Methodology

This is a reference about what has been written, not a claim about what is true. Every entry is built the same way, and the structure is enforced by the publishing tools rather than left to the author.

Three registers

History. What was written, by whom, when, and in which text. For Jung this means Collected Works volume and paragraph numbers. This register is defensible as scholarship: the record is documented and uncontested.

The debate. The peer-reviewed disagreement about what an archetype is: the innatist account, the emergent and developmental account, and the imaginal account. It is presented as a live disagreement, because it is one.

Empirical status. One short line per entry. For most entries it reads “none”, because no named archetype has been tested as a psychological construct. The field’s own leading theorists have set aside the claim that archetypes are inherited genetically. One narrow effect, a recall advantage for matched symbol–meaning pairs, has replicated, and its authors offer non-archetypal explanations for it.

Five tiers

Classical is Jung’s own set. Post-Jungian covers the analysts who extended it. Authored taxonomy is every later list: the twelve, the four, the seventy-four, the brand wheels. Archetypal reading is the use of archetype as an interpretive method in culture, including readings of artificial intelligence. Proposed is reserved and currently empty. This site does not propose archetypes of its own.

What this site never does

• Present any list, Jung’s included, as “the archetypes”.
• Present any instrument as validated.
• Reproduce an author’s descriptions, questionnaires, diagrams or arrangements. We name, tabulate and describe in our own words, and quote briefly with attribution.

Applied psychoanalysis in the humanities tends, as one reviewer put it, to degenerate into wild psychoanalysis. The provenance block on every entry is the guard against that.