Facultas Praeformandi

Facultas praeformandi — the preforming faculty — is Jung’s technical name for what the archetype is as distinct from what it looks like. “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” (Jung 1959, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious §155).

The doctrine is Kantian in its bones. The archetype is to its image as the axial system of a crystal is to the grown crystal: the proportions are invariant, the concrete crystal is not. Jung presses the analogy in the same passage. “The axial system… 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.” The form is real without being a thing; the thing is what happens when the form meets a particular psychic matter.

This is the distinction that saves the theory from Lamarckism. What is inherited is not a representation — not an image of the mother, not a picture of the cross, not a remembered myth — but the possibility that, given suitable occasioning material, such representations will arise with characteristic shape. The archaic remnant is thus an effect, not a cause; the primordial image is the effect made pictorial; the facultas praeformandi is the formal substrate to which neither name fully applies.

Relationships

Primary sources

the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, §155)