Carl Jung: Four Archetypes – Introduction
INTRODUCTION1
The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions.
This has been the case with the concept of the unconscious in general.
After the philosophical idea of the unconscious, in the form presented chiefly by Carus and von Hartmann, had gone down under the overwhelming wave of materialism and empiricism, leaving hardly a ripple behind it, it gradually reappeared in the scientific domain of medical psychology.
At first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents.
Even with Freud, who makes the unconscious —at least metaphorically—take the stage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional significance thanks only to these.
For Freud, accordingly, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought-forms.
A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal.
I call it the personal unconscious.
But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn.
This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious.
I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.
It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.
Psychic existence can be recognized only by the presence of contents that are capable of consciousness.
We can therefore speak of an unconscious only in so far as we are able to demonstrate its contents.
The contents of the personal unconscious are chiefly the feeling-toned complexes, as they are called; they constitute the personal and private side of psychic life.
The contents of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, are known as archetypes.
The term “archetype” occurs as early as Philo Judaeus, with reference to the Imago Dei (God-image) in man.
It can also be found in Irenaeus, who says: “The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from archetypes outside himself.”
In the Corpus Hermeticum, God is called (archetypal light).
The term occurs several times in Dionysius the Areopagite, as for instance in De caelesti hierarchia, II, 4: “immaterial Archetypes,” and in De divinis nominibus, I, 6: “Archetypal stone.”
The term “représentations collectives,” used by Lévy-Bruhl to denote the symbolic figures in the primitive view of the world, could easily be applied to unconscious contents as well, since it means practically the same thing.
Primitive tribal lore is concerned with archetypes that have been modified in a special way.
They are no longer contents of the unconscious, but have already been changed into conscious formulae taught according to tradition, generally in the form of esoteric teaching.
This last is a typical means of expression for the transmission of collective contents originally derived from the unconscious.
Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth and fairytale.
But here too we are dealing with forms that have received a specific stamp and have been handed down through long periods of time.
The term “archetype” thus applies only indirectly to the “représentations collectives,” since it designates only those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration and are therefore an immediate datum of psychic experience.
In this sense there is a considerable difference between the archetype and the historical formula that has evolved.
Especially on the higher levels of esoteric teaching the archetypes appear in a form that reveals quite unmistakably the critical and evaluating influence of conscious elaboration.
Their immediate manifestation, as we encounter it in dreams and visions, is much more individual, less understandable, and more naïve than in myths, for example.
The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.
As the archetypes, like all numinous contents, are relatively autonomous, they cannot be integrated simply by rational means, but require a dialectical procedure, a real coming to terms with them, often conducted by the patient in dialogue form, so that, without knowing it, he puts into effect the alchemical definition of the meditatio: “an inner colloquy with one’s good angel.”
Usually the process runs a dramatic course, with many ups and downs.
It expresses itself in, or is accompanied by, dream symbols that are related to the “représentations collectives,” which in the form of mythological motifs have portrayed psychic processes of transformation since the earliest times.
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious – Introduction
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