one
of the central concepts employed by Carl Jung in his "The Archetypes of
the Collective Unconscious", and one of his more famous ideas in general,
it that of archetypes. Archetypes are according to Jung a collection of emotionally
charged concepts of forms which are universal in their amorphous shape and more
specific with the content that every culture assigns them with. The deeper you
go in your psychoanalytical inquiry of a certain archetype the more it depersonalizes
and you eventually reach universal human meanings. For Jung, mental problems do
not start nor end with one's specific personality or biography, for they originate
in places that are outside the individual.
Jung
holds that the process of projection is the way through which archetypes can be
identified and revealed. Projection places unwanted mental content such as
memories, fantasies, desires and feelings with outside objects in order to get
rid of them. Before modern times, Jung holds, humans were projecting their
hopes and fears on to the gods which serves as objects for projection.
For
example, if I say about someone that "he is a real monster" what I am
in actual fact referring to is some demonic aspect of my own unconscious (for
Jung – my "shadow" archetype). For Jung the shadow archetype is the
darker and more unknown side of man. In its basic form, the shadow archetype is
the unwanted aspect of the collective unconscious which is rejected,
repressed or projected onto some external object.
Archetypes
for Jung are such projected parts of our mental existence and collective unconscious
which have a universal nature that can take different shapes in different
cultures and different individuals, but always boils down to the same abstract
form of the archetype.
See: list of Jungian Archetypes + short explanations
see also:
See: list of Jungian Archetypes + short explanations
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see also:
