Quest
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A concept in Jungian analytical psychology which refers broadly to images of totality and wholeness – such as the mandala – that appear in dreams or other spontaneous expressions of the unconscious. Jung believed that the quaternity should serve as the primary image of the Godarchetype, replacing the Christian trinity which he viewed as psychically obsolescent. The Christian trinity was an inadequate symbol to denote psychic wholeness, Jung contended, as it failed to encompass the shadow and feminine aspects of the psyche. Jung was not clear on which of these two should be accorded priority, arguing for the inclusion of Mephistopheles in the quaternity, as the shadow cast by Christ, while also expressing great enthusiasm for the Catholic Church’s adoption of the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary. This, he maintained, established a quaternity relation as Mary, representative of the eternal feminine, functioned as counterpart to the bridegroom of Christ. See also: > Jung, Carl Gustav > Transcendent Function
> Mandala
> Shadow
Bibliography Jung, C. G. (1958). A psychological approach to the dogma of the trinity. In Psychology and religion: West and East, CW 11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Quest David A. Leeming
In the cultural dreams that are our myths, heroes serve as our personae, representatives of our collective
psyches – first as cultures and then as a species. Gilgamesh reflects a Mesopotamian physical and psychological experience and Odysseus could not be anything else but Archaic Greek. But when we compare the heroes of these various cultures, Joseph Campbell’s heroic monomyth pattern emerges and we discover a hero who belongs to all of humanity. ‘‘The Hero,’’ writes Campbell, ‘‘is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms’’ (1949/1973 Hero: 19–20). The central event in the universal hero myth, the heroic monomyth, is the quest, in which a hero – the representative of a culture – seeks some significant goal or boon for his people. Often the voyage involves archetypal stages such as the search for truth or riches or a lost loved one, a struggle with monsters, and the descent to the underworld. Jason goes in search of the Golden Fleece, Parcifal the Holy Grail, and the Buddha Enlightenment. Interpreted psychologically, the questing hero is our cultural and collective psyche out in search of identity – that is, Self, the point of self knowledge at which the conscious and unconscious come together as a unity. As we see in the overall heroic monomyth, the archetypal pattern that emerges from a comparison of hero myths, the quest involves several almost ritualistic stages. There is the initial unwillingness to begin the journey – the refusal of the call – reflecting the natural unwillingness of most of us to give up the status quo for a difficult exploration of our inner worlds. But the hero must leave home precisely because he must break new ground in the overall human journey, as we must on the
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