The Trickster & Transcendence

The Joker opens another million at the box office. Loki gets his own series. Harley Quinn, Jack Sparrow, Deadpool, Puss in Boots, Rumpelstiltskin, Wile E. Coyote, the playing card Joker, the court jester. The cultures that disown these figures cannot stop watching them. That is the first clue.

Jung names what is happening. The trickster “haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes in quite unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modulated guise. He is obviously a ‘psychologem,’ an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations, he is a faithful reflection of an undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level” (Jung, 1968, CW 9i, para. 465). The figure is older than civility. Civility cannot delete what predates it. So the trickster returns wearing whatever costume the era will tolerate.

The trickster “symbolizes life’s refusal to bend to our will or conform to our plans, or to be accommodated within neat rational categories and orderly structures” (Le Grice, 2024, p. 126). He “manifests at thresholds of transition” (Le Grice, 2024, p. 127). The work he does is precise. “Through the trickster our own unconscious nature breaks through into the field of human activity and awareness, disrupting and awakening, breaking apart and liberating, that we might step into more authentic modes of being in the world” (Le Grice, 2024, p. 126).

Individuation requires this break. The ego will not surrender its plans voluntarily. The trickster smuggles in what reason refuses. We project the disruption onto the painted face, the silver tongue, the cartoon coyote, because we sense the energy is ours and cannot yet bear to claim it. The fascination is the recognition. Recognition must transcend into integration.

References

Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 9, Pt. 1, 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)

Le Grice, K. (2024). The way of the archetypes, Volume I: Universal principles and individuation. ITAS Publications.