Proof Of Carl Jung’s Archetypes — The Universal Complexes Of Collective Unconscious
Archetypes are archaic images and complexes that are a part of the collective unconscious common to all of humanity. The word archetype is derived from two Greek words — arche and tupos. Arche means first and original and tupos mean type or nature that share a common origin.
The endless repetition of responses, behaviors, and events throughout humanity’s evolution has engraved these experiences into a psychic constitution, giving it a form and character, creating an archetype. It gets activated like an instinctual drive superseding reason and will, and triggering the psyche’s association with the archetypal character.
Also called “motifs” in mythological research, “representations collectives” by Levy-Bruhl, “categories of imagination” by Hubert & Mauss, and “elementary or primordial thoughts” by Adolf Bastian.
Carl Jung who extensively researched this subject proposed ten basic archetypes — self, anima and animus, shadow, persona, the mother, the child, the wise old man, hero, and the trickster figure.
Proof of Archetypes
You can witness archetypal expression via symbolism though it differs subjectively and is tinted by the individual consciousness in which it appears. Jung found their manifestation in dreams, folklore, myths, fairytales, religious and cultural symbols, and in the visions of his neurotic patients, etc.
Dreams are a reliable source since they are involuntary, spontaneous products of the unconscious that are not altered by conscious purpose. Dreams reveal what the conscious mind cannot see. Some of these symbols are intrapersonal while others have no personal significance to the dreamer. The latter are archetypal symbols that coincide with the functioning of the archetype known from historical sources.
Active imagination is another method that can be used to trigger archetypal content. The individual should deliberately stimulate a sequence of fantasies significant to him — a chance, idea, or a motif from a previous dream until the allegory is revealed. This will in turn trigger the frequency of the archetypal images in dreams.
Another interesting source material Carl Jung discovered was in the delusions of his paranoiac patients. One of his patients — a paranoid schizophrenic was standing at the window swaying his head from side to side claiming to see the sun’s penis moving to and fro, from where apparently the wind came from. Failing to make sense of it at that point Jung noted it down. Four years later, during his mythological studies, he came upon a book by Albrecht Dieterich — a philologist who discovered a Mithraic ritual published in papyrus. The text read the following directions:
“Draw breath from the rays, draw in three times as strongly as you can and you will feel yourself raised up and walking towards the height, and you will seem to be in the middle of the aerial region….The path of the visible gods will appear through the disc of the sun, who is God my father. Likewise, the so-called tube, the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube. And towards the regions westward it is as though there were an infinite east wind. But if the other wind should prevail towards the regions of the east, you will in like manner see the vision veering in that direction.”
The Broader Context Of Archetypes
Imagine an individual who received little or no societal conditioning during her growing-up years. Perhaps she was brought up in the middle of a forest or at the top of a mountain away from civilization. What do you think will structure her personality development that lacks a considerable amount of societal conditioning?
It is her instincts of course that will guide her in life, form neurological patterns, and consequently activate an archetype.
Infact, the concept of archetypes itself was proposed as a refutation to John Locke’s Tabula Rasa theory that people are born with a blank mental state.
“The instincts are not vague and indefinite by nature, but are specifically formed motive forces which, long before there is any consciousness, and in spite of any degree of consciousness later on, pursue their inherent goals. Consequently they form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close in fact, that there is a good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behavior.” — Carl Jung
Archetypes are however often confused with personality types. You see personality types are a classification mechanism whereas archetypes are universal elements of the collective unconsciousness of humanity. While archetypes influence the formation of personality, the vice-versa is not true.
From a broader perspective, the archetypal blueprint is the primordial image from which the entire universe emerges.
For instance, the anima — feminine energy in males, and animus — masculine energy in females is a universal representation of the energy. Its expression can be observed in the congruency of geometrical and physical manifestation of consciousness. The flower of life pattern, for instance, contains the shapes that form the building blocks of life itself — the five platonic solids, the seed of life, the tree of life, and Metatron’s cube. It represents the cycle of creation from the beginning to the end. The creation itself is the feminine energy interweaved in the geometry of the universe and vice versa. The geometry forms the pattern for the physical manifestation of consciousness.
Every physical matter has an energetic blueprint called by Rupert Sheldrake the “morphogenetic field” that forms patterns on otherwise random patterns of activity. Vladimir Poponin — a scientist at The Russian Academy of Sciences conducted a DNA Phantom Effect experiment that provided solid evidence for the morphogenetic field and Jungian archetypes.
In a vacuum glass tube consisting only of photons scattered randomly, a piece of human DNA was inserted. What the photons did was indeed remarkable! They arranged themselves into a pattern around the DNA and remained so even after the DNA was removed. We can thus safely conclude that our DNA has an energetic field that serves as a primer for biological expression. Genomic priming is the phenomenon via which the memories and experiences of our ancestors are passed down hereditarily.
This makes Jung’s theory of archetypes a legitimate, valid, and potentially powerful theory. Learning about these archetypes will open avenues for deep self-exploration. You will become aware of the archetypal character at play in your life and can use this knowledge to harness the full expression of your archetype.
