Archetypes: Participation Mystique
Participation mystique is a concept frequently used by Carl Jung and his intellectual descendants, though Jung did not coin the term. He borrowed it from the philosopher and anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.[i] Lévy-Bruhl was responding to the modernist assumption that “primitive” peoples thought in the same way as modern individuals, only less effectively. He proposed instead that their mode of thought was qualitatively different. For them, the boundary between self and world was not clearly defined; subject and object were fused. They did not stand apart from the world but rather “participated” in it and in other beings.
Jung adopted this idea and gave it a psychological interpretation. For him, participation mystique describes a state of identification with the world that reflects the structure of the unconscious – the ground from which modern rational consciousness emerges. It can be understood as a form of projection, in which unconscious contents are cast onto the world and then experienced as if they were inherent in it. Jung states,
The further back we go into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. And if we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual. Instead of individuality we find only collective relationship or what Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique.[ii]
A similar account is offered by the philosopher Owen Barfield, who termed this early mode of consciousness Original Participation. Barfield argued that, in earlier stages of human development, mind and world were experienced as one. Early humans did not recognize that appearances arise through a collaboration between themselves and reality; instead, appearances were taken at face value. In this sense, the world truly was as it appeared.
Over time, however, experience became increasingly differentiated, culminating in the sharp division between mind and matter articulated by Descartes. Modern individuals therefore tend to regard appearances as subjective constructions – illusions or simulations produced by the brain. Yet this view overlooks a key point: even scientific inquiry depends on these same appearances. Science, on this account, investigates a highly refined and differentiated field of experience, not the thing-in-itself.