What are archetypes?

The term archetype is associated with Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who formulated the idea of the collective unconscious.

The Collective Unconscious

Before delving into what exactly the archetypes are, it is necessary to explain Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, which is their “home”, so to speak.

The term archetype is associated with Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who formulated the idea of the collective unconscious. Unlike the personal unconscious, whose contents is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity. The collective unconscious “contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.”[1]

The personal unconscious is made up of complexes, a term coined by Jung that represents a group of ideas or images charged with emotion. They represent a knot of unconscious feelings and beliefs that can be detected through behaviour. “Jung stressed that complexes in themselves are not negative; only their effects often are. In the same way that atoms and molecules are the invisible components of physical objects, complexes are the building blocks of the psyche and the source of all human emotions.”[2]

Before Jung’s discovery, psychology insisted on the personal nature of the psyche. It was a psychology of the person, where the causes are regarded almost wholly as personal in nature.

What Are Archetypes?

The collective unconscious is made up of archetypes, which are “Primordial, structural elements of the human psyche.”[3] These primordial images reflect basic patterns of behaviour common to all of us, which have existed universally since the beginning of time. They include archetypal figures such as the hero, the wise old man, the trickster; archetypal events such as birth, rebirth, the Hero’s journey; and archetypal motifs such as the creation of the world, the apocalypse, or revelation and sacrifice.

Jung did not attempt to provide an exhaustive and systematic list of all archetypes, as some have attempted to do. This would be a largely futile exercise, as archetypes can be combined with each other or an archetype can also appear in several different forms. He tells us that, “There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.”[4]

Jung writes, however, that his years of observation and investigation of the unconscious gave way to recurring archetypal figures, the chief of them being, “the shadow, the wise old man, the child (including the child hero), the mother (“Primordial Mother” and “Earth Mother”) as a supraordinate personality… and her counterpart the maiden, and lastly the anima in man and the animus in woman.”[5]

The archetypes are actualised when they enter consciousness and express themselves as images or certain behaviour based on our interaction with the outside world. They are autonomous living personalities within us, that is, they are not within our control – but are rather given particular expression by individuals and their cultures. As Jung writes, “My views about the ‘archaic remnants’, which I call ‘archetypes’ or ‘primordial images’, have been constantly criticised by people who lack sufficient knowledge of the psychology of dreams and of mythology. The term ‘archetype’ is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious representations. Such variable representations cannot be inherited. The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern.”[6]

Archetypes are forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. This is a crucial point, which he reiterates, “A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience.”[7]

The Discovery of the Collective Unconscious

As is characteristic of Jung’s life, he stumbled upon the idea of the collective unconscious after a dream, as he describes in his partially autobiographical book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He found himself in the upper floor of a house which he did not know but which seemed to be his house. The salon was surrounded by fine old furniture and paintings in rococo style, typical of the 18^th century. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings, and he thought “Not bad.” Filled with curiosity, he descended the stairs to the ground floor and everything was much older, with medieval furnishing, dating from about the 15^th or 16^th century. Here, everything was rather dark, and he thought, “Now I really must explore the whole house.”

Jung came upon a heavy door and opened it, discovering a stone stairway that led down into a cellar. Descending again, he found himself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient, and examining the walls he knew that they dated from Roman times, roughly from 753 BC to 476 AD. Jung’s interest was by now intense. He saw a stone slab on the floor which lifted as he pulled a ring, he descended a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down into the depths, and entered a cave. Thick dust lay on the flood, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. He discovered two human skulls, very old and half disintegrated. Then he awoke.

It was plain for Jung that the house represented a kind of image of the human psyche. Consciousness was represented by the salon. The deeper he went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. At the very depths, he discovered remains of a primitive culture, of the world of the primitive man within himself, a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness. The dream pointed to the foundations of cultural history, a history of successive layers of consciousness, which postulated something of an impersonal nature underlying the psyche. This was his first inkling of a collective unconscious which exists a priori, and lies beneath the personal psyche.

Jung had originally held to Sigmund Freud’s view of “archaic remnants”, which are “mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind.”[8] But dreams like this, and his actual experiences of the unconscious, taught him that such contents are not dead, outmoded forms, but belong to our living being. His work had confirmed this assumption, and in the course of years there developed from it the theory of archetypes.

But how can we prove the existence of a collective unconscious? Jung tells us that the main source is dreams, which have the advantage of being involuntary, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche and are therefore pure products of nature not falsified by any conscious purpose.

Another way to experience the archetypes of the collective unconscious is through active imagination, a sequence of fantasies produced by deliberate concentration. Jung found that the existence of unrealised, unconscious fantasies increases the frequency and intensity of dreams, and that when these fantasies are made conscious the dreams change their character and become weaker and less frequent. From this he has drawn the conclusion that dreams often contain fantasies which “want” to become conscious.

Jung’s investigation into the human psyche spanned more than sixty years. Although it likely concerned him his whole life, as he experienced a vivid dream between the ages of three and four which haunted him for years, and which would preoccupy him all his life. This was the dream of the “man-eater” who stood on a golden throne, which he discovered after descending a stone stairway leading underground. Only many years later did he realise that what he had seen was a ritual phallus, which seemed to be a “subterranean God “not to be named.”[9] This image would appear when anyone spoke too emphatically about Lord Jesus, for he would be reminded of his underground counterpart. It was a frightful revelation which had been accorded him without him seeking it. He was religious in the Christian sense, but always with the knowledge that there is something else, something very secret that people don’t know about. Jung described this childhood dream as his “initiation into the realm of darkness.”[10]

During his early psychiatric work, particularly with patients suffering from schizophrenia, Jung noticed that some of their dreams and fantasies contained archetypal imagery that could not be merely explained by the personal life contents of the patient. As a practising psychologist, he noticed the same phenomenon in the dreams of his patients. These are the so-called “Big Dreams” which come from the collective unconscious and contain powerful archetypal imagery, while “Little Dreams” are those of the personal unconscious, which form the vast majority of our dream life, involving everyday concerns.

Jung adopted these two simple terms from indigenous people he encountered during his expedition to East Africa, specifically the Elgonyi, who informed him that “there are two kinds of dreams: the ordinary dream of the little man, and the “big vision” that only the great man has, e.g., the medicine man or chief. Little dreams are of no account, but if a man has a “big dream” he summons the whole tribe in order to tell it to everybody.”[11] When one has a “big dream”, one has an instinctive feeling of its significance. It can be so overwhelming that one feels compelled to tell others about it, and not keep it to oneself. One has to tell it, on the psychologically correct assumption that it is of general significance. The collective dream impels communication. Fantasies of an impersonal character are so numerous that Jung was obliged to assume the existence of a collective psychic substratum.

The universality of certain myths which repeat themselves in strikingly similar detail in very different cultures and societies gave Jung the idea of a source springing universally within man. He developed the method of “amplification” to help understand the symbolic content of these collective dreams within the individual by drawing from myth, history, religion, etc., to amplify or “turn up the volume” of the dream material.

For example, one dreams about a red stone that appears after a fire. Here, one might inquire about the alchemists’ philosopher’s stone, which is associated with the rubedo (reddening) phase. It is what brings the Great Work of the alchemists to an end, and is therefore a symbol of the Self or the total personality of an individual.

Jung studied alchemy, Gnosticism, fairy tales, comparative religion and mythology, in order to acquire a wider knowledge of the origins and significance of mankind’s collective unconscious. In fact, “the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious… We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual.”[12]

His task was very much like that of an archaeologist excavating the ground to uncover artefact that might reveal something about ancient history. Curiously, Jung himself had wanted to become an archaeologist when he was young, but he did not have the money for it. Instead, he became an archaeologist of the psyche. He wrote, “The primordial images and the nature of the archetype took a central place in my researches, and it became clear to me that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no psychology of the unconscious. A psychology of consciousness can, to be sure, content itself with material drawn from personal life, but as soon as we wish to explain a neurosis we require an anamnesis which reaches deeper than the knowledge of consciousness.”[13]

Archetypes and the Nature of Reality

Archetypes cannot be visualised in themselves, as they exist beyond space and time. What we see are the archetypal images. Archetypes may be likened to what Immanuel Kant called noumena, things as they are in themselves, independent of how we perceive them. They represent the world as it actually is, beyond the veil of appearances. However, since noumena lie outside the bounds of sensory experience, they cannot be directly known. Thus, we are forever stuck in the realm of phenomena, the world as it appears to us, shaped and limited by our senses. The perfect forms exist independently of and prior to all our conceptions of it. They are the archetypes or “first imprints” of which objects in the everyday world are imperfect copies. This philosophy is known as Idealism.

The idea that we do not experience reality in the so-called “real world”, but only its dim shadow, was famously explained by ancient Greek philosopher Plato in his parable of the cave, in which prisoners are chained in a cave, only capable of seeing the shadows of the objects on the wall and mistaking those shadows for reality. This has haunted philosophy ever since. As British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”[14]

Archetypes as Images of Instinct

However, we are not concerned with epistemology (the study, origin, and limits of knowledge), but rather with ethics (“proper conduct”). This is the essential and practical element of integrating archetypes in our lives. Just as the universe is the infinite without, the psyche is the infinite within, the age-old microcosm-macrocosm relationship. Both are awesome and beautiful, but their forces behave in a way that is amoral. Archetypes are not concerned, as we are, with the specifically human values of justice, fairness, service to our fellow human beings. These primitive archetypes serve a realm close to the instincts. In fact, they are the images of the instincts.

The hypothesis of the collective unconscious is therefore no more daring than to assume there are instincts. While many have called this mysticism, Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is neither a speculative nor a philosophical matter, but an empirical one. The question is: are there or are there not unconscious, universal forms of this kind? If they exist, then there is a region of the psyche which one can call the collective unconscious.

If we consider the tremendous powers that lie hidden in the mythological and religious sphere in man, the aetiological significance of the archetype appears less fantastic. In numerous cases of neurosis, the cause of the disturbance lies in the very fact that the psychic life of the patient lacks the co-operation of these forces. A purely personalistic psychology, by reducing everything to personal causes, tries its best to deny the existence of archetypal motifs and even seeks to destroy them by personal analysis. Jung considers this a rather dangerous procedure which cannot be justified medically. The fate of great nations is a summation of psychic changes in individuals. Neuroses are in most cases not just private concerns, but social phenomena, which are influenced by the archetypes.

Archetypes do not have a super-ego, which reflects the internalisation of cultural rules taught by the guidance and influence of parents, institutions and ideals models, and which lead to socially appropriate behaviour. And since the creatures who arise in the collective unconscious are personifications of the impersonal forces of nature, it is we who must bring the ethical into the relationship. “The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon “powers” that are beyond our control.”[15]

But not all archetypes are like this, some may be concerned with human values, by a sense of love and moral responsibility. There is some truth and wisdom in every figure that comes to us in the unconscious, and they help us compensate the one-sidedness of our ego. Jung writes that, “the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives.”[16] It is important to recognise that just as archetypes have a positive or light side, so do they contain a negative or dark side.

Archetypes and Individuation

Archetypes guide us towards psychic wholeness through the individuation process, the path towards the Self, activating unconscious primordial images through exposure to unexplored potentials of the psyche, bringing them into consciousness. From a psychological point of view, Jung saw the God-image as a manifestation of the ground of the psyche, which takes the form of circular symbols of unity (such as the mandala), representing a synthesis of opposites within the psyche.

The Self is the archetype of orientation and meaning, and to have a balanced relation with it, one’s conscious and unconscious personalities must have learned to live at peace and to complement one another. For Jung, the only real adventure remaining for each individual is the exploration of one’s own unconscious.

Explore each archetype in depth

… actually they are archetypal figures, but you know the drill!

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References

[1] Jung, C. G. (1969). The collected works of C. G. Jung: Volume 8. The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press, p. 212.

[2] Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books, p. 20.

[3] Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books, p. 12.

[4] Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)., p. 48.

[5] Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)., p. 183.

[6] Jung, C. G., Henderson, J. L., von Franz, M.-L., Jaffé, A., & Jacobi, J. (1964). Man and his symbols. Doubleday, p. 67.

[7] Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)., p. 79.

[8] Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. & C. Winston, Trans.). Pantheon Books, p. 67.

[9] Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. & C. Winston, Trans.). Pantheon Books, p. 13.

[10] Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. & C. Winston, Trans.). Pantheon Books, p. 15.

[11] Jung, C. G. (1966). The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 7. Two essays on analytical psychology (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. p. 186.

[12] Jung, C. G. (1969). The collected works of C. G. Jung: Volume 8. The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press, p. 205.

[13] Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. & C. Winston, Trans.). Pantheon Books, p. 205.

[14] Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology (Corrected ed.). Free Press, p. 39.

[15] Jung, C. G., Henderson, J. L., von Franz, M.-L., Jaffé, A., & Jacobi, J. (1964). Man and his symbols. Doubleday, p. 82.

[16] Jung, C. G. (1969). The collected works of C. G. Jung: Volume 8. The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press, p. 276.