The Archetypal Sarah Palin

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, has been impressed with Sarah Palin.

So have millions of other voters, one way or another, since John McCain announced the Alaska governor as his running mate just before Labor Day. Some love her and some love to hate her, but no other vice presidential candidate has ever, in my recollection, stirred so much passion and controversy.

When we react with our emotions and our gut feelings, then try to get our intellect on the same page, we are projecting. Specifically, we are casting the recipient of the projection in the role of an archetype.

An archetype is a potent figure in our unconscious mind, said the psychologist Carl Jung. Such an archetypal figure, common to all human beings, is the (imaginary) perfect mother. We are all born with the mother archetype, which in childhood we project onto our actual mom. That's how we "just know" our mom will nurture and protect us, in advance of any actual experience of having a mother.

Another potent figure in the unconscious mind of every human male, Jung said, is the anima, the archetype which gives us men our image of the (again, imaginary) ideal woman.

Neither of these two archetypes, nor any other archetypal ideal hidden in the deep, unconscious psyche, bears any necessary relation to those whom we project the archetypes out upon. Mom may be cruel, and the woman that a man marries because his anima was projected out upon her may turn out to be entirely wrong for him.

But never mind. We project our archetypes out onto people all the same, and we react to people based on these projections. That's part of what's going on with Sarah Palin. It's why oldstyleliberal is so impressed.


But archetypal projections are more complicated than that. Archetypes serve as points around which our life experiences and memories cluster — again, in ways that we are scarcely conscious of. These clusters Jung called complexes. We not only have a mother archetype that we all hold in common, we each as individuals have a mother complex. The mother complex can modify the archetype in strange ways. If our mother was neglectful and cruel, the mother complex that we harbor can take the ideal represented by the mother archetype and append the qualifier "... not!"

We also have, each of us in our conscious mind, structures that can pull against the dictates of the unconscious archetypes. In this day of rampant feminism, we have all learned to expect different things of women and mothers than our archetypes might otherwise have us do.

What we project is accordingly inflected according to our culture and personal history. Today, our culture is in flux regarding women, wives, and mothers. Our personal histories are widely varied as a result. Whether we are male or female, young or old, we all have complicated histories with respect to how we image women.

Some of us see Sarah Palin as an "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "Right on! Such a person is just what the country needs right now."

Others of us see Palin as representing that same "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "No way! She'd set the clock back a hundred years on feminism, women's rights, and a lot of other things."

All the lionizing of Palin from the right, and all the disparagement from the left, are tinged with whether we like or dislike the woman we see in the light of our projections. If Sarah Palin were Abraham Palin, with the same (thin) résumé, McCain's pick for vice president would still draw criticism, à la Dan Quayle. But not nearly as stridently.


P.S. For another take on the archetypal Sarah Palin, see The Projection of Sarah Palin at the Symbol Watcher website. This one casts Palin in the role of the Great Mother archetype: "at once container, cherisher and guardian of life, as well as ruler, possessive controller/destroyer and seductress." Interesting reading!