The Archetype and the Archetypal Image

The Lattice, Not the Crystal

First attested
1946Jung's Eranos lecture of 1946, printed as 'Der Geist der Psychologie' in Eranos-Jahrbuch 1946 (Zurich, 1947), 385-490, and revised and augmented as 'Theoretische Überlegungen zum Wesen des Psychischen' in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (Psychologische Abhandlungen IX; Zurich: Rascher, 1954), 497-608; the English of CW 8 §§343-442 translates the 1954 text. The psychoid is credited to the 1946 lecture in the secondary literature (Addison 2009; Saban); whether §417's exact pairing — archetype as such against archetypal representation — stood in the 1946 printing or was added in 1954, the Collected Works do not say. The underlying form-without-content claim is already in print in the 1936 English of CW 9i §99; CW 9i §155, which carries the crystal, survives only in the 1954 revision of the 1938 lecture.
Claimed
around 380 BCEasserted by Jung himself, who wrote in the mother-archetype essay (CW 9i §153) that he did not claim to have been the first to point out that everything psychic is preformed and that fantasy makes the primordial images visible: 'The honour belongs to Plato.'

The claim runs about 2.3 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

Jung's own position from 1946 is that the archetype itself is never observed and cannot be made conscious, only its images can — so the numbered Jungian sets on sale, Mark and Pearson's twelve brand archetypes of 2001 included, are counting images of something he had said in 1936 was as numerous as life's typical situations.

The pattern itself is never seen — only its images, which is why no one can honestly count them.

Jung drew the line at Eranos in 1946, in a lecture revised in 1954 and translated as 'On the Nature of the Psyche' (CW 8). Archetypal representations, he wrote at §417, must not be confused with the archetype as such: irrepresentable, at the invisible ultraviolet end of the psychic spectrum, and not, he thought, able to reach consciousness. He called it psychoid, a word already used by Hans Driesch (1903) and Eugen Bleuler (1925), entering three reservations marking his sense off from theirs. He had been answering the charge of inherited ideas since 1929; the mother-archetype essay, revised in 1954 from his 1938 lecture, likens archetypal form to a crystal's axial system, preforming structure in the mother liquid without existing materially. Only images are ever seen, and in 1936 he put archetypes at the number of life's typical situations.

Light

It is the move that keeps the theory empirical: from 1929 Jung insisted he had never meant inherited ideas, only an inherited disposition to react as people always have, which leaves every image to be read in context rather than looked up.

Shadow

Jung conceded in the same paragraph that no statement about unconscious processes will ever be verified scientifically. That leaves the archetype untestable, and leaves archetypal free to describe anything at all: the images are unlimited, and what lies behind them cannot be inspected.

Sources and verification9 sources · 7 links

Primary source

  • C. G. Jung, The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology, 1929, CW 8 §229 (essay §§220-231); orig. 'Die Bedeutung von Konstitution und Vererbung für die Psychologie', Die medizinische Welt (Berlin), III:47 (Nov. 1929), 1677-79Jung's own record of the charge he was answering and his answer to it: he says he has frequently been accused of a superstitious belief in inherited ideas, quite unjustly, because the concordances he reports are produced not by ideas but by the inherited disposition to react in the same way as people have always reacted.
  • C. G. Jung, The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, 1936, CW 9i §99Jung's statement that archetypes are as numerous as the typical situations of life, and that repetition has engraved them not as images filled with content but as forms without content, representing only the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.
  • C. G. Jung, Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, 1938, CW 9i §§153, 155; orig. 'Die psychologischen Aspekte des Mutterarchetypus', Eranos-Jahrbuch 1938, revised in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (Zurich: Rascher, 1954), which is the text CW 9i translates§155 opens with Jung's complaint that he repeatedly meets the mistaken notion that an archetype is determined as to its content; states that the representations are not inherited, only the forms; calls the archetype in itself empty and purely formal, a facultas praeformandi; and gives the axial system of a crystal, preforming the crystalline structure in the mother liquid without material existence of its own, as the analogy. §153 is where he says he was not the first to point out that everything psychic is preformed and that fantasy makes the primordial images visible — 'The honour belongs to Plato.'
  • C. G. Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 1946, CW 8 §417 (essay §§343-442); orig. 'Der Geist der Psychologie', Eranos-Jahrbuch 1946 (Zurich, 1947), 385-490; rev. as 'Theoretische Überlegungen zum Wesen des Psychischen', Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (Zurich: Rascher, 1954), 497-608At §417 Jung states that the archetypal representations mediated to us by the unconscious must not be confused with the archetype as such; that the latter is an essentially irrepresentable basic form; that it is a psychoid factor at the invisible ultraviolet end of the psychic spectrum which does not appear capable of reaching consciousness; and that there is no hope of any statement about unconscious states or processes ever being verified scientifically.
  • C. G. Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 1946, CW 8 §368 and its footnotesJung's own acknowledgement that his use of psychoid collides with the term postulated by Hans Driesch and with Eugen Bleuler's die Psychoide, and his three stated reservations: he uses it as an adjective and not a noun, means only quasi-psychic rather than psychic, and intends it to mark off a category of events from both merely vitalistic and specifically psychic ones.

Scholarship

  • Ann Addison, Jung, vitalism and 'the psychoid': an historical reconstruction, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2009, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 123-142; DOI 10.1111/j.1468-5922.2008.01762.xA peer-reviewed reconstruction of where Jung's psychoid came from and what the neo-vitalist debate around Driesch carried into analytical psychology with it.

The tradition itself

  • Jung, 'On the Nature of the Psyche', 1946, 1946/1954The esoteric reading given on this entry — CW 8, on the crystal lattice and the psychoid archetype

Where this claim originates

  • Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes, 2001, New York: McGraw-HillA numbered, closed set of twelve archetypes — Innocent, Sage, Explorer, Hero, Outlaw, Magician, Everyman, Lover, Jester, Caregiver, Creator, Ruler — grouped by four motivations and offered as an application of Jung to branding: the source for the set's composition, its grouping, its publisher and its date.

Further reading

  • Mark Saban, Psychoid (IAAP, Short Articles on Analytical Psychology), International Association of Analytical Psychology, iaap.orgA short openly readable account, by a Jungian analyst and lecturer in Jungian studies at Essex, of Jung's term and its background in Driesch (1903) and Bleuler (1925), and of how he distanced his own sense from both.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe Word ArchetypeAttested

    The word arrives carrying the authority of late-antique theology; the distinction drawn here is Jung's own, from the Eranos essay of 1946, which is why an ancient-sounding term names a twentieth-century claim.

  • CorrectsShadow WorkAttested

    The market phrase treats the shadow as an object that can be inventoried and worked through; on Jung's distinction only images are ever available to consciousness, so whatever an exercise handles is an archetypal image and not the archetype.

  • IncludesThe ShadowAttested

    Aion §13 names the shadow, the anima and the animus as the three archetypes most clearly characterised from the empirical point of view, and calls the shadow the most accessible of them.

  • IncludesThe AnimaAttested

    Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia are archetypal images; on Jung's own distinction the anima archetype itself is never seen, which is why a numbered set of names cannot be the thing.

  • Gave rise toThe AnimusAttested

    Jung classed the animus among the archetypes, so the position he settled on in 1946 and revised in 1954 applies to it: nobody has observed an animus, only images, and the descriptions in Jung's 1928 chapter and Emma Jung's 1931 paper are descriptions of figures met in analysis.

  • Gave rise toThe Gendering of Anima and AnimusAttested

    Goldenberg's 1976 move is Jung's own distinction applied to his gender writing: call anima and animus images rather than archetypes and their content becomes historical.

  • IncludesThe SelfAttested

    Jung classes the self as an archetype — Aion (1951, §351) has psychologists conjecturing 'an archetype of wholeness, i.e., the self' from dreams and active imagination — so only its images are ever seen: mandalas, and the 'supraordinate personality' of king, hero or saviour (CW 6 §790). Warren Colman (2006) notes the unresolved difficulty of its being both the whole psyche and one archetype within it.

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