archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Saboteur (Myss)

The part that talks you out of the thing you most want to do.

One of the four “survival” archetypes that Caroline Myss, in a spiritual self-help book of 2001, says every person carries. Her figure for the fears that make a person undermine their own plans, which she says becomes a warning voice once faced. Not Jung’s trickster or shadow.

The Saboteur 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 Prostitute. In her account it is made of the fears and the low self-esteem that lead a person to choices that block their own success: the plan dropped as soon as it is begun, the relationship ended because a painful outcome is imagined, the same power struggle entered again and again. Myss presents it as perhaps the hardest of all archetypes to understand, because the name suggests betrayal.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,And enterprises of great pith and moment,With this regard their currents turn awry

Public domain · Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1 (1603)

Thought turns the current of resolve aside until the enterprise loses the name of action, the mind as its own obstacle.

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

    Antonio Salieri (Amadeus)

    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/, 1979

    Listed in Myss’s gallery under the Saboteur: the court composer who turns envy against the genius he can hear.

  2. Jung’s example

    Loki

    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/, c. 900

    Listed under the Saboteur in Norse myth, the shape-shifter whose tricks undo the gods’ plans.

  3. Jung’s example

    Eris

    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/, c. 700 BCE

    Listed under the Saboteur, the goddess of discord whose apple starts a war.

  4. Jung’s example

    Bamapana

    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/, ancient

    Listed under the Saboteur in Aboriginal tradition, the trickster who disrupts.

  5. Jung’s example

    The Madwoman of Chaillot

    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/, 1945

    Listed under the Saboteur, a play in which the eccentric women of Paris undo a plot of financiers.

The wider sky

Where the Saboteur (Myss) has been seen

11 exemplars across 5 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

And a good south wind sprung up behind;The Albatross did follow,And every day, for food or play,Came to the mariners' hollo!In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,It perched for vespers nine;Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,Glimmered the white Moon-shine."God save thee, ancient Mariner!From the fiends, that plague thee thus!--Why look'st thou so?"--With my cross-bowI shot the ALBATROSS.

Public domain · Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

The help that follows the ship is shot for no reason given, an act against one’s own luck that the rest of the poem has to pay for.

Every plan arrives with a reason it will fail, delivered in a kindly voice.

The gate that guards the self from change, and sometimes locks it in.

Success is the thing most feared, because it is new.

The deep layer · what was written

Saboteur (Myss): the entry

Definition

The Saboteur 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 Prostitute. In her account it is made of the fears and the low self-esteem that lead a person to choices that block their own success: the plan dropped as soon as it is begun, the relationship ended because a painful outcome is imagined, the same power struggle entered again and again. Myss presents it as perhaps the hardest of all archetypes to understand, because the name suggests betrayal.

Her claim is that the figure’s purpose is the opposite of its name. Faced and befriended, the Saboteur becomes a warning voice that alerts a person to situations in which they are about to be undermined by others or to undermine themselves; ignored, it shows itself in self-destructive behaviour or a wish to undermine other people. Her chapter heading calls it the guardian of choice. As with all her figures, Myss gives it a light and a “shadow” side, where shadow means its harmful expression, not Jung’s concept.

Yet the purpose of this archetype is not to sabotage you, but to help you learn the many ways in which you undermine yourself. — Caroline Myss, “Appendix: The Four Archetypes of Survival”, myss.com (2015), adapted from Sacred Contracts (2001)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

History

Unlike the Victim and the Prostitute, the Saboteur has no clear forerunner in Myss’s earlier books. Anatomy of the Spirit (1996) does not name it, and Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can (1997) speaks only of people who unconsciously sabotage their own healing rather than change. The figure first appears in print as one of a set. A small-press spiritual narrative of June 2000 lists Child, Prostitute, Saboteur and Victim as “the current thinking” on four main archetypes (Smith, 2000), and another self-help book from Trafford names the same four, “although there are others” (JoyBeth, dated 2000 by the Internet Archive and 2001 by Open Library). Both suggest the set was taught in Myss’s workshops before her book. Myss says she began teaching seminars on archetypes in the 1990s; Open Library records a 1997 cassette of hers, Archetypes: The Seminar Tapes (Great Lakes Training Associates), whose contents this site has not heard.

The 2001 book gave the figure its canonical form (Sacred Contracts, Harmony Books, copyright 2001; on sale January 2002). Chapter 4, “Speaking Archetypes: Your Four Principal Energy Companions”, includes the section “The Saboteur: Guardian of Choice”, and the closing gallery adds a short entry with examples. In Archetypes: Who Are You? (2013) the Saboteur is not among Myss’s ten archetypal families but keeps a short entry of its own. The system as a whole is on the framework page.

Myss credits Jung and Plato with the idea of archetypes in general. No Saboteur appears among Jung’s archetypes, and the claim that everyone carries one is hers.

The debate

The Saboteur has no counterpart among the classical ten, but it sits between two of them. Myss’s own examples in the gallery are mostly tricksters, Loki, Eris and the Aboriginal Bamapana, which points to the trickster. Jung’s trickster (1954), however, is a collective figure, a comic and half-animal portrait of an earlier stage of consciousness kept alive in myth and festival, and it brings disorder to the world rather than defeat to the individual. Myss’s Saboteur is personal and fearful. The other neighbour is the shadow: a Jungian reading would treat repeated self-defeat as the work of something unconscious, the shadow or a complex. Myss’s figure is something a person is asked to recognise, question and enlist, which is closer to a habit of mind than to Jung’s unconscious.

The word has an older psychoanalytic history that should not be confused with Myss’s. W. R. D. Fairbairn named an “internal saboteur” in 1944, the part of the ego that turns aggression against a person’s own need for others, a structure later called the antilibidinal ego. Donald Kalsched (1996) brought Fairbairn’s figure into Jungian trauma theory, setting it beside Jung’s negative animus as one of the persecutory inner figures that attack the vulnerable self. Fairbairn’s saboteur is a structure formed in early relationships; Myss’s is a universal companion with a protective purpose. Her published text, as this site has seen it, does not refer to Fairbairn.

Published criticism has not addressed the Saboteur in particular. 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, calls Myss’s handling of Jung “Jung Lite”, and finds the method of placing archetypes on her wheel, by drawing slips of paper, complicated and random. Skeptical critics, Phil Molé (2002) and Joe Nickell (2004; 2007), have addressed her claims as a medical intuitive rather than her archetypes. This site found no discussion of the figure in the analytical-psychology literature it searched.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Myss’s Saboteur, and her method of finding it is a list of reflective questions, not a psychological instrument. The nearest mainstream research is on self-handicapping, beginning with Steven Berglas and Edward Jones (1978): the experimental finding that people sometimes put obstacles in the way of their own performance to protect their self-image if they fail. That work uses its own definitions and does not test Myss’s claim that everyone carries a Saboteur.

Appearances

Myss’s gallery gives her own examples: Greta Garbo in Mata Hari, Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate, Woody Harrelson in The People vs. Larry Flynt and Judy Holliday in The Solid Gold Cadillac; Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot; and from myth Loki, Eris or Discordia, Bamapana and the serpent who robs humans of immortality. 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). The “inner saboteur” is now common coaching vocabulary, and Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence (2012) built a separate system of named “Saboteurs”; it is a separate system and is not presented as Myss’s.

Sources

  • Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-517-70392-2. Chapter 4, section “The Saboteur: Guardian of Choice”; introduction; 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/
  • Myss, C. (1996). Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-517-70391-5.
  • Myss, C. (1997). Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-609-60090-0.
  • Myss, C. (1997). Archetypes: The Seminar Tapes (audio cassette). Great Lakes Training Associates. ISBN 978-1-55982-145-2. Catalogue record only: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8197987W
  • 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.
  • JoyBeth (2000). A Soul’s Delight: Your Step-by-Step Higher Self Integration Journey. Trafford. ISBN 978-1-55212-599-1.
  • 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.
  • Jung, C. G. (1954). On the psychology of the trickster-figure. CW 9i.
  • Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1944). Endopsychic structure considered in terms of object-relationships. Reprinted in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952). Routledge, 1994. ISBN 978-0-415-05174-3.
  • Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12329-7. Index, “Internal Saboteur”, pp. 4, 81, 128.
  • Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(4), 405–417. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.4.405
  • Chamine, S. (2012). Positive Intelligence. Greenleaf Book Group Press. ISBN 978-1-60832-278-7.
  • Marie, L. (2005). Archetypes to the Rescue. JADA Press. ISBN 978-0-9771343-0-4.

Leaving

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grayPlacid, and perfect with my art: the worse!I know both what I want and what might gain, 100And yet how profitless to know, to sigh

Public domain · Browning, Andrea del Sarto (1855)

A painter who is flawless and falls short on purpose or by temper sets reach against grasp, the unfinished as a kind of verdict.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◐ ShadowThe face we never show to the world.Return to the void