From a psycho-symbolic perspective, effective rulership evokes the erasure of the biographical individual: the man disappears beneath the crown; the throne seats the King, not the man, his parts, or his personal needs and wishes. By this line of thinking, it is reasonable to suggest that the archetypal King’s psyche serves as the background and battleground for collective conflicts. In this essay, I explore the extent to which the archetypal King internalises the needs of the people to such an extent that they become the dominant voices in his inner world, or even full-blown subpersonalities. Beginning from the stage of early-Kingship, I will track the gradual and progressive diminishment of the King’s personal parts in favour of new collective parts which, paradoxically, are no longer collective once internalised as functional subpersonalities within the King’s inner world. The King’s transition from selfishness to service isn’t total, of course, but the overall reorientation from personality-based conflicts to collective conflicts is significant. At the centre of the kingly disposition is the minimisation of biographic identity and positive ownership of the populace as a part of himself: the people are not just people, they are ‘his people’; the collective is contacted and condensed as envoys within his inner world. If the people become his people, and his people become parts within himself, the mature King’s psyche is comparable to the birth of subpersonalities in the developing ego of childhood, as outlined below.

To attempt to understand the psyche of the archetypal King, we should first concede the inner world of each individual as an ultimately unknowable experience. Internal reality is a private, self-contained reality with multiple layers of conscious and unconscious subjective experiences. The images, memories and sensations of another person cannot be directly accessed by anybody except the original subject, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t approximate how it feels to be another person. Empathy starts with the attempt to see through the eyes of another, but the half-life of feeling is fleeting. For the sake of brevity, psychological internalisation can be considered the concretisation of temporary empathic connections between Self and Other. Similarly to projection, internalisation is a neutral psychic process: it tilts positively or negatively, depending on the context. The Inner Critic, to give one example of negative internalisation, is an unconscious amalgamation of the critically-charged words, actions and beliefs of influential caregivers during childhood. The traumatised individual classically suffers from the internalisation of bad parenting voices during their childhood which, for some people, results in an internal monologue that feels like a genuine part of themselves that has genuine power over their daily decision making. The healthy adult, on the other hand, is often the result of good parental internalisation, which typically rewards life-long feelings of unconditional positive regard towards oneself. If developing children are capable of subpersonality internalisation through exposure and repetition, it is reasonable to suggest that the psychologically mature adult is capable of consciously internalising the voices and beliefs of other adults, or groups of adults, through intentional exposure and repetition, which leads us towards the inner world of the archetypal King.

If the King exists to fulfil the function of ritualised leadership, then the King could be considered an extension of Robert Moore’s conception of the ritual elder. By way of short definition, consider the Priest an example of ritual eldership. The Priest serves his society by facilitating specific services for specific people within the sacred container of The Church, but the critical difference between the archetypal King and the church-bound elder are the questions of scale, permanence, and mundanity. The King is responsible for stewarding society through multiple generations of crisis and resolution, but this work rarely happens in a single sanctified moment such a wedding or funeral; collective consciousness is dense, it progresses and regresses in mundane, mostly forgettable ways. If his work is tedious, and his Kingdom evolves in slow-motion, the Kingdom is nevertheless an extension of the identity of the King as man and ruler: the lands, towns and people are a continuation of his consciousness, both literally and symbolically. In terms of scale, the King functions as a ritual elder for thousands, or potentially millions, of individuals at once. Upon closer inspection, the Kingdom could reasonably be divided into dozens of distinct segments such as, the farmers, the merchants, the children, etc. This brings us to the curious paradox regarding the King’s role as steward, ruler and internaliser of the citizens: if the needs of each person are irrelevant within the collective, their pains and potentials slumping mute amidst the roar of the crowd, how is it that each individual is uplifted as the most important shareholder within the King’s psyche at the appropriate moment when his inner council holds session? In the absence of unlimited time and empathic capacity, there must be adaptation: the archetypal King learns how to hallucinate the voices of the people to become a successful ruler.

Like the traumatised adult who unconsciously loops on the negative internalised projections from his parents, the King internalises his Kingdom in light and shadow. He hears its fears from within; he listens to the dreams that whisper as generational potentials. Practically speaking, the archetypal King maintains his sanity by organising his Kingdom in the way that the average citizen might manage their own inner world or the needs of their immediate family unit. With enough time on the throne, the biographical man evolves into something approximating a diplomatic shaman: his inner conflicts are overshadowed, dwarfed by the collective conflicts of dozens of distinct societal groups; his psyche is no longer his own, the King’s inner council grows louder with complexity in proportion to the reach of his rulership. Decade after decade, potential after potential, the King facilitates the flow of collective consciousness at the blurry border between the selfish and the selfless until the biographical man perishes and the archetypal crown passes onto the head of another.