Tabula Rasa

The Seba library treats Tabula Rasa in 6 passages, across 4 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Edinger, Edward F., Hillman, James).

In the library

it is in my view a great mistake to suppose that the psyche of a new-born child is a tabula rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it

Jung directly refutes the tabula rasa thesis by arguing that the neonatal psyche arrives with inherited instincts and archetypal preformations that structure apperception from birth.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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Jung always emphasized the fact that the psyche is not a tabula rasa, a blank slate to be written on; nevertheless, it can be influenced profoundly for good or ill by interpersonal experience

Edinger crystallizes Jung's position as the governing axiom of depth-psychological development while simultaneously holding the tension with environmental influence, framing the personal-archetypal dialectic.

Edinger, Edward F., Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002thesis

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the child, like the 'primal horde' of the prehistorical past, is an unknown tabula rasa or prima materia, upon the ground of whose emptiness one may freely propound one's fantasies without contradiction or even response

Hillman critiques the projection of theoretical fantasy onto figures — child, primitive, patient — treated as blank slates, revealing the tabula rasa concept as an epistemological screen for archetypal prejudice.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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the existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tab

Jung argues that the collective unconscious, constituted by primordial images belonging to the basic stock of the psyche, structurally precludes any tabula rasa conception of individual consciousness.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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neonate's not a tabula rasa, 66

This index entry from the Archetypes volume confirms the technical status of the tabula rasa refutation as a named, page-referenced doctrine within Jung's systematic psychology.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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When there is white, everything is, for the moment, tabula rasa, unwritten upon. White is a promise that there is nourishment enough for things to begin anew

Estés reframes the tabula rasa as a mythopoeic image of regenerative potential rather than an epistemological claim, assimilating the concept into archetypal color symbolism and cosmogonic renewal.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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