--- slug: jung-trickster-2d9dcd8f title: "Jung on Trickster" author: "Carl Gustav Jung" work: "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" section: "" year: "1959" tradition: jungian-core themes: - trickster fragment: | The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually. Not always, of course, as a mythological figure, but, in consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythologems, as a corresponding projection on other social groups and nations. 485 If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow, then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning, which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in the subjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow, although by definition a negative figure, sometimes has certain clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quite different background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior. Experience confirms this; and what is more important, the things that are hidden usually consist of increasingly numinous figures. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,18 who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hides in her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage, magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but it would be pointless to do so, as psychologically one only understands what one has experienced oneself. The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations but names for certain areas of experience, and though they can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them. Thus, I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more "scientific." But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima. 486 Actually, it is not surprising that this should be so, since even the most rudimentary insight into the shadow sometimes causes the greatest difficulties for the modern European. But since the shadow is the figure nearest his consciousness and the least explosive one, it is also the first component of personality to come up in an analysis of the unconscious. A minatory and ridiculous figure, he stands at the very beginning of the way of individuation, posing the deceptively easy riddle of the Sphinx, or grimly demanding answer to a "quaestio crocodilina."19 487 If, at the end of the trickster myth, the saviour is hinted at, this comforting premonition or hope means that some calamity or other has happened and been consciously understood. Only out of disaster can the longing for the saviour arise-in other words, the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow create such a harrowing situation that nobody but a saviour can undo the tangled web of fate. lead_in: "" reflection: | Jung's sequencing here is worth sitting with: shadow first, then anima, then the wise old man — each figure hiding behind the previous one like a series of doors. But notice what he slips in at the end of that sequence. The saviour. And the structural logic he offers is precise: the saviour is not a beginning but a consequence, arising specifically out of disaster that has been consciously understood. The longing for rescue — for the figure who will undo the tangled web — does not precede the descent. It appears only when the harrowing situation has already registered. This matters because the fantasy of the saviour almost always runs in the opposite direction: we invoke the rescuing figure to avoid the harrowing situation, to skip the consciously understood disaster. The anima, Jung tells us, remains untouched in a state of perpetual emotionality because men cannot bear to see what she actually does in their lives — summoning everything they can never get the better of. The shadow before her is easier, and even the shadow causes the greatest difficulties. So the soul builds its exits early, and spirituality is often the most elegant one: find the wise old man, acquire the wisdom, bypass the figure who stands closer, whose specific power is to remain permanently unfinished. What the passage opens is the question of sequence. You cannot locate the saviour before the disaster. The longing is born inside the wreckage, not before it. reflection_v0_3: | The figure Jung names "minatory and ridiculous" is worth pausing over — he means simultaneously threatening and absurd, and he means both at once, not one then the other. The trickster, the shadow, the clown who blocks the gate: his comedy is the comedy of what we cannot outrun. What follows that double quality is the sequence Jung traces here, a kind of archaeology running backwards from the surface — shadow first, then anima, then the wise old man — each figure more numinous than the last, each one hidden inside the one before like a Russian doll. Hillman would resist the teleology, the implicit graduation toward wisdom, but even he could not deny the layering itself. What Jung is quietly insisting is that the ridiculous exterior is not a mistake of the psyche; it is protective coloring. The saviour emerges only after disaster because the longing has to be real, not manufactured — which means the shadow's intractable absurdity is doing something the intellect cannot do for us. parent_id: Jung_1959_The_Archetypes_and_the_Collective__par0110 source: oracle-v3-retrieve generated: 2026-04-17 regenerated: 2026-04-18 prompt_version: v2.7 status: draft --- Jung writes: > The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually. Not always, of course, as a mythological figure, but, in consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythologems, as a corresponding projection on other social groups and nations. 485 If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow, then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning, which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in the subjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow, although by definition a negative figure, sometimes has certain clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quite different background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior. Experience confirms this; and what is more important, the things that are hidden usually consist of increasingly numinous figures. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,18 who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hides in her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage, magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but it would be pointless to do so, as psychologically one only understands what one has experienced oneself. The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations but names for certain areas of experience, and though they can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them. Thus, I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more "scientific." But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima. 486 Actually, it is not surprising that this should be so, since even the most rudimentary insight into the shadow sometimes causes the greatest difficulties for the modern European. But since the shadow is the figure nearest his consciousness and the least explosive one, it is also the first component of personality to come up in an analysis of the unconscious. A minatory and ridiculous figure, he stands at the very beginning of the way of individuation, posing the deceptively easy riddle of the Sphinx, or grimly demanding answer to a "quaestio crocodilina."19 487 If, at the end of the trickster myth, the saviour is hinted at, this comforting premonition or hope means that some calamity or other has happened and been consciously understood. Only out of disaster can the longing for the saviour arise-in other words, the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow create such a harrowing situation that nobody but a saviour can undo the tangled web of fate. — Carl Gustav Jung Jung's sequencing here is worth sitting with: shadow first, then anima, then the wise old man — each figure hiding behind the previous one like a series of doors. But notice what he slips in at the end of that sequence. The saviour. And the structural logic he offers is precise: the saviour is not a beginning but a consequence, arising specifically out of disaster that has been consciously understood. The longing for rescue — for the figure who will undo the tangled web — does not precede the descent. It appears only when the harrowing situation has already registered. This matters because the fantasy of the saviour almost always runs in the opposite direction: we invoke the rescuing figure to avoid the harrowing situation, to skip the consciously understood disaster. The anima, Jung tells us, remains untouched in a state of perpetual emotionality because men cannot bear to see what she actually does in their lives — summoning everything they can never get the better of. The shadow before her is easier, and even the shadow causes the greatest difficulties. So the soul builds its exits early, and spirituality is often the most elegant one: find the wise old man, acquire the wisdom, bypass the figure who stands closer, whose specific power is to remain permanently unfinished. What the passage opens is the question of sequence. You cannot locate the saviour before the disaster. The longing is born inside the wreckage, not before it. --- Carl Gustav Jung · *The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious* · 1959