Reflections on the Nature of the Kingship Archetype

The Investigation of the history and psychology of kingship has become an absorbing interest for me since my work with schizophrenic patients led me to define a reconstitutive process (Perry, 1962). In these psychotherapeutic efforts I departed from clinical custom in giving full attention to the delusional productions during the acute phase of the disorder. Seeing in these two major motifs occurring with some regularity—that of death and rebirth and that of centrality—I concluded at first that the process must belong to the initiation class of images (Perry, 1957). However, midway through a dozen years of collecting such observations on in-patients, I stumbled by chance upon some of the literature on archaic kingship and recognized that this class of images accounted for the contents of the process far more completely and satisfactorily.

These considerations led me to conclude that we see in certain schizophrenic cases a specific archetypal process describing the synthetic work of the unconscious even in the most severe of disorders. That delusions can have restitutive significance has been noted by others. Freud has formulated these fantasy formations in terms of the restoration of object relations by infantile substitutes for reality (Freud, 1924). Jung, in his more extensive explorations of psychosis, has described the compensatory role of delusions in attempting to rescue the personality from a pathological one-sidedness (Jung, 1914); also, he saw in them the attempt of the pathological complex to destroy itself (Jung, 1959).

In my paper on reconstitutive process (Perry, 1962), I selected 12 out from a series of a couple of dozen schizophrenic cases that I had treated, using the motifs of delusional imagery as the criteria of my choice. I grouped the themes regularly recurring from case to case under broad headings and ordered them as follows. Characterizing the patients' subjective feelings were: a split self-image with markedly debased and over-exal