archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Victim (Myss)

What was done to me, and what I do with having been done to.

One of the four “survival” archetypes that Caroline Myss, in a spiritual self-help book of 2001, says every person carries. An inner alarm against being victimised, which in its harmful form trades on sympathy and blames others. Her figure, with no counterpart in Jung.

The Victim is one of the four archetypes that Caroline Myss calls “survival” archetypes and holds to be present in everyone, with the Child, the Prostitute and the Saboteur. Myss writes as a medical intuitive and spiritual teacher, and her claim about the Victim is a practical one: properly recognised, it works as an inner alarm. It warns a person when they are about to let themselves be victimised, whether by passivity or by rash and inappropriate action, and it lets them see their own readiness to victimise others for gain. Her chapter heading calls it the guardian of self-esteem.

Go deeper

At the threshold

With blackest moss the flower-plotsWere thickly crusted, one and all:The rusted nails fell from the knotsThat held the peach to the garden-wall.The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:Unlifted was the clinking latch;Weeded and worn the ancient thatchUpon the lonely moated grange.She only said, “My life is dreary,He cometh not,” she said;She said, “I am aweary, aweary,I would that I were dead!”

Public domain · Tennyson, Mariana (1830)

A woman shut in a decaying house says only that nothing comes and that she would rather be dead, powerlessness as a whole landscape.

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

    Isaac

    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. 1800 BCE

    Listed in Myss’s gallery under the Victim: the son bound for sacrifice by his father.

  2. Jung’s example

    Heracles

    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. 430 BCE

    Listed in Myss’s gallery under the Victim for the Busiris episode: seized in Egypt to be sacrificed to the gods, he breaks his chains and kills the king.

  3. Jung’s example

    Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

    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/, 1886

    Listed under the Victim, a man destroyed by the thing he made of himself.

  4. Jung’s example

    Misery

    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/, 1987

    Listed under the Victim, a novel of a writer held captive and made to write for his captor.

  5. Jung’s example

    Torch Song Trilogy

    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/, 1982

    Listed under the Victim, a play about a man’s ordinary love life in a hostile world.

The wider sky

Where the Victim (Myss) has been seen

11 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

"Work--work--workTill the brain begins to swim;Work--work--workTill the eyes are heavy and dim!Seam, and gusset, and band,Band, and gusset, and seam,Till over the buttons I fall asleep,And sew them on in a dream!

Public domain · Hood, The Song of the Shirt (1843)

The seamstress’s refrain wears the self down to the task and a dream of the task, helplessness as an economy and not a mood.

The door closes again, and a small voice says it was always going to.

A claim on sympathy that can feed on itself until it becomes the whole house.

Underneath, the first sign of a boundary, if anyone will stay and hold it.

The deep layer · what was written

Victim (Myss): the entry

Definition

The Victim is one of the four archetypes that Caroline Myss calls “survival” archetypes and holds to be present in everyone, with the Child, the Prostitute and the Saboteur. Myss writes as a medical intuitive and spiritual teacher, and her claim about the Victim is a practical one: properly recognised, it works as an inner alarm. It warns a person when they are about to let themselves be victimised, whether by passivity or by rash and inappropriate action, and it lets them see their own readiness to victimise others for gain. Her chapter heading calls it the guardian of self-esteem.

In what Myss calls its shadow form the Victim becomes an identity: the conviction that one is always taken advantage of and never at fault, and a habit of seeking sympathy and pity by displaying one’s injuries. The aim she sets is not to deny that harm happens but to stop living from it, so that a person meets challenges rather than collecting grievances. Her “shadow” means the figure’s harmful expression; it is not Jung’s concept of the shadow.

History

The Victim was Myss’s figure before it was one of four. Anatomy of the Spirit (1996), in its chapter on the fourth chakra, introduced a word she coined, “woundology”, for the use of one’s wounds as a language of intimacy and a way of controlling close relationships (p. 209). Her next book was built around the idea. Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can (1997) opens with a chapter called “Woundology and the Healing Fire”, argues that some people do not heal because their wounds have become their social currency, and speaks of a “victim archetype” (index, p. 151). In its fourth chapter, “Beginning the Journey to Individual and Symbolic Power”, an imagined scene tells the reader that everyone carries a Victim within (around p. 115). That is the first appearance this site has found of the universal claim.

The 2001 book made the Victim 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 Victim: Guardian of Self-Esteem”, and the closing gallery adds a short entry with examples. A small-press spiritual narrative of June 2000 already lists Child, Prostitute, Saboteur and Victim as “the current thinking” on four main archetypes, which suggests the set was taught in workshops before the book appeared (Smith, 2000). In Archetypes: Who Are You? (2013) the Victim is not one of Myss’s ten archetypal families and appears only in passing. The system as a whole is described on the framework page.

Myss cites Jung for the idea of archetypes in general. Jung, however, wrote of no Victim archetype, and nothing in his work corresponds to the claim that a Victim figure is one of four that everyone must face.

In its shadow manifestation, the Victim tells you that you are always taken advantage of and it’s never your fault. — Caroline Myss, “Appendix: The Four Archetypes of Survival”, myss.com (2015), adapted from Sacred Contracts (2001)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The debate

The Victim has no counterpart among the classical ten. The nearest is the shadow, but the fit is loose. Jung’s shadow is the side of the personality the ego does not see and meets only in projection; Myss’s Victim is a role a person can watch themselves play and name in others. Something of the persona is in it too, since the shadow Victim is a self-presentation designed to draw a response.

A closer relative lies outside Jungian thought. Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle (1968) set out Victim, Persecutor and Rescuer as interchangeable roles in the scripts of transactional analysis, with the Victim an active player in a game rather than only a casualty. Myss’s Victim, which can also become the victimiser, and her separate Rescuer archetype in the gallery, cover much of the same ground; the texts this site has seen do not draw the parallel.

The figure inherits the main objection to woundology. Myss’s account of illness ties disease to unresolved emotional history and holds that some people stay ill because illness has become their identity. Joe Nickell discussed Why People Don’t Heal in two books (2001; 2004) and noted that Myss cites no double-blind or other scientific test of what it claims (2004). Phil Molé (2002), in an encyclopedia entry on her holistic medicine, summarised her view of illness as the cumulative history of a person’s emotional life and found it unsupported. Neither critic addresses the Victim archetype by name; their target is the theory of illness from which it grew.

Kate Maver’s review of the 2001 book in the evangelical Christian Research Journal (2003) notes that readers are “stuck with” the four survival archetypes and questions Myss’s standing to redefine Jung’s term:

Myss has no Jungian credentials, and no advanced degree in psychology. — Kate Maver, “Caroline Myss and the New Age Contract”, Christian Research Journal 25(4) (2003)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Her review is a confessional one. This site found no discussion of Myss’s Victim in the analytical-psychology literature it searched.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Myss’s Victim, and her method of finding it is self-examination by question, not a psychological instrument. The nearest mainstream research is the “tendency for interpersonal victimhood”, a personality construct developed independently by Gabay and colleagues (2020) with its own measure. It concerns a disposition to feel victimised in relationships and says nothing about Myss’s figure or her claim that everyone carries it.

Appearances

Myss’s gallery gives her own examples: Isaac, bound for sacrifice by his father; Heracles, captured by the Egyptian king Busiris and breaking free; Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Stephen King’s Misery; Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy; and the films Boys Don’t Cry, The Accused, Sophie’s Choice and Reversal of Fortune. These are her readings. The word “woundology” passed into the wider self-help literature with her name attached, for example in Carol Rutter’s Burying the Secret (2008), and the Victim 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).

Sources

  • Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-517-70392-2. Chapter 4, section “The Victim: Guardian of Self-Esteem”; 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. Part 2, chapter 4, “The Fourth Chakra: Emotional Power”, p. 209; index, “Woundology”.
  • Myss, C. (1997). Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-609-60090-0. Chapter 1, “Woundology and the Healing Fire”; chapter 4, “Beginning the Journey to Individual and Symbolic Power”, around p. 115; index, “victim archetype”, p. 151.
  • 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
  • Karpman, S. B. (1968). Fairy tales and script drama analysis. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 7(26), 39–43. https://karpmandramatriangle.com/pdf/DramaTriangle.pdf
  • Nickell, J. (2001). Real-Life X-Files: Investigating the Paranormal. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2210-6. Index, “Myss, Caroline”, p. 142.
  • Nickell, J. (2004). The Mystery Chronicles: More Real-Life X-Files. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2318-9.
  • 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.
  • 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/
  • Gabay, R., Hameiri, B., Rubel-Lifschitz, T., & Nadler, A. (2020). The tendency for interpersonal victimhood: the personality construct and its consequences. Personality and Individual Differences, 165, 110134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110134
  • Rutter, C. (2008). Burying the Secret: The Road to Ruin Is Paved with Books about the Law of Attraction. Babbling Books. ISBN 978-0-9798609-0-4.
  • Marie, L. (2005). Archetypes to the Rescue. JADA Press. ISBN 978-0-9771343-0-4.

Leaving

Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all,And sweetest in the gale is heard;And sore must be the stormThat could abash the little birdThat kept so many warm.

Public domain · Dickinson, Hope is the thing with feathers (1891)

Something small keeps singing without words through the storm, an opening out of the stuck place that asks nothing back.

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