Archetype

1. Etymology

Archetype comes from Greek archétypon (ἀρχέτυπο): arch (ἀρή)—beginning, first principle, origin—plus typos (τύπος)—blow, impression, stamp, or model. Classically it names a first form from which copies are struck, not the copy itself. What returns in dream and myth is rarely a fixed picture, but a living impression of an older stamp.

Jung traces the word at the opening of Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious: Philo Judaeus (Imago Dei in man); Irenaeus (a creator copying from archetypes outside himself); the Corpus Hermeticum (archetypal light”); Dionysius the Areopagite (immaterial Archetypes”). Augustine does not use the word yet carries the idea as ideae principales. For Jung the modern term paraphrases the Platonic εἶδς and names archaic or primordial types—universal images present since the remotest times. Related forms: archetypal, archetypes; German Urbild (primordial image”) beside Archetypus.

2. Plain summary

An archetype is a deep, shared pattern in the human mindmore like a blank shape waiting to be filled than a finished picture.

Cultures keep telling of someone who leaves home, meets danger, and returns changed. Costumes and names shift; the shape of the journey keeps showing up. People everywhere also seem to know what a mother” figure can feel like—warm, fierce, sheltering, or smothering—even when their own mother was different. That recurring shape is closer to Jung’s meaning than any single story or person.

These are not school facts. They arrive as images, dreams, strong feelings, and myths. You do not invent them from scratch; they belong to the shared background of being human, and take color from each life they enter.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma common archetypal figures and motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):

anima; animus; shadow; self; persona; ego–self axis / supraordinate personality; mother (including Great Mother / Earth Mother / primordial mother); father; child (including divine child / child hero); kore / maiden; hero; wise old man / wise old woman; trickster; spirit; mana-personality; syzygy (anima–animus pair); puer aeternus; senex; coniunctio / sacred marriage motifs; rebirth / night-sea journey motifs; quaternity / mandala as archetypal image of wholeness; Christ as archetype (religious typology); tree as archetypal image; hermaphrodite / androgyne; dragon / treasure-hard-to-attain; watercourse / river-bed metaphor for archetypal channeling of life; primordial image / Urbild; archetypal God-image; archetypal situations (birth, marriage, separation, death); archetypal modes of apprehension (typical ways of perceiving).

3. Academic elucidation

In analytical psychology, an archetype is a formative factor of the collective unconscious: an inherited possibility of representation, not an inherited ready-made idea. Jung distinguishes the archetype as such—a psychoid, irrepresentable regulating principle—from archetypal images, the varied figures through which that principle appears. Myth and dogma often preserve elaborated historical formulae; the living archetype in dream and vision is usually more individual and harder to paraphrase without losing its charge.

Contents of the personal unconscious are chiefly feeling-toned complexes; contents of the collective unconscious are archetypes. Becoming conscious alters the archetype; it takes color from the individual consciousness in which it appears. Close to instinct, Jung’s spectrum simile places physiological dynamism toward the “infra-red” and the instinctual image toward the ultra-violet,” with the archetype marked by a numinous violet” quality—image and dynamism at once. Descent Press keeps Sharp and Samuels in the lexicon section so they never silently become Jung’s voice.

4. Lexicon

Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structureindeed they are its psychic aspect.

It is not … a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas.

(Sharp, 1991, p. [provisional — unverified])

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986)

The archetype is a psychosomatic concept, linking body and psyche, instinct and image. … Archetypes are recognisable in outer behaviours especially around birth, marriage, motherhood, death and separation.

(Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986, p. 26)

5. CW concordance sample, not exhaustive

The contents of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, are known as archetypes.

(Jung, 1934/1968, CW 9i, p. 4, ¶4)

The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.

(Jung, 1934/1968, CW 9i, p. 5, ¶6)

Psychologically, however, the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon.

(Jung, 1947/1969, CW 8, p. 276, 415)

See also: psychoid.

References

Jung, C. G. (1968). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 3–41). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1934; German revised text 1954 in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins, Hull source note-only)

Jung, C. G. (1969). On the nature of the psyche. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 8, p. 276, 415). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1947; cf. editorial first version 1946; German 1954 Hull source — note-only)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.