ancestral complex
The Family Unconscious — cognate with what some passages call the ‘ancestral complex’ — designates that stratum of psychic life in which the individual is not yet, or never fully, differentiated from the inherited psychological substance of the family system. The depth-psychological corpus approaches this concept from several competing angles. Jung’s early association research, documented in the Collected Works Volume 1, established empirically that family members share unconscious reaction patterns to a degree that cannot be explained by conscious imitation alone, pointing toward a genuine psychic porosity between generations. Greene, working from an astrological-analytical synthesis, extends this into the concept of ‘family fate’: the archetypal patterns encoded in planetary configurations that repeat across generations without reducible causal chains, manifesting as what she calls the ‘family curse’ of Greek myth. Grof’s transpersonal framework accommodates ‘ancestral experiences’ in LSD states — vivid identifications with biological forebears — as empirical evidence for a layered ancestral unconscious. Hillman, characteristically, resists the reductive implications of the family unconscious, warning that the fantasy of being ‘our parents’ children’ forecloses the daimonic calling of the individual soul. Papadopoulos recovers Jung’s 1909 word-association family research to theorize ‘shared unconscious structures’ distinct from mere inter-projection. The central tension across all these voices is between inheritance as fate and inheritance as complex — between what is structurally given and what may be individuated.
Problems of a sexual nature, or of an instinctual nature generally, seem represented as family complexes by Pluto. But other things besides instinctual conflicts pass down through families, and these can bear a creative as well as a destructive face.
Greene argues that the family unconscious operates as an inherited complex transmitted across generations, carrying both destructive and creative archetypal patterns that manifest as personal fate.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
these experiments show that very often there exists an unconscious concordance of association between parents and children, which can only be explained as an intensive imitation or identification. The results of these researches indicate a far-reaching parallelism of biological tendencies
Jung’s earliest empirical evidence for the family unconscious: the word-association test reveals shared unconscious reaction patterns within families that exceed what conscious imitation can account for.
, Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902thesis
the ‘shared unconscious structures’; these are structures that are not projected by one person onto another but, nevertheless, are affecting certain subgroups within families. These must be structures of a ‘collective’ nature that contribute to one’s creation of sense
Papadopoulos distinguishes ‘shared unconscious structures’ within families from mere inter-projection, identifying a quasi-collective psychic layer specific to the family unit.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis
It is perhaps more difficult to envisage the psychic substance of the family as one substance out of which the lives of its individual members are molded, to such an extent that particular planetary aspects repeat among the charts of family members without any perceivable or understandable causal basis.
Greene posits a shared ‘psychic substance’ constituting the family unconscious, evidenced by non-causal repetition of archetypal patterns across family members’ horoscopes.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
Their joint unconscious psyche — the rages they suppress, the longings they cannot fulfill, the images they dream at night — basically form our souls, and we can never, ever work through and be free of this determinism.
Hillman critically articulates the dominant therapeutic fantasy of the family unconscious as total psychological determinism, a fantasy he will subsequently contest through the acorn/daimon theory.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
states of possession in which the possession is caused by something that could perhaps most fitly be described as an ‘ancestral soul,’ by which I mean the soul of some definite forebear… Daudet supposes that, in the structure of the personality, there are ancestral elements which under certain conditions may suddenly come to the fore.
Jung identifies the ‘ancestral soul’ as a discrete structural element within the personality that can erupt into possession-like states, providing the phenomenological basis for the ancestral complex.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
Sometimes, they involve actual reliving of short episodes from the life of one’s ancestors or whole sequences that are specific and rich in concrete detail. In other instances, they follow the pattern of tuning in to the personality of a certain individual in one’s biological lineage to the point of complete physical, emotional, and intellectual identification
Grof’s LSD research documents ancestral experiences as a distinct transpersonal register of the unconscious, in which subjects identify completely with specific forebears, supporting a layered ancestral stratum of the psyche.
, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975supporting
Identification with parents or the closest members of the family is a normal phenomenon in so far as it coincides with the a priori family identity. In this case it is better not to speak of identification but of identity, a term that expresses the actual situation.
Jung distinguishes primary family identity — a pre-individual participation mystique — from secondary identification, grounding the family unconscious in an a priori psychic unity prior to individuation.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
Shared traumas make for shared complexes. Sometimes these are generational… We can think here of a cultural layer of the unconscious, a sort of cultural unconscious.
Stein extends the logic of shared family complexes to a cultural layer of the unconscious, positioning the family unconscious as intermediate between the personal and the fully collective.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
Our mothers were afflicted with a self-image of shame, degradation, self-doubt and low self-esteem; our grandmothers were afflicted too, back through how many generations?
Woodman traces the intergenerational transmission of a shame-based mother complex across many generations, illustrating the depth of ancestral psychological inheritance.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993supporting
the avoidance of parental influence and identification is a sure way to become a carbon copy — the return of the repressed.
Moore demonstrates the clinical paradox of the family unconscious: repression of parental identification ensures its symptomatic return, illustrating the coercive force of familial psychic inheritance.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
Even in cases where children do exhibit sexual symptoms — where, in other words, the incestuous tendency is perfectly obvious — I should recommend a careful examination of the parents’ psyche. One finds astonishing things.
Jung redirects etiological attention from the child’s symptom to the parents’ unconscious, insisting that family psychic material is the true site of neurotic causation.
, The Development of Personality, 1954supporting
Both dysfunction and emotional sobriety are contagious. As the family that is holding too much unaddressed emotional pain struggles to retain its equilibrium
Dayton’s systems-therapy perspective treats unaddressed emotional pain as contagious within the family system, a clinical parallel to the depth-psychological concept of shared family unconscious material.
, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Lasting Fulfillment, 2007aside
Whether this reflects a convoluted and deeply unconscious family collusion or an archetypal ‘meaning’, it is still a fate.
Greene raises the irreducible ambiguity at the heart of the family unconscious: whether shared psychic outcomes reflect unconscious collusion between members or transpersonal archetypal necessity.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984aside