Prostitute (Myss)

Definition

The Prostitute is one of the four archetypes that Caroline Myss calls “survival” archetypes and holds to be present in everyone, with the Child, the Victim and the Saboteur. The name is a deliberate provocation. Myss uses it for the part of a person that will sell or negotiate away their integrity, out of fear for their physical or financial survival or simply for gain. Selling is meant broadly: of talents, ideas, loyalty or silence as much as of the body, and staying in a job or a marriage that harms one because it pays is her standard case. The figure also runs the other way, as the readiness to buy a controlling interest in someone else.

Her chapter heading calls it the guardian of faith. The claim is that every compromise made for security is a test of faith, that a person who has faith cannot be bought, and that once faced, the figure becomes a protection: a settled sense of not being for sale. Like each of Myss’s figures it has a light and a “shadow” side, where shadow means its harmful expression, not Jung’s concept. The figure says nothing about people who do sex work, and Myss treats the word as a metaphor.

History

The image is older in Myss’s writing than the set of four. The Creation of Health, written with the physician C. Norman Shealy and first published in 1988, compares a relationship kept for security unfavourably with paid prostitution, where at least the terms are openly understood (seen in the 1993 edition). Anatomy of the Spirit (1996), in its chapter on the second chakra, “The Power of Relationships”, already makes the universal claim: an element of the prostitute lives in every psyche, a part that could be bought for the right sum, whether it shows itself in business or in personal life, and the prostitution of one’s energy is far commoner than the physical kind (index, “Prostitution”, p. 152).

The 2001 book capitalised the figure and made it one of the four survival archetypes (Sacred Contracts, Harmony Books, copyright 2001; on sale January 2002). Chapter 4, “Speaking Archetypes: Your Four Principal Energy Companions”, gives it the section “The Prostitute: Guardian of Faith”, and the closing gallery adds a short entry with examples. A small-press spiritual narrative of June 2000 had already listed Child, Prostitute, Saboteur and Victim as “the current thinking” on four main archetypes, which suggests the set was being taught in workshops before the book (Smith, 2000). In Archetypes: Who Are You? (2013) the Prostitute is not among Myss’s ten archetypal families but keeps a short entry of its own, where it is still called universal. The system as a whole is on the framework page.

Prostitution should be understood as the selling or selling out of your talents, ideas, and any other expression of the self. — Caroline Myss, “Appendix: The Four Archetypes of Survival”, myss.com (2015), adapted from Sacred Contracts (2001)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Myss credits Jung and Plato with the idea of archetypes in general. No Prostitute archetype appears in Jung, and the claim that everyone carries one is hers.

The debate

The Prostitute has no counterpart among the classical ten. The nearest is the persona, Jung’s name for the attitude a person adopts to meet what society expects, which becomes a problem when the ego takes the mask for the whole person. Myss’s figure sharpens that into a transaction: the self presented, or withheld, in exchange for safety or reward. There is something of the shadow in it as well, since the venal streak is what most people would rather not see in themselves. But the frame is different in kind. Jung’s persona is a necessary adaptation and his shadow a matter of what is unconscious; Myss’s Prostitute is a moral and spiritual test, and the faith it guards belongs to her religious frame of divine guidance. That is a theological claim rather than a psychological one.

The motif itself is ancient and literary: the bargain that buys security or power at the price of the soul is the plot of the Faust legend, which Myss lists among her examples. What she adds is the universal attribution, the assertion that every person carries this figure and must come to terms with it as a condition of their life’s purpose.

Published criticism has not dwelt on this figure. Kate Maver’s review of the 2001 book in the evangelical Christian Research Journal (2003) notes that everyone is said to be “stuck with” the four survival archetypes and remarks, with some irony, that readers taking offence at an “inner prostitute” should remember that every archetype has positive and negative sides; her wider objection is that Myss offers “Jung Lite”. Skeptical critics, among them Phil Molé (2002) and Joe Nickell (2004; 2007), have addressed Myss’s claims as a medical intuitive rather than her archetypes. This site found no published discussion of the choice of name or of the figure in the analytical-psychology literature it searched.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Myss’s Prostitute, and her method of identifying it is a set of reflective questions, not a psychological instrument. This site has not found adjacent mainstream research that tests anything close to the figure as she defines it, and research on sex work is unrelated.

Appearances

Myss’s gallery gives her own examples: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; a run of Jack Lemmon’s films, among them The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome and Mass Appeal; Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday; Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity; Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront; and, from religion, the Yoruba orisha Ochun, whom she describes as forced into prostitution for a time to feed her children. These are her readings. The figure is taught with the other survival archetypes in Myss’s courses and in books that adopt her scheme, such as Linda Marie’s Archetypes to the Rescue (2005), which works through each of the four.

Sources

• Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-517-70392-2. Chapter 4, section “The Prostitute: Guardian of Faith”; 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. Part 2, chapter 2, “The Second Chakra: The Power of Relationships”; index, “Prostitution”, p. 152.
• 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.
• 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. (2004). The Mystery Chronicles: More Real-Life X-Files. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2318-9.
• Nickell, J. (2007). Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2467-4. Index, “Myss, Caroline”, p. 216.
• Marlowe, C. (1604). The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Project Gutenberg #779.
• Marie, L. (2005). Archetypes to the Rescue. JADA Press. ISBN 978-0-9771343-0-4.