The structural elements of the collective unconscious are named by Jung "archetypes" or "primordial images." They are the pictorial forms of the instincts, for the unconscious reveals itself to the conscious mind in images which, as in dreams and fantasies, initiate the process of conscious reaction and assimilation. These fantasy-images undoubtedly have their closest analogues in mythological types. We must therefore assume that they correspond to certain collective (and not personal) structural elements of the human psyche in general, and, like the morphological elements of the human body, are inherited. The archetypal structural elements of the psyche are psychic organs upon whose functioning the well-being of the individual depends, and whose injury has disastrous consequences: Moreover, they are the unfailing causes of neurotic and even psychotic disorders, behaving exactly like neglected or maltreated physical organs or organic functional systems. It is the task of this book to show that a series of archetypes is a main constituent of mythology, that they stand in an organic relation to one another, and that their stadial succession determines the growth of consciousness. In the course of its ontogenetic development, the individual ego consciousness has to pass through the same archetypal stages which determined the evolution of consciousness in the life of humanity.
— Erich Neumann
Neumann is making a claim that sounds evolutionary but cuts deeper than that: the archetypes are not metaphors for psychic life, they are its organs. Miss the distinction and you have a pleasant theory of symbols; hold it and you have something more demanding — a psychology in which psychic structures can be injured the way a liver can be injured, with analogous consequences. The comparison is not ornamental. An organ neglected does not simply underperform; it produces pathology. Neumann is saying the same holds for the archetypal substrate: what goes unmet in the structural sense does not stay dormant, it generates disorder.
What follows from this is that individuation is not self-improvement conducted at leisure. The ego passes through archetypal stages not because growth is its nature in some optimistic sense, but because those stages are the phylogenetic inheritance the psyche carries as structure — and bypassing them leaves the structure compromised. This is where the parallel to ontogeny bites: a developmental stage skipped does not disappear, it persists as a demand. The mythology Neumann reads across cultures is evidence of that demand writ large, humanity working through what could not be avoided, because the organs required it. The individual psyche is doing the same thing, whether or not it knows the name of what it is doing.
Erich Neumann·The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton·2019