As Aristotle so well understood, mythic language is curative. Though catharsis its tragic poetry yields inner harmony to the soul. All myth has a lamentative, grieving, as well as a laughing aspect and like grief and laughter, is restorative. The archetype is a link or rebinding (religio) of the present and the past. (Belmonte)
For Jung, as for Freud, culture is unstable and precarious, always in danger of of lapsing into the regression of unrestrained appetite or setting into rigid molds of renunciation and sublimation. But whereas for Freud the claims of religion and myth are fundamentally irrational, representing the triumph of either desire or terror, for Jung the religious imagination resolves the dialectic of impulse and renunciation, rendering human life not only possible but possessed of a potential for joy.
(Unamuno)
No archetypal figure represents the conflict of culture and nature more parsimoniously than the trickster figures that recur in various animal-human guises in the vast majority of recorded mythologies.
Freudians describe such figures as providing drastic relief from the intolerable pressure of instinctual cravings, and Jung would seem to echo this notion when he describes the Winnebago trickster as “a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness.”(Radin 1956)
But in his famous essay on the theme, Jung enjoins his readers : "to never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself.” (Singer 72)
Jung goes on to describe the trickster figure as a “reflection” and an “epitome” as well as “component” of personality. For Jung, as for Socrates, the reflective properties of the mind are the beacons of its dynamic, unfolding inner life. Apparently for Jung, archetypal imagery allows mind to view itself as a balanced totality, as a form of contending but mutually interdependent processes, accordingly the archetype is an oracular message, a governor or a steersman of information. (Belmonte)
