Discussion Jungs Concept and Archetypal Image

Discussion Jungs Concept and Archetypal Image essay assignment

Discussion Jungs Concept and Archetypal Image essay assignment

We will discuss the following questions:

How do you understand Jung’s concept of ‘archetype.’
What has been the major archetypal image or theme in your life?
Be aware that the concept of the archetype is different from virtually every other major concept in psychology. It is less personal and more collective. So look for your archetype in myths, legends, roles, or themes in films or novels that have impacted you.

Base your choice on the discussion of archetypes in the text. Do not rely on the popular treatments of the concept that are so popular on the internet.

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Jung initially worked with fellow psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose 1899 work The Interpretation of Dreams had attached significance to the recurring themes and motifs in people’s dreams, and sought to understand their relevance to subjects’ psyches and their mental wellbeing.1

However, Jung and Freud later took different paths, with the former disagreeing with Freud’s emphasis on the influence of biological factors such as libido on behavior and personality.

Instead, Jung looked at areas of the mind that constitute the psyche, and the way in which they influenced one another. He distinguished the persona, or the image of ourselves that we present to the world, from our shadow, which may be comprised of hidden anxieties and repressed thoughts. Jung also noted the relationship between our personal unconscious, which contains an individual’s personal memories and ideas, and a collective unconscious, a set of memories and ideas that is shared amongst all of humanity. Shared concepts, which Jung described as archetypes, permeate the collective unconscious and emerge as themes and characters in our dreams and surface in our culture – in myths, books, films and paintings, for example.

Jung felt that disunity among thoughts in the personal subconscious and the conscious could create internal conflicts which could lead to particular personality traits or anxieties. Such inner conflicts could be resolved, claimed Jung, by allowing repressed ideas to emerge into the conscious and accommodating (rather than destroying) them, thus creating a state of inner harmony, through a process known as individuation.

In this article we will look at Jung’s theories on psychoanalysis and the most significant of his archetypes, and will see how his ideas influenced modern psychology.

Personal Unconscious
Jung’s idea of the personal unconscious is comparable to the unconscious that Freud and other psychoanalysts referred to. To Jung, it is personal, as opposed to the collective unconscious, which is shared amongst all persons.

The personal unconscious contains memories which are unaware we still possess, often as a result of repression.

As we exist in a conscious state, we do not have direct access to our personal unconscious, but it emerges in our dreams or in a hypnotic state of regression.

Collective Unconscious
The collective unconscious is key to Jung’s theories of the mind as it contains the archetypes.

Rather than being born as a tabula rasa (a ‘blank slate’ in Latin) and being influenced purely by our environment, as the English philosopher John Locke believed, Jung proposed that we are each born with a collective unconscious. This contains a set of shared memories and ideas, which we can all identify with, regardless of the culture that we were born into or the time period in which we live. We cannot communicate through the collective unconscious, but we recognize some of the same ideas innately, including archetypes.

For example, many cultures have cultivated similar myths independently of one another, which feature similar characters and themes, such as the creation of the universe.

Archetypes
Jung noted that within the collective unconscious there exist a number of archetypes which we can all recognize. An archetype is the model image of a person or role and includes the mother figure, father, wise old man and clown/joker, amongst others. The mother figure, for example, has caring qualities; she is dependable and compassionate. We all hold similar ideas of the mother figure and we see her across cultures and in our language – such as the term ‘mother nature’.