The Seba library treats Savage in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Jung, C. G., Bly, Robert).
The small, brown-skinned savage who accompanied me and had actually taken the initiative in the killing was an embodiment of the primitive shadow.
Jung explicitly identifies the savage figure in his own dream-life as a personification of the primitive shadow, establishing the core depth-psychological equation between savagery and repressed unconscious content.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis
The savage was either a primitive ideal of lost liberty, or an ignoble and unequal antecedent of more perfect men. The former was, of course, Rousseau’s idealisation of noble savagery.
This passage maps the two dominant Enlightenment positions on the savage — Rousseau’s noble idealization versus Turgot’s progressivist dismissal — situating depth psychology’s inherited conceptual field.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997thesis
When we hear the phrase, ‘the Wild Man,’ our fantasies move toward a monster, or savage, but it is clear now that the Wild Man is closer to a meditation instructor than to a savage.
Bly explicitly distinguishes the Wild Man archetype from the culturally projected image of the savage, arguing that authentic masculine depth is misread as mere savagery by a civilization that cannot tolerate instinctual vitality.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
He really did make them more savage than he received them, and their savageness was shown towards himself; which he must have been very far from desiring.
Socrates uses ‘savage’ in a political-ethical frame, arguing that the true test of leadership is whether it civilizes or brutalized those governed, anticipating depth psychology’s concern with how cultural authority handles instinctual life.
, Gorgias, -380supporting
Rudeness and sarcasm may be savage, but the unexpected is not savage.
Bly draws a careful phenomenological distinction between savagery (mere aggression or social disruption) and spontaneity (the authentic trace of the Wild Man), refining the term’s psychological valence.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
Savage man is a warrior, so his god is a warrior. He has a battle-axe, a shield. The battle-axe, the shield are sacred, divine, because they are the weapons, the attributes, of a war-god.
Harrison employs ‘savage man’ in the comparative-religion framework to explain how primitive anthropomorphism projects human warlike qualities onto divinity, a form of unconscious religious projection.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
primitive man’s lack of power to draw intellectual distinctions lies at the back of many religious phenomena
Harrison’s characterization of primitive (savage) cognition as undifferentiated underlies her broader thesis about the pre-logical origins of religious and magical practice.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912aside