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Reflecting on the
Archetypes of Teaching
a
Clifford Mayes
a
Brigham Young University
Published online: 28 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Clifford Mayes (1999) Reflecting on the

Archetypes of Teaching, Teaching Education, 10:2, 3-16, DOI:
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 Reflecting on the
Archetypes of Teaching
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CLIFFORD MAYES, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

Introduction: Beyond Biography
In the last decade there has been a significant increase in research about teacher reflectivity.
Inservice and preservice teachers are encouraged to individually develop a deeper under-
standing of the pedagogical assumptions, psychological images, political commitments,
and other existential forces that shape their practice (Pajak & Blase, 1989; Bullough &
Gitlin, 1995; Valli, 1993; Woods, 1987). In this process, the teacher examines his or her
own ideas about what constitutes good practice, either cultivating them, modifying them
or, when appropriate, exchanging them for more fruitful ideas (Elbaz, 1990).
Largely absent from this body of literature, unfortunately, is consideration of the deeper
psychospiritual dimensions of teaching (Buchman, 1990; Cliff & Houston, 1990; Serow,
Eaker, & Ciechalski, 1992; Tremmel, 1993). Despite the undoubted importance of the
current biographical and political approaches to teacher reflectivity, I would argue that
these approaches cannot fully flower unless they are rooted in a broader ontological field
(Heidegger, 1964). Only then may we fully understand the foundations of our own prac-
tice and that of our students (Purpel & Shapiro, 1995; Wexler, 1996). Never forgetting the
significance of the institutional and biographical determinants of our teaching, I therefore
believe that we must focus much more of our attention on what Wilber (1980) has called
the "transbiographical," especially since this is often an important factor in many people's
decision to become teachers (Serow, Eaker, & Ciechalski, 1992). In this article, I shall
argue that what I call "archetypal reflectivity" is a powerful way to explore the
transbiographical domain. But before explaining what I mean by archetypal reflectivity
and illustrating how it plays a pivotal role in my own teaching, it will first be necessary to
briefly suggest what it might mean to take a transbiographical, or ontological, approach to
teacher reflectivity. To do so, I shall discuss "transbiographical" psychology (Wilber,
1980) or, as it is alternatively called, "transpersonal" psychology (Maslow, 1968).

Toward the Transbiographical

As is generally known, Maslow posited a pyramid of human needs, starting at the base
with physiological needs and then ascending to safety needs, followed by belongingness
 X&tpfff

DP TEACHING EDUCATION VOLUME 10, NUMBER 2

needs, esteem needs, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, and culminating in the summum bonum
of the humanistic psychologies—namely, self-actualization needs. In the early 1960's, how-
ever, Maslow, the dean of humanistic psychology, began to feel that his pyramidal model,
although correct as far as it went, was incomplete. Above and beyond self-actualization needs,
he came to perceive the inherent human need to go beyond the biographical and historical
influences on one's consciousness. Calling for psychological research and practice to ex-
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plore "the naturalistically transcendent, spiritual, and axiological," Maslow wrote:

I consider Humanistic, Third Force Psychology to be transitional, a preparation for
a still "higher" Fourth Psychology, transpersonal, transhuman, centered in the cos-
mos rather than in human needs and interest, going beyond humanness, identity,
self-actualization, and the like.... Without the transpersonal, we get sick, violent,
and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic. (1968, pp. iii-iv)
This is the ontological realm, and it is precisely in this direction that I feel teacher reflectivity
must move if it hopes to address the whole person.
There are many transpersonal psychologies which I have discussed elsewhere in relation
to teacher reflectivity (Mayes, in press). Here, I should like to focus on a particular school
of transpersonal psychology that has received very little attention in educational litera-
ture—Jungian archetypal psychology (Aldridge & Horns-Marsh, 1991; Craig, 1994; Shaker,
1982). By accessing what Jung (1959) called the archetypes of the collective uncon-
scious, we may cross the threshold from the specifically biographical (the realm, for ex-
ample, of Freudian and Existential psychotherapy) into the transpersonal and universal. I
hope to demonstrate that this is one way of investing our reflectivity and practice as teach-
ers with "numinosity" — or "spirit" (Jung, 1959; see also Ajaya, 1985).

Notes on Archetypes
It is generally acknowledged that Jung (1959) was the first to attempt a systematic archetypal
psychology. Echoing both Plato and Augustine, he used the term "archetypes" as the corner-
stone of his theory. According to Jung, who in his youth had read and admired Kant, arche-
types were phenomenologically a priori. He began to formulate this premise as an intern
psychiatrist. Widely read in ancient literature and myth, the young physician began to note
intriguing and seemingly inexplicable correspondences between the dreams of, say, a delu-
sional 19-year-old girl in a provincial Swiss psychiatric hospital who had been diagnosed as
a paranoid schizophrenic, and the motifs and images of, say, an Assyrian creation myth.
So persistent and impressive were such correspondences between the personal and the
mythical in Jung's clinical experience that he was forced to break with Freud, despite the
fact that he was the great man's premier disciple and heir apparent to the psychoanalytic
throne. Having joined forces with Freud early on when the Viennese psychiatrist was still
 ] REFLECTING ON mMa|CTYPi^tE^raNG;^ : ^ '• : ~:; ; \ u;;;:>^ AIH3

anathema in psychiatric circles, Jung now left Freud precisely as Freud's approach was
beginning to prevail. But Jung's clinical experience was ineluctably leading him to con-
clude that it was not sexual energy (as important as that was in the economy of the psyche)
that was the bedrock of psychic functioning. Instead, at the base of human consciousness
was a web of variegated primal energies—some sexual, but mostly not—which were
innate, universal, and which manifested themselves today, as well as 10,000 years ago, in
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recurring images and motifs; these could as easily appear tonight in a Chicago bus driver's
dreams as in a Sumerian epic poem.
Of course, Jung did not deny the existence of the strictly personal subconscious. Indeed,
he continued to maintain that the Freudian, Adlerian, and Reichian approaches explained
certain processes and dysfunctions at the level of the personal subconscious. But he
insisted that the personal subconscious is, as it were, a small boat in a vast and irreduc-
ible psychic sea which, because it flows in and out of everyone's psyche, Jung called the
collective unconscious. If we wanted to plumb the depths of psychic functioning, it was
that sea (with all of its strange creatures) that we would ultimately have to explore. Indeed,
many psychological phenomena that existed in the personal subconscious (such as the
Oedipal complex) were ultimately powered by the deeper dynamics of the collective un-
conscious (such as the seductive universal pull exerted by the archetypal Great Mother
back into the cosmic womb; see Neumann, 1954).
Yet, just what an archetype of the collective unconscious ultimately is—whether a merely
biological phenomenon chemically imprinted in the nervous system, a quintessential^
spiritual message from God, or somehow both—is never quite clear in Jung's writings.
Or rather, he vacillates from work to work, in some passages seeming to characterize the
collective unconscious as strictly physiological, but in other passages holding forth the
tantalizing Platonic possibility that the collective unconscious is that area where our
psychospiritual space intersects the mind of God, whose thoughts are thus encoded for us
as the archetypal images of our religions, myths, dreams, art—and psychopathology.
Whatever the true nature of archetypes, we must find some functional definitions of them
if we are to apply them concretely to the business of teacher reflectivity. In his seminal
work, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann (1954) characterized the
collective unconscious as the living ground from which is derived everything to do with a
particularized ego possessing consciousness: upon this it is based, by this it is nour-
ished, without this it cannot exist. The group psyche—which...is not to be confused with
the mass psyche — is characterized by the primary preponderance of unconscious ele-
ments and components, and by the recession of individual consciousness, (p. 270)
Emma Jung (1960/1986), Jung's wife and author of what has become a classic archetypal
interpretation of the Grail Legend, called archetypes "dispositions or dominant structures
 ™™^
E 3 3 Z :: • • . ....""*", .'. """.. *""" *' TEACHING EDUCOTON"VOLUME 10, NUMBER*!

in the psyche" which manifest themselves as recurring images and motifs. Using one of
her husband's metaphors, she compared them to the invisible potential existence of the
crystalline structure in a saturated solution. [Archetypes] first take on a specific form
when they emerge into consciousness in the shape of images; it is therefore necessary to
differentiate between the unapprehendable archetype—the unconscious, preexistent dis-
position—and the archetypal images. [Archetypal images] are human nature in the uni-
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versal sense. Myths and fairy tales are also characterized by this universal validity which
differentiates them from ordinary dreams, (pp. 36-37)
June Singer (1988) has observed that a life that does not rest upon mythic archetypes in some
form or other is ultimately sterile. One's personal mythologies "are not false beliefs. They are
not the stories you tell yourself to explain your circumstances and behavior. Your personal
mythology is, rather, the vibrant infrastructure that informs your life, whether or not you are
aware of it. Consciously and unconsciously, you live by your mythology" (p. xi).
We may take it, then, that psychospiritual health is a dynamic balance between the egoic
and archetypal realms, between the propositional world and the imagistic one (Houston,
1996; Wilber, 1980). On one hand, without steady infusions of archetypal energy and
imagery, the depressed ego exists in a dull quotidian world where we languish under the
apprehension that our beliefs and deeds exist in a void. This is the root of existential
alienation and neurosis (Watts, 1968). On the other hand, a psyche completely under the
primal sway of the collective unconscious — a psyche exploding with and possessed by
those archetypes — cannot maintain the ego structure necessary to control and commu-
nicate that primal energy in emotionally and socially functional ways. The ego simply
disintegrates as the person completely identifies with and is taken over by primal images
and plots. Edinger (1973) coined the term "inflation" to describe this excessive identifica-
tion with an archetype (p. 146), and it is the root of fanaticism and psychosis (Jung,
1956). But where there is a synergy between ego and archetype, a person may live and
work in ways that are practical yet invested with numinosity, with spirit. It is this numfnosity
that we have yet to sufficiently explore in our reflectivity as teachers. Why have we not
done so? Part of the reason lies in the political economy of American education itself.

Seeing Beyond Corporate Educational Reform—And Approaching

the Archetypes of Teaching
American public education over the last century has increasingly come to reflect the as-
sumptions and exigencies of the overarching social corporate system in which—and for
which—it largely exists (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Cremin, 1964,1977; Morrow & Torres,
1995). The teacher in corporate America, increasingly seen in managerial, technocratic
terms (whether those terms are set by the so-called educational "reforms" of either the
liberal or conservative administrations) is typically required to deliver a curriculum de-
vised by "experts" in pursuit of higher international test scores and greater geopolitical
 O?l?!^ i , -"^j"-- •, •"": • :p; "•- y :• r ~ | f f g

competitiveness in the transnational corporate economy. This corporate model of educa-

tion alienates the teacher from the means and relations of production that define her work
(Densmore, 1987). It also increasingly distances her from the archetypes of the teacher
that spiritualize her work. De Castillejo's (1973) observations about physicians are equally
germane to teachers:
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[General Practitioners] have been vociferous about their unjust remuneration and
inferior status in the medical hierarchy, but I have never heard them mention what
is much more likely to be the fundamental nature of their unhappiness: that the
archetype of a healer which has sustained and nourished them throughout the cen-
turies has fallen from their shoulders leaving them as little cogs in the great ma-
chine of modern medical practice. It is not a greater share of the world's wealth they
lack, but "mana." (p. 22: emphasis in original)
Similarly, we as teachers need to be able to draw on archetypes of the teacher so that we can
view and renew our practice sub specie aeternitatis—and thereby find transpersonal "mana."

In the following section, I should like to look very briefly at some of the major motifs and
characters that the archetypal hero meets on his or her journey. I shall then apply these
motifs and characters to my own experience as a teacher of the sociology of education. In
giving these examples of my own archetypal processes in the classroom, I not only beg
the reader's indulgence but also would like to emphasize that these examples are certainly
not meant to be prescriptive. Each teacher will invoke and evoke different archetypes (or at
least unique variations on similar archetypes) in the course of her own archetypal reflectivity
and practice (Hillman, 1976).

The Student as Archetypal Hero and the Teacher as Archetypal Sage

In the archetypal journey of the hero, he or she must respond to the call to adventure by
passing a perilous threshold and entering a wild and dangerous land, usually a desert or
forest. This begins the hero's quest for the grail — a sacred cup which holds a god's
blood and offers eternal life and vision. The hero must abandon his or her commonplace
life in order to begin the high, and highly dangerous, adventure of discovering this grail.
Along with St. Paul, the archetypal hero must finally decide to "put away childish things"
(1 Corinthians 13:11). The person who cannot rise to this challenge remains a child,
regardless of age. In archetypal psychology this is called the puer and puella complex,
from the Latin for boy and girl, for that is what a person who refuses a call to psychospiritual
adventure will remain throughout life, regardless of chronological age.
On the heroic journey, the heroic novitiate is not alone. Soon after crossing the threshold,
he/she meets with a wise old man or wise old woman. These wise ones successfully
completed their own archetypal quests many years ago when they were young. They now
often possess powerful amulets and know how to make potions. Frequently, they speak in
 TEACHING EDUCATION VOLUME 10, NUMBER 2

riddles. Guiding the young travelers, the Wise Ones are the archetypal teachers—like Obiwan
Kanobe in Star Wars or Guinan in Star Trek. Their amulets and potions symbolize the fact that
they are able to aid the seeker because they have had their own visions. They speak in riddles,
even apparent contradictions, in order to tease the puer and puella out of easy, smug certain-
ties and force them to embrace the higher forms of wisdom that will lead them to the grail. Let
me illustrate how this set of archetypes operates in my own practice.
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As an educational foundations teacher, by immediately problematizing my students' often

complacent and superficially celebrationist notions about American public education, I
implicitly challenge the academic puer or puella to cross the threshold, to become an
initiate, to set out heroically into the forbidden forest of political and ontological complex-
ity, where there are fewer answers but greater questions of expanding fascination and
charm. As do most teachers worth their salt, I both frustrate and tantalize my students with
"the call" to abandon their typically simplistic notions about the presumed triumphs of
modern American education.

For example, my mostly conservative students begin my class believing that the quantity
of resources and quality of instruction in public schools are fairly equal across the United
States. Examining sections from Bowles and Gintis' (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America,
Kozol's (1992) Savage Inequalities, and Spring's (1996) American Education, we examine
the Reproductionist argument that the blatant inequities in American schooling are largely
a function of ethnicity and socioeconomic status. I somewhat scandalize my students by
making it clear that, although I have recently found myself shifting somewhat to the Right,
I spent many years involved with the socialist, Reproductionist view.

To make matters even "worse" for my students, I insist that the problems that we are
examining in the class are so enormously complex that no one has a monopoly on the
truth. I emphasize that any "solution" also comes with its own set of problems, and that
the perspective one adopts largely depends on the problems that one is willing to live
with. Hence, I encourage my students to formulate their own positions on the issues
under analysis, assuring them that I welcome any view from far Right to far Left so long as
those views result from authentic engagement with the issues. And I insist that we seri-
ously consider Counts' (1932) belief that the only truly democratic society is one in which
socioeconomic disparities have been minimized, and that it is the historic calling of the
American teacher to sensitize students to this political vision (Murphy, 1990).

In short, I upset some of my students' most cherished truisms by suggesting that Ameri-
can education probably inhibits social equity at least as much as it promotes it, that there
is a powerful argument that socialism is more democratic that modern American corporate
capitalism, and that in the sociology of American education there are no absolute truths.
As if all of this were not shocking enough to my conservative students, they are hearing
 REEMCTINGON TTffi ARCHETWESW '£ "ziV_l. :V*Lr-V;?'V;V:y|IT3

these ideas from a co-religionist professor in the church's major educational institution
(indeed, the largest Christian university in the United States) who has also held respon-
sible ecclesiastical positions.
Yet archetypally, this is not at all as strange as it initially seems to many of my students.
Indeed, it makes a great deal of sense. For I am aware that I am embodying the archetype
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of the Wise Old Man (even at forty five!), challenging my students to heroically set out on
the mythic quest of formulating their own approaches to the ambiguities and inequities of
the American educational system. As does any good, old wise one, I ask them to purge
themselves of "puerish" and "puellish" superficiality so that they may prepare themselves
for the complex elixir of their own ethical vision. I also ask them—indeed I dare them—
to cross the threshold of adventure.
The Teacher as Ogre and Clown
However, although most of my students respond positively to the call (as the increasing
number of office-hour visits and the growing intensity of classroom discussions through-
out the term indicate), not all do. Some entrench themselves even more firmly in their
archetypal roles as puers and puellas—the good boys and the good girls — who, in our
culturally conservative church, sometimes confuse the simple certainties of provincial
political conservatism with theological virtue. To them, my formerly leftist views mark me
as not only the Sage but also, paradoxically, the Ogre. I am that "dangerous presence
dwelling just beyond the protected zone of the village boundary.... The emotion that he
instill[s] in human beings who by accident [adventure] into his domain [is] 'panic' fear, a
sudden groundless fright" (Campbell, 1949, p. 81). To these students, I am literally out-
landish. It is at this point in the term that one or two such students will rather imperiously
enter my office, brandishing a "drop slip" as if it were the very sword of truth and virtue,
and summarily inform me that they are transferring into another section that is taught by a
much older and impeccably conservative colleague. Through my archetypal reflectivity as
a teacher, I see that I am not really a specific person to such students so much as I am an
embodiment of the Dark Magician, the sol niger of the alchemists, who threatens their
political and ontological certainties with those suspicious conceptual transformations that
are the academic alchemist's art (Jung, 1963; E. Jung, 1960/1986). Knowing this empow-
ers me to respond with greater depth and maturity to such students' anxiety and hostility
— and to not take it personally. Yet such cases are quite rare. Most of my students seem
excited by my beckoning them into forbidden ideological zones that their good parents
warned them about before they left their simple cottages and ventured into spooky aca-
demic forests.

Yet since an archetype is often a multifaceted complex, I also know that in a somewhat
different but genealogically related guise, my students are also investing me with the ar-
chetypal energy of the Clown and Trickster—a role that I love to cultivate by riddling my
 TEACHING EDUCATION -VOLUME 10," NUMBER 2 £y

classes with everything from self-deprecating slapstick to subtler academic irony (Campbell,
1949). Indeed, I have found that humor is a powerful tool in allaying my conservative
students' anxiety; that, like Coyote in Native American mythology, I will lure them into
ethical catastrophe and doctrinal heresy with my shapeshifting tricks (Jamal, 1996). Nev-
ertheless, it is both inevitable and undeniable at this stage of my students' heroic journey
that I also am embodying their Shadow—an archetype and function which is arguably one
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of Jung's most compelling "discoveries" (Jung, 1963), one that has various applications
to the psychodynamics of instruction. I shall only touch on a few of them.

The Shadow
The shadow embodies our dark components—those necessary and (when sagaciously
managed) empowering psychic forces that constitute the "negative" pole of our dialectical
psyches (Riegel, 1979). An accumulation of all that was suppressed in us during ego
development, the Shadow is something that we would gladly deny but that remains in-
eradicably there, a psychic and existential given (Wilber, 1983). The Shadow challenges
the fragile virtues and unidimensionality of our "persona," as Jung called it.
As dearly (and desperately!) as we would like to disown our shadow and ascribe our
darkness to another, we must ultimately own it in order to harness its enormous energy—
and thereby create light out of its darkness, that ancient Gnostic project (E. Jung, 1960/
1986). We must even learn to welcome our shadow. As Edinger (1973) has said:
[T]his does not mean to act out crude impulses externally. It refers rather to an
acceptance of the rejected, negative side of one's nature. The inner opponent to our
conscious standpoint is to be accepted and treated generously. The shadow must
be accepted. Only then can wholeness of personality be approached, (p. 142)
On the other hand, we can "project" our shadow onto another person or group of people. In
this existentially inauthentic and psychologically destructive move, we deny our own
personal darkness by "seeing" it in another person. We thus make of him our psychic
scapegoat (Perera, 1986), put our sins on his head, and as in Leviticus (16:22) send him
out into the wilderness, far away from the comfortable confines of our city walls and su-
perficial pieties.

The Teacher as the Student's Shadow

I would like to illustrate the importance in the classroom of the teacher's awareness of the
archetype of the Shadow with an example from an essay I recently wrote concerning
transpersonal approaches to teacher education (Mayes, in press). Last year I had a stu-
dent who entered into a Gestalt dialogue in front of my methods class with his "worst high
school teacher" — a character who figures prominently in our Gestalt exercises each
term. In Gestalt dialoguing (Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman, 1951), one sits in a chair

10
 REFLECTING ON THE ARCHETYPES OFTEACHING

across from an empty chair and actually converses with another person as if he or she
were there. Then, one moves over to the empty chair, assumes the other's identity and
carries on the conversation from this new perspective. As this switching of chairs and
identities continues, one learns a great deal about oneself in terms of how one has inter-
nalized the other person. As himself in the dialogue, my student experienced some of the
repressed rage that as a high school student seeking good grades—a "good boy" in the
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church and community — he had never allowed himself to feel. This dialogue enabled
him to consciously reenact the painful experience of being a disempowered student in a
classroom run by a particularly difficult teacher. In archetypal terms, he was experiencing
the impotency of his own puer.
Equally interesting not only to him but to all of us who were watching, were his responses
after switching chairs a few times, for it emerged in this specific case that the "bad teacher's"
problem lay in a fundamental inability to commit to relationships. (Now, whether or not
this was true of the actual teacher is irrelevant. What we were dealing with was not that
teacher as such, but ultimately an aspect of my student's own identity as a teacher.) And
what I knew was that my student's father had just divorced his mother for a much younger
woman. My student had previously confided to me that he felt his father was "a nice guy
and I love him a lot. But he's also a jerk. He can't keep commitments." Here was a crucial
connection between my student's life and "the bad teacher" who damaged those students
in his care through an inability to commit and thus reflected for my student the dark side of
his father—and probably the dark side of himself. My student experienced with great imme-
diacy and clarity the truth of Noddings' (1984) belief that the essence of good teaching is
emotional commitment to one's students—what Buber (1958) called an I-Thou relationship.
He also experienced the psychological forces that can sabotage that relationship.

In short, my student had come squarely into contact with the archetype of the Shadow, in this
case the "Shadow Teacher." Further reflectivity along archetypal lines—not only through
Gestalt dialogues but also through meditation (Hanh, 1987), journal writing (Progoff, 1975),
and group discussion (Stewart, 1996)—would help my student learn how to withdraw this
projection. Even more importantly, this work could potentially help my student maintain his
own psychological balance and defend his own emotional space as a future teacher. For he
would be more able to respond (and resist) appropriately when—as a male teacher and there-
fore inevitably an embodiment of the Father archetype to many adolescent students—he be-
comes the focus of their projection of the Father's Shadow.

Jung (1963) felt that male teachers should be especially aware of the fact that they are
often the focus of the male-shadow projections of female students who had been seriously
abused by their fathers. And to be sure, I have sometimes wondered if the rare and, to me,
inexplicable instances of hostility that I sometimes experience from female students re-
sults from the damaged daughter's father-projection onto me. I would also add to Jung's

11
 IH3 ;£j7]v^^^

warning the caution that female teachers should be equally aware of the female-shadow
projections of their male students whose relationship with their mothers may have left
them damaged sons.

The Student as the Teacher's Shadow

It must be noted as well that shadow projections also emanate from the teacher onto the
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student. Just as students will project their darkness onto us, we as teachers may also
project our own archetypal darkness onto students in ways that are not only educationally
damaging to those students but also sexually, emotionally, politically and morally damag-
ing. Thus, just as we must resist absorbing the student's adumbrated illusions, so we
must withdraw our projections from them. In my own practice as a teacher of teachers, I have
found that archetypal reflectivity—taking the form of journal work, role playing, guided imag-
ery and meditation—is an indispensable tool in accomplishing this for myself and with my
students. An example from my own life and teaching may help illustrate this point.
I was an only child of a marriage with a distant father and an emotionally needy mother. She
thus looked to me for the affection that she did not sufficiently receive from him. As I
began about ten years ago to reflect on how this may have affected my teaching, I realized
that I spent a great deal more time focusing on the needs of the women in my classes than
of the men. I would often imagine that all my female students were in the throes of emo-
tional distress, although few in fact probably were. Hypersensitive to what I distortedty
perceived to be their "needs," I sentimentalized and "rescued" them in ways that certainly
did them little good and probably did some damage. In short, I was possessed by the
dark side of the Great Mother archetype—the Devouring Mother (Neumann, 1954;
Washburn, 1995)—whose varied, voracious psychic needs I projected onto my female
students and then struggled to satisfy.

I was also possessed by the Shadow of the Great Father Archetype—The Senex or Criti-
cal Father (embodied so forcefully for an entire generation in Lucas's self-consciously
Jungian figure of Darth Vader or "Dark Father"). Projecting this shadow of my father onto
my (younger!) male students, I often viewed them as tacit critics and secret mockers.
Despite my pleasant facade, I was largely unresponsive to their needs and potentials.
Under the influences of the shadow archetypes of the Great Mother and the Great Father, I
could not see my students in their existential uniqueness. Lacking archetypal reflectivity,
my effectiveness as a teacher was seriously compromised. By working through these
dilemmas at the personal and archetypal levels, I became able to see and nurture my
students with much more authentic sensitivity to their real needs, not my chimerical ones.

In sum, striving to be the archetypal wise ones—else by what authority do we stand before a
class?—we must learn not to accept any inappropriate projections of the shadow. In
this way, we protect our own psychic spaces and help our students expand theirs. And yet

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 REFLECTING ON THE ARCHETYPES OF TEACHING

we must also sometimes cleverly manifest various shadow archetypes to further our stu-
dents' dialectical development (Riegel, 1979). How to recognize and harness these con-
flicting archetypes, in oneself and in one's students, is a critical part of the ongoing task of
one's ontological and moral development as a teacher. Each teacher will interpret and
carry out this task in different ways. It is not my purpose to prescriptively define those
individually variable existential tasks. But I do want to suggest that being generally aware
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of these archetypal dynamics and appropriating them in personally enriching ways, is

already an important step in investing one's reflectivity and practice with greater emotional
adroitness and numinosity.

Icarus and the Archetype of Cooperative Learning

In addition to embodying the archetypes of the Sage, Ogre and Clown as well as respond-
ing appropriately to shadow projections, we as teachers must also be co-novitiates with
our students. This idea of the dual role of the teacher as both a leader and a fellow traveler
in the classroom is at the heart of instructional theory that sees the classroom as a com-
munity of learners (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1986). In archetypal terms, this means that
the teacher must, as it were, manifest both Obiwan Kanobe and Luke Skywalker in a single
psyche. As teacher-students, we must be willing to change; we must be capable of doubt,
susceptible of reforming and rejecting our own precious paradigms. Put in archetypal
terms, this is to say that we must simultaneously embrace not only the archetype of the
Sage but also of the Hero/Heroine. Seeing ourselves as learners who, along with our
students, are engaged in a life-long journey of learning, we thereby guard against the
hubris or psychic "inflation" that can result from an excessive identification with the Wise
One orthe related archetypes of the Great Mother and Great Father (Edinger, 1973; Neumann,
1954). In this manner we are also less prone to feel that we must have all the answers to
all of our students' questions and problems—a common syndrome in teachers which
causes them to lose their boundaries and become emotionally enmeshed with students.

We must not only be showing the way to the grail; we must also always be searching out
new paths for ourselves, seeking, inT.S. Eliot's words, "a further union/a deeper commun-
ion" with our students, our discipline, and the powering, protean questions of our lives.
These are questions that often require us to be humble since, if we are truly learning along
with our students, their questions will sometimes become our questions too—questions
which we cannot avoid by hiding behind an omniscient, teacherly persona (Craig, 1994).
Lacking this humility, we will fall into the grip of the archetype of Icarus; our wax wings
will melt in the unforgiving daily sun of classroom reality. Here is the archetypal root in
teachers of both arrogance and burnout. But by honoring and participating in our stu-
dents' ontological journey, we as teachers stay fresher and more malleable—more teach-
able: we draw from the same psychospiritual springs that our students do.

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Hence, we may view the call for cooperative learning -- in which the teacher is both "teacher"
and "co-learner" — in archetypal terms. Both guiding and accompanying students on a
joint venture of mutual surprise into new ways of being and knowing, the cooperative
teacher is both Sage and heroic Novitiate, perennially in search of new elixir.

Conclusion: The Hero as Teacher, Teaching as Heroic

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In this essay I have dealt with some of the major stages of the heroic journey as presented
in Joseph Campbell's (1949) classic work The Hero with a Thousand Faces: the call to
adventure, the acceptance or refusal of the call, the rebirth just after crossing the thresh-
old, the ogre or seducer just beyond the threshold, and the proffering of supernatural aid
by the teacher, often in the form of Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman. In concluding, I
should like to look at the final stage of the epic journey: the return of the hero to society.
The culminating archetype of the Hero who returns to society from the underworld is none
other than the archetype of the Teacher (Campbell, 1949). In a sense, then, the Hero
archetype and the Teacher archetype are blended into one. It is therefore not just chance
that when the awestricken Mary Magdalen first recognizes the risen Lord Jesus (our great-
est archetype of the Hero returning from the dead to bring new life to the community) she
calls him "Rabboni" -- or "Teacher" (John 20:16).
Both hero and teacher are called to share their transfiguring vision with and for the com-
munity from which they emerged, out of which they were called, and to which they finally
return. Their final mythic task is to revitalize their community. Here, perhaps, is the
archetypal dimension to Critical Theory's vision of the teacher as political change agent.
At any rate, the hero thereby finds his or her apotheosis in the consummately social and
ethical act of teaching.
Just as the mythic hero must become a teacher, the classroom teacher should see himself
or herself in mythical terms. In addition to reflecting biographically and politically, then
(Bullough & Gitlin, 1995), it is at least equally important that teachers be able to refresh
themselves emotionally and spiritually by reflecting on their work in timeless, transpersonal
terms. Seeing their teaching as integral to their transpersonal quest helps teachers satisfy
their hunger for the mana of "psychic rewards," which is arguably their primary motivation
for teaching (Lortie, 1975). Because archetypal reflectivity so richly provides that mana, it
should become a staple of our reflectivity.
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