Apollo archetype

The Apollo archetype personifies the aspect of the personality that wants clear definitions, is drawn to master a skill, values order and harmony, and prefers to look at the surface rather than at what underlies appearances. The Apollo archetype favors thinking over feeling, distance over closeness, objective assessment over subjective intuition. [Shinoda-Bolen, J., Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves (1989) p.135 Harpur & Row] [Layton-Shapira, L., The Cassandra Complex: Living with Disbelief, p.10] [Jung, C.G., 'The Apollonian and The Dionysian' p.136 in Psychological Types, Vol 6 Collected Works, Princeton-Bollingen 1971]

Description

Early in the 20th century Carl Gustav Jung sought to find a word which could describe the innate patterns of behaviour that govern our lives and so introduced the term ‘Archetypes’ into modern psychology. Jung described archetypes as distinct themes manifesting in the fantasies and behaviour of his patients and found these same themes visibly rendered in arts, religion, myths, architecture, and social customs of all peoples. Because he did not want the term ‘archetypes’ become yet another intellectual abstraction, Jung advanced various mythic images to illustrate them e.g. the Goddess Demeter is a presentation of the archetypal mother; Zeus an archetypal father; Apollo the archetypal intellectual and so on. In fact Jung went on to personify many archetypes by using general expressions like: 'The Great Mother’, 'Old Wise Man’, 'Shadow archetype’, etc. which have now become standard expressions in the field of Analytical Psychology. Jung writes “The fact that the unconscious spontaneously personifies is the reason why I have taken over these personifications in my terminology and formulated them in names”. [Jung, C.G., The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious Vol 9, part 1. Collected Works, Princeton-Bollingen 1971] As with other archetypes, the Apollo archetype is not specific to either gender. [Shinoda-Bolen, J., Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves (1989) p.135 Harpur & Row] Women often find that a particular archetypal constellation traditionally belonging to males -such as the Apollo archetype- exists in them as well, and conversely men can sometimes identify a part of themselves with a specific goddess archetype. According to Dr. Jean Shinoda-Bolen gods and goddesses "represent different qualities in the human psyche. The pantheon of Greek deities together, male and female, exist as archetypes in us all... There are gods and goddesses in everyperson." [Shinoda-Bolen, J., Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves (1989) p.x-xi Harpur & Row]

As well as the many positive aspects of the Apollo archetype such as order, reason, moderation, harmoniousness, and unemotional perfection [Hillman. J., Suicide and The Soul, Spring Publications 1965. p.122-23] archetypal psychologist James Hillman suggests that the archetype may manifest as a negative potential if it becomes overly dominant: "Apollo certainly presents a pattern that is disastrous, destructive for psychological life, cut off from everything that has to do with feminine ways, whether Cassandra or Creusa or Daphne -whomever he touches goes wrong- so that you have the feeling that Apollo simply doesn't belong where there is psyche." [Hillman, J. "Inter-Views", Spring Publications, 1983 p.25]

References