The Trickster has been depicted as both mythical figure and archetype — what Carl Jung identified as instinctual schemas guiding behavior that serve both individual and social development. As archetype, Trickster is a masterful, yet unpredictable, catalyst of psychological change. Trickster energy challenges staid beliefs and well-worn habits by unearthing assumptions and toppling worldviews that have lost their usefulness. However, there is nothing moralistic about the Trickster. Sometimes to continually grow, things simply must change.
In 1912, Sam Blowsnake, a Ho Chunck Native American, recorded his people’s Trickster myth. The myth’s bawdry parody of human nature reminds me of how self-defeating our behaviors often are — such as when psychological defenses orient mind and body to past dangers, regardless if the present lacks similar threats. In the Ho Chunck Trickster myth, the Trickster’s right arm fights its left arm, eats its own intestines, takes advantage of those who trust him, and wanders aimlessly about the world.
“Give that back to me, it is mine! Stop that or I will use my knife on you!” So spoke the right arm. “I will cut you to pieces, that is what I will do to you,” continued the right arm. Thereupon the left arm released its hold. But, shortly after, the left arm again grabbed hold of the right arm. This time it grabbed hold of its wrist just at the moment that the right arm had commenced to skin the buffalo. Again and again this was repeated. In this manner did Trickster make both its arms quarrel. That quarrel soon turned into a vicious fight and the left hand was badly cut up. “Oh, oh! Why did I do this? Why have I done this? I have made myself suffer!”
The Trickster’s way is dissociative — tearing things asunder, ignoring the body’s natural boundaries, and rejecting social norms when instinctual drives take the reins. In trauma jargon, dissociation is a psychological defense characterized by splitting off parts of experience — emotions, sensations, memories — that are unbearable reminders of traumatic events and painful relationships. Letting go of dissociative defenses involves reintegrating the split off aspects of experience. Similarly, Trickster also represents the capacity for creating new associations, joining once disparate emotions, images, ideas, and practices, thus making possible new ways of engaging with the world.
In the indigenous cultures where they originated, Trickster myths presented an opportunity to reflect on the tendency to create self-defeating norms and behaviors. I imagine these myths enlivened the Trickster archetype in our ancestors’ psyches, perhaps modeling the need for continual reflection on how ungrounded many assumptions and customs are. Furthermore, with the Trickster around, neither the sacred nor the profane could leverage excessive influence. Such rigid dichotomies are where Trickster’s energy is most pronounced, since Trickster’s cultural role and archetypal force is its ability to challenge what threatens continual adaptation.
Trickster myths, like so much indigenous wisdom, were discarded when emerging civilizations needed distinctions between good and evil, as well as borders around threats to the status quo, to shore up a sense of security and stability. Enlightenment ideals of scientific advancement eventually followed, along with creating order through control of the natural world. As much as we collectively try to break free of our current worldview and return to sustainable environments with malleable and adaptive psyches, we often find ourselves stuck spending massive amounts of energy — natural and archetypal — attending to environmental and psychological wounds that in part continue through our ignorance of the need for awareness of our Trickster ways. While grasping for split off parts of experience and trying to create cohesion, we often fail to notice that all the pieces the left hand diligently amasses is countered by the right hand’s equally industrious efforts to scatter things about once again.
Reference
Radin, Paul. 1972. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Schoken
Revised 2023/10/03
© Laura K Kerr, PhD. All rights reserved (applies to writing and photography).
