We have seen that Joseph Campbell defined the Hero’s Journey using the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. In his analysis, every story is a hero’s descent from consciousness into the unconscious and back. The psychological dimension of the hero’s battle involves grappling with things that the hero would rather try to avoid. We can think of this as the hero trying to push the things that they want to avoid into the unconscious as opposed to facing them and overcoming them.
Each archetypal phase of life is a Hero’s Journey with a specific mission attached to it. Our job as the hero of the story is to face that mission and to overcome it. But that mission is not easy, and we are always tempted to try and avoid the aspects of it that we find the most difficult. This can include the biological, Exoteric (societal) and Esoteric aspects of the archetypal mission.
To capture this natural tendency, we can adapt another Jungian concept and expand its meaning in the same way that we have expanded the meaning of the archetype to include not just the psychological but also the biological and socio-cultural aspects of life’s journey. We call the Archetypal Shadow all of the factors that are subverting the archetypal mission, whether by pushing them into the unconscious or by some other method.
The usefulness of this expanded framing comes into focus when we incorporate the lessons of the last post in this series, which deal with the concept of the two fundamental pairs of archetypes. The successful completion of the archetypal mission is not simply a function of the individual. It relies significantly on the other half of the archetypal pair also playing their role.
We identified the Child-Parent and the Orphan-Elder as those two pairs. Although each of us is ultimately responsible for our own Hero’s Journey, each archetypal phase of life and its archetypal mission are predicated on the successful negotiation with the other main archetypal pair.
This was an insight which Freud so brilliantly captured with his analysis, in particular the Oedipus Complex. The successful completion of the Child’s archetypal mission is predicated on the relationship with the Parent. If that relationship goes astray, the Child will carry psychological baggage that they must deal with.
The reason to expand the Shadow concept beyond the psychological becomes more obvious when we get to the Orphan-Elder relationship because that relationship is about the Orphan taking up a position in the Exoteric institutions of society. More broadly, that Orphan phase of life is about breaking away from the Parent and the family to forge an independent identity. We must think about this process not just from the point of view of the individual making the Child-to-Orphan transition but about the Child – Parent pair.
In some sense, this is a statement of the obvious. Every Parent must face the difficulty of “letting go” of their Child and allowing it the space to step into society. What we need to understand is that the Parent is also going through an archetypal phase change. There are two archetypal transitions going on: the Child-to-Orphan and the Parent-to-Elder. That means there are two Hero’s Journeys at play, not one.
When the Parent fails in their archetypal transition, we get two archetypes that are so well-known that they appear all the time in literature and film and were also central to the work of Freud and Jung. They are the Tyrannical Father and the Devouring Mother. These are the Parent who are subverting their Child’s transition to Orphan.
We can call these Shadow Archetypes. They are archetypes who are subverting the archetypal mission not just of themselves but of the other member of the pair, in this case the Child – Parent pair.
We could cite countless examples from literature to describe the Shadow Archetype pattern, but let’s use one of the most famous that includes both a Tyrannical Father and a Devouring Mother: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Hamlet is the archetypal Orphan who is at an age where he needs to be initiated into the institutions of society. Since he is a prince, he is on a fixed life path to become king. However, his uncle Claudius has murdered his father in secret and taken on the role of king. Claudius is obviously the Tyrannical Father but things get even worse because he has married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Gertrude then becomes the Devouring Mother. Gertrude and Claudius are subverting the archetypal mission of Hamlet to become king, his rightful Adult role in society.
Simply stealing the throne would be bad enough, but Claudius also deliberately prevents Hamlet from taking a place elsewhere in the world. For example, he prevents Hamlet from returning to university. Meanwhile, Hamlet’s romantic relationship with Ophelia is also subverted by her father. Both Hamlet and Ophelia are trapped in their own homes. They remain under the thumb of their parents at exactly the time when they need to be forging their own identities.
Thus, Hamlet is one of the most perfect stories to describe what happens when the archetypal mission is subverted not by the individual themselves but by the other half of the archetypal pair. As Shakespeare has Fortinbras say at the end of the play, Hamlet would have made a great king. His failure is not primarily his own. It is the responsibility of Claudius and Gertrude, the Shadow Parents.
For our introductory purposes, the example of Hamlet should suffice to demonstrate the point. All archetypes have a shadow form, which simply means the failure, or deliberate subversion, of the archetypal mission.
Here is a provisional list of the Shadow Archetypes with examples from film and literature:
| Primary Archetypes | Sub-Archetype | Shadow Archetype | Example |
| Child | Puer Aeternus | Peter Pan | |
| Orphan | The Victim | Hamlet, Ophelia | |
| Adult | Father | Tyrannical Father | Claudius, Darth Vader |
| Mother | Devouring Mother | Gertrude | |
| Warrior | The Destroyer | Macbeth | |
| Ruler | The Tyrant | King Lear | |
| Lover | The Seducer | Don Juan | |
| Sage | The Evil Sorcerer | Saruman | |
| Elder | The Sophist | Palpatine |