Manikin

The manikin was a little cloaked god of the ancient world, a Telesphoros such as stands on the monuments of Asklepios and reads to him from a scroll. Along with this recollection there came to me, for the first time, the conviction that there are archaic psychic components which have entered the individual psyche without any direct line of tradition.

Jung identifies his childhood manikin as analogous to the Telesphoros figure and uses the recovered memory as the experiential ground for his theory of archetypes as supra-personal psychic inheritances.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis

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The ritual enactments that creatively saved Jung’s spirit and sequestered it in a safe place did not end with the carving of his manikin. Much later, in 1920 when he was 45 years old, while in England, he carved two very similar figures.

Kalsched interprets the manikin ritual as a trauma-driven self-healing act that preserved the ‘personal spirit’ and recurred symbolically throughout Jung’s life.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis

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When he carved and hid the little black man mentioned earlier, while he was a pupil in primary school, he gave the manikin a pebble from the Rhine, painted with colors and divided into an upper half and a lower half. That was ‘his’ stone, his store of vitality.

Von Franz situates the manikin within Jung’s emerging symbolism of the Self, linking the paired figure-and-stone to the coniunctio of opposites and to Stone Age parallels Jung would later discover.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975thesis

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This terrifying apparition was now united, through self-amplification, with the phallic king, into the carved black figure, above ground a nightmare for the small boy, underground as a buried royal being, transformed into a hidden nature-god of creativity.

Von Franz interprets the manikin as the psychic resultant of multiple childhood traumas, synthesizing the threatening ‘dark Jesus’ and the underground phallic king into a single symbol of hidden creative power.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975supporting

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Jung (1963) describes his childhood in a very straight-laced, religious Swiss family where mother and father were estranged and feelings were never discussed. A deeply imaginative, sensitive, and serious Jung boy, he began to be plagued with terrifying nightmares.

Kalsched establishes the traumatic family context — emotional isolation, estrangement, shameful nightmares — that makes the manikin ritual psychologically intelligible as a defensive self-care response.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting

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manikin: Jung’s carved, 28f, 31, 33, 219; in Zosimos’ vision, 228

Von Franz’s index cross-references Jung’s carved manikin with the homuncular figure in Zosimos’ alchemical visions, indicating the broader symbolic lineage to which she assigns the childhood object.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975supporting

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manikin, see homunculus

Jung’s own indexical cross-reference equates ‘manikin’ with ‘homunculus,’ placing the term within the alchemical tradition of the artificially created inner man and underscoring its doctrinal kinship with Paracelsian thought.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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manikin, 161

A bare index citation in ‘The Development of Personality’ registers the manikin as a conceptual reference point in Jung’s developmental psychology, without elaboration in the surrounding text.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Development of Personality, 1954aside

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Trimalchio, when century-old wine is served, says: ‘Alas, alas; then wine lives longer than a man (homuncio, “manikin”). Wherefore let us moisten ourselves. Life is wine (vita vinum est)’.

Onians cites the Latin ‘homuncio’ (manikin) as a colloquial diminutive for mortal man, providing classical etymological context for the term’s broader resonance with brevity of life and vital fluid.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside

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