Seba.Health
John Locke
Philosopher, political theorist · 1632–1704
Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) declared the mind a tabula rasa — a blank slate with no innate ideas, no inherited structure, no archetypal form. This is the direct negation of everything depth psychology would later discover: that the psyche has structure prior to experience, that patterns of response are inherited, that the interior is not empty but populated. Locke made the soul a passive recipient of sensory impressions, completing the Cartesian exile of feeling by denying the interior any independent architecture at all.
Key Works
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
- Two Treatises of Government (1689)
What Did the Blank Slate Cost?
If the mind begins empty, then the interior has no structure of its own. There are no archetypes, no inherited patterns, no complexes waiting to be activated. Everything arrives from outside. This is the philosophical foundation for behaviorism, cognitive science, and every psychology that treats the interior as a product of environmental input rather than an active, structured, autonomous reality. Jung’s entire project — the collective unconscious, the archetypes, the autonomous complex — is a direct refutation of Locke’s premise.
Go Deeper
Ask questions about John Locke — powered by passage-level retrieval across 400+ scholarly works.