archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Child (Myss)

The part that was small once, and keeps its own weather.

The first of the four “survival” archetypes that Caroline Myss, in a spiritual self-help book of 2001, says every person carries. A family of child patterns, wounded, orphan, magical, eternal, divine, organised around dependency and responsibility. Her claim, not Jung’s child.

In Caroline Myss’s system the Child is one of four archetypes she calls “survival” archetypes, which she holds are present in every person, alongside the Victim, the Prostitute and the Saboteur. Myss, a self-described medical intuitive, writes in a spiritual self-help frame: each of the four, she claims, is a lifelong companion guarding something the soul needs. The Child, in her chapter heading, is the guardian of innocence. It stands for the part of a person that expects good things of the future, can play, and trusts; it also holds the person’s early experience of safety, care, loyalty and family.

Go deeper

At the threshold

‘I have no name;I am but two days old.’What shall I call thee?‘I happy am,Joy is my name.’Sweet joy befall thee!Pretty joy!Sweet joy, but two days old.Sweet joy I call thee:Thou dost smile,I sing the while;Sweet joy befall thee!

Public domain · Blake, Infant Joy (1789)

A two-day-old creature names itself Joy and is named in return, the child as pure givenness before anything has happened to it.

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 5 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Oliver Twist

    Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts, “Appendix: The Gallery of Archetypes” (p. 364 ff.); online version, headed “Appendix: A Gallery of Archetypes”, at https://myss.com/free-resources/sacred-contracts-and-your-archetypes/appendix-a-gallery-of-archtypes/, 1838

    Listed in Myss’s gallery under the wounded Child, a boy carried through cruelty by an unbroken hope.

  2. Jung’s example

    David Copperfield

    Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts, “Appendix: The Gallery of Archetypes” (p. 364 ff.); online version, headed “Appendix: A Gallery of Archetypes”, at https://myss.com/free-resources/sacred-contracts-and-your-archetypes/appendix-a-gallery-of-archtypes/, 1850

    Listed under the orphan Child, the boy who must make a family from strangers.

  3. Jung’s example

    The Little Prince

    Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts, “Appendix: The Gallery of Archetypes” (p. 364 ff.); online version, headed “Appendix: A Gallery of Archetypes”, at https://myss.com/free-resources/sacred-contracts-and-your-archetypes/appendix-a-gallery-of-archtypes/, 1943

    Listed under the innocent or magical Child, a visitor who asks the questions adults have stopped asking.

  4. Jung’s example

    Peter Pan

    Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts, “Appendix: The Gallery of Archetypes” (p. 364 ff.); online version, headed “Appendix: A Gallery of Archetypes”, at https://myss.com/free-resources/sacred-contracts-and-your-archetypes/appendix-a-gallery-of-archtypes/, 1904

    Listed under the eternal Child, the boy who will not grow up.

  5. Jung’s example

    Tarzan

    Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts, “Appendix: The Gallery of Archetypes” (p. 364 ff.); online version, headed “Appendix: A Gallery of Archetypes”, at https://myss.com/free-resources/sacred-contracts-and-your-archetypes/appendix-a-gallery-of-archtypes/, 1912

    Listed under the nature Child, raised by the animals and at home in the wild.

The wider sky

Where the Child (Myss) has been seen

26 exemplars across 6 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

When my mother died I was very young,And my father sold me while yet my tongueCould scarcely cry ‘Weep! weep! weep! weep!’So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’

Public domain · Blake, The Chimney-Sweeper (Songs of Innocence) (1789)

A child sold into soot comforts another with a small kindness, the wound and the tenderness side by side.

A small person in a large house, working out who is in charge of the weather.

Hurt early, hopeful anyway; the wound and the wonder arrive in the same body.

Never quite grown up, or grown up too soon: both are ways of staying a child.

The deep layer · what was written

Child (Myss): the entry

Definition

In Caroline Myss’s system the Child is one of four archetypes she calls “survival” archetypes, which she holds are present in every person, alongside the Victim, the Prostitute and the Saboteur. Myss, a self-described medical intuitive, writes in a spiritual self-help frame: each of the four, she claims, is a lifelong companion guarding something the soul needs. The Child, in her chapter heading, is the guardian of innocence. It stands for the part of a person that expects good things of the future, can play, and trusts; it also holds the person’s early experience of safety, care, loyalty and family.

Unlike the other three, the Child is a family. Myss describes several forms, the Wounded Child, the Orphan or Abandoned Child, the Dependent or Needy Child, the Magical or Innocent Child, the Nature Child, the Eternal Child (puer or puella) and the Divine Child, and asks readers to find which one dominates in them. Whatever the form, she places the same question at the centre: when to depend on others and when to take responsibility, when to stand apart from the group and when to belong to it. Each form, like every figure in her system, is given a light side and a shadow side. “Shadow” here means the figure’s harmful expression, not Jung’s concept.

History

The Child as a survival archetype first appears in print in Myss’s 2001 book (Sacred Contracts, Harmony Books, copyright 2001; Publishers Weekly reported it on sale in January 2002). Chapter 4, “Speaking Archetypes: Your Four Principal Energy Companions”, treats the four together, with a section headed “The Child: Guardian of Innocence”, and the book’s closing gallery gives fuller entries for each of the Child’s forms, with examples from film, fiction, fairy tale and religion. The shared history of the system, the twelve-house wheel and the open-ended gallery, is on the framework page.

The pieces are older than the set. A 1988 book written with the physician C. Norman Shealy already records Myss reading a patient as having “the archetype of an orphan” (The Creation of Health, seen in the 1993 edition). Anatomy of the Spirit (1996) gives the “wounded child” as an archetype that each person carries and indexes it at pp. 202 and 206, and Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can (1997) returns to it at length (index, pp. 132–37), where Myss notes that the wounded child had become a popular figure in books and in therapy at the time she took it up. The four survival archetypes as a named set were in circulation in workshop culture shortly before the book: a small-press spiritual narrative of June 2000 reports that “the current thinking” recognises four main archetypes, Child, Prostitute, Saboteur and Victim (Smith, Journey Home To…, 2000). Myss herself says she taught archetypes in seminars through the 1990s, after readings from 1989 onwards in which archetypal patterns began to stand out (Sacred Contracts, introduction).

Later books keep the figure but loosen the frame. In Archetypes: Who Are You? (Hay House, 2013) Myss organises the field into ten archetypal families, from the Caregiver to the Spiritual Seeker; the Child is not among the ten.

Myss names Jung and Plato as her predecessors. Shealy’s appreciation at the front of the book lists the archetypes Jung elaborated, the child among them, and says Myss carries the field into the twenty-first century; the publisher’s description says her process builds on Jung, Plato and contemporary thinkers. The resemblance to Jung is in the name. Nothing in Jung corresponds to the claim that a Child archetype is one of four that everyone must work with, or to the sub-forms as Myss defines them.

The debate

The classical child and Myss’s Child are different objects. Jung’s essay of 1940 read the child of myth and dream, abandoned, invincible, born in miraculous circumstances, as a symbol of futurity and of the self, and warned against taking it as a memory of one’s own childhood. Myss’s Child is almost the reverse: a pattern formed by a person’s actual childhood and carried into adult life, to be healed or matured. Its nearest relative is the inner child of the American recovery movement, popularised by Charles Whitfield (1987) and John Bradshaw (1990), which the core child entry records as a different thing from Jung’s motif. Two of Myss’s forms borrow Jungian names. Her Divine Child echoes the divine child of Jung and Kerényi (1940–41), but as redemptive innocence and trust in the divine rather than as an image of the self. Her Eternal Child takes the puer aeternus, which Marie-Louise von Franz described as a neurotic arrest tied to the mother complex, and gives it a positive pole, the wish to stay young in spirit. Her Orphan Child is likewise distinct from the Jungian orphan of Edinger, an image of the self in its solitude, and from Carol Pearson’s Orphan (1986), a separate authored lineage.

Published criticism of Myss rarely reaches this figure in particular. The fullest critical review of the book this site found, by Kate Maver in the evangelical Christian Research Journal (2003), calls Myss’s use of Jung “Jung Lite”, notes that everyone is said to be “stuck with” the four survival archetypes, and objects that the wheel by which readers place their archetypes is drawn by lot:

This seems like an extraordinarily complicated, random way to arrive at one’s purpose in life. — Kate Maver, “Caroline Myss and the New Age Contract”, Christian Research Journal 25(4) (2003)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Maver writes from a confessional position and her review is theological as much as critical. Skeptical writers have targeted Myss’s medical intuition rather than her archetypes: Phil Molé (2002) devoted an encyclopedia entry to her holistic claims and found them unsupported, and Joe Nickell (2007) grouped her with medical intuitives who show the traits of a fantasy-prone personality. Publishers Weekly (2001) was neutral, likening the method to the I Ching as a prompt for reflection. This site found no discussion of Myss’s survival archetypes in the analytical-psychology literature it searched, nor in academic studies of religion.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Myss’s Child or its sub-forms, and her method of identifying them is an intuitive self-examination, not a psychological instrument. The nearest mainstream work is schema therapy’s “child modes”, states such as a vulnerable or an angry child self, which have a validated self-report measure (Lobbestael et al., 2010). That research uses its own definitions and says nothing about Myss’s figure.

Appearances

Myss’s own gallery is the main source of exemplars. It lists, among others, Dickens’s David Copperfield and Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for the Orphan Child, Oliver Twist and Richard Wright’s Native Son for the Wounded Child, The Little Prince, Pippi Longstocking and Alice for the Magical Child, Tarzan and Saint Francis for the Nature Child, Peter Pan and Big for the Eternal Child, and Horus and the Infant of Prague for the Divine Child. These are her readings. The figure is taught in Myss’s own courses and mentoring programme and turns up in self-help that adopts her four survival archetypes wholesale, for example Linda Marie’s Archetypes to the Rescue (2005), which reprints material from the book by permission.

Sources

  • Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-517-70392-2. Chapter 4, section “The Child: Guardian of Innocence”; introduction; “An Appreciation” by C. N. Shealy; appendix, “The Gallery of Archetypes”. Contents verified from the publisher’s ebook sample (Transworld): https://content.e-bookshelf.de/media/reading/L-535049-ae25abbe32.pdf
  • Myss, C. (2015). Appendix: The four archetypes of survival; Appendix: A gallery of archetypes. Adapted from the book on myss.com. https://myss.com/free-resources/sacred-contracts-and-your-archetypes/appendix-the-four-archetypes-of-survival/
  • Shealy, C. N., & Myss, C. (1988). The Creation of Health. Stillpoint. ISBN 978-0-913299-40-1. Seen in the 1993 Stillpoint edition, ISBN 978-0-913299-94-4.
  • Myss, C. (1996). Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-517-70391-5. Index, “Wounded child archetype”, pp. 202, 206.
  • Myss, C. (1997). Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-609-60090-0. Index, “Wounded child” archetype, pp. 132–37.
  • Myss, C. (2013). Archetypes: Who Are You? Hay House. ISBN 978-1-4019-4108-6.
  • Smith, A. (2000). Journey Home To…: A Message of Hope and Healing for Mankind. Centaine Publications. ISBN 978-1-929769-24-7.
  • Publishers Weekly (3 December 2001). Review of Sacred Contracts. https://publishersweekly.com/9780517703922
  • Maryles, D. (2002, 26 August). Not to be Myssed. Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20020826/35001-not-to-be-myssed.html
  • Maver, K. (2003). Caroline Myss and the New Age contract. Christian Research Journal, 25(4). https://www.equip.org/articles/sacred-contracts-awakening-your-divine-potential/
  • Molé, P. (2002). Holistic medicine: the case of Caroline Myss. In M. Shermer (Ed.), The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-57607-653-8. P. 537.
  • Nickell, J. (2007). Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2467-4. Index, “Myss, Caroline”, p. 216.
  • Jung, C. G. (1940). The psychology of the child archetype. CW 9i. First published in C. G. Jung and K. Kerényi, Das göttliche Kind (1940).
  • Whitfield, C. L. (1987). Healing the Child Within. Health Communications. ISBN 978-0-932194-40-4.
  • Bradshaw, J. (1990). Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. Bantam. ISBN 978-0-553-05793-5.
  • Lobbestael, J., van Vreeswijk, M., Spinhoven, P., Schouten, E., & Arntz, A. (2010). Reliability and validity of the short Schema Mode Inventory (SMI). Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 38(4), 437–458. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352465810000226
  • Caroline Myss Education. Sacred Contracts mentoring. https://myss.com/sacred-contracts-mentoring/
  • Marie, L. (2005). Archetypes to the Rescue. JADA Press. ISBN 978-0-9771343-0-4.

Leaving

I remember, I rememberThe fir trees dark and high;I used to think their slender topsWere close against the sky:It was a childish ignorance,But now 'tis little joyTo know I'm farther off from HeavenThan when I was a boy.

Public domain · Hood, I Remember, I Remember (1827)

The adult measures the distance from childhood in the one place a child could not, and finds it further from heaven than he thought.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey✦ ChildAbandoned, invincible, the beginning and the end.Return to the void