Archetype is one of Jung’s two “signature concepts” according to the Jung scholar, Sonu Shamdasani, the other being the collective unconscious with which it is closely linked. Jung states that the collective unconscious is the part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that unlike the latter it does not owe its existence to personal experience. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious “is made up essentially of archetypes” (Jung 1959, p. 42).
Jung first used the term “archetype” in 1919 in his paper “Instinct and the Unconscious”. He states that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words they are “patterns of instinctual behaviour” (Jung 1959, p. 44). He goes on to say, “There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life” (Jung 1959, p. 48). In Jung’s model,...
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Casement, A. (2014). Archetype. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_45
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