Also Read Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
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Archetypes
Simply put, archetypes represent patterns of behavior and perception. Archetypes are common themes that originate from the collective unconscious. They appear in symbolic form in myths and dreams. They live deep inside of you and have an unconscious affect on your behavior and attitudes.
Strictly speaking Jungian archetypes refer to nuclear 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. It is history, culture and personal context that shape these manifest representations 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 can be loosely compared to the instincts of animals. For example, birds instinctively know how to build nests and all the birds of a species build the exact same kind of nest. The bird is unaware that it has a special instinct for a particular form of nest building. Nevertheless, it does. Or we could say that dogs, as a species, are psychologically patterned to be loyal and obedient to the archetype of Master. Master is an archetype that is strongly developed in dogs; however, it does not appear to be an archetype that exists in the psyches of giraffes, snails, or buffaloes.
Carl Jung postulated two dimensions in the unconscious”the personal (repressed or forgotten content of an individual's mental and material life) and the archetypes (images, patterns, and symbols that are often seen in dreams and fantasies and appear as themes in mythology and religion) of a collective unconscious (those acts and mental patterns shared by members of a culture or universally by all human beings). In Psychological Types (1921) Jung elucidated the concepts of extroversion and introversion for the study of personality types. He also developed the theory of synchronicity, the coincidence of causally unrelated events having identical or similar meaning. Additionally, he was the first person to introduce into the language such terms and concepts as anima and New Age. For Jung the most important and lifelong task imposed upon any person is fulfillment through the process of individuation, the achievement of harmony of conscious and unconscious, which makes a person one and whole.
The Collective Unconscious
In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales. The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it.
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