a child is conceived and later born, his psyche is composed of global, undifferentiated contents. These contents are dependent on the genetic factors which determine the unique development of his brain. During the first months, even years, of life, the unconscious contents become gradually differentiated through the process of individuation, into the psychic structural constructs characterizing the normally functioning adult psyche. It is to this slow and gradual process of psyche development that the outsider, the archetypal prototype of the ego, is referring, when mention is made of the “years” passed in the castle, although he “cannot measure the time.”
“I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible.” The budding ego emerges slowly and gradually from the depths of the unfathomable Collective Unconscious. The contents of the unconscious are infinitely old (the hereditary predispositions and instincts accumulated through literally millions of years of organic evolution), and infinitely horrible, at least as perceived from the point of view of the conscious ego (the narrator) because of their primitive, savage, undifferentiated, and archaic nature. These unconscious elements “silently wave twisted branches far aloft,” manifesting themselves distortedly in dreams and nightmares, striving to assert themselves and acquire a charge of libidinal energy.
“There was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations,” the countless generations of ancestors, transcending the family, going back beyond this origins of the tribe, the nation, the race, and even the species, to our subhuman and animal ancestry, and even to the primordial slime where life first originated…. The experiences of countless generations exposed to similar types of conflicts or situations, with individual survival on the balance, have resulted in the natural selection of those reactions or predispositions with adaptive, or survival, value. Or, more specifically, those combinations of genetic alleles making such adaptive reactions more probable, tend to increase in frequency within the gene-pool of the species, until becoming universal. From the piled-up corpses of dead generations we have inherited ancestral tendencies, such as fear of snakes and fear of the dark. The presence of such fears in primitive man would increase the probability of his surviving to reproductive age (escaping the predaters of the night and the poisonous bite of snakes), while those members of the tribe unable to experience or develop such fears seldom lived to pass on their genetic flaw…and even though in modern times such fears, as well as many other unconscious tendencies and predispositions, have ceased to have significant adaptive value, they form part of our inseparable heritage.
“It was never light” in the unconscious castle, because neither consciousness nor reason can exist in the depths of the primordial, archetypal jungle. There was one “black tower,” a symbol for the process of individuation, which reached above the unconscious forest, into the “unknown outer sky,” the one” point of contact of the global, undifferentiated, unconscious psyche, with the real and objective world. This is the tower that the emerging archetypal ego must ascend, at all costs, to behold the light, to reach consciousness.
The outsider’s only memory of a living thing is that of “something mockingly like (himself), but distorted, shriveled, and decaying, like the castle.” This is a reference to either the other archetypal processes in the unconscious (such as the archetypal persona), or, more likely, specifically to the budding archetypal nucleus which will later lead to the development of the foul and loathsome Shadow, the ego’s inescapable “dark brother”….
“Bones and skeletons strewed the stone crypts deep below the foundations,” symbolizing the axial archetypal systems at the very bottom of the Collective Unconscious, in the deepest layers whose contents can never be made conscious. These skeletal systems, these genetically coded ancestral potentialities, lie dormant until experience activates them. A skeleton cannot move without muscles, and an archetype cannot manifest itself unless the organism experiences stimuli corresponding to an archetypal model of reaction. But for the archetypal ego, these “bones and skeletons” appear as “natural everyday events.”
The outsider has learned all (he) knows from the “mouldy texts” of archetypal lore, without the urging or guidance of a teacher, that is, impelled by innate instinctual forces and archetypal memories.
Note that “there were no mirrors in the castle,” because there can be no opposites, no mirror images, in the unconscious, before the individuation of the contents of consciousness. The principle of opposition in the human psyche always applies to a conscious vs. an unconscious system (i.e., ego vs. shadow, persona vs. soul image, introversion vs. extroversion, feeling vs. thinking, sensation vs. intuition), but there can never be opposition between two unconscious constructs or functions: there are no mirrors within the castle….
“Through endless twilights,” the archetypal ego “dreams,” expressing itself in fantasy images and symbols of the unconscious, until the time for individuation is ripe. Then, with a frantic longing for light, or psychic consciousness, the outsider ascends the “black tower,” and reaches the realm of the Personal Unconscious, the crypt lying above the subterranean castle of the Collective Unconscious, at the border of consciousness. This crypt contains countless oblong boxes, which are to become the depository of forgotten-and repressed material during the lifetime of the individual.
At last, the stone trapdoor, the portal to consciousness, is found and forced open, as well as the final barrier, the iron grating, through which shines “the radiant full moon.” In the symbolic language of the psyche, according to analytical theory, the moon stands for a manifestation of the mother archetype as well as for the mother complex, when it appears in dreams. (The mother complex consists of experiences and other material repressed out of the conscious sphere, and encapsulated by the unconscious, which cluster around the powerful nuclear element providing by the Great Earth Mother archetype—the “magna mater”—derived from ancestral experiences with mothers throughout the ages.) Fittingly enough, the outsider states that the moon, the mother archetype, has previously appeared only “in dreams and in vague visions,” in ancestral “memories.”
The stumbling that follows the veiling of the moon, or mother symbol, by a cloud, represents the extreme dependency of the emerging consciousness of the growing infant on the interaction with the maternal psyche. And as the moon comes out again, the view from the borderline of consciousness is clear again, though “stupefying.” The emergence of the conscious ego is not the end but only the beginning of the psychic quest, because the goal of personality development is not the emergence of the ego, but the realization of the Self….
The following wanderings of the outsider represent the odyssey of the human psyche toward the fabled castle of lights, the Self. The outsider’s progress is not fortuitous, as a kind of “latent memory” guides him, since the transcendent function of self-realization is also an archetypal process. It is significant here to notice that the outsider sometimes follows “the visible road,” or the way dictated by reason and experience, but sometimes leaves it “to thread across meadows where only the occasional ruins” bespeak “the ancient presence of a forgotten road,” or, in other words, pursues his goal following the path indicated by the unconscious wisdom of the archetypes, a path which may appear at times as illogical or irrational,but is nevertheless psychically necessary. The tendency to strive for self-realization is innate, encoded in the genetic combinations carrying the “latent memories” or archetypes from our ancestral past.
In this quest, the outsider has become the “wandering hero,” the traditional symbol of man’s voyage toward Selfhood, of the ego’s longing for the ultimate expansion of consciousness. Finally, he reaches his destination, the “ivied castle” whose windows are “gorgeously ablaze with light.” The castle of lights stands for the Self, the unification of consciousness and the unconscious, the realization of the total psyche. This is, according to Jung, the purpose of human existence, even though complete equalization, complete self-realization, is not possible, because the lack of gradient implies total entropy—the flow of libido coming to a
