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Représentations Collectives

Représentations Collectives

Jung’s concept of the archetype has a pre-Jungian vocabulary. “Mythological research calls them ‘motifs’; in the psychology of primitives they correspond to Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of ‘représentations collectives,’ and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss as ‘categories of the imagination.’ Adolf Bastian long ago called them ‘elementary’ or ‘primordial thoughts’” (Jung, CW 9i §89). Jung’s point is plain: the existence of recurrent trans-cultural psychic patterns was already recognized in ethnology, comparative religion, and philosophy before he proposed the archetype. His contribution was to trace the same patterns to the same source in the individual psyche — to move the phenomenon from the sociology of collectives into the psychology of the dreamer.

The linking bridge is dream. “In dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These ‘primordial images,’ or ‘archetypes,’ as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions” (CW 8 §229).

Jung’s citation of Lévy-Bruhl is methodologically important. The représentations collectives of “primitive” societies were, in classical ethnology, treated as cultural artifacts — shared through tradition, transmitted across generations by custom. Jung accepts the observation and relocates the cause: the motifs recur because they are produced by an inherited psychic structure common to the species. Tradition and initiation transmit the content; the capacity to form the content is everywhere already there.

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