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92 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
demonstrations of male violence. In such contexts, the ideas of Carl
Jung have been influential. Jung proposed the existence of a collective
unconscious resulting from the long evolution of the human
species. According to Jung, this psychological heritage is expressed
in the individual psyche in the form of universal primordial images,
or archetypes. He wrote, for example, that ‘[i]n so far as through our
unconscious we have a share in the historical collective psyche, we
live naturally and unconsciously in a world of werewolves, demons,
magicians, etc., for those are the things which all previous ages have
vested with tremendous affectivity.’ 2 Jung also suggested that a number
of archetypal subpersonalities constituted the individual psyche: the
‘persona’, or the ‘mask’ one presents to the world, also called the
conformity archetype; the ‘anima’ (in men) or ‘animus’ (in women),
which constitutes those gender traits which are repressed in the expression
of the persona; the ‘shadow’, a deeply instinctive archetype
deriving from a primal, animal past, also suppressed by the persona;
and the ‘self’, the concept of a total, unified, entirely conscious psyche
which harmonizes all the other archetypes, and represents the life’s
goal. 3 Jung argued that these various components of the psyche would
evolve during the lifespan of an ordinary individual, an effect he called
individuation, ‘the process that normally leads a human being to the
unification of his personality’. 4 In Jung’s view, when an obstacle to this
development is encountered, a person might require the assistance of
an analyst, and this became the foundation of his technique of analytic
psychology.
Freud and Jung had worked together closely from 1907, having
formed the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society in 1908, which became
the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910, with Jung as
president. It is clear that both were interested in the unconscious, and
in extending self-awareness or consciousness. They were also in accord
in their conceptualization of the human psyche as a combination of
masculine and feminine impulses, and both incorporated into their
work the age-old notion of ‘the beast within’, modernized with a dash of
evolutionary theory — Freud through the consistent use of imagery and
phrasing evocative of an interior animality, Jung through the theoriza-