Hiya @CherryBomb CB!
Yes, Robert Bly's work seems very similar to the work of Beck and Giddens as you describe it, so I don't think you've misunderstood at all. Bly's vision of it is based on the model of the tribe, with female elders and male elders represented metaphorically by the institutions and authorities we had previously turned to for guidance and moderation of our lives, but from which we are now rebelling and which have shown themselves to be lacking the benign side we once trusted them to have.
You may have noticed I tend towards the metaphorical (no, really?!), so I'm very drawn to the imagery of Bly's work. It has parallels in the work of women like Clarissa Pinkola Estés (who wrote Women Who Run With the Wolves). Bly feels -- and it certainly rings true for me -- that we have lost a lot of the rights of passage through stages of our lives, and discarded the meaningful ritual as foolish or embarrassing that once gave people a psychic structure for how to regard our role relative to events around us. More than anything, we've discarded our mentors who taught us how to conduct ourselves *and* provided the guidance (and chastisement, when necessary) for how to learn. We've banished the "Please teach me" and put "How dare you!" in its place. It's a poor bargain.
Archetypes. Okay. (Please feel free to chime in on this, Anne @PeppiPatty !) The idea was formulated by Jung, and can be thought of as ... okay, themes in a story. We're each a story, and a story has some elements in common to all -- an opening, a plot development, the influence of other characters, a resolution, a conclusion -- there are things we see in all stories, regardless of their genre or style of writing. That's like the collective consciousness that Jung envisaged, an underlying awareness that all humans share, with its shared hopes, expectations and sorrows. But stories all have themes that shape the way the story runs -- it might be a heroine or hero story, or a poor innocent treated cruelly, or someone who uses her/his power for malice, or star-crossed lovers -- these examples are distinct themes that make the story run differently, but are identifiably common to all human storytelling. You can think of archetypes like that -- as the themese that manifest in our personal stories. And although they are shared, they show up differently from one story to the next, and each theme won't appear in every story. In a real sense we have no conscious control over which archetypes manifest in our lives; they come from the collective unconscious, after all.
There's some recognition of these concepts in modern transpersonal psychology. Most of us have at least heard mention of the Inner Child and the Inner Critic, and there are whole workshop industries sprung up around learning to appease them and trying to get them to play nicely and support our conscious desires. (I'm not so sure about all that, though you'd probably have a better chance of success than praying to Jaysus for a Cadillac. Or, famously, a Mercedes Benz.) But in a sense the archetypes are a little like astrology, in that what's in your makeup is in the stars when you were born. (I'm being metaphorical again.) You get the spread of archetypes in your life that you were dealt; there may be some aetheric system at work, analogous to the gene lottery of DNA, but we're oblivious to it for now.
(To get serious for a moment, all this is one big reason why I get antsy with people telling other people how they "should" be; if it's not in their archetypal colour palette, how can they be what's demanded of them? It's an ego-driven gesture of cruelty.)
So, a couple of websites that might give a bit more useful grounding in this:
http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/tp/archetypes.htm talks about the four basics as Jung envisaged them, though they're really more the aspects of consciousness and self-perception. In Jung's hands, thy hadn't yet taken on the "themed ride" aspect that they quickly developed as others latched onto the concept and expanded it.
http://www.soulcraft.co/essays/the_12_common_archetypes.html talks about one perspective on the archetype-as-life-focus approach to the subject. Particularly in the US, the idea of archetypes have solidifed as behavioural and personality traits.
CB, many thanks for your link to the interview with Prof Papastergiadis. I found it a very interesting read, and even though I'm convinced a lot of it went over my head, it did reassure me in at least one sense: I had assumed that "cosmipolitanism" was a push for the abolition of cultural distinctions and differing values, so it was useful to realise that was my ignorance at play and that people like the Prof are focussed on "negotiating differences" rather than pushing for universality. (I'm very bothered by the "cultural imperialism" that is apparently implicit in the "global market". Yeah, I'm very bothered by a lot of things.)
Got to take a break for a minute, and this "failed authentication" the website keeps throwing at me is driving me nuts. I'll back with some more in a wee while.
Best regards,
Aonaran
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I came to appreciate Hera, Demeter, Athene, Proserpine which helped me in mothering ... but couldnt talk shopping til recently ..
