Rebirth

Definition

Rebirth is the one entry in Jung’s own set that is not a figure. It names a process: the experience, reported in every period and religion Jung read, of a person or a world passing through a kind of death and coming out renewed. Jung treated it as an archetype of transformation, a class he set apart from the personified archetypes such as the shadow, the anima and the wise old man. Those appear as characters; the archetypes of transformation appear as typical situations, places and ways, the cave, the descent into water, the night journey, the swallowing and the return, which picture the kind of change under way.

He was careful about what the archetype covers. Rebirth cannot be observed or measured, he wrote; it is known only through what people say of it, and the fact that they say it so widely is the evidence that a psychic experience lies behind the word. Within that field he separated rebirth in the strict sense, a renewal or a total change within one lifetime, from reincarnation, resurrection after death and the indirect transformation of the worshipper who watches a rite. His own interest was the psychological case, where the renewal ends in a larger personality, and he identified its natural form with individuation.

History

The theme is older in Jung’s work than the archetype. Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912) has a chapter on “the symbolism of the mother and of rebirth”, which reads the myths of the swallowed sun-hero, the whale-dragon and the Jonah motif through libido theory, as a longing to be born again from the mother; the next chapter does the same for Longfellow’s Hiawatha, whose struggle with the fish-monster is “to die, and be born again” (Psychology of the Unconscious, Hinkle trans., 1916, part II, chapters V and VII). In the Two Essays (1928) the dissolution of the mana-personality is compared to the primitive and Christian initiations that sever the initiate from the carnal parents for a rebirth into spiritual childhood (Baynes trans., p. 262).

The class to which rebirth belongs is named in the 1934 Eranos lecture “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, just after Jung has grouped shadow, anima and old wise man as the archetypes met in personified form:

The process itself involves another class of archetypes, which we may roughly call the archetypes of transformation. These are not personalities, but rather typical situations, places, ways, animals, plants, and so forth that symbolize the kind of change, whatever it is. — C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (1934), in The Integration of the Personality (1939), p. 89; CW 9i ¶80

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He adds that the sequence of tarot images seems to descend from these archetypes (p. 89; CW 9i ¶81).

The entry’s source text is the lecture Jung gave at the Eranos meeting of 1939, by his own account on the spur of the moment, which he reconstructed from stenographic notes for the Eranos-Jahrbuch (1940) and then revised and expanded as “Über Wiedergeburt” in 1950; the English is CW 9i ¶199–258. It has three parts. The first lists five forms of rebirth: metempsychosis, reincarnation, resurrection, rebirth proper (renovatio) and indirect participation in a transformation (¶199–205). The second sets out the psychology. Jung begins from psychic reality:

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes. — C. G. Jung, “Concerning Rebirth” (1940/1950), CW 9i ¶207

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He then divides the experiences into two groups. In the first, the transcendence of life, a person witnesses a transformation outside himself, in the Osiris rites, the Eleusinian mysteries or the Mass, or in a spontaneous vision such as Nietzsche’s noontide (¶208–211). In the second, the personality itself changes: it can shrink, in the “loss of soul” that Janet called abaissement du niveau mental (¶213–214); it can enlarge, as in Nietzsche’s encounter with Zarathustra or Paul’s on the road to Damascus (¶215–219); or its structure can alter, through possession by a complex, identity with the persona, the shadow or the anima, an “ancestral soul”, a crowd, or a cult-hero (¶220–230). Magical and technical procedures, from the rite of being pulled through a hole to the Exercitia spiritualia and yoga, imitate transformations that once happened by themselves, and the natural transformation underlying all of them is individuation, which announces itself mainly in dreams (¶231–239). The third part reads the eighteenth sura of the Koran, “The Cave”, as a rebirth mystery: the Seven Sleepers, Moses and the lost fish, and the mysterious servant of God whom the commentators call Khidr, “the Verdant One”, a symbol, Jung suggests, of the self (¶240–258). The essay ends by calling the sura an expression of “the obscure archetype of transformation” (¶258).

Two cautions for readers. The section on group transformation (¶225–228) carries Jung’s judgements on mass movements, Germany and communism as they stood at the 1950 revision, and the Koran section speaks of the prophet’s “primitive cast of mind” (¶258); both are period views, not part of the concept. And the paragraph numbers belong to the Collected Works text, translated from the 1950 revision, not to the 1939 lecture.

The debate

The first question is whether rebirth is an archetype at all or a name for many. Jung’s two formulations differ: in 1934 the archetypes of transformation are themselves situations and ways; in 1940 rebirth is an affirmation “based on” archetypes. This entry follows the first and treats rebirth as the representative of the non-personal class.

The comparative traditions offer structures without any inherited image. Arnold van Gennep’s Les rites de passage (1909) described ceremonies of separation, transition and incorporation as a social pattern. Mircea Eliade (1957; English 1959) read initiation everywhere as a ritual death and resurrection, a “second birth” into a sacred mode of being, and held that its patterns survive, desacralised, in modern life. Joseph Campbell (1949) built the theme into his monomyth as “The Belly of the Whale”, the passage of the threshold as “a transit into a sphere of rebirth”, and later pointed readers of rebirth to the whole 1939 Eranos volume, which also carried Richard Thurnwald on primitive rites of initiation and rebirth (Campbell 1969).

Within analytical psychology, Murray Stein (1998) uses the insect’s metamorphosis through the pupa to the imago as his controlling image for adult transformation, and reads the later pictures of the alchemical Rosarium philosophorum as rebirth. Nor Hall (1980) puts it in a sentence: “The archetype of rebirth is initiation.” James Hillman (1975) shifts the emphasis from event to image. The Renaissance, he argues, is a rebirth fantasy “rooted archetypally in the psyche”; the archetype of renovatio arrives together with decay, and renascence “belongs archetypally to Hades”, so that any renewal implies a preceding or simultaneous dying.

The emergent and cultural accounts press a rival explanation. Christian Roesler (2012) argued that archetypal images are transmitted more by culture than by biology, and rebirth is a theme dense with ritual and institutional transmission, from the mysteries to baptism. On that view the recurrence Jung documented is what a widely diffused practice would produce, and needs no inherited form.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested rebirth as an archetype or psychological construct. Adjacent mainstream research studies the experiences Jung drew on without his frame: the psychology of religious conversion, which goes back to William James’s “twice-born” (1902), and post-traumatic growth, measured since Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996) by self-report of positive change after trauma. Neither tests an inherited pattern.

Appearances

Jung’s own instances are the best documented: Khidr and the Seven Sleepers, Osiris, Eleusis and the Mass, Lucius made a sun-god at the end of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Heracles tearing off the shirt of Nessus, Faust changed into a boy and into Doctor Marianus, the friendship of Mithras and the sun-god, and the two birds on one tree in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad (CW 9i ¶204–247). The 1912 book adds Jonah and Hiawatha. Campbell’s section on the belly of the whale opens with Hiawatha swallowed by the King of Fishes and gathers swallowing tales from many cultures. Christopher Booker’s “Rebirth” (2004) is a different object, a plot in his seven, and is kept apart here. Outside Jung’s own examples and authors who wrote with the idea in hand, “rebirth” in this sense is a reading, not the author’s intention.

Sources

• Jung, C. G. (1940/1950). Concerning rebirth. CW 9i ¶199–258. Read in Four Archetypes (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), Princeton University Press edition 2010. ISBN 978-0-691-15049-9.
• Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed. 1968). CW 9i ¶80–81. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01833-1.
• Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter 3, p. 89; revised as CW 9i.
• Jung, C. G. (1916). Psychology of the Unconscious (B. M. Hinkle, Trans.). Part II, chapter V, “Symbolism of the Mother and of Rebirth”. Project Gutenberg #65903.
• Jung, C. G. (1928). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (H. G. and C. F. Baynes, Trans.). Baillière, Tindall and Cox. P. 262. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.24254
• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Rebirth”. https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
• van Gennep, A. (1909). The Rites of Passage (M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee, Trans., 1960). University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-84849-5.
• Eliade, M. (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Harcourt Brace. ISBN 978-0-15-679201-1. Chapter 4.
• Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press edition 1972. ISBN 978-0-691-01784-6. Part I, chapter I, section 5.
• Campbell, J. (1969). The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-31834-6. Notes to chapter 2, n. 44 (read in the New World Library edition, 2002, ISBN 978-1-57731-210-9).
• Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-090563-7. Chapter 4.
• Hall, N. (1980). The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-090793-8.
• Stein, M. (1998). Transformation: Emergence of the Self. Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-0-89096-780-5. Chapters on the butterfly image and “Transformative Relationships”.
• Roesler, C. (2012). Are archetypes transmitted more by culture than biology? Questions arising from conceptualizations of the archetype. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57(2), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5922.2011.01963.x
• James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Project Gutenberg #621. Lectures IV–X.
• Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455–471. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490090305
• Apuleius (2nd century). The Golden Asse (W. Adlington, Trans., 1566). Project Gutenberg #1666.
• Rodwell, J. M. (Trans.) (1861). The Koran. Project Gutenberg #2800. Sura 18, “The Cave”.