Image from A.E Waite Tarot Deck

When all else fails, one archetype always turns up for us, to turn the situation around. This is Trickster: a personification of the transcendent function. They appear in different forms across almost all cultures, and in curious, unexpected ways in daily life, in dreams and politics. They are the makers and breakers of boundaries – a key to accepting the non-comprehensible aspects of personality disorders, developmental delays and addictive behaviours. Being tricksters, any definition is always going to be both wrong and incomplete.

In this brief introduction Dale will look at some of their mythological guises –   Hermes, Loki, Puck, Reynard the Fox, Coyote and others – and give short fictionalised clinical examples. Trickster can turn an analysis round from stuck to flowing (and, of course, vice versa). We can’t ‘evoke’ or ‘control’ Trickster, we can learn to notice when they appear.

Dr Dale Mathers is a retired member of AJA, former psychiatrist and author / editor of
six books on depth psychology: the latest – with Dr Carola Mathers– is “Dreams: the Basics”, published in November 2024 by Routledge.