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Jung’s Changing Take on the Archetype
Our real fundamental conflict does not come from the personal trouble; the personal trouble exists chiefly because we are not in tune with our impersonal psychology. We do not move with the waters of life; we try to get out, or we resist the currents. -- C. G. Jung
Very often lectures or writings about “Jung’s view of the archetypes” settle on a particular period in the development of Jung’s thought about them. The following lays out the various changes in his thought, from earlier to later.
Jung I: (the period referred to by most of Jung’s critics)
An archetype is a universal, recurrent event pattern laid down over the millennia in the psyche, then transmitted forward through Lamarckian evolution. Example: watching the sun rise and fall imprinted ages of human beings with the archetype of Rebirth. (Lamarckian evolution taught that we can inherit some experiences from our ancestors. Jung eventually dropped this notion as it gave way to the more Darwinian view.)
Jung II: (the period referred to by most Jungian analysts)
An archetype is a universal, recurrent pattern that is already built into the psyche and functions as one of its ordering principles, much like the skeleton organizes the body’s structure. In other words, all psychic experience is built up around universal themes filled in by culture and personality. Rebirth, the Hero/Heroine, the Divine Child, Transformation, the Hostile Brothers (witness the 1994 battle between Bush and Gore), the Seeker, Death, the Great Mother: these are contentless patterns, the bones and joints and organs of psyche, “wrinkles” in the fabric of being that our experiences fill in bit by bit.
Jung III:
As a structural force that organizes psychic experience, an archetype is not only universal, but especially representative of the psyche’s spiritual dynamisms. Archetypal images are spiritual images. The Seeker, the Trickster, and the others are spiritual potentials to be actualized in reality: the ageless images that Spirit wears to make itself known to us.
Jung IV
As such, the archetype is also a building block of reality, like the tectonic plates on which the continents rest; a fundamental form found everywhere, outside as well as inside (e.g., the spiral pattern, which appears in all cultures and throughout the natural world). There is, therefore, a Trickster quality to all existence as well as a Death quality, a Rebirth quality, Transformation: various faces, one might say, of the ultimately irrepresentable Divine as it turns toward us. Images for That which has no image.
For Jung, our job as individuating (self-realizing) humans is to consciously recognize when one or more of these forces are addressing us—often to shake up and unstick our psychic equilibrium--so we can engage in the dance, the dialog, with Spirit. (This is similar to adapting to the movements of the Tao, meeting various beings along the Pilgrimage of the Soul, being addressed by the Saints or Masters, etc.)
Notice the shift in Jung: from archetype as a universal pattern imprinted upon the mind, to one that comes with the mind, to one that expresses the spirit in images, to one that underlies all reality (e.g., the Tricksterish characteristic of existence). In the end, archetypes for Jung were patterns of potentiality, each of which turns toward us the archetypal face/energy that most needs addressing in our own psyche at a given time: more Trickster for the overly serious, more Beauty for the ascetic, more Divine Child for the favorers of grids and rational schemes. “Take one step toward Allah, and Allah will take two steps toward you.” Or as the comedian Gallagher put it, “Everywhere you leak, Life hangs a bucket.” One of its vehicles for this is myth.