Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repressions of painful thoughts and feelings. I call the sum of all these contents the "personal unconscious." But, over and above that, we also find in the unconscious qualities that are not individually acquired but are inherited, e. g., instincts as impulses to carry out actions from necessity, without conscious motivation. In this "deeper" stratum we also find the a priori, inborn forms of "intuition," namely the archetypes 7 of perception and apprehension, which are the necessary a· priori determinants of all psychic processes. Just as his instincts compel man to a specifically human mode of existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human patterns. The instincts and the archetypes together form the "collective 7 [This is the first occasion on which Jung uses the term "archetype" (Archetypus). Previously, in his publications, he had discussed the same concept under the term "primordial image" (Urbild), which he derived from Burckhardt (cf. Symbols of Transformation, par. 45, n. 45; Two Essays, par. 101). The primordial image, be it observed, 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. The primordial image is, however, in the present text, clearly understood as a more graphic term for the archetype, an essentially unconscious entity which, as Jung points out, is an a priori formthe inherited component of the representational image perceived in consciousness.-EDITORS.] 133 THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE unconscious." I call it "collective" because, unlike the personal unconscious, it is not made up of individual and more or less unique contents but of those which are universal and of regular occurrence.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung is introducing a distinction that will determine everything that follows in depth psychology — not the personal archive of forgotten or repressed experience, but a deeper stratum that no individual authored. The archetypes are not memories; they are forms prior to memory, the shapes into which psychic energy pours before it becomes any particular image or idea. What gets inherited is the mold, not the casting.
The editorial note earns attention here. "Primordial image" — *Urbild*, image of the original — is more graphic, more tactile, easier to reach for when a dream delivers something overwhelming. "Archetype" is colder, more structural, borrowed deliberately from scholastic philosophy and ultimately from Plato. Jung's choice to move toward the colder term is not incidental. He wants the collective unconscious to carry explanatory weight as a psychological hypothesis, not to dissolve into mysticism — which is precisely the charge he was most at pains to resist. The archetype is a formal principle, not a transmitted picture.
What this passage quietly insists on is that the psyche is never only yours. Your suffering, your images, your most intimate terrors arrive already shaped by something older than you. The form preceded you. That is not comfort; it is precision.
Carl Gustav Jung·The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche·1960