Trickster

1. Etymology

Trickster names a mythic and psychic figure of ambivalent, mercurial mischief—subhuman and superhuman, bestial and divine—whose chief danger is unconsciousness. Related:; carnival reversal; negative hero; forerunner of the saviour. Distinct from simple villainy or from the fully differentiated shadow, though shadow-adjacent.

2. Plain summary

The trickster is the part of life that trips you with your own hands—and sometimes, stupidly, saves what cleverness could not. In myth he plays pranks, changes shape, suffers and escapes; in the psyche he is the mercurial shadow that civilized memory forgets until “fate” seems to play tricks. Jung warns that the hidden shadow’s dangerousness can exceed our wildest dreams.

He brings the chance to turn the meaningless into the meaningful. His flips echo enantiodromia; his relation to consciousness is often compensation. He is not a mascot for chaos—he is a figure of unconsciousness that can foreshadow transformation.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common trickster-related figures and motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
ambivalent mercurial shadow tendencies; forerunner of the saviour; subhuman and superhuman; bestial and divine; chief characteristic = unconsciousness; civilized forgetting / fate playing tricks; dangerousness of apparently harmless shadow; carnival / hierarchic reversal; devil as ape of God; (sly jokes, shape-change, dual nature, privation/torture, saviour approximation); negative hero achieving by stupidity; mythical figure and inner psychic experience; transforming meaningless into meaningful; propensity for enantiodromia; compensatory relation to consciousness; shadow adjacency; persona exposure; inflation via identification with the clever fool; complex prankster enactments; active imagination encounters.

3. Academic elucidation

In analytical psychology the trickster is both a mythologem and an inner psychic experience: an ambivalent figure whose unconsciousness is itself the problem and whose antics can compensate one-sided consciousness and foreshadow renewal. Lexica stress parallels and the link to enantiodromia and compensation. Descent Press keeps Sharp and Samuels in §4 so lexicon paraphrase never silently becomes Jung’s voice

4. Lexicon

Sharp (1991)

Trickster. Psychologically, descriptive of unconscious shadow tendencies of an ambivalent, mercurial nature. … [The trickster] is a forerunner of the saviour … He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. … The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. … He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams.

(Sharp, 1991)

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986) 152–153 (List “Trickster 152–3”):

Trickster … resemblance to the alchemical figures of with his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, power to change shape, a dual nature (half animal/half divine)… An altogether negative hero, the Trickster yet manages to achieve through his stupidity what others fail to achieve by concentrated effort. … both a mythical figure and an inner psychic experience… he symbolises the propensity for enantiodromia… his actions inevitably reflect a compensatory relationship to consciousness.

(Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986, pp. 152–153)

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

A curious combination of typical trickster motifs can be found in the alchemical figure of; for instance, his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and—last but not least—his approximation to the figure of a saviour.
(Jung, 1954/1968, CW 9i, p. 255, ¶456)

He is obviously a “psychologem,” an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level.
(Jung, 1954/1968, CW 9i, p. 260, ¶465)

… a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.
(Jung, 1954/1968, CW 9i, p. 263, ¶472)

The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals.
(Jung, 1954/1968, CW 9i, p. 270, ¶484)

See also: trauma; treasure-hard-to-attain; shadow; enantiodromia; compensation; persona; inflation; complex; active imagination; archetype; self; individuation. participation mystique.

References

Jung, C. G. (1968). On the psychology of the trickster-figure. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9i, pp. 255, 260, 263, 270, ¶¶456, 465, 472, 484). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1954)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.