Fordim does! (But not nearly so much, or so useful, as
Bęthberry has already provided above.)
I am about as far as one can get from an expert on Jungian analysis (or Freudian psychology for that matter). But I do have some experience with the kind of interpretations that come about through psychological-based ‘readings’ of texts. My concern with all such attempts is that they far too often (although by all means not always) are merely a more terminology-laden way of avoiding the difficult and ethically demanding task of interpretation that I’ve been hammering away on in this thread. That is, whereas the question of “What Tolkien meant” is far too often used as a way to either,
a) avoid generating one’s own interpretation (and thus become a Nazűl) or
b) generating one’s own interpretation and then pretending that it is Tolkien’s own (and thus become a very petty version of Sauron)
the turn to Jungian archetypes is merely the same attempt in disguise. “What did Tolkien intend/mean?” becomes “What does this archetype mean?” and we’re back to options a) or b) above as we look for answers either outside the individual experience of the text, or we project our own experiences onto the text and then claim that they’re from an ‘outside’ source of truth.
The example of the spider is fortuitous, for it helps demonstrate how the spider is not an archetype at all – at least, not in the sense that we “all” react to spiders the same way. In West African cultures, Spider is a trickster figure: a spirit of creation and destruction who embodies the chaotic and random elements of the natural cycle. Not evil at all, or frightening, just a force to be reckoned with. The African who were brought to the Caribbean as slaves brought their memories of Spider with them, and in the historical struggle by the slaves for liberation, he became Anansi – a powerful spirit who embodied all the rebellious tricksterism, the survival tactics, wit and ingenuity required by the enslaved. (Anyone familiar with Native American legends might be thinking of Coyote here – and you’d be right to!
) What’s more, I know several entomologists who would be horrified by the idea that they are “supposed” to be horrified by spiders.
This is why I would resist any simplification of a figure like Shelob into something like an archetypal spider, when the ‘real’ (that is, subcreated) history of her is much more interesting and revealing. And here we go back into the author/text relationship again, for Tolkien wrote in his letters that one of his earliest memories was of running across the lawn at his home in South Africa after being bitten by a spider – he attributes his dislike of arachnids to this event. (He also wrote of a recurring dream he had throughout his life of a wave coming from the west and destroying the land – the birth of Numenor.)
Images, symbols, tropes and figures are the result of historical processes that we can watch and trace and study. And once more, I am led to the interesting case presented by Tolkien’s subcreated world in this regard. One example of what I’m talking about is the Evening Star. In ‘our’ (Western/European tradition) the Evening Star is associated with either Venus – and thus love – and/or Lucifer – and thus the glory of the fallen angels. But what about the Evening Star in Middle-Earth? Tolkien gives us a long and elaborate history for Earendil that includes not one jot (at least overtly) of the mythos of Venus or Lucifer – does this mean that the symbolic value of the Evening Star in Middle-Earth is divorced from its symbolic value in the Primary World? Or can we (should we) be able to look for concordances between the Secondary World symbol and the Primary World symbol? That is, how much – if any – Venus and/or Lucifer is there in Earendil? Is such a question even valid?