I must content myself with the hypothesis of an omnipresent, but differentiated, psychic structure which is inherited and which necessarily gives a certain form and direction to all experience. For, just as the organs of the body are not mere lumps of indifferent, passive matter, but are dynamic, functional complexes which assert themselves with imperious urgency, so also the archetypes, as organs of the psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an extraordinary degree. That is why I also call them dominants of the unconscious. The layer of unconscious psyche which is made up of these universal dynamic forms I have termed the collective unconscious. So far as I know, there is no inheritance of individual prenatal, or pre-uterine, memories, but there are undoubtedly inherited archetypes which are, however, devoid of content, because, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences. They only emerge into consciousness when personal experiences have rendered them visible.
— W. Y. Evans-Wentz
Jung is at pains, here, to keep the archetype from collapsing into something it isn't — a memory, a transmission of images from ancestor to descendant, a Lamarckian inheritance of stored pictures. What is inherited is structure, not content: the capacity to form certain kinds of experience, not the experience itself. The body's analogy does real work. A kidney is not content; it is an operation that becomes visible through what it processes. So too the archetype — it only surfaces when life has given it something to work with, when personal wounding, desire, or encounter has provided the material the structure was always prepared to receive.
This matters because it undoes a common misreading that runs beneath a great deal of spiritual practice: the idea that if you could only retrieve the archetype directly — through technique, through image, through accumulated gnosis — you could bypass the lived event entirely. The structure answers to experience; you cannot approach it from the other side. What this means in practice is that the archetype does not descend to meet you in the abstract. It arrives in the specific — this grief, this body, this impossible longing — and only there does the inherited form become legible. The instinct, as Jung says elsewhere in the Collected Works, and the archetype are the same thing seen from different aspects: one from below, one from above.
W. Y. Evans-Wentz·The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition)·1927