Archetype as Crystal Axial System

Jung’s most precise description of what the archetype-as-such is — in CW 9i — is crystallographic. The archetype, he writes, 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 … [the archetype’s form] might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which the ions and molecules aggregate. (Jung 1959, §155)

The analogy does more than illustrate. It answers three pressures on the concept at once. First, it resolves the “inherited idea” misreading: what is inherited is no more an idea than the axial system is a crystal. Second, it specifies the relationship between form and content — the axial system constrains but does not determine the concrete crystal, as the archetype constrains but does not determine the archetypal-image. “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” (§155). Third, it aligns the archetype with the instinct on precisely the same structural ground: both are formal readinesses, knowable only when something crystallizes out of them. The instinct-archetype-parallel is not a metaphor but a claim that instinct and archetype are the same kind of thing viewed from different sides.

The crystal analogy is the passage to which every later specification of archetype-as-formal-a-priori returns. It is the paragraph james-hillman refuses and edward-edinger amplifies — the node at which the post-Jungian split can be measured (see post-jungian-vertex).

Relationships

Primary sources

jung-archetypes-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959), §155
jung-structure-dynamics-psyche (Jung 1960) — “On the Nature of the Psyche,” where the instinct-archetype parallel is elaborated