The Archetype of Fear

Tony Crisp

The images of fear can be darkness; an unknown something approaching you; losing control in some way; a dark and monstrous figure or animal; an obscure but powerful 'thing' that is threatening to engulf or destroy you; or death in its various forms such as disease, ageing, or meeting an opponent, etc.

As a human being you are not simply an instinctive animal. Even intelligent animals such as chimpanzees and foxes do not simply responded to their environment instinctively. They learn certain types of behaviour from their parents, from experience, and from their fellow animals. Our own relationship with fellow human beings from infancy passes on to us an enormous amount of information through copied behaviour, through word of mouth, through our own experience, and through reading or viewing.

The instincts that inform us, and the cultural or personal information we acquire, are both the result of enormous amounts of experience. Instinctive behaviour for instance, has developed over millions of years of dealing with survival. In a similar way cultural responses that we absorb are the result of experiences faced by millions of people. Both of these sources can be described by the word archetypal. By this is meant that no one particular experience or piece of information lies behind an instinct or a cultural response. Such responses are usually the synthesis arrived at over thousands of years, perhaps millions.

In this sense an archetypal behaviour is the synthesis of thousands of people's response to situations. These archetypes are often more easily seen, not so much in our own personal experience, but certainly in how some things are portrayed in art, in literature, and in popular or group responses to things that we might confront.

However, it is difficult to categorise such responses as clearly instinctive, cultural or personal. If we take the example of pain for instance, some individuals in tribal cultures seem to have a very high tolerance for pain, whereas many people in European based cultures have a much lower tolerance. So we cannot say that a response to pain is instinctive. Even if it is instinctive to remove your hand from something that burns, there still seems to be a cultural element to the response.

In looking at general responses to human situations, there are however particular things that often stimulate fear. Of course, physical or emotional pain is one. There are many other things that are much more subtle though. Fear of death for instance, can be seen as a sort of archetypal response to something that is unreal until we actually meet the experience of death. Another such fear is the loss of what we usually call identity or personality. The illustration of such fear is often portrayed in films where an alien creature, a disease, or and encroaching influence gradually takes over ones body and mind. This fear not always expressess itself in an obvious way. Sometimes it is connected with the losing of what one identifies with. For instance you may be blessed with an attractive and healthy body, and as this ages and loses its attractiveness, you may feel great stress, and struggle with enormous vigour to maintain the features that are slipping away. Such struggles arise out of the fear of losing oneself, or at least losing the sense of oneself connected with appearance, work, success, or financial standing.

Something that is not as obvious but nevertheless can be seen to cause enormous depression and even illness in human beings is our connection with meaning. As humans we struggle to give meaning to the world and to our own lives. People often despair if they are not involved in a meaningful task, work or relationship. The meanings we give to our life and the world may be expressed in religious, scientific, or aesthetic beliefs. If these beliefs are threatened or questioned we may experience anger or stress. Enormous effort and expense are often involved in creating an expression of these beliefs in our outer life, and an attempt to support them or their reality. Any threat to them may cause great fear or anger.

Examples of fear in dreams are as follows.

I go upstairs to a bedroom to get a weapon. When I enter the darkened room, I sense that someone is there. I fall onto my stomach on the bed and there I am paralyzed, unable to move, extremely fearful that I will be attacked while I am in this vulnerable position, feebly kicking my feet, sure that the 'enemy' is somewhere in this darkened room with me. I keep expecting to kick someone, but I can't really tell if I ever do. I am in a state of complete panic. PG.

I dreamt I while I was sitting on a pier when I suddenly I had a feeling of danger. I safely pulled my feet out of the water when a shark rose out of the water really angry with me for pulling my feet out. I woke up frightened and couldn't fall asleep again for the rest of the night. ARE dream.

Dreams also show how we can deal with our fears, sometimes paradoxically.

I dreamt that I was being approached by a tiger. I was in fear believing that the tiger would attack me. I decided not to fight or run but instead do nothing. When the tiger reached me, it was friendly. I could hear it communicating to me that if I did not fear it, it would not attack. ARE dream.

The paradox is of not being frightened of what is, in the dream, frightening. Yet that is the way through fear, to face, in the dream or in ones exploration of your dreams, what is frightening. This can be done using the methods given under peer dream work. Also see the example 5 under nightmares.

Fear is fundamental to life, but for humans, because of our ability to think and hold images of things we are not actually meeting at the moment, fear can become a constant threat. Therefore the facing of fear, the meeting and dealing with the many images of fear we meet, is extraordinarily transformative.

We often do things in our dreams that have no place there. For example, we may dream of falling into the sea and be terrified we will drown. That is ridiculous because we can easily breathe under water in a dream, or fly, or die and be reborn. The sea we fear drowning in, the sky we fear falling from, the monsters we run from, are our own emotions. They are images and emotions we frightenourselves with. We drown in sorrow, we fall in our own estimation, and we may run from responsibility or decisions. Learning to breathe under water, to fly, to confront monsters in our dreams is a way of learning how to handle our own feelings - just like a sailor learns to handle the sea. It is a life skill. See: Dream Processing

Useful questions are:

Have any of my dreams been examples of facing and dealing with fear?

If so what can I learn from them?

What does my dream and its drama suggest I am frightened of?

Am I paralysed by my fear, or can I confront it?

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