Inside the Archetypal Field: Jung, Jacobi & Whitmont on What Moves Beneath the Mind

Artist: Jake Baddeley

Field Notes:
The Essential Jung by Anthony Storr

Jung makes a distinction between a “big dream” and an “ordinary dream.” Such “motifs," he says, are typically “highly impressive,” “numinous,” and “analogous or even identical to mythology.” Jung refers to these patterns as “structures,” and he then names them archetypes (p. 65).

Jung provides an anecdote about a patient’s dream of a “sun phallus.” Later, he discovers a myth thought to be from the “Mithraic cult” resembling similar structures to the man's dream. He correlates these matching images with archetypes that appear from what he calls the “collective unconscious” (pp. 66-67).

“Since the collective unconscious is common to all men, archetypal manifestation can be demonstrated in the normal as well as in the insane” (p. 68).

Jung is making observations of a through-line between energy and archetypal images: “the idea of energy and its conservation must be a primordial image that was dormant in the collective unconscious” (p. 69).

He cites Lovejoy’s term “primitive energetics,” “which are characterized by the release of affects,” related to images such as “soul, spirit, God …” (p. 69).

Jung provides a psychotherapeutic insight upon reflecting on a period during which he was “wrought up” by dysregulated emotions. He goes on to describe a possible critique with the Eastern Yogic approach to regulating psycho-somatic affects, not until he “abandoned this restraint,” and “allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh,” to the extent he translated “the emotions into images,” did he feel “inwardly calmed and reassured” (p. 79).

Love this: Jung attempts to clarify common confusion “that an archetype is determined in regard to its content …” He goes on to make a metaphysical analogy by comparing the structural makeup of a crystal forming inside a liquid having “no material existence of its own” to a framework from which an archetype, paradoxically, is, but simultaneously, is not.

This suggests that an archetype may provide a psychological representation for the physics of particles in superposition—an a priori state of infinite possibilities before content floods into the forming image, energizing a pattern to play out in a definitive way we experience as reality nano second by nano second.

“The archetype in itself is empty … nothing but a faculties praeformandi (pre-formed faculties), a possibility of representation which is given a priori” (p. 84).

Complex, Archetype, Symbol by Jolande Jacobi

Jacobi argues “the archetype” did not arise from “organic life, but … with life itself.” Dwelling only in the “shadow realm, the collective unconscious.” We can only have “indirect knowledge, precisely through our encounter …” (p. 32).

Only when expressed by individual psychic material and takes form does it become psychic and enter into the area of consciousness” (p.35). Sounds like a psychological quantum superposition.

The unconscious is the storehouse where the “totality of all archetypes” is deposited from the "remotest beginnings” that function as “systems of readiness for action,” and “images and emotions” (pp. 36-37).

Jacobi argues that archetypes are pattern images formed from instincts or instinctual patterns, similar to the instinctual patterns of animals (pp. 41-45).

On one hand, “The archetypes are not inherited images,” on the other hand, Jacobi states “the archetype is inherited form,” at first by no specific contents …” (p. 53).

Beautifully said, “For out of it, through the archetype, speaks the unfalsified voice of nature, beyond the judgment of the conscious mind and uninfluenced by the injunctions and prohibitions of the environment which leaves its deposit in the personal unconscious” (p. 60).

Jacobi contends that archetypes are not a “tangible foundation” because they “transcend consciousness.” (pp. 60-61).

She describes archetypal synchronicity “as an organizer of representations, … as a kind of regulator and organizing factor.” combined with “intensified emotionality … for the emergence and experience of synchronistic phenomena” to occur (p. 64).

Archetypes like complexes are bipolar and possess a positive and negative pole.

Jacobi ends her chapter on archetypes, quoting Jung He offers a warning against “cutting loose from our archetypal foundations,” likening the separation to psychological suicide and a cause to all kinds of neurotic and psychotic disorders.

Why? Because archetypes have an “ordering effect” on the psychic life. From a lifespan developmental view, the medical model “disorder” in psychological life may stem from a malordered “configurational process” of archetypal movement between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

Because they are the “protectors” like the archetypal Ganesha, who destroys every blockage, but can “bridge every split.”

The elixir, “He who speaks with the “primordial images” speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the time he lifts the idea he is trying to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring” (Jung, C.W. 15).

The Symbolic Quest by Edward Whitmont

Whitmont circles back to his “as if” archetypal patterns, which appear in personal dreams, pointing toward living the “individual myth.” He discusses religions and mythologies to express the recurring ordering pattern of these “primordial images” (pp. 84-102).

I especially liked the sad story of the girl who was executed by the Nazi’s for playing a part in the student rebellion, who dreamed of helping a child during her descent into the abyss before her death.

I am particularly interested in Whitman’s stages of actualization, from childhood to adulthood, mid-life, and the concrete and the symbolic, as a journey of archetypal misconfigurations or configurations leading towards or away from individuation (pp. 115-133).

References

Jung, C. G. (1968). The essential Jung (A. Storr, Ed.). Princeton University Press.

Jacobi, J. (1959). Complex, archetype, symbol in the psychology of C. G. Jung. Princeton University Press.

Whitmont, E. C. (1969). The symbolic quest: Basic concepts of analytical psychology. Princeton University Press.