“Is it Possible That Phish’s ‘Lifeboy’ Could Represent a Jungian Archetype?”

“The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean.” – C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

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I’m not even listening back to it. And I’m still trying to figure out just what to make of it, all in all. One thing is for certain, anyway — my current self is a cute, furry Teddy Bear compared to my high school self which filed this message away unthinkingly with what must have been a wardrobe of other existentially sadistic quips.

But my vision still lingers. It’s a songwriter with a guitar and nothing else — no hope for his life, no faith in the cosmos or a larger being, no direction to steer himself in other than this grim, stark honesty of which most people certainly seem incapable, even if they were driven to such an inner realization. It’s a vision that conjures up a certain amount of fear — fear of the ultimately heretic figure, the kind that could very well get expelled from a Catholic elementary school.

Somewhere within his masterwork The Archetypes and the Collective Unconcsious, Dutch psychiatrist C.G. Jung (known casually elsewhere as Carl Jung), credited with inventing the concept of the archetypes, defines them as simply “The contents of the collective unconscious” (4). Doesn’t it seem natural that a little boy or girl in a staunch, rigid parochial environmental setting, might try to push feelings of skepticism to the back of his or her mind, or have such things essentially shoved by ruler slaps or paddles? 

Now, I realize I’m muddling “personal unconscious” and “collective unconscious” here. But for how often Jung throughout the book seems to cede to the primordial mystery and uncontrollable aspects of archetypes, it would seem to allow for a certain flexibility the terms. It doesn’t seem inconceivable, in other words, that archetypes, while existing as the “contents” of the collective unconscious, could be the “product” of something that originally was conscious but was too harsh or overwhelming to continue to mentally support, a process that would mirror the psychological phenomenon of repression of trauma, of course. This development seems especially credible considering the grand, overarching motifs and concepts of which archetypes are typically the subject — the birth mother, aging and bodily decay, pain and divinity. In particular, I had in mind the archetypes of the trickster figure, who’s described in one point of Archetypes as a “wounded wounder,” and also the female daughter figure who does something like extending the mother’s life through a continual blood transfusion, to paraphrase Jung’s words for temporal purposes, if I may. 

The character in Phish’s “Lifeboy,” a tune on Hoist (1994) with the refrain “God never listens to what I say”, seems to roll all of these big-picture neuroses into one. Divinity is an obvious, copious theme within the lyricism and a reservoir of emotional anguish active in the speaker is obviated by the subject matter. 

The discussion should circle back, either way, to whether “Lifeboy” actually MEANS anything. I’m implicitly arguing within this essay that it does. Just to take my own mental reaction as evidence, I, as an aspiring critic, have a hard time even slotting where I’d rank this tune among Phish’s catalogue, though I have a suspicion that it would be second behind the live version of “NICU” available on the boxed set Hampton Comes Alive. That is to say, the song itself has a way of inundating my mind state with this strong, potent compunction, like a guilt about enjoying it that I’m sure obviously comes from my upbringing as a part-time, masquerading Catholic in a conservative community. And like I allude to earlier, when I first heard Hoist in high school, I basically mentally discarded “Lifeboy,” hence, you could say, relegating it to my unconscious. I sort of said, “I’m sure there’s somebody more fu**ed-up out there than this dude.” But now I’m not so sure that there is. 

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Works Cited:

Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press, 1990. 

121 thoughts on ““Is it Possible That Phish’s ‘Lifeboy’ Could Represent a Jungian Archetype?””

  82. «Ходячие мертвецы» — постапокалиптический хоррор, создателем которого выступил номинант на премию «Оскар», режиссер Фрэнк Дарабонт Ходячие мертвецы 11 сезон Сериал Ходячие мертвецы (The Walking Dead, США, 2010)

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