page_title: Jungian archetypes
section_title: Introduction
hierarchical_section_title: Jungian archetypes / Introduction
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Platon
context_page_description: Jungian archetypes are defined as universal, archaic symbols and images that derive from the collective unconscious, as proposed by Carl Jung. They are the psychic counterpart of instinct. That is to say they are a kind of innate unspecific knowledge, derived from the sum total of human history, which prefigures and directs conscious behavior.
  They are unclear underlying forms, or the archetypes-as-such, from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood among others. History, culture and personal context shape these manifest representations thereby giving them their specific content. These images and motifs are more precisely called archetypal images. However it is common for the term archetype to be used interchangeably to refer to both archetypes-as-such and archetypal images.
  Archetypes, according to Jung, seek actualization within the context of an individual's environment and determine the degree of individuation.
context_section_description: Carl Jung rejected the tabula rasa theory of human psychological development, believing instead that evolutionary pressures have individual predestinations manifested in archetypes. He introduced the first understanding of this concept when he coined the term primordial images. Jung would later use the term "archetypes".  
  According to Jung, archetypes are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world. They are autonomous and hidden forms which are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular expression by individuals and their cultures. In Jungian psychology, archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious. The existence of archetypes may be inferred from stories, art, myths, religions, or dreams.
  Jung's idea of archetypes was based on Immanuel Kant's categories, Plato's Ideas, and Arthur Schopenhauer's prototypes. For Jung, "the archetype is the introspectively recognizable form of a priori psychic orderedness". "These images must be thought of as lacking in solid content, hence as unconscious. They only acquire solidity, influence, and eventual consciousness in the encounter with empirical facts."
  The archetypes form a dynamic substratum common to all humanity, upon the foundation of which each individual builds his own experience of life, colouring them with his unique culture, personality and life events. Thus, while archetypes themselves may be conceived as a relative few innate nebulous forms, from these may arise innumerable images, symbols and patterns of behavior. While the emerging images and forms are apprehended consciously, the archetypes which inform them are elementary structures which are unconscious and impossible to apprehend.
  Jung was fond of comparing the form of the archetype to the axial system of a crystal, which preforms the crystalline structure of the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which the ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal: a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond to the instincts. The existence of the instincts can no more be proved than the existence of the archetypes, so long as they do not manifest themselves concretely.
  With respect to defining terms and exploring their natures, a study published in the journal Psychological Perspective in 2017 stated that the Jungian representations find expression through a wide variety of human experiences, the article summing up,
  "Archetypes are universal organizing themes or patterns that appear regardless of space, time, or person. Appearing in all existential realms and at all levels of systematic recursion, they are organized as themes in the unus mundus, which Jung... described as “the potential world outside of time,” and are detectable through synchronicities."
caption: Jung's ideas on archetypes were based in part on Plato's Forms.
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