Buddhist Romanticism

varieties of archetypes, but that three types were particularly important for
re-establishing mental health. The first were the archetypes of life, which
Jung also called the anima in his male patients, the animus in his female
patients. These represented the principle of the opposite gender contained
in each person and, in Jung’s words, craved life, both good and bad. In
describing the message of this type of archetype, Jung stated that “Bodily
life as well as psychic life have the impudence to get along much better
without conventional morality, and they often remain the healthier for it.” 14
However, one cannot simply surrender to the amoral demands of this sort
of archetype. Balanced health requires going deeper, to archetypes of
meaning—wise ways of negotiating the demands of the ego and
anima/animus—and ultimately to archetypes of transformation: indications
that communication among the various levels of the psyche had been
established, and that the ongoing process of integration had been engaged.
Jung presented a variety of hypotheses as to the nature of the collective
unconscious and the origin of the archetypes and the symbols through
which they communicated. In some of his writings, he suggested that the
collective unconscious was a biological inheritance from the past; in others,
that the collective unconscious had porous boundaries connecting it with
the collective unconscious of all other psyches existing at the same moment
in time. As for the compensatory action of the archetypes, in some cases he
suggested that this was simply an inherited biological self-regulating
faculty; in others, that it had its roots in the totality of all contemporaneous
consciousness; in others, that its origin was divine. In true Romantic
fashion, he did not see these various possibilities as mutually exclusive.
When discussing the possibility of a divine origin for the archetypes and
their messages, Jung stressed the need for symbols to mediate the
communication from the divine to the human. The divine, he said,
borrowing Otto’s characterization of the holy, was an overwhelming and
sometimes frightening power, something “totally other”—although in his
view, the “other” was not something outside of one’s self; it was, instead, a
psychic factor from the unconscious that the conscious mind didn’t
recognize as coming from within the psyche. Without the mediation of
symbols through the archetypes, the ego would be overcome by the power
of this factor and potentially harmed.
Because these symbols were often ambiguous, Jung maintained that they
required careful interpretation so that they could give wise guidance in the
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