In Jung’s The Personal and the Collective Unconscious he focuses on a case study of one of his patients. He first briefly explains the process of transference, and then proceeds to explain how he used this concept in an attempt to cure the woman of her apparent hysteria. She related her dreams and through transference would supposedly be cured. However, in her case, transference could not be concluded, so Jung stipulates that there was more to her dreams than the mere father representation, but rather a primordial God figure. There was nothing in the patient’s life to elicit this type of figure appearing in a dream, leading Jung to believe that certain figures, or archetypes, exist outside of the self, and collectively in society. Basically the woman’s life had no bearing on those dreams as they did not come from her, but from the collective out of which, she, the individual was bred. Her dream is not of the father figure, but rather the God figure inherited from society that takes root in her unconscious.
That last part I want to apply to American Gods. Gaiman creates this novel as a narrative of how different gods came to America, but also depicts what has happened to them since their first appearance, namely a deterioration in belief, a mixture of beliefs, and a rise of new gods that in many ways can be considered sacrilegious at best. The latter part is not of consequence here, but the depiction of these gods over time is.
Despite their hardships in maintaining worshipers, holidays, or rites, they have only mildly become distorted, meaning their true forms are still apparent and recognizable. One of the reasons behind this can be elucidated through the understanding of the collective unconscious as seen in Jung’s case study. Even though the gods were reportedly brought to America by individuals through personal worship centuries earlier, their images rely not on those particular people, or even their ancestors, but rather an archetypal form, unchanging in the human mind, or through human belief.
There are probably dozens of examples from the novel I could use to demonstrate this point, but I will briefly focus on Eostre, because I like her. Her outwardly appearance serves to assimilate her into the liberal culture of her surrounding (she takes residence in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco), but as she enters what Gaiman refers to as “backstage,” where gods embody their true selves, she is easily recognized for what she is (she has very little to do with Easter aside from the association with fertility through the idea of rebirth). Even her physique is unchanged backstage, relying on previous sketches of her that echo her first worshippers’ images.
And this is essentially true of all the gods in the novel. Regardless of what form they take physically, their real form remains unaltered by time, existing backstage in the same state as it did thousands of years before. These gods do not exist in individual belief, or rely on how any one person sees them, but rather on how they are perceived in the collective, an amalgamation of how everyone sees them. This concept exists in a loop. They are as they are because that is how they are seen, but they are seen as such because that is the way they are. Do you see?
None of the mortal characters in Gaiman’s novel would be any more prone to transference than Jung’s patient. None of them are coming to terms with issues within their lives, but rather issues that have plagued every life before them.
