archetype.guide

Concept

Archetype and archetypal image

In Jung’s later usage, the archetype is an unrepresentable organising form and the archetypal image is what that form looks like once experience has filled it. The distinction dates from 1946 and was never settled.

The form is never drawn. Images drift in and are gathered onto it, so it shows only as their arrangement; then they are let go and a different set gathers on the same form.

What was written

Definition

Jung used “archetype” for a recurring pattern in the psyche that he believed to be common to all people, and “archetypal image” for the concrete form in which such a pattern shows up in a dream, a myth, a symptom or a work of art. From 1946 he insisted the two should be kept apart. The archetype as such has no content of its own and cannot be perceived directly; only its effects can be seen, and those effects are the images. A mother figure in a fairy tale, a dragon in a dream and a goddess on a temple wall would, on this account, be three images of one form.

The distinction matters because it is Jung’s answer to an objection he faced for thirty years: if images vary so much from culture to culture, what exactly is inherited? His reply was that the form is inherited and the content is not. Whether that reply works is the central dispute in the post-Jungian literature, and this site presents it as a dispute, not a settled definition.

History

The idea arrived before the word. In the 1912 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido Jung analysed a young woman’s fantasies against mythological parallels, and spoke of “primordial images”, a phrase he took from the historian Jacob Burckhardt. By 1917 he was describing the collective unconscious as expressing itself through “dominants”, nodal points around which imagery gathered. The word “archetype” itself first appears in the 1919 essay “Instinct and the Unconscious”, where Jung calls archetypes inborn forms of intuition and describes the primordial image as the instinct’s perception of itself.

It is this factor that I call the archetype or the primordial image. The primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct’s perception of itself, or as the self-portrait of the instinct. — C. G. Jung, “Instinct and the Unconscious” (1919), CW 8 ¶277, as quoted in Stevens (2003)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

For the next quarter century Jung used “archetype” and “primordial image” almost interchangeably. The split came with the 1946 Eranos lecture published in 1947 as “On the Nature of the Psyche”. There he distinguished the archetype as such, which he called psychoid, from the archetypal representations that reach consciousness, and he complained that readers kept taking archetypes for inherited ideas.

One must constantly bear in mind that what we mean by “archetype” is in itself irrepresentable, but that it has effects which enable us to visualize it, namely, the archetypal images. — C. G. Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche” (1947), CW 8 ¶417, as quoted in Stevens (2003)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

In the essays gathered as The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious he reached for a crystal: the axial system fixes the structure of a crystal but not the concrete shape of any individual one (CW 9i ¶155). Elsewhere he called the archetype an unknowable nucleus that “never was conscious and never will be”, which “was, and still is, only interpreted” (CW 9i ¶266, as quoted in Samuels 1985).

Jungian scholars reading the whole run of texts find more than one concept. Jean Knox (2003) identifies four models that recur and merge in Jung’s writing: biological entities hardwired in the genes; abstract organising frameworks with no representational content; core meanings that do carry content; and metaphysical entities. Christian Roesler (2012), writing in the field’s flagship journal, finds four partly incompatible framings, biological, statistical, transcendental and cultural, and concludes that Jung never produced a consistent definition. He also argues that the 1946 split does not rescue the concept, since an archetype like the hero cannot plausibly be called free of content. The most recent peer-reviewed treatment concedes that post-Jungians have not arrived at a unified definition either (Dale and Howe, 2026).

The disagreement is live. One camp holds the inherited, biological reading (Stevens, Goodwyn). Another reads archetypes as emergent patterns built on a few embodied image schemas, learned early because every infant meets the same basic conditions (Knox, Hogenson, Merchant). A third places archetypes in imagination alone and disowns biology (Hillman). This site’s entries cite where each view is set out and do not adjudicate between them.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1919). Instinct and the unconscious. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8 ¶263–282. Princeton University Press. The first use of “archetype” is at ¶270 and the self-portrait passage at ¶277, as cited in Stevens (2003) and Roesler (2012).
  • Jung, C. G. (1947/1954). On the nature of the psyche. CW 8 ¶343–442. The irrepresentability passage is at ¶417, as quoted in Stevens (2003).
  • Jung, C. G. (1934–1954). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i. The crystal analogy is at ¶155 and the “only interpreted” passage at ¶266, as quoted in Stevens (2003) and Samuels (1985).
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 2, “Archetype and complex”, on the 1917 dominants and the 1946 distinction.
  • Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9.
  • Knox, J. (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-129-7. Chapter 2 sets out the four models; chapter 3 the image-schema account.
  • Roesler, C. (2012). Are archetypes transmitted more by culture than biology? Questions arising from conceptualizations of the archetype. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57(2), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5922.2011.01963.x
  • Dale, R., & Howe, E. (2026). Affective neuroscience implications for the Jungian self and archetypes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 71(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.70086