Carl Jung on Archetypes- Anthology
It is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of the God image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 47.
“If as seems probable, the aeon of the fishes is ruled by the archetypal motif of the ‘hostile brothers,’ then the approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites. It will then no longer be possible to write off evil as a mere privatio boni; its real existence will have to be recognized”). ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 275
We do not know what an archetype is (i.e., consists of), since the nature of the psyche is inaccessible to us, but we know that archetypes exist and work. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Self, Page 694.
The better we understand the archetype, the more we participate in its life and the more we realize its eternity or timelessness. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Self, Page 695.
There is no real life without archetypal experiences. The ordinary life is two-dimensional-it consists of pieces of paper-but the real life consists of three dimensions, and if it doesn’t it is not real life, but is a provisional life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 970.
The self in its divinity (i.e., the archetype) is unconscious of itself. It can become conscious only within our consciousness. And it can do that only if the ego stands firm. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1; 335-336.
It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits an archetypal idea which enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the pre-rational psyche. They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual’s life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
The archetype is outside of me as well as in me. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern. Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image. ~Carl Jung, Letters II, 154.
Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites! This is unavoidable, for consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 20.
With the archetype of the anima, we enter the realm of the gods, or rather, the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Page 28
When I say as a psychologist , that God is an archetype, I mean by that the “type” in the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 149
Analysts and mathematicians both consider themselves infallible; they live with invisible magic cloaks around them. They are both concerned with archetypes . Archetypes are living powers; they are the “thoughts of God.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 59.
Matter may be stimulated by the inner psychic process, understood archetypally, to produce something analogous. A latent tension, for example, can manifest itself in creaking wood. Matter plays along with the psychic process. There is a story that says that when Mohammed ascended into Heaven the stone in the Temple of Jerusalem wanted to go too. The archetype manifests itself in the outer world as sympathia. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
We should be particularly watchful when synchronous events occur for a numen is then in sight. In a certain mood one notices that the crows fly towards the left. When an archetypal event approaches the sphere of consciousness, it also manifests itself in the outer life. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51
When someone is under a grave threat, and the archetypes are constellated, synchronistic situations can arise — events that are independent of him, existing in the outside world. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
Like every archetype, the animus has a Janus face. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, The Philosophical Tree; Page 268.
An archetype is composed of an instinctual factor and a spiritual image. ~Carl jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Archetypes; Page 21.
Archetypes are not matters of faith; we can know that they are there. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung; Archetypes; Page 21.
The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Archetypes, Page 21.
Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one’s life. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung; Archetypes; Page 21.
Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung; “Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”; CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Page 62.
Take for comparison the daily course of the sun-but a sun that is endowed with human feeling and man’s limited consciousness. In the morning it rises from the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks upon the wide, bright world which lies before it in an expanse that steadily widens the higher it climbs in the firmament.
In this extension of its field of action caused by its own rising, the sun will discover its significance; it will see the attainment of the greatest possible height, and the widest possible dissemination of its blessings, as its goal. In this conviction the sun pursues its course to the unforeseen zenith-unforeseen, because its career is unique and individual, and the culminating point could not be calculated in advance. At the stroke of noon the descent begins
. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning. – “The Stages of Life” (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
We must constantly bear in mind that what we mean by “archetype” is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualizations of it possible, namely, the archetypal images and ideas. We meet with a similar situation in physics: there the smallest particles are themselves irrepresentable but have effects from the nature of which we can build up a model. The archetypal image, the motif or mythologem, is a construction of this kind. ~Carl Jung; “On the Nature of the Psyche” (1947). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.417.
The archetype or primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct’s perception of itself, or as the self portrait of the instinct, in exactly the same way as consciousness is an inward perception of the objective life-process. ~Carl Jung; “Instinct and the Unconscious” (1919). CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche P.277.
The God-image is a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature, it must necessarily be regarded as representing a certain sum of energy (libido) which appears in which creates the attributes of divinity is the father-imago, while in the older religions it was the mother imago… In certain pagan conceptions of divinity the maternal element is strongly emphasized. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para. 89.
The archetypal image of the wise man, the savior or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man’s unconscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Archetypal statements are based upon instinctive preconditions and have nothing to do with reason; they are neither rationally grounded nor can they be banished by rational arguments. They have always been part of the world scene representations collectives, as Levy-Bruhl rightly called them. Certainly the ego and its will have a great part to play in life; but what the ego wills is subject in the highest degree to the interference, in ways of which the ego is usually unaware, of the autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes. Practical consideration of these processes is the essence of religion, insofar as religion can be approached from a psychological point of view. ~Carl Jung Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 353
The psychic fact “God” is a typical autonomism, a collective archetype…It is therefore characteristic not only of all higher forms of religion, but appears spontaneously in the dreams of individuals. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; fn 29.
At such moments [“when an archetypal situation occurs”] we are no longer individuals, but the race. . . . ~Carl Jung; On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW 15: 128.
Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Chapter 6.
The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure–be it a daemon, a human being, or a process–that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . . ~Carl Jung; On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW 15; 127.
A remarkable instance of this can be found in the Eleusinian mysteries, which were finally suppressed in the beginning of the seventh century of the Christian era. They expressed, together with the Delphic oracle, the essence and spirit of ancient Greece. On a much greater scale, the Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth of ancient Egypt. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; P. 68.
It would be blasphemy to assert that God can manifest Himself everywhere save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship between Cod and the soul automatically precludes any devaluation of the latter. It would be going perhaps too far to speak of an affinity; but at all events the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relation to God, i.e. a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the God-image [q.v.]” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 399-400 and Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 11.
Just as the “psychic infra-red,” the biological instinctual psyche, gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its chemical and physical conditions, so the “psychic ultra-violet,” the archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic. ~Carl Jung; On the Nature of the Psyche; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 420.
While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them. ~Carl Jung; MDR; Page 306.
All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet. ~Carl Jung; The Integration of the Personality p. 72
The unconscious . . . is the source of the instinctual forces of the psyche and of the forms or categories that regulate them, namely the archetypes. ~Carl Jung; The Structure of the Psyche; CW 8, par. 342.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events of the conscious life–as well as in the life that transcends consciousness–of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion.
Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. ~Carl Jung: CW 10; Civilization in Transition; Wotan; Page 395.
Hierosgamos. Sacred or spiritual marriage, union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity and also in alchemy. Typical examples are the representation of Christ and the Church as bridegroom and bride (sponsus et sponsa) and the alchemical conjunction of sun and moon. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 395.
With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow-so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. ~Carl Jung; CW 17; The Shadow; Page 338; par. 19.
This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or ‘archetype’ [q.v.] of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman . . .
Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion.” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 391.
Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the body’s form. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 49.
Like any archetype, the essential nature of the self is unknowable, but its manifestations are the content of myth and legend. ~Carl Jung, Definitions CW 6, Para 790.
The idea of angels, archangels, “principalities and powers” in St. Paul, the archons of the Gnostics, the heavenly hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, all come from the perception of the relative autonomy of the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 66, Para 104.
It seems to me probable that the real nature of the archetype is not capable of being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I call it psychoid. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, para. 417.
Often when people behave in an exceedingly unexpected manner the appearance of an archetype is the explanation ; archetypes go back not only through human history, but to our ancestors the animals, that is why we are able to understand animals so well and make friends with them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 177.
The idea of transformation and renewal by means of the serpent is a well-substantiated archetype. It is [a] healing [symbol] ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Par 184.
…as I have inserted some rather extensive material illustrating the multiple “luminosities” of the unconscious, representing the “conscious-like” nuclei of volitional acts (presumably identical with archetypes). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 448-449.
The self in its divinity (i.e., the archetype) is unconscious of itself It can be come conscious only within our consciousness. And it can do that only if the ego stands firm. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 335-337.
But every archetype before it is integrated consciously wants to manifest itself physically since it forces the subject into its own form. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 335-337.
My further writing led me to the archetype of the God-man and to the phenomenon of synchronicity which adheres to the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 479-481.
It is when we come to a summit in life that the archetypal symbols appear. These primeval pictures of human life form the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Pages 176-177.
The moment where the archetype appears is always characterized by remarkable emotion; it, as it were, fascinates the dreamer and exalts him, as if the Muse had kissed him not only on the forehead but on the shoulder. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 177.
But this is where the above-mentioned difficulty comes in: our knowledge of the instincts, i .e., of the underlying biological drives, is very inadequate, so that it is only with the greatest difficulty and great uncertainty that we can equate the archetypes with them. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 546-548.
The archetypal or image side seldom comes to the surface in young people, they take instinct for granted, and never stop to think what the meaning of it is, it just functions naturally. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 213.
She [The Anima] herself is the archetype of mere life that leads into experiences and awareness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 498-499.
The archetypes of the unconscious can be shown empirically to be the equivalents of religious dogmas. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 17.
In the West the archetype is filled out with the dogmatic figure of Christ; in the East, with Purusha, the Atman, Hiranyagarbha, the Buddha, and so on. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 17.
It is also a plausible hypothesis that the archetype is produced by the original life urge and then gradually grows up into consciousness-with the qualification, however, that the innermost essence of the archetype can never become wholly conscious, since it is beyond the power of imagination and language to grasp and express its deepest nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 313.
Your conception of the archetype as a psychic gene is quite possible. ~ Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 313.
But the ground-plan of these images [Archetypal] is universal and must be assumed to be pre-existent, since it can be demonstrated in the dreams of small children or uneducated persons who could not possibly have been influenced by tradition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 538-539.
Thus the archetype as a phenomenon is conditioned by place and time, but on the other hand it is an invisible structural pattern independent of place and time, and like the instincts proves to be an essential component of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 538-539.
The combination of priest and medicine man is not so impossible as you seem to think. They are based upon a common archetype, which will assert its right provided your inner development will continue as hitherto. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 516-517.
In archetypal conceptions and instinctual perceptions, spirit and matter confront one another on the psychic plane. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 420.
If so, the position of the archetype would be located beyond the psychic sphere, analogous to the position of physiological instinct, which is immediately rooted in the stuff of the organism and, with its psychoid nature, forms the bridge to matter in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 420.
The dreams of early childhood contain mythological motifs which the children could not possibly know of. These archetypal images are the primeval knowledge of mankind; we are born with this inheritance, though this fact is not obvious and only becomes visible in indirect ways. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 119.
Consciousness thus is torn from its roots and no longer able to appeal to the authority of the archetypal images; it has Promethean freedom, it is true, but also a godless hybris. It does indeed soar above the earth, even above mankind, but the danger of an upset is there, not for every individual, to be sure, but collectively for the weak. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 85.
This system of images is also born in human beings, it is the archetypes, the potential force in man, but it only comes to the surface when the moment for it is ripe, then the archetype functions as an urge, like an instinct. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 213.
In the collective unconscious the archetypes and the instincts are one and the same thing. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IV 24 May 1935, Pages 213.
The Sambhoga-kaya corresponds exactly to the modern term collective unconscious; and the archetypal figures correspond to the Devatas of our text. ETH Lecture XIII 17Feb1939, Page 86.
The history of energetics is largely intuitive, it starts primitively as intuitions of archetypes, first they were beings, now they are mathematical formulas. ~Carl Jung, Lecture III, 4May1934, Page 100.
Do not allow yourself to go gray over missing my 60th birthday. The abstract number 60 means nothing at all to me. I much prefer to know, through hearing from you, what you are doing. What the European Jews are doing I already know, but what the Jews are doing on archetypal soil—that interests me extraordinarily. ~Carl Jung, 22Dec1935.
Anthropos: Original or primordial man, an archetypal image of wholeness in alchemy, religion and Gnostic philosophy. There is in the unconscious an already existing wholeness, the “homo totus” of the Western and the Chên-yên (true man) of Chinese alchemy, the round primordial being who represents the greater man within, the Anthropos, who is akin to God. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 152.
I tried to give a general view of the structure of the unconscious. Its contents, the archetypes, are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure—indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
We shall have to reckon with quite unusual difficulties in dealing with it, and the first of these is that the archetype and its function must be understood far more as a part of man’s prehistoric, irrational psychology than as a rationally conceivable system. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
Phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically we have grown up out of the dark confines of the earth; hence the factors that affected us most close*ly became archetypes, and it is these primordial images which influence us most directly, and therefore seem to be the most powerful. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.
I would like to suggest that every psychic reaction which is out of proportion to its precipitating cause should be investigated as to whether it may be conditioned at the same time by an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.
We should make the archetype responsible only for a definite, minimal, normal degree of fear; any pronounced increase, felt to be abnormal, must have special causes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 33.
Arrangement in triads is an archetype in the history of religion, which in all probability formed the basis of the Christian Trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 113.
The body as a whole, so it seems to me, is a pattern of behavior, and man as a whole is an Archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letter to Medard Boss, 27June1947.
The archetypes. . . are not intellectually invented. They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious one could best compare with myths. That’s the origin of mythology. Mythology is a dramatization of a series of images that formulate the life of the archetypes. ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 348.
Music is dealing with such deep archetypal material with boots as swift as and those who play don’t realize this. Yet, used therapeutically from this level music should be an essential part of every analysis ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 126.
In our ordinary mind we are in the worlds of time and space and within the separate individual psyche. In the state of the archetype we are in the collective psyche, in a world-system whose space-time categories are relatively or absolutely abolished. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume II, P. 399.
We must, however, constantly bear in mind that what we mean by “archetype” is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualisation of it possible, namely the archetypal images and ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 214.
The archetype is an irrepresentable factor, a “disposition” which starts functioning at a given moment in the development of the human mind and arranges the material of consciousness in definite patterns. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 148.
The archetypes are complementary and equivalents of the “outside” world and therefore possess “cosmic” character. Thins explains their numinosity and godlikeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 196.
The word “type” means “blow” or “imprint”, thus an archetype presupposes an imprinter. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 14.
We simply do not know the ultimate derivation of the archetype any more than we know the origin of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 14.
The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21.
Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one’s life. One part of the archetypal content is of material and the other of spiritual origin. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21.
When all the archetypal images are properly placed in a hierarchy, when that which must be below is below, and that which must be above is above, our final condition can recapture our original blissful state. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21.
Archetypes are not matters of faith; we can know that they are there. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21.
When an archetypal event approaches the sphere of consciousness, it also manifests itself in the outer life. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.
When an archetype is constellated it can appear in the inner and the outer world at the same time. Each distinct case is an example of creation. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.
There is a story that says that when Mohammed ascended into Heaven the stone in the Temple of Jerusalem wanted to go too. The archetype manifests itself in the outer world as sympathia. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 56.
I should like to study the theory of numbers. What is a number, an entity, a sequence, an archetype? We think we can perceive and grasp a number logically and suddenly it behaves quite differently from the way we expected. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.
That is the first archetype [Oedipus] Freud discovered; the first and the only one. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 13.
The anima is an archetypal form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of feminine or female genes. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 18.
It is a peculiar fact that the archetype of the anima plays a very great role in Western literature, French and Anglo-Saxon. But in Germany, there are exceedingly few examples in German literature where the anima plays a role. . . . ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.
Nobody can say where man ends. That is the beauty of it, you know. It is very interesting. The unconscious of man can reach—God knows where. There we are going to make discoveries. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.
It [The Mandala] is the archetype of inner order; and it is always used in that sense, either to make arrangements of the many, many aspects of the universe, a world scheme, or to arrange the complicated aspects of our psyche into a scheme. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.
A mandala spontaneously appears as a compensatory archetype during times of disorder. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.
. . . what is meant [by the child archetype] is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 742.
The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 334-335.
Primeval history is the story of the beginning of consciousness by differentiation from the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32.
the Church severed the coniunctio from the physical realm altogether, and natural philosophy turned it into an abstract theoria. These developments meant the gradual transformation of the archetype into a psychological process which, in theory, we can call a combination of conscious and unconscious processes. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 295.
It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept. It is far more than that: it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 96.
Archetypes are not mere concepts but are entities, exactly like whole numbers, which are not merely aids to counting but possess irrational qualities that do not result from the concept of counting, as for instance the prime numbers and their behaviour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 22.
Inasmuch as karma means either a personal or at least an individual inherited determinant of character and fate, it represents the individually differentiated manifestation of the instinctual behaviour pattern, i.e., the general archetypal disposition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 287-289.
You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17
Nobody has ever seen an archetype, and nobody has ever seen an atom either. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
When I say “atom” I am talking of the model made of it; when I say “archetype” I am talking of ideas corresponding to it, but never of the thing-in itself, which in both cases is a transcendental mystery. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
One must therefore assume that the effective archetypal ideas, including our model of the archetype, rest on something actual even though unknowable, just as the model of the atom rests on certain unknowable qualities of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
Nobody would assume that the biological pattern is a philosophical assumption like the Platonic idea or a Gnostic hypostasis. The same is true of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 152.
Emotions follow an instinctual pattern, i.e., an archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47. Purple
It looks as if the collective character of the archetypes would manifest itself also in meaningful coincidences, i.e., as if the archetype (or the collective unconscious) were not only inside the individual, but also outside, viz. in one’s environment, as if sender and percipient were in the same psychic space, or in the same time (in precognition cases). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Where an archetype prevails, we can expect synchronistic phenomena, i.e., acausal correspondences, which consist in a parallel arrangement of facts in time. The arrangement is not the effect of a cause. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Divine favour and daemonic evil or danger are archetypal. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 52-53.
Just as the physicist regards the atom as a model, I regard archetypal ideas as sketches for the purpose of visualizing the unknown background. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 64-65.
No doubt the archetypes are present everywhere, but there is also a widespread resistance to this “mythology.” That is why even the gospel has to be “demythologized.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 83-86.
I fully realize that Catholic analysts are faced with very particular problems which, on the one hand, are an aggravation of the work which is difficult in itself already, yet on the other hand, an asset, since you start within a world of thought and feeling based upon archetypal realities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 100-101.
This archetypal drama is at the same time exquisitely psychological and historical. We are actually living in the time of the splitting of the world and of the invalidation of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 133-138
I never look for archetypes and don’t try to find them; enough when they come all by themselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.
The “archetype” is practically synonymous with the biological concept of the behaviour pattern. But as the latter designates external phenomena chiefly, I have chosen the term “archetype” for “psychic pattern.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
Nobody would assume that the biological pattern is a philosophical assumption like the Platonic idea or a Gnostic hypostasis. The same is true of the archetype. Its autonomy is an observable fact and not a philosophical hypostasis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern. Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
I have never claimed f.i. to know much about the nature of archetypes, how they originated or whether they originated at all, whether they are inherited or planted by the grace of God in every individual anew. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 184-187.
Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites! ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
In the two Christian churches, the importance and the psychological significance of rites are not generally appreciated; to some people they are acts of faith or of habit; to others, acts of magic. But in reality there is a third aspect: the aspect of the rite as a symbolic act, giving expression to the archetypal expectation of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.
On the other hand “God” is a verbal image, a predicate or mythologem founded on archetypal premises which underlie the structure of the psyche as images of the instincts (“instinctual patterns”). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
“God” in this sense is a biological, instinctual and elemental “model,” an archetypal “arrangement” of individual, contemporary and historical contents, which, despite its numinosity, is and must be exposed to intellectual and moral criticism, just like the image of the “evolving” God or of Yahweh or the Summum Bonum or the Trinity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
I don’t know whether the archetype is “true” or not. I only know that it lives and that I have not made it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
With increasing approximation to the centre there is a corresponding depotentiation of the ego in favour of the influence of the “empty” centre, which is certainly not identical with the archetype but is the thing the archetype points to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
As the Chinese would say, the archetype is only the name of Tao, not Tao itself. Just as the Jesuits translated Tao as “God,” so we can describe the “emptiness” of the centre as “God.” Emptiness in this sense doesn’t mean “absence” or “vacancy,” but something unknowable which is endowed with the highest intensity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
The up surging archetypal material is the stuff of which mental illnesses are made. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
They [Archetypes] guide but they also mislead; how much I reserve my criticism for them you can see in Answer to Job, where I subject archetypal statements to what you call “blasphemous” criticism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
The reason why mythic statements invariably lead to word-magic is that the archetype possesses a numinous autonomy and has a psychic life of its own. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
I cannot prove the identity of an historical personage with a psychological archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 267-268.
The archetype is not just the formal condition for mythological statements but an overwhelming force comparable to nothing I know. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
Christ is not an archetype but a personification of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 304-306.
The spiritual (as contrasted with the worldly) Messiah, Christ, Mithras, Osiris, Dionysos, Buddha are all visualizations or personifications of the irrepresentable archetype which, borrowing from Ezekiel and Daniel, I call the Anthropos. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 304-306.
The archetype itself (nota bene not the archetypal representation!) is psychoid,i.e., transcendental and thus relatively beyond the categories of number, space, and time. That means, it approximates to oneness and immutability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 317-319.
The fact is that the numbers pre-existing in nature are presumably the most fundamental archetypes, being the very matrix of all others. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 325-327.
Like all the inner foundations of judgment, numbers are archetypal by nature and consequently partake of the psychic qualities of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 327-329.
So far as the integration of personality components are concerned, it must be borne in mind that the ego-personality as such does not include the archetypes but is only influenced by them; for the archetypes are universal and belong to the collective psyche over which the ego has no control. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
Thus animus and anima are images representing archetypal figures which mediate between consciousness and the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
By these deeper levels I mean the determining archetypes which are supraordinate to, or underlie, individual development and presumably are responsible for the supreme meaning of individual life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 344-345
The archetypes have a life of their own which extends through the centuries and gives the aeons their peculiar stamp. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 344-345
Since the archetypes are the instinctual forms of mental behaviour it is quite certain that, inasmuch as animals possess a “mind,” their mind also follows archetypal patterns, and presumably the same that are operative in the human mind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373
As we do not know the actual status of an archetype in the unconscious and only know it in that form in which it becomes conscious, it is impossible to describe the human archetype and to compare it to an animal archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373
If I say that we do not know “the ultimate derivation of the archetype,” I mean that we are unable to observe and describe the archetype in its unconscious condition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373
Yet in the archetypal unimaginable event that forms the basis of conscious apperception, a is b, stench is perfume, sex is amor Dei, as inevitably as the conclusion that God is the complexio oppositorum. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396
This, too,[UFO’s] is an expression of something that has always claimed my deepest interest and my greatest attention: the manifestation of archetypes, or archetypal forms, in all the phenomena of life: in biology, physics, history, folklore, and art, in theology and mythology, in parapsychology, as well as in the symptoms of insane patients and neurotics, and finally in the dreams and life of every individual man and woman. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 397-398.
Or in other words: there is no outside to the collective psyche. In our ordinary mind we are in the worlds of time and space and within the separate individual psyche. In the state of the archetype we are in the collective psyche, in a world-system whose space-time categories are relatively or absolutely abolished. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400
Our intellectual means reach only as far as archetypal experiences, but within that sphere we are not the motors, we are the moved objects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400
The experimental activation of an archetypal situation has to be explained causally, since there is no possibility of explaining it otherwise and no reason to do so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 420-421
I can also say, therefore, that in itself the archetype is an irrepresentable configuration whose existence can be established empirically in a multitude of forms. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
At the same time the archetype is always of an objective nature since it is an a priori ideational pattern which is everywhere identical with itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
The archetype, then, is a modality that represents visual forms, and synchronicity is another modality representing events. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
With regard to the dynamic processes of the unconscious, he can also determine that the further characteristic of synchronicity exists; in other words, that archetypes have something to do with synchronicity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
In so far as both modalities, archetype and synchronicity, belong primarily to the realm of the psychic, we are justified in concluding that they are psychic phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
Synchronicity is not a name that characterizes an “organizing principle,” but, like the word “archetype,” it characterizes a modality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
Concerning archetypes, migration and verbal transmission are self-evident, except in those cases where individuals reproduce archetypal forms outside of all possible external influences (good examples in childhood dreams!). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451
Since archetypes are instinctual forms, they follow a universal pattern, as do the functions of the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451
Why should the psyche be the only living thing that is outside laws of determination? We follow archetypal patterns as the weaver-bird does. This assumption is far more probable than the mystical idea of absolute freedom. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451
The assumption, therefore, that the (psychoid) archetypes are inherited is for many reasons far more probable than that they are handed down by tradition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451
The childish prejudice against inherited archetypes is mostly due to the fact that one thinks archetypes are representations; but in reality they are preferences or “penchants,” likes and dislikes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451
It is legitimate to ask yourself what it is that carries the qualities of the archetypal and synchronistic, and to pose the question, for instance, of the intrinsic nature of the psyche or of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
Therefore Elihu in spite of his fundamental truth belongs to those foolish Jungians, who, as you suggest, avoid the shadow and make for the archetypes, i.e., the “divine equivalents,” which by the way are nothing but escape camouflage according to the personalistic theory. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 544-546
In some cases of psychotherapeutic treatment, contact with the sphere of the archetypes can produce the kind of constellation that underlies synchronicity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 498-500
In this chaos of chance, synchronistic phenomena were probably at work, operating both with and against the known laws of nature to produce, in archetypal moments, syntheses which appear to us miraculous. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 493-496
Now whether these archetypes, as I have called these pre-existent and pre-forming psychic factors, are regarded as “mere” instincts or as daemons and gods makes no difference at all to their dynamic effect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
But it often makes a mighty difference whether they [Archetypes] are undervalued as “mere” instincts or overvalued as gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Another common misunderstanding is that I derive my idea of “archetypes” from Philo or Dionysius Areopagita, or St. Augustine. It is based solely upon empirical data, viz . upon the astonishing fact that products of the unconscious in modern individuals can almost literally coincide with symbols occurring in all peoples and all times, beyond the possibility of tradition or migration, for which I have given numerous proofs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 500-502
A certain interplay of round and square seems to be indispensable. This is about all I can tell you about “architectural archetypes.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 509-510
I call them archetypes, i.e., instinctual forms of mental functioning. They are not inherited ideas, but mentally expressed instincts, forms and not contents. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520-523
The archetypality of Communism is on the one hand the common ownership of goods, as in primitive societies, and on the other hand the unlimited power of the tribal chieftain. Ostensibly all goods belong to all. Everybody has his share. But since all are represented by one man, the chieftain, only one man has control of everything. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 513
It may be a prejudice to think that the world of human ideas is conditioned by archetypes, but it is also a means of grasping something of the psychology of another organism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506
Thus the environment delivers us from the power of the archetypes, and the archetypes deliver us from the crushing influence of the environment. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506
For me the archetype means: an image of a probable sequence of events, an habitual current of psychic energy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506
Therefore Elihu in spite of his fundamental truth belongs to those foolish Jungians, who, as you suggest, avoid the shadow and make for the archetypes, i.e., the “divine equivalents,” which by the way are nothing but escape camouflage according to the personalistic theory. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 544-546
Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of nature and is connected to his own roots. ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page 23.
If I speak of the collective unconscious I don’t assume it as a principle,
I only give a name to the totality of observable facts, i.e., archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567
Just like the animal, man too is caught up in the conflict between archetypal drives and environmental conditions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506
The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 195, Para 392.
Psychologically, however, the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 415
If we release the energy of the collective unconscious until we have no more, then we arrive at differentiation. The archetypes are sources of energy. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 99
If people who have no views of life catch hold of an archetypal idea, say a religious idea, they become efficient. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 99
They [ESP] were puzzling to me inasmuch as archetypal constellations are usually more or less momentary and don’t extend over longer periods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 576-577
As you have found out for yourself, the I Ching consists of readable archetypes, and it very often presents not only a picture of the actual situation but also of the future, exactly like dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 584-585
Your equation of certain archetypal ideas with fundamental physiological processes has my undivided applause. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 617-620
I would like to emphasize that it very often does not depend upon the use one makes of an image, but rather upon the use the archetypes make of ourselves, which decides the question whether it will be artistic creation or a change of religious attitude. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626
I see that many of my pupils indulge in a superstitious belief in our so-called ” free will” and pay little attention to the fact that the archetypes are, as a rule, autonomous entities, and not only material subject to our choice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626
I was especially interested in palaeontology; you see, my life work in historical comparative psychology is like palaeontology. That is the study of the archetypes of the animals, and this is the study of the archetypes in the soul. The Eohippus is the archetype of the modern horse, the archetypes are like the fossil animals. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218
The archetype of the individual is the Self. The Self is all embracing. God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218
. . the individual in society may be understood as a piece of the archetype, a piece that has been differentiated out of the collective representation. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218
You don’t see the archetypal world, but live like a pressed flower in the pages of a book, a mere memory of yourself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
The great lure of the archetypal situation is that you yourself suddenly cease to be. You cease to think and are acted upon as though carried by a great river with no end. You are suddenly eternal. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 240.
The indispensable condition is that you have an archetypal experience, and to have that means that you have surrendered to life. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972
The archetype itself is an exaggeration and it reaches beyond the confines of humanity. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.
For the archetype is nothing human; no archetype is properly human. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.
Therefore the appearance of an archetype in our psychology is always a moment of the greatest danger as well as the greatest hope. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 67
When someone is able to perform the art of touching on the archetypal, he can play on the souls of people like on the strings
of a piano. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 150
The archetypes are the numinous, structural elements of the psyche and possess a certain autonomy and specific energy which enables
them to attract, out of the conscious mind, those contents which are best suited to themselves. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 344.
Experience of the archetype is not only impressive, it seizes and possesses the whole personality, and is naturally productive of faith. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 344.
A host of possibilities is still embedded in the archetypes, in the realm of the Mothers. The abundance of possibilities eludes our comprehension. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 22
The origin of the archetypes is a crucial question. Where space and time are relative it is not possible to speak of developments in time.
Everything is present, altogether and all at once, in the constant presence of the Pleroma. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 22
The archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all
rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 415.
It seems to me probable that the real nature of the archetype is not capable of being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I call it psychoid. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 417
Archetypes probably represent typical situations in life. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 254
The deposit of man’s whole ancestral experience—so rich in emotional imagery—of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337
Meaningful coincidences—which are to be distinguished from meaningless chance groupings—therefore seem to rest on an archetypal foundation. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 846
The archetype—let us never forget this—is a psychic organ present in all of us. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 271
Man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of Nature and is connected with his own roots. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 174
The archetypes are imperishable elements of the unconscious, but they change their shape continually. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 301
When, towards middle life, the last gleam of childhood illusion fades—this it must be owned is true only of an almost ideal life, for many go as children to their graves—then the archetype of the mature man or woman emerges from the parental imago: an image of man as woman has known him from the beginning of time, and an image of woman that man carries within him eternally. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 74
Empirically considered, however, the archetype did not ever come into existence as a phenomenon of organic life, but entered into the picture with life itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 222.
Holiness is also revelatory: it is the illuminative power emanating from an archetypal figure. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 225.
The archetype is, so to speak, an “eternal” presence, and it is only a question of whether it is perceived by the conscious mind or not. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 329
It is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148.
In a very generalizing way we can therefore define them [Archetypes] as attributes of the creator. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 606.
They[Archetypes] are primordial psychic experiences which very often give patients access again to blocked religious truths. I have also had this experience myself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 56-57
His [Freud] is the honour of having discovered the first archetype, the Oedipus complex. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 524-527
Your dream unquestionably refers to the archetypal problem of the extrusion of the soul from the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 306-307
No, the Virgin was the archetypal figure of the soul of man, the anima, and it is only in the soul of man that God can be born, where else could it be? ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Page 32
The shadow can represent the whole of the unconscious – that is both personal and archetypal contents – or just the personal material which was in the background and not recognised, not wanted. ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Page 55
He [Jung] said he had learned never to start an interview beyond a few pleasantries – ‘How are you?’ – but to wait for the patient, because the instincts, the archetypes, lie in between and we don’t know what may be there. ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Page 55
