Primordial Image

Primordial image — Urbild in Jung’s German — is the term Jung used before he had the word archetype, and the term he periodically returned to when he wanted the concept to land pictorially rather than formally. He borrowed it from the Basel historian Jacob Burckhardt. The editorial apparatus of CW 8 makes the inheritance and the trouble explicit: Burckhardt is the source, Symbols of Transformation §45 n.45 and Two Essays §101 are the earliest appearances, and “the primordial image… is here and elsewhere used as the equivalent of the archetype; this has given rise to some confusion and to the belief that Jung’s theory of hereditary elements involves the inheritance of representations (ideas or images), a view against which Jung repeatedly protests” (Jung 1960, CW 8 §270 n.7).

The distinction Jung eventually enforced cuts sharp. The primordial image is an inheritable form once it has been filled with conscious content; the archetype as such is empty — “a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms” (Jung 1959, §155). The primordial image is thus the archetype rendered phenomenal; it is what consciousness encounters when the formal substrate breaks in.

The term survives in Jung’s late work as a pedagogical shorthand. Where archetype risked abstraction, primordial image — like archaic remnant — kept the concept in picture-language, closer to the material the analyst actually met on the couch and closer to the mythological and alchemical imagery in which Jung read the same structures.

Relationships

• archetype
• archaic-remnants
• archetypal-image
• collective-unconscious

Primary sources

• jung-structure-dynamics-psyche (Jung 1960, CW 8 §270 n.7)
• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, §155)
• jung-psychological-types (Jung 1921)
• jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung 1953, §101)