Haiku Poetry and the Parenting Principle: An Exploration
Haiku Poetry and the Parenting Principle: An Exploration
by Robert Epstein
Even small acts of love enrich oneself
and the world. ~ Anonymous
For many years now, I regularly turn to haiku poetry to explore the world, which includes the human psyche—my own and others’. Carl G. Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, who broke with Freud to discover his own spiritually oriented approach to psychotherapy, emphasized the vital role of archetypes in the realm of psychological life. The author of Modern Man in Search of a Soul defined the term in the following way:
Archetypes are, by definition, factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal [recurring, primal], but in such a way that they can be recognized only from the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously, and presumably they form the structural determinants of the psyche in general.
Jung continues:
As a priori conditioning factors, they represent a special, psychological instance of the biological “pattern of behavior,” which gives all of living organisms their specific qualities. Just as the manifestations of this biological ground plan may change in the course of development, so also can those of the archetype. Empirically considered, however, the archetype did not ever come into existence as a phenomenon of organic life, but entered into the picture with life itself.
Among the many important archetypes that might be identified, the Mother and Father archetypes are prominent.
