Instinct-Archetype Parallel

Jung’s structural definition of the collective unconscious pairs instinct and archetype as the twin inheritances of the human organism. “In this ‘deeper’ stratum we also find the a priori, inborn forms of ‘intuition,’ namely the archetypes of perception and apprehension, which are the necessary a priori determinants of all psychic processes. Just as his instincts compel man to a specifically human mode of existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human patterns. The instincts and the archetypes together form the ‘collective unconscious’” (Jung, CW 8 §270).

The parallel is load-bearing. Instinct is universal, inherited in form only, collective rather than individual. “Instinct is an essentially collective, i.e., universal and regularly occurring phenomenon which has nothing to do with individuality. Archetypes have this quality in common with the instincts and are likewise collective phenomena” (CW 8 §270). What instinct is to action, the archetype is to apprehension: the body acts in inherited patterns; the psyche perceives and represents in inherited patterns. Neither is acquired; neither is idiosyncratic; both are the specifically human mode of being.

The parallel has two consequences. First, it grounds the collective unconscious biologically without reducing it to biology — the archetype is no more a mere neural reflex than the instinct is a mere behavioral tic. Second, it renders the collective unconscious unavoidably psychophysical. “The collective unconscious is another of those points at which pure psychology comes up against organic factors, where it has, in all probability, to recognize a non-psychological fact resting on a physiological foundation” (CW 8 §230). Jung thereby refuses both the Cartesian split that would make the psyche a ghostly second substance and the reductive move that would make it mere brain. The archetype lives at the boundary.

Relationships

• archetype
• collective-unconscious
• somatic-unconscious
• embodied-consciousness

Primary sources

• jung-structure-dynamics-psyche (Jung, CW 8 §§269–272)
• jung-civilization-in-transition (Jung, CW 10)