Depth and Archetypal Psychology — Session Four / Part Two (2–4): The Eternal Orphan or Weakling Archetype
Archetype of Eternal Orphan / Weakling
Aydin Areta

Within each of us lives an eternal orphan who has lost the home, protection and security of childhood. Each of us has repeatedly experienced moments in life when, confronted with life’s complexity and difficulties, we have felt alone, weak and inadequate. We carry this sense of inadequacy with us to the end as though it were an eternal guilt.

In the first part of Session Four, devoted to the orphan archetype and an introduction to it, we briefly discussed its characteristics and the complex feelings associated with it or arising from it. We considered how our calm, magical, protected childhood, full of security and refuge, sooner or later falls before the dragon of chaos and the difficulties and complexities of life into the orphan archetype.

This is a psychological space in which, for the first time in life, we experience ourselves psychologically as orphaned, and to which we will return again and again as a gateway to the underworld.

Part Two of Session Four continues the previous discussion and examines the four possibilities that generally confront us when we meet the complexities of life after entering the psychological space of the orphan:

1) Remaining in the psychological space of the orphan and falling into the eternal orphan or weakling archetype.

2) Regressing into unconsciousness and returning to underdevelopment, remaining in the eternal child; or retaining a deep sense of resentment, anger and woundedness and falling into the victim archetype.

3) Ego inflation, remaining trapped in crude and absolute egocentrism and self-centredness.

4) Choosing the fourth condition: movement towards individuation and the Self.

Part Two of Session Four then examines the first of these conditions: falling into the eternal orphan or weakling archetype. Remaining in the condition of the eternal orphan and the weakling archetype is a psychological state in which we become trapped in feelings of weakness and defenselessness, a profound guilt about not becoming what we could have been and not doing what we could have realised, together with deep feelings of helplessness, inadequacy, hopelessness, pessimism and lack of refuge.

The weakling is a gateway to the inner hell and to the archetypes of the shadow. By becoming trapped in its characteristics, we gradually become permanent solitary residents of a dark inner world in which, although we have lost faith in light, we simultaneously burn with the thirst of an unanswered need to move towards it.

We imagine ourselves weak while, within, we are filled with guilt for failing to realise what we could have become. This guilt strikes the psyche like a painful sting until the end, saying: rise and realise yourself before the opportunity is gone.

In Part Three, which we will soon address, we will examine an alternative psychological space that can begin in the condition of the weakling or develop independently: regression into the unconscious. Here we prefer not to see and not to know, to remain in ignorance, simplicity and the ease of not knowing, or to become trapped in denying our own role and responsibility for passing beyond the orphan archetype and moving towards individuation.

Remaining in a deep sense of woundedness, resentment and anger will ultimately preserve us, as though in salt, within the psychological space of the victim.

Link to the video on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/WPlyOCfbbqI