Identification with the Archetype

The structural mechanism that produces inflation. Jung names it directly: “The characteristic feature of a pathological reaction is, above all, identification with the archetype” (Jung 1959, par. 621). The ego, encountering an activated archetypal content, fails to distinguish itself from the content and behaves as if the content were itself.

The mechanism is described with particular clarity in the Zarathustra seminars: “When a person has an unconscious content — say a certain archetype is constellated — then his conscious, not realizing what the matter is, will be filled with the emanation or radiation of that activated archetype. And then he behaves unconsciously as if he were that archetype, but he expresses the identity in terms of his ego personality” (Jung 1988, 16 October 1935). The signs are visible to outside observers — pomposity, the inability to be argued with, the ridiculous gravity of one who has become “a hell of a fellow” — and invisible to the identified ego itself, which experiences only heightened intensity and felt importance.

Jung’s example is Nietzsche, who could distinguish himself from Zarathustra grammatically — “and Zarathustra passed by me” — but could not maintain the distinction at the level of identity, and was Zarathustra at moments of greatest charge. “Whenever one is caught in an archetype, one forgets oneself completely, one is in a heightened condition, just inflated” (Jung 1988, Autumn Term 1935). The archetype is not personal; it is collective; the ego’s claim to it is structural confusion.

Identification differs from complex-identification in magnitude and source. The personal complex possesses the ego with material from the personal unconscious; the archetype possesses it with material from the collective-unconscious. The first produces neurosis; the second produces inflation in the favorable case and psychosis in the unfavorable. Jung notes the line is not always crossable: “Identification can, in favourable cases, sometimes pass off as a more or less harmless inflation. But in all cases identification with the unconscious brings a weakening of consciousness” (Jung 1959, par. 621).

Relationships

• inflation
• mana-personality
• archetype
• collective-unconscious
• identification-with-the-complex
• autonomous-psychic-complex

Primary sources

• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, par. 621)
• jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung 1953)