Henderson, Joseph. Thresholds of Initiation. Middletown:  Wesleyan University Press, 1967. Pp.  260.

… He develops the provocative theory that there is an archetype of initiation and has assembled comparative material brought into relation with dreams from patients to expound its implications.…

… This thesis can be combined well with the view that it is creative archetypal imagination which provides the dynamism for cultural development. But the initiation

would be the result of interaction between the archetypes and the culture pattern and would not in itself be an archetype.…

There are several indications, besides his concept of the archetype of initiation which I find questionable, that Henderson expands and varies his usage. For instance he states that there is an ‘archetype of the group’ (p. 128) and a ‘social archetype’ (p. 113), and at the second International Congress for Analytical Psychology he tentatively introduced the idea that there was an ‘archetype of culture’.

All these formulations expand the concept and with it archetypal experience. On the other hand somewhat confusingly he refers to the archetype of the self. Here, though he could quote Jung to support him (cf. Fordham, this Journal, 8, i), the usage goes far to reduce the usefulness of the term and also the meaningfulness of the self as the psychosomatic wholeness of ego and archetypes…

… But ‘whether the cultural forms originally took a religious, or social or philosophical direction seems to have depended upon the psychological differences among native types of men in response to the exigences of history, climate and geography [my italics].

I understand this to mean that the structures of differing societies derive from interactions, graphically postulated by Henderson, giving rise to initiation, a social and religious form designed to assist in transmuting the archetypal world into cultural life. The view that this process is general and results in types of behaviour that essentially follow a single significant pattern is in line with evolutionary theory but it does not make the pattern archet