August 2024 – Depression and the Divine Child

I try to give a “pointillistic” view of depression in these newsletters, from the very pragmatic (as with here) to the rather abstract (like here), to give multiple ways to think about this complex experience. Today’s newsletter will be more of the latter, although in a weird sense (as hopefully you’ll see) fundamentally pragmatic. So, this month I’ll be describing what Carl Jung called the archetype of the Divine Child, specifically seen through the lens of a Jungian analyst named Donald Kalsched.

Kalsched writes about what he calls the “self-care system”, which is essentially the way our psyches protect themselves from damage when in contact with a threatening or caustic outside world. We’re all aware of the normal protections, such as defensiveness (“I didn’t do anything wrong!”), but Kalsched unpacks a more primal phenomenon, a defense system at the level of the basic archetypes which is organized around the protection not of the personal “Inner Child,” but of the more fundamental Divine Child.

Take a read and see if or how this idea might apply to your own life. Once you get the concept, it can be a very useful addition to the pragmatics of dealing with depression.

May your summer be progressing with the right mix of comfort and challenge.

The Divine Child archetype and its relationship to depression.

The Nature of Archetypes: Although “archetype” in conventional parlance refers to a typical or model example of something (“John is the archetype of the used car salesman”), in the Jungian world it refers to basic functioning structures of the mind which express as symbols. Among the major archetypes are the Mother, Father, Wise Man, Crone, Rebel, Divine Child, and Self. They are not simply static symbols, like the Christian cross, but rather active mental complexes that organize the way we think, feel, and see the other humans and the world itself. These are not metaphors (a word or symbol which stands for something else), but rather mental organs analogous to those in the body. They are very real, something you’ll know is true when you experience them getting strongly activated in yourself or others.

The archetypal layer of the psyche precedes, or underlies, the personal layer of self, a kind of “grammar” of the mind that belongs to every human. Because I, say, have a passion for kale, it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily shared by others with different backgrounds. In contrast, everyone has the Mother, Father, Child (and other) archetypes as real and active parts of their psyches. Ask yourself why the Marvel films are so broadly popular and successful (collectively they have grossed 30 billion worldwide)? It’s certainly not because they constitute high art, but rather because they are such clean dramas of the archetypal dimension of all human life. When Superman shows up, whatever we may think of the character or depiction, when it is done accurately, we can feel the Warrior/Protector archetype get lit up, which only happens across the culture because that archetype is shared by everyone.

The Divine Child: So, what this article will look at is the archetype of the Divine Child, which the Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched has written about through the lens of trauma in his books, The Inner World of Trauma (1996), and Trauma and the Soul (2015). Both unpack the nature of the Divine Child, how it becomes wounded, what archetypal protectors do to protect that Divine Child (what he calls the “self-care system”), and what the healing of that Child looks like. Whereas much of the trauma literature focuses on the impact of trauma on the personal self (essentially trauma to the personal ego), Kalsched goes substantially deeper into how we can carry trauma to the impersonal self, at the archetypal level.

Kalsched’s understanding is as such: a human being is born into this world with, or as, an activated Divine Child. Again, the Divine Child is not the personal “inner child” but rather the most basic wellspring of aliveness, wonder, openness, wholeness, and the seeking of wholeness. Jung says, “…in every adult there lurks a child—an eternal child, something that is becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention and education. That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole” (quoted in Wesley, 2019). While it is, like all the archetypes, indestructible (the “eternal child”), a particular person’s access to it can be wounded if the environment of the infant/young child is not protective of the Divine Child, and is not attuned to the Divine Child in a way that helps the pure Child manifest in this grungy reality.

Because the Divine Child is deeply vulnerable (that is its nature as profound openness), if mishandled it can be deeply wounded in a way that, if unmitigated, could cripple the individual. The self-care system (SCS) exists to prevent this from happening, but because a young child cannot change the circumstances of its surroundings, the psyche has to pull the Divine Child away from the world. This happens either through freezing the child (rendering it inert like Sleeping Beauty), or sequestering it in a hidden world of fantasy where it is inaccessible to the harsh world. But since Kalsched asserts that the whole function of the human psyche is to shepherd this Child into this world to animate the human life—in a way, to actually make us fully human—the SCS hides the Child in hopes that one day the conditions in the outer world will be such that the Child can be unfrozen or released from its dream state to exist in this world.

Think of popular storytelling, and how many narratives revolve around attempts to find missing children, or protect endangered children. Or how many focus on the efforts of adults to break out of dull, deadened lives through embracing creativity, connection, and play (the Divine Child’s qualities). These stories are so common because this archetypal journey, of the wounding, hiding, and then reclaiming of the Child is woven into the fabric of our human psyches. Think about 2023’s Oscar winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and notice how it tells the story of a mother cut off from her daughter, in which the mother is deadened and the daughter depressed. The film’s triumphant ending is the reuniting of the Mother-Daughter, through which the daughter is released from her near-fatal depression, and the mother is freed up to love and play. There’s a reason the film struck such a chord.

Depression and the Divine Child: The relationship between the Divine Child and depression is, as with virtually all depressions, centered on losses (“futility”) which cannot be grieved, leading to a shutdown state called “depression” (see a previous article here). Grief is the emotional (and embodied) process that responds to loss, whose purpose is to align our psyches to a reality which now includes that particular loss. This is normal and by design, because if there was no grief, we’d keep pouring energy into goals which are futile (say, of getting our father to be accepting of us after he has died). If we were to do that, we would dangerously bleed out our limited human energy supplies; it is grief which protects us from that state.

However, when a loss is the losing of that which defines our sense of self and sense our self-in-the-world (for example, if our mothers represent everything good in the world, the only place we can access a sense of our own worth), then grieving is letting go of that which allows us to go on living (believing in our own and the world’s goodness). In that case, there’s an impossible dilemma: one part of us needs to let go and grieve, and another part needs to hang on in order to survive, and the “resolution” is a temporary stopgap, being depression. We are not vibrantly, actually alive, but we are sustaining a basic aliveness, which is seen as good enough when the alternative is dying from the despair and meaninglessness of a world without that Child.

Remember that the goal (according to Kalsched) of the whole psyche is to install the Divine Child in this world, to allow it to be included, interactive, and contributing to our real lives. But when that goal is stymied (literally, or it’s believed that the world is simply not one where the child can play safely), then there is the registration of loss, which triggers the grief process. But the nature of our psyches is such that the energy of the Divine Child—the play, hope, sense of goodness, vitality, growth—is what allows for a life to be anything credibly called “alive”, such that the loss of it in an experiential way is the loss of our lives. This is the dilemma just described, loss that cannot be grieved, producing an “ungrieved futility” (here) which leads to depression.

Goals and the Divine Child

All goals are meaningful because we are attached to their outcomes, with some of those goals being personal ones (e.g., “I want to win the tennis match”), and some impersonal (e.g., “Don’t die”, and, “Magnify the experience of aliveness and growth”). Grief is not about the goals per se, but about our attachment to those goals, such that when the goal collapses (or we believe it has) our attachment is undermined and we are confronted with letting go of that now futile goal. Whether it is a personal or archetypal goal, the same process attends to its real or perceived loss, and given that the (seeming) loss of the Divine Child is deeply life threatening, depression is deployed to protect our lives through “greying up” the loss. If we cannot see the loss clearly, then our psyche can half-pretend it didn’t happen, and thereby tamp down the (in this case) dangerous grief and letting go process.

However, as Kalsched (and Jung) point out, although the Divine Child can be frozen or sequestered in fantasy for safety, it cannot be destroyed. Those protectors who swooped in and pulled the Child out of dangerous situations are always looking for the world in which that Child can return and contribute, and if you look closely at your own life, you can see choices which (however they were justified to ourselves) seem only about creating contexts of play. These may be quite narrowly banded—the soldier who surreptitiously writes poetry, the CEO who DJs “because it trains in people skills”, the teenager who keeps a secret diary—but they are the psyche’s life-seeking impulse at work in the world. However, that seeking does not want to stop; rather, it wants to keep pushing, cajoling, and arranging the situations the Child is exposed to, to be more and more hospitable, a kind of “terraforming” of the world, both the external and especially the internal world of our different subpersonalities. It wants our Inner Critic to feel safer to not attack the child, and there to be a stronger internal Parent who is able to care for and nurture that Child (when our actual parents were not able to). In a real way, it wants all of the world for the Child.

Whatever damage was done, and whatever threat was in the Child’s environment that activated the Protectors to remove that Child from its own natural growth process, it’s not a permanent loss. Although it often feels internally (whether we’re conscious of it or not) that the Child is forever lost, that rarely is the case. Instead, what is true is that the psyche uses depression for protection, but rarely gives up on the goal of serving the Child’s growth and its integration into the rest of the psyche. As much as our mind’s may have developed a protective jaundiced, resigned, or cynical view of the world and its receptivity to the Child, nonetheless our psyches are dogged about trying to find cracks in the cement which can be widened and stabilized to let the delicate plant, the Divine Child, grow.