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The Apophatic Method of CW 9i

The Apophatic Method of CW 9i

Jung’s method in CW 9i is not to define archetypes but to circle them. The archetype-as-such, being empty and purely formal (§155), cannot be named except through the phenomena it precipitates. The volume’s method is therefore apophatic: the archetype is known by its effects, and its effects are known only as they repeat across unrelated individuals and cultures in configurations no personal biography can account for.

The governing example is the dual-mother motif:

Now it is absolutely out of the question that all the individuals who believe in a dual descent have in reality always had two mothers, or conversely that those few who shared Leonardo’s fate have infected the rest of humanity with their complex. Rather, one cannot avoid the assumption that the universal occurrence of the dual-birth motif together with the fantasy of the two mothers answers an omnipresent human need which is reflected in these motifs. (Jung 1959, §95)

The motif is archetypal because it arises where the biographical ground for it does not. This is the volume’s criterion, applied essay by essay. The mother-archetype is circled through personal mother, grandmother, nurse, mythological mother, Demeter-Kore, the Church, Sophia, the earth. The divine-child is circled through Apollo, Hermes, Zeus, Dionysus, Narayana, the Christ-child, Meister Eckhart’s naked boy, the English “Radiant Boy.” The trickster is circled through Wakdjunkaga, the medieval simia dei, Mercurius, Tom Thumb.

The method is amplification before it is analysis. Classical, mythological, and alchemical parallels are laid down first; psychological interpretation follows. This is the methodological signature the archetypal-school will later make explicit and the developmental-school will qualify. It is the method on which CW 9i’s authority rests — not “here is what archetypes are” but “here is what archetypal phenomena do, and here is the apophatic inference that follows.”

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