Post by Auburn on Mar 1, 2017 21:33:57 GMT -5
The Puer & Senex archetypes & their relation to Pe and Pi.
I've historically had little desire to draw any sort of connection between the 8 functions and the Jungian archetypes. I still hold that same position today, generally speaking, but we might call this an experimental line of thought... to see what arises, beginning first with someone who's attempted this very thing:
Beebe's Model
1st Function = Hero
2nd Function = Parent
3rd Function = Child
4th Function = Anima/us
5th Function = Same attitude, different orientation (i.e. Te for Ti)
6th Function = Witch/Senex
7th Function = Trickster
8th Function = Demon
So, diagrams like this have never sat well with me for various reason.
That said, the archetypes (as general descriptions of phenomenon) do have thematic overlaps with the functions as they emerge in CT. And if there were to be any correlation, it would actually be with Pe=Child/Puer and Pi=Parent/Senex, regardless of hierarchical order of the person.
The qualities of the Puer, as described in the spoiler above, demonstrate essentially the naivete of Pe uninhibited by lessons; existing in a constant "refresh factor" and not honoring the virtues of time, patience and prudence. Pe, in all people, acts as this channel into the novel/new, the playful and spontaneous.
The qualities of the Senex are a little more of a mish-mash, but the highest concentration of traits revolves around the Pi function (if we detach the association to sadness/melancholy). There is in the Senex a type of 'agedness' and density in perspective, a slowness, a chronicling of events, and a storage of information. The Senex is the archetype of the process we all undergo wherein we lose youthful innocence and curiosity and replace unknowns with knowns. And I've noticed that type aside, people's Pi function tends to become more prominent with age.
As a bonus... (more walls of text!
)
Here's something I wrote recently on the INTP forum in response to a thread on Beebe's model:
I've historically had little desire to draw any sort of connection between the 8 functions and the Jungian archetypes. I still hold that same position today, generally speaking, but we might call this an experimental line of thought... to see what arises, beginning first with someone who's attempted this very thing:
Beebe's Model
1st Function = Hero
2nd Function = Parent
3rd Function = Child
4th Function = Anima/us
5th Function = Same attitude, different orientation (i.e. Te for Ti)
6th Function = Witch/Senex
7th Function = Trickster
8th Function = Demon
So, diagrams like this have never sat well with me for various reason.
- One being that I never quite saw it being this way from firsthand experience, nor could I confirm its assumptions in samples.
- Second, the extrapolation required to make such a theory work is sketchy, too mathematical (i.e. like Socionics is) and in many ways unfalsifiable/unjustifiable. I am no longer a fan of unfalsifiable theories, although I do appreciate psychological nuance.
- Third being that I felt "cognition" was/is a separate phenomenon than the unconscious and its inner contents; both only having coincidental parallels, if any.
~~~
That said, the archetypes (as general descriptions of phenomenon) do have thematic overlaps with the functions as they emerge in CT. And if there were to be any correlation, it would actually be with Pe=Child/Puer and Pi=Parent/Senex, regardless of hierarchical order of the person.
For those unfamiliar... here's a description of the archetypes. (Bold added by me)
Online at: pueretsenex.blogspot.com/
The Puer Archetype:
The single archetype tends to merge the following into one: the Hero, the Divine Child, the figures of Eros, the King’s Son, the Son of the Great Mother, the Psychopompos, Mercury-Hermes, Trickster, and the Messiah. In him we see a mercurial range of these ‘personalities’: narcissistic, inspired, effeminate, phallic, inquisitive, inventive, pensive, passive, fiery, and capricious. The puer has a one-sided vertical direction, its Ikaros-Ganymede propensity of flying and falling. Because of this vertical direct access to the spirit, this immediacy where vision of goal and goal itself are one, winged speed, haste –even short cut- are imperative. The puer cannot do with indirection, with timing and patience. It knows little of the seasons and of waiting. And when it must rest or withdraw from the scene, then it seems to be stuck in a timeless state, innocent of the passing years, out of tune with time. Its wandering is as the spirit wanders, without attachment and not as an odyssey of experience. It wanders to spend or to capture, and to ignite, to try its luck, but not with the aim of going home. Like the senex, it cannot hear, does not learn. The puer therefore understands little of what is gained by repetition and consistency, that is, by work, or of the moving back and forth, left and right, in and out, which make for subtlety in proceeding step by step through the labyrinthine complexity of the horizontal world. These teachings but cripple its winged heels, for here, from below and behind, it is particularly vulnerable. It is anyway not meant to walk, but to fly. Instead of soul, of insight, the puer attitude displays an aesthetic point of view: the world as beautiful images or as a vast scenario. Life becomes literature, an adventure of intellect or science, or of religion or action, but always unreflected and unrelated and therefore unpsychological. It is the puer in a complex that ‘unrelates’ it, that volatizes it out of the vessel –that would act it out, call it off and away from the psychological- and thus is the principle that uncoagulates and disintegrates. What is unreflected tends to become compulsive, or greedy. The puer in any complex gives it its drive and drivenness, makes it move too fast, want too much, go too far, not only because of the oral hunger and omnipotence fantasies of the childish, but archetypally because the world can never satisfy the demands of the spirit or match its beauty. Hungering for eternal experience makes one a consumer of profane events. Thus when the puer spirit falls into the public arena it hurries history along. [Hillman, J. ‘Puer Papers’, Spring Publications (1979)]
The single archetype tends to merge the following into one: the Hero, the Divine Child, the figures of Eros, the King’s Son, the Son of the Great Mother, the Psychopompos, Mercury-Hermes, Trickster, and the Messiah. In him we see a mercurial range of these ‘personalities’: narcissistic, inspired, effeminate, phallic, inquisitive, inventive, pensive, passive, fiery, and capricious. The puer has a one-sided vertical direction, its Ikaros-Ganymede propensity of flying and falling. Because of this vertical direct access to the spirit, this immediacy where vision of goal and goal itself are one, winged speed, haste –even short cut- are imperative. The puer cannot do with indirection, with timing and patience. It knows little of the seasons and of waiting. And when it must rest or withdraw from the scene, then it seems to be stuck in a timeless state, innocent of the passing years, out of tune with time. Its wandering is as the spirit wanders, without attachment and not as an odyssey of experience. It wanders to spend or to capture, and to ignite, to try its luck, but not with the aim of going home. Like the senex, it cannot hear, does not learn. The puer therefore understands little of what is gained by repetition and consistency, that is, by work, or of the moving back and forth, left and right, in and out, which make for subtlety in proceeding step by step through the labyrinthine complexity of the horizontal world. These teachings but cripple its winged heels, for here, from below and behind, it is particularly vulnerable. It is anyway not meant to walk, but to fly. Instead of soul, of insight, the puer attitude displays an aesthetic point of view: the world as beautiful images or as a vast scenario. Life becomes literature, an adventure of intellect or science, or of religion or action, but always unreflected and unrelated and therefore unpsychological. It is the puer in a complex that ‘unrelates’ it, that volatizes it out of the vessel –that would act it out, call it off and away from the psychological- and thus is the principle that uncoagulates and disintegrates. What is unreflected tends to become compulsive, or greedy. The puer in any complex gives it its drive and drivenness, makes it move too fast, want too much, go too far, not only because of the oral hunger and omnipotence fantasies of the childish, but archetypally because the world can never satisfy the demands of the spirit or match its beauty. Hungering for eternal experience makes one a consumer of profane events. Thus when the puer spirit falls into the public arena it hurries history along. [Hillman, J. ‘Puer Papers’, Spring Publications (1979)]
The Senex Archetype:
The god Saturn-Kronos is image for both positive and negative senex. His temperament is cold. Coldness can also be expressed as distance; the lonely wanderer set apart, cast out. Coldness is also cold reality, things just as they are; and yet Saturn is at the far-out edge of reality. As lord of the nethermost, he views the world from the outside, from such depths of distance that he sees it, so to speak, all upside down, yet structurally and abstractly. The concern with structure and abstraction makes him the principle of order, whether through time, or hierarchy, or exact science and system, or limits and borders, or power, or inwardness and reflection, or earth and the forms it gives. The cold is also slow, heavy, leaden, and dry or moist, but always the coagulator through denseness, slowness, and weight expressed by the mood of sadness, depression, or melancholia. Psychologically the senex is at the core of any complex or governs any attitude when these psychological processes pass to end-phase. We expect it to correspond to biological senescence, just as many of its images: dryness, night, coldness, winter, harvest, are taken from the processes of time and of nature. But to speak accurately the senex archetype transcends mere biological senescence and is given from the beginning as a potential of order, meaning, and teleological fulfillment –and death- within all the psyche and all its parts. So death which the senex brings is not only bio-physical. It is death that comes through perfection and order. The senex spirit appears most evidently when any function we use, attitude we have, or complex of the psyche begins to coagulate past its prime. It is the Saturn within the complex that makes it hard to shed, dense and slow, and maddeningly depressing –the madness of lead-poison- that feeling of the everlasting indestructibility of the complex. It cuts off the complex from life and the feminine, inhibiting it and introverting it into an isolation. We must further conclude that the negative senex is the senex split from its own puer aspect. He has lost his ‘child’.
The god Saturn-Kronos is image for both positive and negative senex. His temperament is cold. Coldness can also be expressed as distance; the lonely wanderer set apart, cast out. Coldness is also cold reality, things just as they are; and yet Saturn is at the far-out edge of reality. As lord of the nethermost, he views the world from the outside, from such depths of distance that he sees it, so to speak, all upside down, yet structurally and abstractly. The concern with structure and abstraction makes him the principle of order, whether through time, or hierarchy, or exact science and system, or limits and borders, or power, or inwardness and reflection, or earth and the forms it gives. The cold is also slow, heavy, leaden, and dry or moist, but always the coagulator through denseness, slowness, and weight expressed by the mood of sadness, depression, or melancholia. Psychologically the senex is at the core of any complex or governs any attitude when these psychological processes pass to end-phase. We expect it to correspond to biological senescence, just as many of its images: dryness, night, coldness, winter, harvest, are taken from the processes of time and of nature. But to speak accurately the senex archetype transcends mere biological senescence and is given from the beginning as a potential of order, meaning, and teleological fulfillment –and death- within all the psyche and all its parts. So death which the senex brings is not only bio-physical. It is death that comes through perfection and order. The senex spirit appears most evidently when any function we use, attitude we have, or complex of the psyche begins to coagulate past its prime. It is the Saturn within the complex that makes it hard to shed, dense and slow, and maddeningly depressing –the madness of lead-poison- that feeling of the everlasting indestructibility of the complex. It cuts off the complex from life and the feminine, inhibiting it and introverting it into an isolation. We must further conclude that the negative senex is the senex split from its own puer aspect. He has lost his ‘child’.
The qualities of the Puer, as described in the spoiler above, demonstrate essentially the naivete of Pe uninhibited by lessons; existing in a constant "refresh factor" and not honoring the virtues of time, patience and prudence. Pe, in all people, acts as this channel into the novel/new, the playful and spontaneous.
The qualities of the Senex are a little more of a mish-mash, but the highest concentration of traits revolves around the Pi function (if we detach the association to sadness/melancholy). There is in the Senex a type of 'agedness' and density in perspective, a slowness, a chronicling of events, and a storage of information. The Senex is the archetype of the process we all undergo wherein we lose youthful innocence and curiosity and replace unknowns with knowns. And I've noticed that type aside, people's Pi function tends to become more prominent with age.
As a bonus... (more walls of text!
)Here's something I wrote recently on the INTP forum in response to a thread on Beebe's model:
Archetypal Roles of the Functions
Pe (child)
The Pe function, regardless of hierarchical placement, plays the role of the Puer Aeternus. It is responsible for giving a person's personality an element of playfulness, youth, and curiosity. And this quality can be directly deduced from the fundamental attributes of extroverted perception, which are:
* Insatiable impulse for new/novel information. Proactive (E) perception (P) is the active seeking-out of information not presently in your grasp. Whether this information is literal -- as in Se, who seeks stimulation -- or figurative as in Ne, who seeks funny or novel associations and imagery acrobatics, both are driven toward a type of new-ness. In culture at large, and in the individual, Pe is the function that is creative and productive in the artistic sense.
The music industry is saturated with Se-leads and the entertainment industry (say, animation) is saturated with Ne-leads. Pe is the regenerative, ever-young element within our culture that alters and changes the energy of our society.
James Hillman, one of the successors to Jung, put this eloquently in a quote found in this article related to the Puer pueretsenex.blogspot.com/ although he's not tying it to Pe.
Pi (parent)
In the same article, Hillman talks about the Senex, which is the archetypal equivalent of Pi. The qualities of the Senex are those of age, of what one roughly calls wisdom and the prudence brought upon by time but also by holding a long history of information behind you.
Again, these qualities emerge spontaneously from the Pi function by virtue of its configuration. Introverted (I) perception (P) does not seek-out for information, but goes within (I) for it, from what has been absorbed from the past or intuited to be the case overall about the world. In the heightened form of this function, Pi can be very closed-off, isolated in its perception and resistant to change. Indeed, Pi has an "old" quality to it that needs to constantly be offset by the spontaneous energy brought to it by the Pe function.
Without the Pe function, the Pi function will stagnate; having in its own libido no innate motion toward any part of the world (E). The Pi function, for all its wisdom would, if given the chance, be entirely content holding a perception of life composed entirely of the information already gathered. This naturally doesn't happen fully to anyone because few people are so one-sided, but that is ever the vector it seeks to follow.
And this is what heavy Pi types are often "parental" or giving advice, often seeming to be the "responsible" one for their age, or the knowledgeable one with an arsenal of facts.
~~~~~
Given these categories, for a TiNe, for instance, Ne is always a "child" function and Si is always a "parent" function. Not the other way around, as Beebes would suggest. Growing into Si is synonymous with 'maturation' or 'adult-ing' for a TiNe. And growing into Ne is more akin to loosening-up and becoming more child-like.
Se is the other child function which they don't have, but they can appreciate it in others. It's really a TiNe's Ne that is laughing at Se's antics, and vice versa. Because these two children get along with each other. The same applies to the relationship the other functions have toward their missing siblings.
Pe (child)
The Pe function, regardless of hierarchical placement, plays the role of the Puer Aeternus. It is responsible for giving a person's personality an element of playfulness, youth, and curiosity. And this quality can be directly deduced from the fundamental attributes of extroverted perception, which are:
* Insatiable impulse for new/novel information. Proactive (E) perception (P) is the active seeking-out of information not presently in your grasp. Whether this information is literal -- as in Se, who seeks stimulation -- or figurative as in Ne, who seeks funny or novel associations and imagery acrobatics, both are driven toward a type of new-ness. In culture at large, and in the individual, Pe is the function that is creative and productive in the artistic sense.
The music industry is saturated with Se-leads and the entertainment industry (say, animation) is saturated with Ne-leads. Pe is the regenerative, ever-young element within our culture that alters and changes the energy of our society.
James Hillman, one of the successors to Jung, put this eloquently in a quote found in this article related to the Puer pueretsenex.blogspot.com/ although he's not tying it to Pe.
Pi (parent)
In the same article, Hillman talks about the Senex, which is the archetypal equivalent of Pi. The qualities of the Senex are those of age, of what one roughly calls wisdom and the prudence brought upon by time but also by holding a long history of information behind you.
Again, these qualities emerge spontaneously from the Pi function by virtue of its configuration. Introverted (I) perception (P) does not seek-out for information, but goes within (I) for it, from what has been absorbed from the past or intuited to be the case overall about the world. In the heightened form of this function, Pi can be very closed-off, isolated in its perception and resistant to change. Indeed, Pi has an "old" quality to it that needs to constantly be offset by the spontaneous energy brought to it by the Pe function.
Without the Pe function, the Pi function will stagnate; having in its own libido no innate motion toward any part of the world (E). The Pi function, for all its wisdom would, if given the chance, be entirely content holding a perception of life composed entirely of the information already gathered. This naturally doesn't happen fully to anyone because few people are so one-sided, but that is ever the vector it seeks to follow.
And this is what heavy Pi types are often "parental" or giving advice, often seeming to be the "responsible" one for their age, or the knowledgeable one with an arsenal of facts.
~~~~~
Given these categories, for a TiNe, for instance, Ne is always a "child" function and Si is always a "parent" function. Not the other way around, as Beebes would suggest. Growing into Si is synonymous with 'maturation' or 'adult-ing' for a TiNe. And growing into Ne is more akin to loosening-up and becoming more child-like.
Se is the other child function which they don't have, but they can appreciate it in others. It's really a TiNe's Ne that is laughing at Se's antics, and vice versa. Because these two children get along with each other. The same applies to the relationship the other functions have toward their missing siblings.
