Thus Jung understood archetypes to be inborn dispositions or unobservable psychic structures that in recurring typical situations produce similarly structured ideas, thoughts, emotions, and fantasy motifs. The Jungian archetypes have often been compared with the Platonic ideas. In this regard, it should be said that the difference between an archetypal representation and a Platonic idea is that the Platonic idea is conceived of as a purely cognitive content, whereas an archetype might as easily manifest as a feeling, an emotion, or a mythological fantasy. Thus the Jungian archetype is a somewhat broader concept than the Platonic idea. We must also distinguish between the archetype in itself and the archetypal image, representation, idea, or fantasy. In other words, archetypes are in themselves completely unobservable structures; only when they are stimulated by some inner or outer state of need (either inner compensation processes or outer stimuli) do they, at crucial moments, produce an archetypal image, an archetypal fantasy, a thought, an intuition, or an emotion. These can be recognized as archetypal, because they are similar in all cultures and among all peoples. At this point that may seem a bit abstractly formulated, but if we read a collection of love songs or war songs from all over the world, we will see that people in such archetypal situations ever and again express similar feelings, ideas, and fantasies. There is no doubt that the archetypal structures are inherited; this is not, however, the case with the images. Jung was repeatedly reproached with the idea that mental images could not be hereditary. But he never claimed that. The disposition is passed down, the structures are passed on, and they then always produce the same or similar images afresh. When an inborn archetypal structure passes into the manifest form of an archetypal fantasy or image, the psyche makes use of impressions from the external surroundings for its means of expression; therefore, the individual images are not entirely identical but only similar in structure. For example, an African child, when an image of something overwhelmingly terrifying needs to take shape in him, will perhaps fantasize about a crocodile or a lion, and a European child in the same situation will imagine a truck that is barreling toward him, threatening to run him over. Only the structure of something overpoweringly threatening will be the same in this case.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is drawing a boundary that still gets collapsed by readers who should know better. The archetype is not the image — it is the invisible pressure that forces an image into existence when the situation demands it. Plato's ideas are purely cognitive because they belong to a tradition that had already decided the real was the thinkable, that whatever cannot be grasped by *nous* cannot be properly real. Jung's move is to insist that the same underlying structure can just as readily erupt as a bodily emotion, a compulsive fantasy, a dream-figure that won't let you sleep, as it can as a thought. That is not a minor amendment to Platonism; it reopens something Platonism had deliberately closed.
The crocodile and the truck carrying the same structure is the clearest demonstration available that what the psyche inherits is a grammar, not a vocabulary. The child in Lagos and the child in Hamburg are both seized by something overwhelming and threatening; the local environment provides the word, the archetype provides the syntax. This means the archetypal layer is not reached by stripping away cultural imagery in search of some universal original beneath it — you cannot dissect down to the structure, because the structure only ever appears dressed in what the surrounding world made available. Contact with the archetype happens through the image, not despite it.
Marie-Louise von Franz·Psyche and Matter·2014