The End of the Archetype

I thought we were adjusted to the post-Elizabethan complexity of the human psyche

I’m getting a little sick of archetypes. They’re all over the self-help webs. Jungian symbology is making a run for your psyche.

Maiden, Crone, Lover, Wise Woman—these narrative tropes can inspire, if you can look past the fact that a lot of those old stories were very messed up.

That’s because the world used to be very messed up.

Let’s look at the fact that the “Beauty and the Beast” myth occurs all over the world, and was essentially utilized to control women, to normalize forced marriage, and to introduce them to the idea that men are violent and wild. The story was essentially a road map for how to submit to it.

From a writer’s point of view: You don’t look back at some crass stereotype and go “I love that so much I want to become that.” You go: “That’s what dead, old people used to think, and their world was massively messed up, saturated in low-vibrational density, scarcity, and violence. Look at all this generational trauma!”

Most of those old stories were showing you what happens from a worldview of lack. They collapse people into two-dimensional puppets. They strip complexity from the human psyche because that was how they saw the world. Their morality echoes through every beat.

Yes, Jung was probably right that we have a collective unconscious filled with familiar symbols of life on Earth, and there are things to be honored in there, but one of the great stagnations of human experience is hanging on to old stories forever, instead of creating new ones—or at the very least, talking back hard core to the old ones.

Or just walk away. No, I don’t like this world where a young person is cast out into the woods (back then: that was murder) because someone doesn’t like them. Because someone heard a prophecy. And in this story, nobody goes to help that banished person.

I don’t want to reproduce that story. I certainly don’t want to become it. If that absolutely has to be the set-up for my story, this puppy is moving in a very different direction. I’m going to stop fetishizing the virginal qualities of young women, and start asking about the corruption of those in power and the cowardice of an entire population.

If you’re scrolling through IG and you come across some Jungian therapist telling you the “wild daughter” was banished into the woods, where she encountered her “holy hunger”—great. That therapist is taking a nasty old piece of work and using it to inspire you to consider your own wildness and honor it.

But a lot of those old stories were conceived in plain old bigotry. Just because a story survived for two thousand years, doesn’t mean it’s a good one. It just means that someone hung on to it, probably out of custom and control.

We need to resist stereotypes, especially with respect to our self-perception. Tropes exist. Characters exist. But we are always evolving. Always. That is our prime directive.

This High Priestess interrupts her inter-dimensional healing when DoorDash delivers her fried chicken.

This Wild Daughter gets extremely agitated when her neck pillow isn’t comfortable on the airplane.

It’s good to notice your own tropes now and then, but also notice your complexity. What’s inside you is far greater and richer than you could ever imagine, so explore that.