Archetype

The archetype, in Jung’s mature formulation, is the form-giving pole of a two-pole structure whose other pole is instinct. Jung states the reciprocity directly: “Just as conscious apprehension gives our actions form and direction, so unconscious apprehension through the archetype determines the form and direction of instinct. If we call instinct ‘refined,’ then the ‘intuition’ which brings the instinct into play, in other words the apprehension by means of the archetype, must be something incredibly precise” (Jung 1960). His illustration is the yucca moth that “must carry within it an image, as it were, of the situation that ‘triggers off’ its instinct” (Jung 1960).

The archetype is therefore not an ornament laid over instinct but the image-content that makes the instinctual act the specific act it is. In Jungian usage a careful distinction obtains between archetype as such (the structural, unrepresentable disposition) and archetypal image (the particular image through which the disposition becomes conscious). The distinction prevents the archetype from being collapsed into a literary motif.

The archetypes collectively constitute the collective-unconscious — the stratum below personal biography where the species’ inherited patterns of imaginative response are held. Specific archetypal figures (anima/animus, shadow, self, neumann-great-mother, puer-aeternus-senex) are the named loci of this substrate.

Relationships

• collective-unconscious
• instinct
• self
• shadow
• anima
• image

Primary sources

• jung-structure-dynamics-psyche (Jung 1960)
• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972)
• jungs-map-of-the-soul (Stein 1998)