Four Archetypes (2 page)

¹
C. G. Jung,
The Red Book
, edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Series (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

²
Collected Works
B.

³
The Red Book
, p. 262.

⁴
Ibid.

⁵
The German word “Geist” has no exact equivalent in English and, depending on context, can be rendered by “spirit” or “mind.”

⁶
See § 398, pp. 93–95.

⁷
The Red Book
, pp. 245, 251.

⁸
See § 399, p. 95, and § 402, pp. 96–97.

⁹
The Red Book
, p. 336.

FOUR ARCHETYPES

1

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.

2

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,
²
although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought-forms.

3

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.

4

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
.

5

The term “archetype” occurs as early as Philo Judaeus,
³
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.”
⁴
In the
Corpus Hermeticum
,
⁵
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,”
⁶
and in
De divinis nominibus
, I, 6: “Archetypal stone.”
⁷
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.

6

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.
⁸

85

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.

¹
[From “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” first published in the
Eranos-Jahrbuch 1934
, and later revised and published in
Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins
(Zurich, 1954), from which version the present translation is made. The translation of the original version, by Stanley Dell, in
The Integration of the Personality
(New York, 1939; London, 1940), has been freely consulted.—E
DITORS
.]

²
In his later works Freud differentiated the basic view mentioned here. He called the instinctual psyche the “id,” and his “super-ego” denotes the collective consciousness, of which the individual is partly conscious and partly unconscious (because it is repressed).

³
De opificio mundi
, I, 69. Cf. Colson/Whitaker trans., I, p. 55.

⁴
Adversus haereses
II, 7, 5: “Mundi fabricator non a semetipso fecit haec, sed de alienis archetypis transtulit.” (Cf. Roberts/Rambaut trans., I, p. 139.)

⁵
Scott,
Hermetica
, I, p. 140.

⁶
In Migne,
P.G
., vol. 3, col. 144.

⁷
Ibid., col. 595. Cf.
The Divine Names
(trans. by Rolt), pp. 62, 72.

⁸
One must, for the sake of accuracy, distinguish between “archetype” and “archetypal ideas.” The archetype as such is a hypothetical and irrepresentable model, something like the “pattern of behaviour” in biology. Cf. “On the Nature of the Psyche,” sec. 7.

[First published as a lecture, “Die psychologischen Aspekte des Mutterarchetypus,” in
Eranos-Jahrbuch 1938
. Later revised and published in
Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins
(Zurich, 1954). The present translation is of the latter, but it is also based partially on a translation of the 1938 version by Cary F. Baynes and Ximena de Angulo, privately issued in
Spring
(New York), 1943.—E
DITORS
.)

148

The concept of the Great Mother belongs to the field of comparative religion and embraces widely varying types of mother-goddess. The concept itself is of no immediate concern to psychology, because the image of a Great Mother in this form is rarely encountered in practice, and then only under very special conditions. The symbol is obviously a derivative of the
mother archetype
. If we venture to investigate the background of the Great Mother image from the standpoint of psychology, then the mother archetype, as the more inclusive of the two, must form the basis of our discussion. Though lengthy discussion of the
concept
of an archetype is hardly necessary at this stage, some preliminary remarks of a general nature may not be out of place.

149

In former times, despite some dissenting opinion and the influence of Aristotle, it was not too difficult to understand Plato’s conception of the Idea as supraordinate and pre-existent to all phenomena. “Archetype,” far from being a modern term, was already in use before the time of St. Augustine, and was synonymous with “Idea” in the Platonic usage. When the
Corpus Hermeticum
, which probably dates from the third century, describes God as
the ‘archetypal light,’ it expresses the idea that he is the prototype of all light; that is to say, pre-existent and supraordinate to the phenomenon “light.” Were I a philosopher, I should continue in this Platonic strain and say: Somewhere, in “a place beyond the skies,” there is a prototype or primordial image of the mother that is pre-existent and supraordinate to all phenomena in which the “maternal,” in the broadest sense of the term, is manifest. But I am an empiricist, not a philosopher; I cannot let myself presuppose that my peculiar temperament, my own attitude to intellectual problems, is universally valid. Apparently this is an assumption in which only the philosopher may indulge, who always takes it for granted that his own disposition and attitude are universal,
and will not recognize the fact, if he can avoid it, that his “personal equation” conditions his philosophy. As an empiricist, I must point out that there is a temperament which regards ideas as real entities and not merely as
nomina
. It so happens—by the merest accident, one might say—that for the past two hundred years we have been living in an age in which it has become unpopular or even unintelligible to suppose that ideas could be anything but
nomina
. Anyone who continues to think as Plato did must pay for his anachronism by seeing the “supracelestial,” i.e., metaphysical, essence of the Idea relegated to the unverifiable realm of faith and superstition, or charitably left to the poet. Once again, in the age-old controversy over universals, the nominalistic standpoint has triumphed over the realistic, and the Idea has evaporated into a mere
flatus vocis
. This change was accompanied—and, indeed, to a considerable degree caused—by the marked rise of empiricism, the advantages of which were only too obvious to the intellect. Since that time the Idea is no longer something
a priori
, but is secondary and derived. Naturally, the new nominalism promptly claimed universal validity for itself in spite of the fact that it, too, is based on a definite and limited thesis coloured by temperament. This thesis runs as follows: we accept as valid anything that comes from outside and can be verified. The ideal instance is verification by experiment. The antithesis is: we accept as valid anything that comes from inside and cannot be verified. The hopelessness of this position is obvious. Greek natural philosophy with its interest in matter, together with Aristotelian reasoning, has achieved a belated but overwhelming victory over Plato.