Child

Definition

The child archetype, in Jung’s usage, is the motif of the child as it occurs in myth, religion, fairy tale, dream and fantasy: the god born in a cave or a manger, the infant exposed on the water or abandoned in the forest, the small figure who cannot be killed, the golden child of the alchemists. Jung was explicit that it is not a memory of one’s own childhood and not the literal child. It is an image of beginnings and of the future, of what is “not yet”, and it faces two ways at once: back to the undifferentiated state before consciousness, and forward to the goal, since the divine child, born from the union of opposites, is for Jung a symbol of the self. Its typical features are miraculous or humble birth, abandonment and danger, invincibility despite smallness, and often a hermaphroditic or dual nature.

Two things the definition excludes. It is not an endorsement of childishness: the shadow side of the motif is what von Franz called the problem of the puer aeternus, the adult who stays provisional. And it is not the “inner child” of the recovery movement, a renaming recorded below, which takes the wounded personal child as its object where Jung took the mythological one.

History

The motif entered Jung’s work with the hero. Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) already treats the hero’s birth and the dual mother, and its 1952 revision speaks of the mother as the gateway to the unconscious where “the divine child slumbers, patiently waiting his conscious realisation” (CW 5 ¶508, as quoted in Samuels 1985). A lecture of November 1932, “The Development of Personality” (German 1934, CW 17), already speaks of a child that persists in the adult, unfinished and in need of care; it is an antecedent, not a naming. In the 1934 lecture “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” the child is placed among the symbols of the end of the process, “likewise the child (as higher form of the puer eternus)”, and the hero and the puer aeternus are said to recur as themes throughout (The Integration of the Personality, 1939, p. 94).

The dedicated essay came through a collaboration. In 1940 the classicist Karl Kerényi published Das göttliche Kind (Albae Vigiliae VI/VII), on the primordial child in Greek myth, with Jung’s commentary “Zur Psychologie des Kind-Archetypus”; a companion on the Kore followed, and the pair appeared together as Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie (1941), in English as Essays on a Science of Mythology (Bollingen, 1949), in a British edition as Introduction to a Science of Mythology, and in a new German edition in 1951. The common citation “1949/1951” compresses this: 1940 is the original. Jung’s essay, collected in CW 9i, sets out the child’s abandonment, which it calls a necessary condition of consciousness (¶287, as given in Sharp 1991), its invincibility, its hermaphroditism and its character as beginning and end (¶299), and insists that the motif is not a residue of actual childhood. Its best-known sentence describes the child as a paradox:

an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a personality. — C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype” (1940), CW 9i ¶299f, as quoted in von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (1970)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Psychology and Alchemy (1944) ties the motif to the opus: Böhme’s “golden child”, the filius philosophorum, is glossed as the “archetype of the divine child” with a cross-reference to the essay (CW 12 ¶215). Aion (1951) makes the structural claim in one clause: the syzygy of anima and animus forms the tension of opposites “from which the divine child is born as the symbol of unity” (CW 9ii ¶59).

The post-war elaborations run in three directions. Marie-Louise von Franz’s lectures of 1959–60, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (1970), took the motif’s pathology, with Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince as her text. James Hillman’s “Senex and Puer” (1967) and “Abandoning the Child” (1971) made the puer and the abandoned child figures of the imaginal rather than stages. Neumann’s The Child (1973) and Fordham’s infant observation made the child the site of the self’s first appearance. Donald Kalsched’s The Inner World of Trauma (1996) is the clinical synthesis, and John Bradshaw’s Homecoming (1990) the popular one.

The debate

The classical reading keeps Jung’s ambiguity. Von Franz, working through the Little Prince, finds the motif “double”: the same figure reads negatively as the infantile shadow or positively as a symbol of the self, and when it splits one half has usually been swallowed by the mother complex. The puer problem, in her account and in Stevens’ summary of it (2003), is a bond to the mother that keeps a man provisional, and Jung’s remedy was work. Edward Edinger (1972) gives the structural version: the self is born but the ego is made, the infant’s identity with the self is the original inflation, and the mother, following Neumann, is the first carrier of the self.

The developmental school and Neumann disagreed about the child itself. Fordham, from infant observation, posited a primary self in the infant that deintegrates into experience; against Neumann he argued (1981) that if the mother is the baby’s self there is no baby. Samuels (1985) notes that the dispute pits an empirical temperament against a mythopoeic one.

The archetypal school refused to treat the child as a phase. Hillman’s senex and puer are a pair that splits only in ego-consciousness; the negative senex, as Kalsched summarises him, is “the senex split from its own puer aspect. He has lost his ‘child’”, and that child is an avatar of the self’s spiritual aspect. Thomas Moore’s anthology of Hillman (1989) records his refusal to see the child as something we grow out of.

The trauma reading is Kalsched’s. His archetypal self-care system is a dyad: a vulnerable inner child carrying the personal spirit, and a protector who turns persecutor to keep that child from being hurt again. The child keeps its mythological sense in the clinic:

Symbolically, therefore, the child represents the potential for realization of the personal spirit in life. At the miraculous moment of a child’s birth, the imaginal becomes real, incarnate, and it is for this reason, I believe, that mythology has selected the birth of the divine child as its answer to the question “Does God manifest himself in history?” — Donald Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma (1996), chapter on Rapunzel

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The popular renaming is Bradshaw’s “inner child” (Homecoming, 1990), which grew out of family-systems and recovery work and refers to the wounded personal child of a particular life, with Jung’s name attached loosely if at all; Pearson’s “Innocent” (1991) is a type in a separately organised system, not a renaming. Kalsched’s survey of “popularized versions” of the self-care dyad in Woodman, Leonard and Estés shows the Jungian literature itself moving the same way. The emergent school, finally, has no child archetype: for Knox (2003) there are no archetypes with built-in content, and the divine child is cultural elaboration of simpler developmental patterns.

Empirical status

Narrow. One peer-reviewed study has put a “Child” scale to work. Kalnova and Hamilton (2014) had 312 undergraduates rate symbolic images on 57 evaluative items, which factor analysis reduced to eight archetype scales, one of them a child-like factor, though the published abstract does not name it and the full text was not checked, with the structure replicating across three image sets. Its limits are real: one image-rating experiment with students, scales drawn from popular twelve-type lists as much as from Jung, no independent replication, and no test of the configuration Jung described. It shows that raters sort images on a child-like dimension, not that the archetype exists as Jung meant it. The nearest mainstream research is developmental psychology of infancy and attachment, which Fordham and Knox draw on and which studies real infants, not the motif. Inner-child work in the recovery movement has not been tested as a Jungian construct.

Appearances

Jung and Kerényi’s book is the first list. Kerényi’s essay ranges over the child-gods of Greek myth, Hermes above all, the Cretan Zeus and Dionysus, and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is the primary text. The Christian divine child is Jung’s other pole; Kalsched’s answer to his own question is “as Moses, as Christ, as Buddha, as Krishna”, and Moses set adrift on the Nile is Brewster’s example of the exposed child. The alchemical filius is the motif in the laboratory: the “golden child” of Böhme in Psychology and Alchemy, and the child born from the tomb in the text of Komarios to Cleopatra, which von Franz (1972) reads as the stone as divine child. The Kalevala’s thumb-sized hero in copper armour is von Franz’s fairy-tale case, taken from Kerényi. Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943) is her modern one, and Kalsched reads “Rapunzel” and the Norwegian “Prince Lindworm”, both opening in childlessness, as stories of the child-part held in enchantment. Except for Kerényi and Jung, the “divine child” is a reading applied after the fact; only von Franz and Kalsched wrote with the concept in hand.

Sources

• Jung, C. G. (1912/1952). Symbols of Transformation. CW 5 ¶508, as quoted in Samuels (1985). Earlier English text: Psychology of the Unconscious (B. Hinkle, Trans., 1916), Project Gutenberg #65903.
• Jung, C. G. (1934). The development of personality (lecture, November 1932). CW 17.
• Jung, C. G. (1934). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. CW 9i. English in The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans., 1939), p. 94. Farrar & Rinehart.
• Jung, C. G., & Kerényi, C. (1940/1941). Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 1949). Princeton University Press edition 1993. ISBN 978-0-691-01756-3.
• Jung, C. G. (1940). The psychology of the child archetype. CW 9i ¶259–305 (span as given in Kalsched 1996); ¶287 and ¶299 as given in Sharp (1991); ¶299f as quoted in von Franz (1970).
• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entries “Child” and “Puer aeternus”. https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
• Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶215.
• Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶59. Princeton University Press.
• von Franz, M.-L. (1970). The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (3rd ed. 2000). Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-88-5. Lecture 3.
• von Franz, M.-L. (1972). Creation Myths (rev. ed. 1995). Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-528-1.
• Edinger, E. F. (1972). Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche. Shambhala edition 1992. ISBN 978-0-87773-576-2. Chapters 1 and 2.
• Hillman, J. (1975). Abandoning the child. In Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-308-8.
• Hillman, J. (1979). Senex and puer: an aspect of the historical and psychological present (Eranos lecture 1967). In Puer Papers. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-310-1.
• Fordham, M. (1981). Neumann and childhood. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 26(2), 99–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1981.00099.x
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapters 3 and 5.
• Moore, T. (Ed.). (1989). A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-016132-3. Chapter 9, “Mythology as family”.
• Bradshaw, J. (1990). Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. Bantam. ISBN 978-0-553-05793-5.
• Pearson, C. S. (1991). Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250678-8.
• Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12329-7. Chapters 5, 7 and 10.
• Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Chapter 9, pp. 154–155, for the puer aeternus.
• Knox, J. (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-129-7. Chapter 3.
• Kalnova, S. S., & Hamilton, M. A. (2014). The effect of image features on the activation of archetypes. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 33(3), 227–250. https://doi.org/10.2190/IC.33.3.b
• Brewster, F. (2018). Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-78906-6. Chapter 2.
• Homeric Hymn to Hermes. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.