From Passive Vessel to Problematic Cosmology: Notes Toward a Needy Source

On archetypes, co-emergence and the God who needed Job.

This essay began as a critique of Jung’s distinction between the psychological and the visionary artist. It became something else. The reader is warned.

I have never been entirely comfortable with Jung’s distinction between the psychological and the visionary artist.¹ The psychological artist works with conscious intention—the material shaped according to a predetermined purpose, the work arriving more or less where the artist directed it. The visionary artist is swept up—the autonomous complex taking over, the work arriving with a force and specificity that no conscious intention could produce. She receives rather than directs. She is the vessel through whom the collective unconscious speaks.

My gripe is not with what the distinction names (though the polarity of the two types of artists has always felt like an oversimplification). Something real is being described. The experience of the work arriving with unexpected force, exceeding what the conscious mind was reaching toward, feeling less like self-expression than like reception. That is real—I can concur from my own poetry practice. But the framework that organises it has always sat uneasily with me, in a way I could not quite articulate until fellow Univocity Drift conspirator, Gabriela Spulirova, pointed something out. Jung developed this distinction by examining constituted individuals—finished works, completed texts—and asking what kind of unconscious content they contained. But Simondon’s principle cuts directly across this method.² You cannot understand the constituted individual by examining it as a finished product. You can only understand it by attending to the process of individuation that produced it. The psychological/visionary difference—if it exists—is not detectable in the made. It is present only in the making: in what happened at the threshold between the conscious intention and the unconscious pressure, in the specific quality of the encounter between the poet’s receptivity and what was pressing toward form. Jung’s distinction was always examining the wrong object.

Which begins to explain the unease. The polarity feels imposed from outside rather than arising from inside the creative process itself. And it rests on something deeper that, once named, I could not stop noticing: a structural assumption of one-directionality.

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The One-Way Traffic of Gnosticism?

The collective unconscious in Jung’s account presses toward conscious expression. The archetypal ground—the accumulated deposit of human experience, the inherited patterns from the phylogenetic past—strives upward toward manifestation in the present. The visionary artist is the one through whom this pressing finds its most complete form. The direction is always from the source toward manifestation: the archetypal depth to the actual surface, the potential to the realised. The source is complete. The visionary artist transmits it.

This is a Gnostic structure—emanation from a completed pleroma, the fragments seeking return, the direction of the flow always from the source into matter and back again. The source itself is whole. The prophet is the one who facilitates the return most completely. The passive vessel is exactly right for this framework: the vessel does not change the divine light it carries. It only transmits its fragments.

I found myself increasingly resistant to this—not only as a theoretical position but as a description of what the practice actually feels like. The relationship with the unconscious—with whatever we want to call the ground from which the work comes—does not feel like an excavation or a quest toward a fixed destination but like a genuine relationship. We play. We fall out. We make love. We disagree. And like all relationships, both parties are changed by it. The source does not feel complete and indifferent. It feels—and I am aware of how this sounds—responsive.

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The Individuation Game

Sitting with this discomfort for some time, I found someone else articulating what I had held as an unnamed assumption. Charles’s work on Benjamin and the archetype, If the archetype is not the fixed eternal form that Jung’s Romantic inheritance implies—if it is, as Benjamin’s dialectical image suggests, a constellation of past and present in which both are genuinely reinterpreted through the context of the other³—then the archetype is already more dynamic, more historically responsive, than the standard account allows. Charles calls for a post-Jungian criticism capable of this: a materialist attentiveness to things, the past dragged into the present with its own materiality and history rather than haunting it as a ghostly emanation from a completed source⁴. Samuels has acknowledged that the archetype is moving toward the relative, contextual, personal.⁵ The field is preparing the ground for something it has not yet said. Or is, for some reason, reluctant to say.

The next step follows almost logically. If the archetypes are changeable, genuinely altered by their historical expression, then what of the Self? The standard Jungian position is that the Self is complete—wholeness always already present, individuation the process of bringing what is unconscious into consciousness. The Self does not develop; the ego’s relationship to the Self develops. Individuation is never completed because there will always be something of the Self that remains unknowable—but the incompleteness is on the ego’s side. The Self is whole all by itself, thank you very much.

This is also where the enlightenment game is played—who is more individuated, who has integrated more shadow, who is further along the path toward wholeness. A hierarchy that only makes sense if there is a fixed destination, however personalised, everyone is moving toward at different speeds. And this feeds into Jung’s implicit privileging of the visionary artist, where the game shifts its language but not its rules: who is more visionary? Chosen? Gifted? I have always found this troubling—or more like tear-my-skin-off irritating. It turns a living, dynamic relationship into a competition with a leaderboard. And it misses what the relationship actually is.

What if the Self is not complete? What if individuation is never finished not only because the ego cannot fully integrate what the Self contains, but because the Self is itself changing, developing, genuinely altered by its encounters with the actual world? The incompleteness on both sides. The relationship genuinely mutual. Both parties changed by the encounter.

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A Needy God: Jung’s Best Kept Secret

Jung’s Answer to Job⁶ had been waiting for the question I was asking. God, confronting Job, is genuinely changed by the encounter. The divine—which in Jung’s own psychology is the symbol of the Self, the central organising archetype—is not the unmoved dispenser of completed content. It is a participant in the exchange, altered by what the human brings, made more fully itself through the confrontation with its own creation. Jung may not name it as such but the reciprocity is clear: Job needs God, but God needs Job.

It is worth pressing on this carefully. Jung’s account in Answer to Job is primarily epistemological: God becomes conscious of himself through Job, self-knowing rather than self-making. The Self for Jung is complete; the encounter produces recognition of what was already there rather than the production of something new.

But the distinction between self-knowing and self-making begins to dissolve under examination. If God genuinely needed Job—not as a mirror reflecting pre-existing wholeness but as the condition of something new arriving in the divine—then the self-knowing is already self-making in disguise. Jung also insists that the Self will always have something unknowable about it: the archetype as such forever exceeds any particular expression of it. Which means every encounter is generative rather than merely revelatory. Each specific, historically situated encounter produces a configuration of partial knowing that was not there before. The knowing is always also a making.

Answer to Job was published in 1952, just shy of a decade before Jung’s death. Psychology and Literature—the source of the psychological/visionary distinction—was published in 1930, revised 1950. The gap is not only chronological. It is the gap between the Jung who insisted he was only an empirical psychologist describing what he observed and the Jung who was willing to say: the divine is genuinely changed by the human encounter. The post-Jungian tradition has preserved the conservative Jung and marginalised the radical one. The more defensively empirical position has become orthodoxy. The more philosophically serious position has been treated as an embarrassment.

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It’s Complicated

The strongest grounding, though, is not Answer to Job. It is simpler than that. Jung defines the archetype as the accumulated deposit of human experience over millennia—the inherited patterns consolidated from repeated encounter across cultures and historical periods.⁷ If that is what an archetype is, it follows necessarily that it is still being added to. The deposit did not seal at some point in prehistory and leave us to receive from a completed field. Humanity is always moving. Always generating new experience. Always depositing new patterns. The archetypes are not fixed because the world is not fixed. This is Jung’s own ontology, taken seriously rather than softened into Platonism.

Ann Addison, working on Jung’s psychoid concept and its origins in the Red Book, states the feedback directly: “just as the effects of archetypal processes manifest in embodied images within the psyche-soma continuum, so also may embodied experience feed back into the archetypal organising process”.⁸ The poem—the practice’s equivalent of active imagination, the embodied elaboration of unconscious imagery—feeds back. The arrow does not only point one way.

A critic might press: Addison speaks of the organising process being affected, not the archetype itself. But this distinction only holds if the archetype is a closed thing—a fixed entity behind its expressions, a form from which the organising process emanates. If the archetype is instead a relational process, constituted by and through its encounters with experience—which is precisely what the accumulated deposit ontology implies—then there is nothing behind the relation that could remain unchanged while the relation is affected. To change the organising process is to change the archetype. They are not separable.

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To Me, To You?⁹

Deleuze’s virtual/actual distinction gives this its most rigorous contemporary formulation—though I want to be precise about what I am and am not suggesting. Deleuze himself does not argue for reciprocity between the virtual and its actualisations. The virtual is indifferent to its expressions.¹⁰ What attracted me initially to the virtual was the genuine newness of each actualisation—each poem a specific production that did not previously exist in that form. Difference in Deleuze is not changeability. It is the intensive multiplicity that makes genuine production possible.

But Deleuze was explicit about the open whole. Drawing on Bergson, he insists that the whole is ‘neither given nor giveable’.¹¹ It does not have a pre-given or fixed nature or static endpoint but is in a process of continual becoming and creativity. Its nature is constant change, giving rise to something new, preventing each set from closing in on itself. This is what practice shows me. The ground that feels responsive, the relationship that changes both parties, the source that becomes through its encounter with what it has produced. The open whole is not simply a philosophical position but a description of what making feels like from inside it.

I came to Deleuze through Christian McMillan’s work on the Jung-Deleuze relationship and open teleology, the encounter deepened by the conversations that generated this essay in the hotbed of rebellious philosophy that is Univocity Drift HQ.

McMillan’s paper, Jung and Deleuze: Enchanted Openings to the Other: A Philosophical Contribution,¹² identifies enchanted openings in Jung’s thought—places where his concepts resist the static reading and open onto something more dynamic. Among these, the psychoid-archetypes: not fixed Platonic forms but openings to what he calls enchanted spatio-temporal dynamisms, the archetype operating at the threshold of the psychic and the material rather than above it. This shifted something for me and spoke to something intuited in my own practice. The archetype as opening rather than container. The encounter between poet and archetypal ground as what Deleuze and Guattari call a transversal relation¹³—the between that sweeps both along, producing what neither contained alone. Each encounter a spiral repetition: genuinely other, returning to the same territory with a difference that the previous revolution made possible.

Roderick Main, drawing on Whitehead and on James Williams’s reading of Deleuze in The Ethical Ambivalence of Holism: An Exploration through the Thought of Carl Jung and Gilles Deleuze,¹⁴ shows that the co-emergence is already implicit in Deleuze even if undertheorised. In The Logic of Sense, a counter-actualisation reworks the form and power of the virtual, sending it back as new creativity. The actual changes the virtual. And Main argues that both Jung and Deleuze can be read as implicitly panentheistic —the whole not separate from its parts, genuinely affected by them, and yet always more than them. The archetypal ground affected by what it produces while always exceeding any particular expression of it. Transcendent enough to be inexhaustible. Immanent enough to be changed.

The counter-actualisation is not a subsequent event—it is the other face of the actualisation itself.¹⁵ In the panentheistic reading, virtual and actual are always already implicated in each other. The archetype is not a pattern but a patterning—not a fixed form but a persistent tendency, a deep orientation that shapes what can emerge without determining in advance what will emerge. What makes it archetypal is not its fixity but its depth and persistence—the tendency recurring across cultures and historical periods, below the individual and the cultural, in the pre-individual substrate of psychic life that Jung calls the collective unconscious. Each encounter adds to and slightly alters the tendency. The tendency shapes each new encounter.

For Jung, the archetypes are the psychic face of a deeper ground he calls the unus mundus—the one world, the unitary creative reality in which psyche and matter are not yet separated, from which both physical and psychic phenomena emerge.¹⁶ The archetype is the unus mundus finding expression in human psychic experience. Which means the changeability of the archetype implies something about the unus mundus too: the creative ground genuinely affected by what it produces.

The claim is not that the visionary work affects the archetypal ground as a subsequent event—as though the poem is first produced and then feeds back. The encounter is primary. The poem and the archetypal ground co-emerge through the meeting. Neither pre-exists the encounter in the form it takes after it. The changing is not exchanged. It happens simultaneously—in both, as both, through the single movement of the encounter itself.

The convergence between Deleuze’s virtual field and Jung’s unus mundus is worth spending a minute with. Both are pre-individual grounds from which phenomena emerge. Both are prior to the split between psyche and matter. Both are inexhaustible. Both are relational processes rather than things—which is what dissolves the apparent paradox. If the virtual is all possible difference, how can the actual change it? It cannot, if the virtual is a thing. But if both the virtual and the archetype are relational dynamics rather than entities—constituted by and through their encounters rather than dispensing from behind them—then the counter-actualisation is not the addition of new content to a fixed reservoir. It is the ongoing constitution of the process through its encounters.

This is perhaps the essay’s most radical implication—and it reaches beyond Jung, beyond Deleuze, beyond the question of the visionary artist that started it. The foundational structure of Western cosmological thinking assumes a source that precedes its expressions: the chaos before the cosmos, the pleroma before the fragments, the singularity before the Big Bang. The source is prior. The expressions are derivative. What the accumulated deposit ontology implies, what Answer to Job demonstrates, what the practice suggests from the inside, is something else entirely: the source is constituted through its expressions. Not prior to them. Not independent of them. Co-emergent with them. The ground is constituted through the grounding. This is a claim beyond the full scope of this essay—and, if I am honest, possibly beyond the scope of my intellect entirely. But the logic leads here. The encounter is primary. The source is not.

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The Patterning Patterns the Patterning

The visionary artist, then, is not the passive vessel through whom the completed source speaks. She is the active participant in a genuinely living relation. The poem is what the relation produces—not from the archetypal field, not from the poet, but from the meeting itself. The poet brings everything she is to the meeting: her history, her practice, her consciousness, her particular way of holding the threshold open. The archetype brings its pressure toward form. What they produce together could not have been produced by either alone. Each encounter changes what the next encounter can find available—for this poet returning, for any poet who comes after. The spiral rather than the circle. Not the poem alone but the encounter that made it possible.

This is a recovery of the Jung who knew that God needs Job—who understood, at the end of his life, that the source becomes through its encounter with what it has produced—not after it, not because of it, but simultaneously with it, in the same movement. It is also the application to the visionary artist that Jung himself did not make. The post-Jungian tradition has preserved the wrong Jung. The conversation that Answer to Job opens has barely begun.

The practice, for what it is worth, keeps suggesting the same thing. The relationship with whatever we want to call the ground from which the work comes does not feel like a mining of something fixed and finished. It feels like what it is: a relationship. Ongoing. Unresolved. Both parties changed by the meeting, changing together, changing in spite of each other. Neither complete.

Which makes the question of who is more individuated, who is more visionary, not only unanswerable but—finally—the wrong question entirely.

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Cassie Fielding (Origami Chicken) is a poet, doctoral researcher and founding editor of Vesica Press. She is completing a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where her research investigates the alchemical structure of surrealist poetry practice. She lives in the north of England, working on her thesis and building Hypnagogic Peacock, a journal of vesical work.

Her site is cassiefielding.co.uk.

1

Jung, C. G. 1930/1966. “Psychology and Literature.” In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, translated by R. F. C. Hull. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 15. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2

Simondon, G. 1958/2020. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

3

Benjamin, W. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso.

4

Charles, M. 2013. On the conservatism of post-Jungian criticism: competing concepts of the symbol in Freud, Jung and Walter Benjamin. International Journal of Jungian Studies, 5:2, 120-139.

5

Samuels, A. 1985. Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge.

6

Jung, C. G. 1952/1969. Answer to Job. In Psychology and Religion: West and East, translated by R. F. C. Hull. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

7

Jung, C. G. 1954/1968. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by R. F. C. Hull. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9i. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

8

Addison, A. 2017. “Jung’s Psychoid Concept: An Hermeneutic Understanding.” International Journal of Jungian Studies 9 (1): 1–16.

9

For any non-British readers unfamiliar with the Chuckle Brothers—a beloved British children’s comedy duo whose signature routine involved passing an increasingly unwieldy object between them with the repeated instruction ‘to me, to you’—the subheading refers to the reciprocal passing of influence between ego and archetype. The Chuckle Brothers would have made excellent alchemists.

10

Deleuze, G. 1968/1994. Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

11

Deleuze, G. 1966/1991. Bergsonism, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.

12

McMillan, C. 2018. “Jung and Deleuze: Enchanted Openings to the Other: A Philosophical Contribution.” International Journal of Jungian Studies 10 (3): 184–198.

13

Deleuze, G, and Guattari, F. 1980/1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

14

Main, R. 2021. “The Ethical Ambivalence of Holism: An Exploration through the Thought of Carl Jung and Gilles Deleuze.” In Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole, edited by Roderick Main, David Henderson, and Christian McMillan. London: Routledge.

15

Deleuze, G. 1969/1990. The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press.

16

Jung, C. G. 1955-56/1970. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 14. Princeton: Princeton University Press.