The Archetype

Abstract

Whereas Freud insisted that the unconscious mind was entirely personal and peculiar to the individual and made up of repressed wishes and traumatic memories, Jung maintained that there existed an additional phylogenetic layer (the 'collective unconscious'), which incorporated the entire psychic potential of humankind. Support for this notion came from the studies Jung conducted with his colleagues at the Burgh+�lzli Hospital in Zurich into the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenic patients. They were able to demonstrate that these contained motifs and images that also occurred in myths, religions, and fairy tales from all over the world (Jung 1956). Jung concluded that there must exist a dynamic substratum, common to all humanity, on the basis of which each individual builds his or her own experience of life, developing a unique array of psychological characteristics. In other words, the archetypes of the collective unconscious provided the basic themes of human life on which each individual worked out his or her own sets of variations. The archetype is thus Jung's basic concept, in that its significance for analytical psychology is comparable to that of gravity for Newtonian physics, relativity for Einsteinian physics, or natural selection for Darwinian biology. It is one of the most important ideas to emerge in the twentieth century, possessing far-reaching implications for both the social and the natural sciences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved) (from the chapter)