On the Scent of the Centaur

On the Scent of the Centaur…Tracking the symbol of the Centaur across time, reflecting on the meaning and value of this symbol located at the nexus between the Spirit of the Depth and the Spirit of the Time, in an attempt to engage and illuminate the question of ‘The (Animal) Body’ in analytical work aimed at psychic synthesis.

This lecture explores the historical significance of centaur symbolism, through the lens of art and literature, to frame a reflective inquiry about the body in relation to the process of Individuation. Tracking the centaur’s historical arch, it would seem that, as an archetype of the hybrid, it was pointing both backward and forward; back in time to our state of primordial one-ness and forward, as a symbol of the creative union of the opposites (evidenced by the emergence of the hybrid-archetype of Chiron during Antiquity). Like The Hermaphrodite, The Centaur was not only a product of primitive non-differentiation. It did not disappear with an increase in civilization; centaurs persist across cultural epochs.

We pick up ‘the scent’ in early Antiquity when The Centaur (the enigmatic hybrid of horse and man) was revered in the mythic imagination of the Babylonians and Greeks. As civilisation advanced, the cultural representation of the centaur grew more ambiguous and darker. The centaur (man’s instinctual nature) is ‘driven back into the forest’ of the unconscious; consciousness becomes divided from the deeper instinctive strata of the human psyche, and as such, severed from the instinctual (animal) body. At the turn of the 20th Century, a revolutionary moment emerged: The Centaur is ‘re-membered’ by the poets, novelists, and artists of the time. This is the moment where the Spirit of the Time reflects the ‘rebellion on the part of the animal’ as Jung refers to it in the quote above from Psychology of the Unconscious. This is also the moment when Freud and Jung grapple with the ‘Sexual Question’ of their time, diverging in their views on the structure and dynamics of the psyche. It is against the backdrop of Jung’s two-fold insight – that the body had become The Shadow of the Western Mind and that, from his depth-psychological perspective, it was integral to the Soul-Self – that I reflect on the contemporary question of ‘The Body’ in analytical work. This contemplation occurs at a time when symbolically speaking, the centaur is encountering the cyborg at the edge of the forest.