by Adriana Tanese-Nogueira

Created on: March 18, 2010

I work with Goddesses as a way to represent archetypes. This is called Archetypal Psychology and the developer of it is James Hillman. After his books others came. Archetypes are susceptible to be worked in many ways. As their symbolic nature suggests there are different viewpoints and forms to express one single truth. Therefore, Hillman’s understanding has gone far in the work of other psychologists.

“My Goddesses” are meant to help to tell important aspects of people’s life in a specific way which I consider important nowadays. I find it’s a wonderful and quite clear way - once you understand them - to say so many things that would take hours to be expressed. Because the archetype is an image it’s easily understood. And for its non-rational essence it grabs a variety of human aspects, since behaviors to thoughts, emotions, choices, etc.

How can it be? Because underneath individuality and the singularity that each of us, as conscious people, represent there is a common underground from which our human nature sprouted and still roots in.

There is no better way to understand archetypes than to see them working. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is the discoverer of many important concepts about the human psyche. He never stopped stressing that he was an empiric, that is someone who experiments and checks his intuitions out. His thought doesn’t come from a group of predetermined ideas. On the contrary, he constantly focuses on testing ideas, confronting them with the facts the psyche offers.

What are those? The way you feel, your dreams, behavior, reactions, words, desires. The psyche facts are also the actual happening in your life. When observing closely you’ll notice a pattern. If you go deeper and compare different people together, and if you have the awareness to avoid bias and prejudgments plus the patience to persevere, you’ll notice models of behaviors with choices, reactions, feelings, etc. An entire life scene is included.

You can work then on distinguishing the subjective elements from the common material that come from the personal human lives. You agree with me that after a while you’ll be dealing with a kind of abstract material, as it were a draft of a painting. A draft you can use to paint in a variety of styles and colors. That’s an archetype. Jung also compared this material with historical figures and dreams characters.

The “draft” is found everywhere, no matter the race, the age, the place, the gender. Archetypes pass on generation after generation and they exist because humans in history since the beginning of times had dealt with some identical issues: birth and death, love, sex, marriage, war, group, survival, and many others. If biology says that the living creatures can develop an ability or an organ that it’s inherited genetically, why shouldn’t the greatest creation of all - the Humans Beings - not be able to pass on the basic essential meaning of their experiences?

Learn more about this author, Adriana Tanese-Nogueira.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.