SOMETIMES, WHEN THINKING ABOUT ARCHETYPES, the whole notion can seem a bit remote from every day. Yet I have to say I use it, almost every day, when I work with counseling clients and especially with couples. So let's have a closer look at how the six archetypes work in that context.

Often when working with individuals and couples at a certain point it becomes necessary to ask them which of the archetypes they currently are living. I offer them the whole range in ascending order: do they feel themselves to be the trusting Innocent? Or are they closer to the cautious Orphan? Perhaps they feel more like questioning and exploratory Pilgrim? Or do they see themselves as focused and determined as a Warrior-Lover? Perhaps they see themselves as the Monarch who feels in control? Or possibly they see their situation as more like the Magician’s mastery? Usually this question is not difficult – if only because most people come for guidance when they feel confused and lost. This means they’re either unhappy Orphans, or Pilgrims who are in danger of giving up.

So let’s take a look at some actual cases, in which I’ve changed the names.

Aaron had certainly looked like a real Monarch in the workplace. He had made so much money out of his law practice that he’d been able to take six or seven years off, running his part of the business from afar, and he’d intended to use the time to find out what he truly wanted to do with his life. He became, in effect, a Pilgrim again. As the money began to run low he panicked – since he didn’t yet have a replacement activity that paid money at the rate he thought his wife required.

Do you see the thinking? He felt he had to continue to be the ‘success’ he had been, yet he had already given up the work that had made him so wealthy and was living off his investment in the firm. His wife was disturbed by this. She wanted the prestige and the money of the rich lawyer husband, and she couldn’t understand why he’d chosen to learn Tai Chi, Yoga, and Ayurveda. She was, truly, an Orphan who needed the physical reassurances of status, and she viewed Aaron’s departure into Eastern learning as a betrayal of all she held dear. Aaron saw it as the life ahead he so powerfully wanted.

In archetypal terms, Aaron was becoming a Pilgrim in seeking out spiritual values, unfortunately his wife wanted to remain a comfortable Orphan who was looked after. She thought he was nuts; he thought she was limited. Yet he still loved her because she hadn’t actually changed. She was still the same person he’d married. The question for him was whether he was prepared to follow his own spiritual journey or cave in to her demands.

In despair he became uncertain, confused, guilt-ridden, and eventually extremely depressed. This is important information, since his despair was a masking symptom that screamed out that he didn’t know which way to go – although in his heart, of course, he did. For, once we have started on a spiritual journey as a Pilgrim, there really can be no turning back without a psychic reaction – in this case a depression. This left Aaron with a hard choice. Either he could give up his search for deeper meaning and be depressed, perhaps for life, or he could continue and face the anger of his wife.

When he saw the situation in these terms he could let go of blaming himself or his wife. He began to accept that she had a valid point of view, but that it didn’t apply to his needs. He knew that if he tried to pretend to be the man he had been he would crumble before too long. In the end he elected to stay with his Pilgrimage, but he was able to talk to his wife about it in terms that were comprehensible to them both, and she eventually was able to accept that he had reasons that mattered. She became interested in his Pilgrimage. In the process she found herself, timidly at first, to be drawn to the questioning and deep seeking of the Pilgrim’s world. What had been a deadlock between them eased, and they moved forward together as Pilgrims – which in a sense was what each had always wanted.

Let’s take another example. Nate and Marie came for counseling because Nate had presented as a fit young man who was interested in music, but after he moved in with Marie he stopped exercising, gained a lot of weight, and abandoned his music. He wanted Marie to be a 'wifey wife' (his words) who would run a neat home and have lots of kids. Marie wasn't interested in kids, but had started thinking that she'd have some for Nate's sake because 'that was what he wanted'.

When we dug deeper what we found was that Nate wanted Marie to be the person his very Catholic parents would approve of, and he thought she'd fit the bill. Actually, he wasn't that interested in her or in having sex with her (he found her too independent to be really attractive, and was much more interested in watching sex videos) and he admitted he'd only pretended to be interested in music and song-writing in order to attract her. What Nate was, truly, was an Orphan who wanted an orderly life and someone to fit into it.

Marie wanted a partner who would do interesting things in life, and include her. She was a Pilgrim. Once they realized this they had the option of changing. Nate couldn't risk being a Pilgrim; he was too afraid of offending his parents. Marie didn't want to retreat and be an Orphan. She wanted to pursue her songwriting career. When they saw that this was a problem of archetypal stages they were able to understand that it wasn't that one person had been deceptive, or the other had been overbearing - it was just that they were pointed in entirely different directions. They settled up their finances and parted relatively amicably.

While not a happy ending in the conventional sense, each person was able to leave the relationship knowing more about why it hadn't worked, fully aware that no one was 'the bad guy'. It meant that they were both able to use their awareness to go out into the world once more, looking for a suitable partner, without feeling helpless, lost, or a failure. Nate soon found someone. Marie is still looking, but her songwriting career has taken off in a modest way and she's very happy about the way her life is going.

A different case is that of Rob and Hannah. They met when each was in their mid fifties, at a conference, and were surprised by the passionate affair they fell into. They decided to follow their emotions. Rob left his wife and Hannah began to wonder where they could live and grow their relationship.

Her work took her to Israel a great deal, where she had family. His work was mostly in the USA. Clearly it was going to be difficult to manage this situation. In our counseling sessions what emerged was that Rob was able to articulate that he was ready to do whatever it took to spend his life with Hannah. This was exactly what Hannah had doubted, clinging ever closer to her family ties in Israel (she was very close to her nieces). Hearing Rob say that he was committed to his relationship with her because she made him feel mentally alive gave her the courage to become a Pilgrim and accept their situation, not knowing quite where it would go.

Rob was a Warrior-Lover, declaring himself positively. Hannah spent some months as a Pilgrim, exploring this situation (the Orphan option of running back to the family seemed very tempting at times) and finally, responding to Rob's certainty, she agreed to become a Warrior-Lover also. They have been very happily together ever since, even though they spend a fair amount of time on airplanes!

In the course of their time together, they've found that their work interests have intersected in very satisfying ways. Both are active in politics and human rights, and each has enriched the other's sense of what can be done. They are moving, gradually, towards being Monarchs, bringing out the best in each other and doing so in order to serve the greater good. Life may not be easy in terms of the mileage they cover annually, but they are very fulfilled. Each knows now that they could have given up on their hopes after they first met, and gone back to living as Orphans. Neither regrets the change in the slightest!

Moving into the Pilgrim archetype, in each of these cases, is the challenge these couples faced. For all of them, knowing that this was a stage of spiritual development helped enormously. Until that point all of them had doubted their own sanity when faced with what was, after all, a perfectly natural growth point. Once they could see that they didn’t need to recoil in fear, and knew to some extent what the way ahead would involve in terms of future changes, they felt far more empowered to seize hold of their lives and live them fully, and indeed, happily. We could say that using the language of archetypes had been, for each couple, a real life-saver.

© Dr. Allan Hunter, 2009

Dr Allan Hunter is the author of The Six Archetypes of Love
and Stories We Need to Know; Reading your Life Path in Literature.
Visit www.sixarchetypes.com to learn more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Allan Hunter was born in England in 1955 and completed all his degrees at Oxford University, emerging with a doctorate in English Literature in 1983. His first book was Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism. In 1986, after working at Fairleigh Dickinson University's British campus and at Peper Harow Therapeutic Community for disturbed adolescents, he moved to the US. For the past twenty years he has been a professor of literature at Curry College in Massachusetts, and a therapist. He has produced two books specifically aimed at using writing and drawing exercises therapeutically - The Sanity Manual and Life Passages. Both books are based on his revolutionary interactive writing exercises, tried and proven in counselling sessions and classes. While working with clients in this way he began to uncover the presence of a series of archetypes within their writings. This led to his present work with the formulation of the six archetypal stages of spiritual development.

Four years ago he began teaching with the Blue Hills Writing Institute and he has remained with it ever since, working with students to explore the memoir and life-writing. His own experience of this medium is reflected in From Coastal Command to Captivity; The Memoir of a Second World War Airman, a project on which he worked with his father up to the time of his death. It required extensive reworking to bring this memoir to completion. As in all his books, the emphasis is on the healing nature of the stories we weave for ourselves if we choose to connect to the archetypal tales of our culture.