You might think I'm interested in psychology and personality because I write. I mean, duh.
Actually, I'm interested in it more because of my own long travails with under-treated affective disorder. It's about survival for me.
The people in my head create themselves and just expect me to write it down to the best of my ability. They don't actually care what I think about it. If I want to crack the books and use personality typologies or, in the more dire cases, DSM descriptions, to try to understand them, that's my own business.
So I study these things for my own sake, not theirs.
Yesterday I read Jean Shinoda Bolen's classic "Goddesses in Everywoman." It's different from a personality typology; it's an arche-typology. It tells us that humans are subject to the will of various archetypes--the Huntress, the Mother, the Lover--which are bigger than any one of us. Yes, it's very Jungian, very collective-unconscious.
I'm not sure what I think about it. Bolen says that people can have more than one archetype present in them, but she only discusses them separately, and quite frankly they seem pretty mutually exclusive.
There's the "virgin goddesses" (self-directed, self-sufficient, goal-oriented figures who put their own priorities first)...
the "vulnerable goddesses" (other-directed, relationship-oriented figures who need to be needed--and suffer the consequences)...
and the "alchemical goddess," Aphrodite, who mixes self-sufficiency and relationship-orientedness in a way that sets her completely apart. (This is a delicate way of saying she's a total slut. Which, if you are an enlightened, sex-positive sort of person, you will see as a high compliment, and if not...not.)
It's really, really difficult to imagine a single human being seriously containing several of these archetypes as major ongoing components of their psyche.
I don't mean it's hard to envision people acting like various archetypes at different times. They can and do. Almost every mother, for example, has a "mother bear" in her that dives for her toddler if someone comes between them in the grocery store. (That's "Demeter energy" in Bolen's system.)
But as a basic orientation to life, a prime motive...? It's hard to imagine someone being both "virgin" and "vulnerable" at the same time, or teetering between the two and needing to choose. "Well, I could put my own plans first, but then, I could also devote myself completely to Jock..."
I really don't think someone in that situation is actually torn between "Athena" and "Hera."
Instead, there are a couple of possibilities.
(A) She could be an "Aphrodite" who's either going to divorce Jock two years from now, or, if she decides to go on that Andes expedition after all, will find another Jock and shortly be asking the same question again. I.e., rather than being a conflict between two archetypes, her dilemma could be the sign of a different archetype altogether.
(B) The system isn't really all that valid and her conflict would be better explained by Enneagram typology (she's a 2/3, maybe) or neurosis.
#
Take me, for example. You might have noticed I'm kinda intellectual, a trait which Bolen reserves almost exclusively for the "virgin goddess" Athena. And I do put my own priorities first. Except that my priorities are inward ones, like Hestia. But I can't be her because (A) Bolen goes out of her way to say that Hestia is NOT intellectual and (B) you should see my house. Bolen insists that Hestia loves keeping house. Not me; my house is a pit. Bolen would run screaming. Plus, in marching to my own inner drummer, I have outwardly gone along with what people wanted for me, like Persephone, the eternal daughter/victim (who I frankly think Bolen despises; she takes a much sharper tone towards this "princess" who "wants to play at life" and has "the illusion that she is eternally young").
So in Bolen terms, I'm all over the map, yet in Myers-Briggs terms I'm a probable INFP and in Enneagram terms, I'm a slam-dunk 5/4. It's all there: intellectualism, following my own star (which includes total neglect of my surroundings because I'm too busy analyzing "Goddesses in Everywoman"), and even going along a bit externally so I can be left alone with my inner world.
But here's the thing.
"INFP"..."5/4"...these are categories, laundry lists.
Athena, Hestia (kind of), Persephone...they have faces.
They have stories.
They may not fit exactly...but then, they may not need to. They may be poems in a world of prose. Moon and stars in a world of streetlights.
I think, by the end, that is indeed what Bolen's getting at. It's not how you act or "who you are," as if anyone could know; it's which narrative you need, which compass to steer by.
#
Sometimes I wish we knew where we were going.
