archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Classical (Jung) · an archetype

Father

The weight behind the man, and the voice that judges in the dream.

Jung’s name for the inherited image behind the personal father, which he said gives a real father his outsized hold over a child’s fate. Jung invoked it often but never wrote an essay on it, so the idea has to be gathered from scattered passages.

The father archetype, in Jung’s usage, is the inherited readiness to experience “the father”: the image behind the actual man that, Jung held, lends him a power over a child’s life far greater than his personal qualities would explain. Jung set it beside the mother archetype as its partner. Where the mother stands for the given structure of the psyche, the father stands for its energy and direction, and in later life his image turns into spirit, authority, law and the voice that passes judgement in dreams. On Sharp’s summary of the scattered remarks, a man’s father-complex shows through his persona and his shadow, while for a woman Jung made the father the first carrier of the animus.

Go deeper

At the threshold

I am thy father’s spirit,Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,Till the foul crimes done in my days of natureAre burnt and purg’d away. But that I am forbidTo tell the secrets of my prison-house,I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood,

Public domain · Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v (the Ghost) (1604)

The dead father returns as spirit and lays a fate on his son, the father as a power that outlives the man.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Raguel, Sarah and Asmodeus

    Jung, The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual, 1909

    The father who mourns his daughter’s bridegrooms and secretly digs the next one’s grave.

  2. Jung’s example

    Jehovah as paterfamilias

    Jung, The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual, 1909

    The household father raised into a god who must be obeyed in fear.

  3. Jung’s example

    The creator God of Miss Miller’s hymn

    Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido), 1912

    A young woman’s poem of creation, read as the father-imago lifted into a deity.

  4. Jung’s example

    The wise old man as father figure

    Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12 ¶159), 1944

    The informing spirit who initiates a son into the meaning of life, met only in dreams.

  5. Jung’s example

    The raven

    Jung, The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales (CW 9i ¶433), 1948

    A sinister father-imago in bird form, holding the hero’s soul captive.

  6. a later reading

    Kronos

    Anthony Stevens, Archetype Revisited, 2003

    The father who eats his sons so that none can replace him; a later reading.

The wider sky

Where the Father has been seen

27 exemplars across 11 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

‘Father, father, where are you going?O do not walk so fast!Speak, father, speak to your little boy,Or else I shall be lost.’The night was dark, no father was there,The child was wet with dew;The mire was deep, and the child did weep,And away the vapour flew.

Public domain · Blake, The Little Boy Lost (Songs of Innocence) (1789)

A child calls after a father who is already out of reach, the absence that later writers called father hunger.

He walks too fast in the dark, and the child calls after him.

His word becomes law, then heaven, then a voice with no face.

Every son outgrows him, and finds him waiting in the next authority.

The deep layer · what was written

Father: the entry

Definition

The father archetype, in Jung’s usage, is the inherited readiness to experience “the father”: the image behind the actual man that, Jung held, lends him a power over a child’s life far greater than his personal qualities would explain. Jung set it beside the mother archetype as its partner. Where the mother stands for the given structure of the psyche, the father stands for its energy and direction, and in later life his image turns into spirit, authority, law and the voice that passes judgement in dreams. On Sharp’s summary of the scattered remarks, a man’s father-complex shows through his persona and his shadow, while for a woman Jung made the father the first carrier of the animus.

The definition needs a plain caveat. Jung spoke of the father as an archetype in several places but never wrote an essay on it, as he did for the mother, the child, the Kore, the spirit and the trickster. His one paper on fathers is a psychoanalytic study of 1909, and the archetypal reading was added to it decades later. What follows is therefore a gathering of passages rather than the reading of a single text, and much of it is the work of later writers, because Jung’s own material is thin.

History

The first text is Freudian. “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual” appeared in the first volume of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschung (1909) and in English in 1916. It argues that a child’s early relation to the father shapes adult fate, through four case histories in which grown patients reproduce a father’s constellation in their choice of partners and their symptoms. It widens the claim to religion: the Old Testament, Jung writes, raised the paterfamilias into Jehovah, and the infantile constellation later splits into a sublime deity and a devil. His paradigm is the Book of Tobit, where Sarah’s seven bridegrooms die on the wedding night and her father Raguel digs the eighth son-in-law’s grave in advance, the father in a twofold aspect as grieving parent and secret enemy of the marriage. The paper ends with an open question:

In my experience the father is usually the decisive and dangerous object of the child’s phantasy — C. G. Jung, “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual” (1909), in Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916), p. 175

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912, English 1916) supplies the term “father-imago” and treats the masculine creator God as a derivation of it, in the reading of Miss Miller’s “Hymn of Creation” (part I, chapter 3).

A dating caution belongs here. The essay was revised for a later edition, and the version in CW 4 adds the archetype. Stevens (2003) quotes it: the personal father embodies the archetype, which “acts as an amplifier” of whatever in him fits the inherited pattern (CW 4 ¶744, as quoted in Stevens 2003). Stevens attributes this to Jung in 1909. The 1916 English text, read for this entry, contains no archetype language, so the sentence belongs to the revision and should not be backdated.

The mature statements are short and scattered. The 1938 lecture on the mother archetype pairs the two in a single sentence:

The father, on the other hand, represents the dynamism of the archetype, for the archetype consists of both—form and energy. — C. G. Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (1938/1954), CW 9i ¶187

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The 1945 essay on the spirit in fairytales derives the spirit figure from the father: a positive father-complex in a man produces credulity towards authority, in a woman lively spiritual interests, and in dreams the decisive convictions, prohibitions and counsels come from a father-figure, most often the wise old man (CW 9i ¶396). The same essay calls the raven in one tale a sinister father-imago (¶433). Psychology and Alchemy (1944) makes the wise old man “the archetypal father figure”, the informing spirit who initiates a son into the meaning of life (CW 12 ¶159). Sharp’s Jung Lexicon (1991) adds the daughter’s side: the father shapes her Logos and is the first carrier of her animus-image (CW 5 ¶272; CW 14 ¶232, as given in Sharp), and remarks that Jung’s comments on the father complex were rarely more than asides.

The debate

Samuels (1985) states the problem: Jung wrote one early paper on the father, so his ideas have to be teased out. Samuels lists them as the father as opposite of the mother, as informing spirit and personal counterpart of God the Father (CW 5 ¶70, as quoted in Samuels), as model persona for a son, as that from which a son must differentiate, as the daughter’s first lover and animus image, and as a figure in the transference. He then surveys the developmental writers: von der Heydt (1973) on the eclipse of the father, Dieckmann (1977) on dream images of destructive authority, Seligman (1982) on the “missing father”, and Carvalho (1982) on the father as the first significant other beside the mother.

The evolutionary reading is Stevens (2003), whose chapter on the father treats the archetype as Elder, King and Father in Heaven, the carrier of Logos, with a terrible side in Jehovah, Shiva and Kronos. Stevens reports Jung’s view that the father archetype stirs only around the fifth year and argues it matters much earlier.

The archetypal school reverses the valuation. Hillman (1987), citing Guggenbühl-Craig, holds that the murderous father is essential to fathering: the father’s failures break the son’s idealisation and initiate him into his own shadow, and the cry to be fathered idealises the archetype. The men’s movement took the opposite line. Bly (1990) called for “Zeus energy”, male authority accepted for the community, and Hollis (1994) described a “father hunger” in sons whose father imago was inadequately activated.

The sharpest objection is Samuels’s own later one:

The archetypal element is that there is no father archetype; the father relation features a lack of innate features. — Andrew Samuels, The Political Psyche (1993), p. 139

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

On this view the father relation is built from two other bonds, mother and infant and man and woman, and is culturally variable in a way Jung’s universal father ignored. The same critique applies to the gendered pairing of father with spirit and mother with nature that the classical account inherits.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested a father archetype, and no instrument measures one. The adjacent mainstream field is developmental research on fathers’ involvement and absence, collected in Lamb’s The Role of the Father in Child Development (5th ed., 2010), which studies the effects of actual fathers without positing an inherited image.

Appearances

Jung’s own instances are few and textual: Raguel in the Book of Tobit, Jehovah as the paterfamilias raised to a god, Miss Miller’s creator God, the raven of the spirit essay, and the wise old man as father figure. Later readings supply the mythological cast. Stevens reads Kronos, who eats his sons to keep his throne, and Shiva, as the terrible father; Bly reads Zeus as positive authority; Hillman reads Laius, who exposes Oedipus, as the infanticidal father. Ernest Jones’s study of Hamlet (1923) reads the ghost and the murdered father through Freud, a reminder that the rival theory, Freud’s primal father in Totem and Taboo (1913), is the other source of the figure in modern criticism. Bolen’s Zeus (1989) belongs to a separately organised taxonomy and is not a renaming. Except for Jung’s own examples, every one of these is a reading.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1909). Die Bedeutung des Vaters für das Schicksal des Einzelnen. Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschung, 1, 155–173. English in Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (C. E. Long, Ed., 1916), chapter 3, pp. 156–175. Moffat, Yard. Project Gutenberg #48225.
  • Jung, C. G. (1949). The significance of the father in the destiny of the individual (revised text). CW 4, Freud and Psychoanalysis, pp. 301–323; ¶744 as quoted in Stevens (2003).
  • Jung, C. G. (1912). Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. English as Psychology of the Unconscious (B. M. Hinkle, Trans., 1916), part I, chapter 3. Project Gutenberg #65903.
  • Jung, C. G. (1954). Psychological aspects of the mother archetype (Eranos lecture 1938). CW 9i ¶187.
  • Jung, C. G. (1948). The phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales (Eranos lecture 1945). CW 9i ¶396, ¶433.
  • Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶159.
  • Jung, C. G. (1952). Symbols of Transformation. CW 5 ¶70 as quoted in Samuels (1985); ¶272 as given in Sharp (1991).
  • Jung, C. G. (1955–56). Mysterium Coniunctionis. CW 14 ¶232 as given in Sharp (1991).
  • Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Father complex”. https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 5, “A note on the father”, pp. 129–131.
  • Samuels, A. (Ed.). (1985). The Father: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives. Free Association Books. ISBN 978-0-946960-27-9.
  • Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 6, “Fathers”, pp. 138–139.
  • Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Chapter 8, “The father”.
  • Hillman, J. (1987). Oedipus revisited. Eranos-Jahrbuch 56, 261–307; excerpted in A Blue Fire (T. Moore, Ed., 1989), pp. 220–221. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-016132-3.
  • Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51720-0.
  • Hollis, J. (1994). Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-64-9. Chapter 4, “Father Hunger”.
  • Lamb, M. E. (Ed.). (2010). The Role of the Father in Child Development (5th ed.). Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-40549-9.
  • Freud, S. (1913). Totem and Taboo (A. A. Brill, Trans.; Routledge printing, 1919). Project Gutenberg #41214.
  • Jones, E. (1923). A psycho-analytic study of Hamlet. In Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis. International Psycho-Analytical Press. https://archive.org/details/essaysinappliedp032427mbp
  • Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4.

Leaving

All things counter, original, spare, strange;Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:Praise him.

Public domain · Hopkins, Pied Beauty (1918)

Fathering turned into a verb for the source of all variety, the father image at its widest before it opens onto everything else.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey☿ Wise Old ManThe archetype of meaning.Return to the void