The Word Archetype

Borrowed Word, Later Pedigree

First attested
1919Jung's contribution to the symposium "Instinct and the Unconscious", read at Bedford College, London University, on 12 July 1919 in H. G. Baynes's English translation and printed in the British Journal of Psychology (General Section) X (1919), part 1, 15-23. The Collected Works editors attach a note to that paragraph stating it is the first occasion on which Jung uses the term "archetype" (Archetypus). Their bibliographical note gives the pages as 15-26; the journal's own pagination runs Rivers 1-7, Myers 8-14, Jung 15-23, Wallas 24-26. The German original, "Instinkt und Unbewusstes", was not printed until 1928, in Über die Energetik der Seele.
Claimed
1st centuryasserted by C. G. Jung, who at CW 9i §5 — the 1954 revision of his 1934 Eranos lecture "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious", and the version the Collected Works translates — writes that the term "occurs as early as Philo Judaeus" and traces it further through Irenaeus, the Corpus Hermeticum and Dionysius the Areopagite.

The claim runs about 1.9 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

Jung's "archetype" first appeared in 1919, in an English translation read in London — and the ancient pedigree now printed beneath it, Philo through Dionysius, was assembled thirty-five years later, in the 1954 revision of a 1934 lecture.

An ancient theological word, borrowed in 1919 for a use no ancient author intended.

Jung's paper reached a joint meeting of the Aristotelian Society, the Mind Association and the British Psychological Society at Bedford College, London, on 12 July 1919, in H. G. Baynes's English translation; the Collected Works editors mark "the archetypes of perception and apprehension" as his first use of the word, and the German went unprinted until 1928. Since 1911 he had written "primordial image", urtümliches Bild, crediting a letter of Jacob Burckhardt's on Faust — though Burckhardt's biographer Werner Kaegi dates the term to the seventeenth century. The pedigree came later: Philo, Irenaeus, the Corpus Hermeticum and Dionysius the Areopagite belong to the 1954 revision of the 1934 Eranos lecture, not to the lecture. The Irenaeus sentence Jung quoted flat is the conditional half of a reductio — his account of the Valentinians' doctrine, set down to break it.

Light

Jung printed his sources in footnotes, in 1919 and again in the 1954 revision, so the borrowing can be followed. The 1919 note is the candid one: having credited Augustine with the idea, he adds that the term is in Dionysius and the Corpus Hermeticum.

Shadow

A reader meeting Philo, Irenaeus and Dionysius in a footnote hears two thousand years of confirmation — though the Areopagite is a borrowed name, a Syrian of about 500. What is old is the word; what is new is the claim that anything is inherited.

Sources and verification6 sources · 3 links

Primary source

  • Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, Book II, ch. 7, trans. Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1, 1885, II.7.5; chapter headingThe chapter is headed "Created things are not the images of those Æons who are within the Pleroma", and §5 runs: "For if the Creator of the world did not form these things directly from His own conception, but, like an architect of no ability, or a boy receiving his first lesson, copied them from archetypes furnished by others, then whence did their Bythus obtain the forms of that creation which He at first produced?" - a conditional inside a reductio against the Valentinians, closing on Irenaeus's own position: "one Artificer, and one God, who of Himself formed those things which have been created." This is the translation Jung's own footnote cites. The register (docs/SOURCES.md §3.1) lists this translation and cautions that Irenaeus is a hostile witness who systematises opponents for polemical effect — never his summary as a group's self-description; the entry therefore attributes the doctrine to Irenaeus's account of the Valentinians rather than asserting it as theirs.
  • C. G. Jung, "Instinct and the Unconscious" (1919), Collected Works vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1919, §§270, 275, 277, with editorial note 1 and notes 7-8§270 contains "the archetypes of perception and apprehension", to which the Collected Works editors attach note 7: "This is the first occasion on which Jung uses the term 'archetype' (Archetypus). Previously, in his publications, he had discussed the same concept under the term 'primordial image' (Urbild), which he derived from Burckhardt." Editorial note 1 gives the occasion: a joint meeting of the Aristotelian Society, the Mind Association and the British Psychological Society at Bedford College, London University, July 1919, presented in an English translation prepared by H. G. Baynes, first published in the British Journal of Psychology (General Section) X (1919) — the CW editors give the pages as 15-26, where the journal's own pagination gives Jung 15-23 and Wallas 24-26 — the German original appearing only in 1928. §275 reads "Medieval philosophy, from the time of St. Augustine - from whom I have borrowed the idea of the archetype - down to Malebranche and Bacon", with Jung's own note 8: "The actual term 'archetype,' however, is to be found in Dionysius the Areopagite and in the Corpus Hermeticum." §277: "It is this factor which I call the archetype or primordial image."
  • C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), Collected Works vol. 6, 1921, §624"[F]or the inborn mode of psychic apprehension I have proposed the term archetype" and "What I understand by it is identical with the 'primordial image,' a term borrowed from Jacob Burckhardt." Two years after the coining, Jung is still defining "archetype" by reference to "primordial image", which remains the operative term of the book.
  • C. G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality, trans. Stanley Dell (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), 1939, p. 53, in "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious"Dell's translation of the ORIGINAL 1934 version of the lecture. At the place corresponding to CW 9i §5 it reads in full: "The term 'archetype' derives from St. Augustine. The term is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos." Philo, Irenaeus, the Corpus Hermeticum, Dionysius and all four footnotes are absent. The ancient pedigree is therefore a feature of the 1954 revision, not of the 1934 lecture.
  • C. G. Jung, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (Eranos-Jahrbuch 1934; revised in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins, Zurich, 1954, which is the version translated here), Collected Works vol. 9i, 1954, §5, with editorial note 1 and notes 3-7Editorial note 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." §5 then gives the list of ancient occurrences: Philo Judaeus (note 3: De opificio mundi, I, 69), Irenaeus (note 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.)"), the Corpus Hermeticum (note 5), and Dionysius the Areopagite, De caelesti hierarchia II, 4 and De divinis nominibus I, 6 (notes 6-7). Jung's English text renders the Irenaeus line as a flat declarative: "The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from archetypes outside himself."

Scholarship

  • Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge University Press), 2003, pp. 241-242 (the 1919 symposium, the participants, and "Jung's contribution contained his first use of the term 'archetype'"); pp. 297-298 (the Burckhardt Faust letter, Jung's adoption of "primordial image", and Kaegi's note that the term stems from the seventeenth century)That the 1919 symposium was jointly organised by the British Psychological Society, the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, with Russell, Whitehead, G. E. Moore, Henry Head, Rivers, Myers and McDougall among the participants, and that "Jung's contribution contained his first use of the term 'archetype'". Also that Jung quoted, in a footnote to Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, a letter of Burckhardt's calling Faust "a genuine and legitimate myth, i.e., a great primordial image [urtümliches Bild], in which everyone has to intuit his own being and destiny again in his own way"; and that Werner Kaegi notes the term urtümliches Bild or Urbild did not originate with Burckhardt, stemming from the seventeenth century, "hence Jung's attribution of it to the latter is significant" (Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, vol. 4, p. 464, quoted here at second hand through Shamdasani).

Linked entries

  • Set againstIndividuationAttested

    The same manoeuvre twice: archetypus credited to Augustine in 1919, individuatio taken from the scholastic principium individuationis that Schopenhauer had made current - each an old word arriving with an authority the new sense had not yet earned.

  • Set againstShadow WorkA modern connection

    The borrowing runs the other way here: "archetype" is an ancient word Jung gave a new sense, while "shadow work" is a recent phrase Jung never used that travels under his name.

  • Set againstThe Archetype and the Archetypal ImageAttested

    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.

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