The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications

by Renos K. Papadopoulos

The other important influences on Jung’s development of the archetypal concept were Kant and Schopenhauer. Kant argued that we cannot know what we add to or subtract from the real world in the act of perceiving it. We experience the world in the way we do because of the nature of our perceptual apparatus and because of the a priori categories of time and space which condition all our perceptions. These given and inescapable factors function like tinted spectacles which we cannot remove and which, as a result, colour every observation that we make. Throughout Jung’s work there are recurring references to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and its assertion that ‘there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition’. Jung equated this a priori structure with the archetypes.