung’s development of self is a concept quite similar to Fromm, Eliade, Frankl and other humanistic driven ideas discussed prior to reach completion, wholeness, absoluteness, in essence to be harmonious with nature (fate).
who are at the center of his work? If they are Contraries, then what does the
How are the perceptions of human nature conveyed by individuals subject to the influence of
In order to understand Jung's theory of archetypes, the reader must first have an understanding of the reasoning behind them. Carl G. Jung explains the conscious mind by dividing it into three different psyches: the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The ego is simply Jung's interpretation of the conscious mind. The personal unconscious is anything that is not presently conscious, but can be. The collective unconscious is a reservoir of human experiences that is passed from generation to generation. It includes the archetypes of self, which are archetypes for different kinds of people or characters in literature (Jung 67). They can be described as things such as déjà vu, or love at first sight. It is the feeling that what is being felt or experienced has been felt or experienced before.
Carl Jung is the father of archetypal criticism and creator of the term collective unconscious. Jung (1875 – 1961) was born in Switzerland and learned from Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalytic critic, before breaking off and creating his own literary theory. Because of his shift to the Archetypal theory, also called mythic criticism, Jung was repelled by the psychoanalytic community, until he came up with the idea of a collective unconscious. “Jung’s ideas caused him to be banished from the psychanalytic community for the next five years. During this time, he formulated his own model of the human psyche, which would become his most important contribution to psychology and literary criticism (Bressler).” The collective unconscious is the common knowledge of themes and archetypes that every human has gained from ancestral memory. This is the bases for Archetypal criticism, the reason for humans being able to recognize archetypes and recurring patterns in literature. Archetypal literary works relate to the beliefs, knowledge, and desires of readers through recognizable themes and archetypes (Bressler 149). Archetypes are universally recognized patterns, characteristics, or objects that invoke similar emotional responses from every person. Archetypes give literary works deeper meaning because
Jung’s theory of personality development opposed Freud’s, disagreeing “that human motivation is exclusively sexual and that the unconscious mind is entirely personal and peculiar to the individual” (Stevens, 18). Jung composed multiple theories, which, in summation, created his theory of personality development. The Complex Theory was done by a word association test; a patient is given a word in which that are to respond back with one of their own as quickly as possible. From these tests, Jung proposed that below the conscious is the personal unconscious, which is structured according to clusters of emotions, images, and ideas organized around a core theme. His image of the human psyche was explained in relation to the structure of a house: “the room on the upper floor represented his conscious personality”, “the ground floor stood for the first level of the personal unconscious”, and “in the deepest level of all he reached the collective unconscious”, an area that holds deeper memories transmitted biologically, left from our ancestors
seemed to be developed from our own life experiences. For most of the traits measured,