As James Hillman has pointed out, soul offers an approach to life as sacred, an orientation toward depth. It brings a quality of awareness that is reflective, imaginative, and downward, engaged with the dailiness of things.

However, for millennia, the sexual archetype has been split: It is worshiped for its powers of creating life, and it is damned for its powers of connecting us to the shadowy realms of the body and instincts. Therefore, sexual shadows pervade our intimacies. Eros, the god of love, opens the floodgates of desire and shuts them just as rapidly. Or he

Today, as the sole currency of exchange, money is a potent symbol of transformation, of the power to turn one thing into another, like the alchemist’s quest in reverse: turning gold into matter—food, clothing, shelter, pleasure, status, mobility. But like other archetypes that carry soul, money also carries shadow, hidden meanings, forbidden

Archetypal psychologist James Hillman points out that betrayal can be seen as a necessary turning point that permits an individual to move out of a childlike state of naïve trust and innocence into an awareness of the complexity of every human being, including the dark side.

However, its formulaic approach does not account for the power of the unconscious. And at times it becomes so oversimplified that its proponents risk reductionism and the peril of reification—the danger of believing that to name something is to fully understand it (“Oh, you were abused as a child, or you come from an alcoholic family. That explains

Parents, children, teachers, clergy, and friends add to the mix, helping to determine what is allowed to be expressed and what is not. For some families, emotional vulnerability and crying are encouraged; for others, they are banished into shadow. For some families, anger and conflict are tolerated; for others, they are the worst taboo. For some

On the other hand, a woman who sacrifices her career opportunities to be a stay-at-home mother may envy her husband’s achievements. In addition, she may succumb to the danger of envying her children’s opportunities as well. If she lives vicariously through her daughter with conscious pride, she also may suffer with unconscious resentment and

Poet Robert Bly has also explored a version of this pattern, which he calls the “naïve male” and identifies by several traits: The man assumes that others are sincere and fair, without seeing their shadows. With this kind of blindness, he has special, prized relationships only with certain people. In addition, he may be passive in relationships,

It is impossible to maintain a child’s innocence according to a standard of perfect parenting—that is, the parent cannot meet the child’s longing for love, desire for safety, and needs for mirroring at every given moment. The parent, whose soul has been wounded, is bound to fail. From the point of view of the child’s soul, the betrayal is