The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications

by Renos K. Papadopoulos

‘the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves … they are patterns of instinctual behaviour...

‘The primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct’s perception of itself, as the self-portrait of the instinct’ (...

Thus the archetype is ‘a dynamism which makes itself felt in the numinosity and fascinating power of the archetypal image’ (1947/1954: par. 414; Jung’s italics).

Jung was fond of making a crystallographic analogy, comparing the form of an archetype to the axial system of a crystal,

The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only.

With regard to the definiteness of the form, our comparison with the crystal is illuminating inasmuch as the axial system determines only the stereometric structure but not the concrete form of the individual crystal. This may be either large or small, and it may vary endlessly by reason of the different size of its planes or by the growing together of two crystals. The only thing that remains constant is the axial system, or rather, the invariable geometric proportions underlying it. The same is true of the archetype. In principle, it can be named and has an invariable nucleus of meaning – but always only in principle, never as regards its concrete manifestation. In the same way, the specific appearance of the mother-image at any given time cannot be deduced from the mother archetype alone, but depends on innumerable other factors. (Jung 1938/1954: par. 155)

Jung had no hesitation in linking the archetypes to structures in the brain: every man is born with a brain that is profoundly differentiated, and this makes him capable of very various mental functions, which are neither ontologically developed or acquired … This particular circumstance explains, for example, the remarkable analogies presented by the unconscious in the most remotely separated races and peoples. (Jung 1916: pars. 452–453)

CW 7 la estrctura del inconsciente

‘The universal similarity of human brains leads us then to admit the existence of a certain psychic function, identical with itself in all individuals; we call it the collective psyche’ (Jung 1916: par. 454).

Jung’s theory of archetypes, first proposed in the form of ‘primordial images’ nearly a hundred years ago, is being rehabilitated by the new disciplines of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary psychiatry,

They are the phylogenetic (evolutionary) foundations on which ontogenesis (individual development) proceeds.

Like all profound ideas, the archetypal hypothesis is not entirely new. Its origins go back at least as far as Plato and probably further. Jung himself recognised this when he described archetypes as ‘active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that pre-form and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions’ (1938/1954: par. 154; italics added).

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For Plato, ‘ideas’ were pure mental forms originating in the minds of the gods before human life began, and, as a consequence, they were supraordinate to the objective world of phenomena.

Archetypes similarly combine the universal with the individual, the general with the unique. While they are common to all humanity, they are nevertheless manifested in every individual in a manner peculiar to him or her.

como una huella dactilar viene indicando

Jung took the term ‘archetype’ from the Corpus hermeticum, where God is referred to as ’apxérimov (the archetypal light).

Jung also found the term in Adversus haereses by Irenaeus: ‘The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from archetypes outside himself.’ Although St Augustine does not use the word ‘archetype’ he nevertheless speaks of ‘ideae principales, which are themselves not formed … but are contained in the divine understanding’ (Jung 1934/1954: par. 5).

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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.

Even more influential than Kant was Schopenhauer, who described what he called ‘prototypes’ as ‘the original forms of all things’. They alone, he maintained can be said to have true being, ‘because they al...

Repeatedly, Jung stressed that the archetype was not an arid, intellectual concept, but a living, empirical entity, charged not only with meaningfulness but also with feeling.

‘It would be an unpardonable sin of omission’, he wrote, ‘were we to overlook the feeling value of the archetype. This is extremely important both theoretically and therapeutically’ (1947/1954: par. 411; Jung’s italics).

CW 8 sobre la naturaleza de la psique

Psychology, he maintained, is the only science that has to take ‘feeling-value’ into account, for feeling ‘forms the link between psychic events on the one hand, and meaning and life on the other’ (Jung 1961: par. 596).

CW 18 Healing the Split

In other words, the archetype is ‘a piece of life’, ‘a living system of reactions and aptitudes’ (1927/1931a: par. 339) and ‘it is connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion’ (1961: par. 589).

There is some disagreement about the etymology of the term. Archetype is a Greek word signifying an original or prot...

The first element ‘arche’ signifies ‘beginning, origin, cause, primal source and principle,’ but it also signifies ‘position of a leader, supreme rule and government’ (in other words a kind of ‘dominant’); the second element ‘type’ means ‘blow and what is produced by a blow, the imprint of a coin … form, image, copy, prototype, model, order, and norm’ … in the figurative, modern sense, ‘pattern, underlying form, primordial form’ (the form for ex...

It is this sense of a ‘mould’ or a ‘matrix’ that informs Goethe’s idea of the Urbild or ‘original plan’ on which he believed all animals and all plants to be based. Even Charles Darwin felt obliged to use the term archetype in approximately the same sense in The Origin of Species (1859),

Although the term ‘archetype’ did not originate with Jung, the sense in which it is now current has been very largely determined by his usage of it.

the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) maintained that certain représentations collectives characterised the psychology of primitive peoples.

The ethnographer Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), who travelled extensively throughout the world recording the folklore of diverse cultures, noted the existence of universal themes which he called ‘primordial thoughts’ or ‘elementary ideas’ which nonetheless manifested themselves in local forms (‘ethnic ideas’) peculiar to the group of people he happened to be studying;

Hubert and Mauss (1909) described the recurrence of universal beliefs and doctrines, calling them ‘ca...

Claude Lévy-Strauss, the advocate of structuralism in anthropology, who studied the unconscious infrastructure of the patterns typical of human social, economic, political and cultural life. For Lévy-Strauss all forms of social life were a projection of universal la...

In biology, a clear parallel to Jungian archetypes exists in Ernst Mayr’s (1974) ‘open programmes’, which prepare animals and plants to respond appropriately to environmental changes

The anthropologists Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger, both of Rutgers University, have applied ethological concepts to the study of human social behaviour and maintain that the basic functions responsible for such behaviour are encoded in the ‘biogrammar’ (Tiger and Fox 1972) which each individual is born with and which develops in appropriate ways during the course of the human life cycle.

The amazing readiness with which young children in different cultures learn to speak the language or dialect of their parents is considered by the psycholinguist, Noam Chomsky (1965), to be dependent upon the activation of an innate ‘language acquisition device’ within the central nervous system incorporating the ‘deep structures’ upon which all languages proceed.

Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, proposed that the repertoire of behaviours with which each animal species is equipped is dependent upon innate releasing mechanisms in its central nervous system which are primed to become active when appropriate stimuli – called ‘sign stimuli’ – are encountered in the environment. When these stimuli are met, the innate mechanism is released, and the animal responds with a ‘pattern of behaviour’ which is adapted, through evolution, to the situation.

Further evidence in support of the archetypal hypothesis comes from cross-cultural studies of human communities throughout the world (Brown 1991; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971; Ekman 1973; Fox 1975; Murdock 1945), from cross-cultural studies of dreams (Hall and Domhoff 1963; Hall and Nordby 1972; Stevens 1995) and from Booker’s (2004) mammoth study of plots in stories and myths.

Since the early 1980s, evolutionary psychologists and psychiatrists on both sides of the Atlantic have detected and announced the presence of neuropsychic propensities which are virtually indistinguishable from

‘Ultimately’, wrote Jung, ‘every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species’ (Jung 1938/1940: par. 146).

CW 11 psicologia y religion

The independent discovery of the archetypal hypothesis – or something very like it – by workers in such a rich diversity of disciplines bears eloquent testimony to its empirical validity.

he describes archetypal events (e.g., birth, death, separation from parents, initiation, marriage, the union of opposites, etc.), archetypal figures (e.g., mother, child, father, God, trickster, hero, wise old man, etc.), archetypal symbols (e.g., sun, moon, water, mandala, cross, fish, horse, snake, etc.) and archetypal motifs (e.g., the Apocalypse, the Deluge, the Creation, the night sea journey, etc.).

Jung would say that the archetype-as-such is at once an innate predisposition to form such an image and a preparation to encounter and respond appropriately to the creature per se in the environment.

The most profound influence of archetypal functioning on the experience of the individual is the manner in which archetypes are held to control the human life cycle. Jung postulated that as we mature we pass through a programmed sequence which he called the stages of life. Each stage is mediated through a new set of archetypal imperatives which seek fulfilment in both personality and behaviour –

The archetypal units making up the collective unconscious possess the dynamic property of seeking their actualisation in the reality of life

‘Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain-structure – indeed, they are its psychic aspect’ (1927/1931b: par. 53).

CW 8 Mind and Earth

Archetypal actualisation determines the degree to which the over-riding goal of individuation is achieved.

Actualisation (Jung also spoke of ‘evocation’ and ‘constellation’) of an archetype seems to proceed in accordance with the laws of association worked out by psychologists at the end of the nineteenth century.

Two of these laws are particularly apposite: they are the law of similarity and the law of contiguity. Thus, for example, the mother archetype is actualised in the child’s personal psyche through the contiguity of a female caretaker whose characteristics are similar enough to the innate anticipations of the...

Complexes are functional units which make up the personal unconscious, just as the collective unconscious is composed of archetypes.

When therefore a distressing situation arises, the corresponding archetype will be constellated in the unconscious. Since this archetype is numinous, i.e., possesses a specific energy, it will attract to itself the contents of consciousness – conscious ideas that render it perceptible and hence capable of conscious realization. (Jung 1911–1912: par. 450)

When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will, or else produces a conflict of pathological dimension, that is to say, a neurosis. (Jung 1936: par. 99)

(Jung 1936: par. 99)

CW 9i The concept of the collective unconscious

Archetypal actualisation is thus at the core of Jung’s understanding of developmental psychology, both healthy and abnormal. Psychopathology occurs when archetypal strategies malfunction as a result of environmental insults of deficienci...