Jungian Analysis in Victoria, BC |
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"Archetypes are, by definition, factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a way that they can be recognized only by the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously, and presumably they from the structural dominants of the psyche in general. .... As a priori conditioning factors they represent a special psychological instance of the biological 'patterns of behavior,' which gives all things their specific qualities." (CW, 11, para. 222)
This is an excellent starting point issue. The quote from Jung emphasises the notion that archetypes are essentially "factors and motifs" that organize the psyche. In this, the archetypes are the structuring elements of the psyche, yet, even with this central function, they continue to prove elusive and complex in their form.
This page attempts to make the notion of the archetypes a little more clear in providing basic information about their role in the psyche. As we cannot "see" an archetype, and can only deduce their existence through archetypal images, this site gives examples of such archetypal images in art, literature and film. Anyone who has entered a Jungian Analysis will "know" these archetypes in a very real sense as one may argue that is in the lived experience of Jung that we truly grasp the meaning of much of his theory. The major archetypes encountered in analysis will be explained as will the crucial difference between archetypes or symbols and signs.
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Archetypes are not inherited ideas. "I have frequently been accused of a superstitious belief in "inherited ideas " - quite unjustly, because I have expressly emphasized that these concordances are not produced by "ideas" but rather by the inherited disposition to react in the same way as people have always reacted." "The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious 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 zero of their existence exclusively to hereditary. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes. " (CW9(1), para. 88) |
