Archetypes Are Not Yours to Hold

...and can we truly 'understand' what they are?

There is a proliferation of talk these days about “embodying the archetype” as if it’s as simple as trying on a new persona. I see it in retreats, courses, memes, and hashtags, invocations of the Queen, the Priestess, the Warrior, the Witch, as if these archetypal energies are accessories of personal branding or spiritual ascension. But the truth is far more complex and far more cautionary.

This is just new language for what is so often referred to as spiritual bypassing.

Even those who spend years studying Jung find themselves circling the ineffable. I’ve taught analysts-in-training who have read hundreds of pages of Jung’s work, sat through hours of seminars, and still struggle to nail down one definition of what an archetype truly is. That’s not a failure of intellect but instead, a reflection of the archetype’s nature and the fact that Jung’s work spans over decades and was constantly evolving. Archetypes resist final definition and cannot be pinned down or concretized without distortion.

The archetype is not a mask we choose, an identity we claim or a self-help ‘tool’ for self-actualization or aesthetic curation.

Jung wrote, “An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors. If such a content should speak of the sun and identify with it the lion, the king, the hoard of gold guarded by the dragon, or the power that makes for the life and health of man, it is neither the one thing nor the other, but the unknown third thing that finds more or less adequate expression in all these similes, yet – to the perpetual vexation of the intellect – remains unknown and not to be fitted into a formula. (CW 9i, par. 267). It is a psychic blueprint, vast and impersonal, which shapes and structures human experience from within the deep collective strata of the collective (not personal) unconscious, a key aspect of Jung’s work that led to his split from Freud. It is not a “thing” we can fully define. It is a force that moves through us, sometimes with grace, often with disorientation.

And crucially, it does not live only in the psyche.

Jung said, “Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited within the brain structure – indeed, they are its psychic aspect. They represent, on the one hand, a very strong instinctive conservatism, while on the other hand they are the most effective means conceivable of instinctive adaptation. And they are thus, essentially, the chthonic portion of the psyche … that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature. (“Mind and Earth,” CW 10, par. 53.). This means archetypes do not only dwell in symbolic or psychological space but in what Jung called the psychoid realm.

The psychoid is the zone of mystery where psyche and soma touch. Where image has flesh and where numinous forces are not just ideas but sensations. This isn’t the territory of the will or a place we can command or colonise with our ego (AKA our centre of personal consciousness in Jungian terms).

So when someone says they are “stepping into or embodying an archetype,” first of all, I don’t know what that actually means, followed by a quiet queasiness in my gut about how the wellness world reduces complexity into marketable Instagram-sized tidbits, without respect for the origin of concepts that require commitment and time to learn. Not because the longing is untrue, but because the archetype is not something we step into and, more often, it steps into us against our will.

This is especially true for people who carry complex trauma, particularly trauma rooted in early developmental experiences. When the young ego is too undeveloped to protect itself, something larger from the collective unconscious often has to enter. An archetype steps in, not metaphorically but psychically, such as the Warrior who fought back, the person who learned to negate all their needs via the archetype of the Martyr, or the Queen who ruled the interior world when no one outside cared. The Prophet, the Scapegoat or the Witch who held truth when silence was the only currency. These aren’t conscious choices and are inheritances forged in survival that can eventually devour our vitality when they are no longer needed.

They arrive as what some might call archetypal energies, others might name as cosmic principalities, vast transpersonal forces that align with ancient religious frameworks. Paul in the New Testament writes of “powers and principalities,” naming them as cosmic-scale agencies. These aren’t just theological abstractions and map closely to what Jung saw as autonomous archetypal patterns that can possess and govern psychic life when the ego is underdeveloped or overwhelmed. They have a live and will of their own, and live on the spectrum of instinct to numinosity, and each archetype has its own polarity.

In this state, the archetype is not a guide but a ruler.

“We cannot get accustomed to the idea that we are not absolute master in our own house.” (CW 9 i, par. 235).

To think we can ‘invoke’ an intense archetypal energy, like some sort of incantation and direct it with our own will is hubris and can often lead to egoic inflation. It also indicates a lack of understanding of what an archetype is.

And elsewhere, more starkly: “If there is already a predisposition to psychosis, it may even happen that the archetypal figures, which are endowed with a certain autonomy anyway on account of their natural numinosity, will escape from conscious control altogether and become completely independent, thus producing the phenomena of possession.” (CW 9 i, par. 82)

Archetypes don’t have a moral centre, and they aren’t concerned with your well-being. Jung was clear about this. “The archetype is, so to speak, an ‘eternal’ presence, and it is only a question of whether it is perceived by the conscious mind or not.” (CW 9 i, par. 301).

He also noted: “The archetypes have a life of their own which extends through the centuries and gives rise to the mythologies of the peoples. They are not under our control and are often in direct opposition to the conscious aims of the individual” Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14, par. 502).

This is why we must be cautious with practices and substances that court the numinous without grounding. Psychedelics, in particular, can amplify archetypal content and flood the ego with images and forces that cannot be metabolized.

Jung warned that proximity to the numinous is both medicine and danger: “The approach to the numinous is the real therapy... but the fact is that the approach to the numinous is also the danger, for it is the most terrifying thing. It is not a ‘nice’ thing. It is hellish… The numinous is the equivalent of the god-image, and you know what happens to people who get too close to God” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 377).

So when the wellness industry packages these forces as personal growth strategies, as if we can sign up for a 6-week course to “embody the Goddess archetype,” we aren’t just simplifying. We are desecrating and not approaching the archetype in the reverent caution it requires for our own well-being. Worse, we may be inviting people with trauma histories to unconsciously re-enter possession states they already barely survived and to move further into dissociative states, when the ego is eclipsed by content from the personal (complexes) or collective (archetypes) unconscious.

The work isn’t to step into an archetype and become it, which is akin to handing over our conscious will to it. It’s to learn how to be in conscious relationship with the arhcetypal forces that live in the centre of our personal complexes from a strong and stable egoic state without being overtaken.

Jung writes, “They are irrepresentable in themselves, but their effects are discernible in archetypal images and motifs” (CW 9i, para 155). We do not see them directly. We can begin to first observe patterns in our lives which indicate the personal myth we have been living, that often shows up in our negative PERSONAL complexes.

This is the sacred task of individuation, not to become more of a certain ‘archetype’ whatever that could possibly mean in practice, but to become more human and whole, to be fully incarnated in our human-sized bodies, not inflated beyond our size.

To let the archetypes kneel to the human scale of our breath and to ground on the hearth, not float above our own blood and bone of the body.

And for those who have been dominated by archetypal energies to survive, our work is to learn how to stay human-sized in the presence of God.

And here is where we must recall the old truth, one that holds even more weight in this archetypal terrain: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” (Alexander Pope). In the realm of the unconscious, partial understanding does not liberate. It seduces, inflates. and fragments.

Intoxication is not transformation.

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For those wanting to explore this edge with care and support, I invite you into my Soul in Motion offerings, where we engage the symbolic and somatic psyche through an embodied Jungian lens:

• Soul in Motion Weekly Circles – an ongoing space for reflection, movement, and integration

• Soul in Motion 12-Session Programme – a deeper dive into the archetypal body and symbolic life through a trauma-informed container

Let the archetypes whisper. Let your body decide what is true.

About Me
I’m a Jungian Analyst and the founder of Jungian Somatics™, a discipline that brings together depth psychology, trauma-informed embodiment, and the symbolic intelligence of the body. With over two decades of experience in the healing arts, I support individuals and communities in navigating transformation that is both personal and collective. My work integrates Jungian theory, relational neuroscience, somatic practice and embodied spirituality. I’ve taught internationally, including training analysts-in-formation in archetypal dynamics, embodied dreamwork, and the psychoid nature of trauma.