In what must be regarded as its earliest and most archaic form, as found among the North American Indians, Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.
— Paul Radin
Trickster unsettles every framework that requires a stable agent doing the willing — and that is precisely what makes him so difficult to receive. He is not a broken version of the hero, not the ego's shadow waiting to be integrated into something more wholesome. Radin is careful here: Trickster is not unconscious in the clinical sense, not simply undeveloped. He is prior to the distinction between conscious and unconscious. He precedes the categories he will eventually generate.
What this means for anyone who encounters Trickster as a live force — in a dream figure, an addiction, a compulsion that keeps returning no matter how much awareness you bring to it — is that the therapeutic instinct to get ahead of him, to understand him into submission, is already the wrong move. He does not become manageable through insight. Values emerge through him, Radin says, not by taming him but by letting his blundering run its course. The cost of the values is the blundering — the humiliation, the appetite, the consequence that couldn't be foreseen because he never foresaw anything.
There is something here about what suffering actually produces: not refinement of the agent, but the world the agent stumbles into being.
Paul Radin·The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology·1956