Understanding Jung’s Archetypes

Copyright © 2019 by Tom Whitehead. All rights reserved.

In my opinion (and the opinion of many others) Jung was one of the greatest psychological theorists of all time. He was brilliant. Even so, when he tried to explain the “archetype” and the “collective unconscious” he had trouble conveying exactly what he meant. As he himself acknowledged, “probably none of my empirical concepts has met with so much misunderstanding as the idea of the collective unconscious.” 2 There are several possible reasons for this communication failure.

The first of these stems from Jung’s being an introvert. He was relatively isolated from the mainstream world of his fellow theorists. This distance carried both advantages and disadvantages. On the advantage side, the gulf between Jung and his peers meant that his ideas were truly his own. And this accounts for much of their originality. On the disadvantage side, genuinely original ideas are easily misunderstood precisely because they are out of the mainstream. They are unfamiliar, and so harder to accept.

A second reason stems from the atmosphere of caustic criticism that was so characteristic of the era in which he wrote. This was the time when behaviorism was in full bloom. Any discussion of intrapsychic life provoked accusations of scientific naiveté and professional ridicule. Given this atmosphere, it’s possible that Jung was motivated, perhaps unconsciously, to keep his ideas out of the reach of critics, and so protect them from misguided attack. In other words, he may have been hiding his conceptual baby from the wolves circling his cabin.

A third reason for the misunderstanding is that despite his impressive intellect, and despite his huge output as a writer, Jung wasn’t super effective at expressing his insights to others in terms they could actually understand.

Finally, as a clinician, Jung wrote mostly about the psychology of humans, rather than animals in general. But as his writings make clear, the concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious apply not just to humans but to all animals. Each and every animal species inherits a collection of such archetypal patterns. The psychology of humans is far more complex than that of most animals. Ironically, he may have been clearer when describing animal archetypes than when describing those of humans.

For these reasons, and perhaps others, Jung’s ideas struck many as esoteric or ineffable. As a 1970s article in the New York Times put it, “his statements about the collective unconscious often seemed vague and won him the label of ‘mystical’ — a euphemism for ‘unscientific and soft-headed.’ ” 3

But Jung wasn’t unscientific. Although the rigid-thinking, behaviorally-minded psychologists of his era largely ignored his work, Jung formulated his concepts to fit careful, real-world observations. The Times article goes on to concede that Jung was “anything but soft-headed, and he saw the hypothesis of a collective unconscious as opening up a whole new territory for psychological research.” 4

Jung’s conclusions about archetypes and the collective unconscious were in no way mystical. As he repeatedly stressed, they are both evidence-based and practical. In fact, Jung felt that the archetype concept is a key that unlocks an understanding of all animal behavior, human or otherwise. I heartily agree.

Psychology: the orphan science

The sciences are all interrelated – except psychology. Physics is connected to chemistry, and chemistry is connected to biochemistry and biology. Even astronomy and geology relate to physics. So where does psychology fit in the grand scheme of science? That has never been clear. We would expect psychology to be linked to biology. And up until the turn of the last century it seemed to be headed in that direction.

Then a bizarre twist of history torpedoed that potential connection: the behaviorist movement bumped psychology into an entirely different trajectory. Behaviorists set out to make psychology a thing in itself, equal in stature to the other sciences, but with no clear connection to any of them.

A perfect example of the disconnect lies in the way behaviorists dealt with animal instincts. Instinct is the single most obvious point of contact between biology and psychology. Instincts clearly guide an animal’s perception and behavior; and it is just as clear that they are part of the animal’s biology. Animal instincts are visibly quite real. It’s obvious that different animals have different instincts, and equally obvious that their instincts shape both their behavior and their psychology. Because these truths are self-evident, the rationale for extending the instinct concept into psychology is something of a no-brainer.

And yet, for about 50 years mainstream psychology insisted that instinctual differences could be safely ignored. Instead, behaviorists focused their efforts on discovering general “laws of learning” that were independent of the instinctual biases of the animals they used in their research.

Strangely – very strangely – behaviorists further proclaimed that the path toward a “real psychology” lay in dismissing anything that was in any way psychological. The behavioral movement banned any consideration of awareness, experience, or consciousness – the very things that had, to that point, been the cornerstones of psychology.

Psychology’s crown

In the end, the behaviorist approach failed to create a “real psychology.” The movement was a bust. It failed largely because behaviorists turned a blind eye to the differences in instinct among the animals they were studying. The link between biology and psychology does lie in instinctual differences. So understanding that link was the very thing that would have guided researchers toward a “real” science. Here’s the irony: Behavioral psychology, metaphorically speaking, was feverishly searching for its missing crown everywhere but on its own head.

That long-sought crown is none other than Jung’s archetype concept. The cluster of archetypes he labeled the “collective unconscious” is the entire set of a species’ instinctual, biologically determined ways of perceiving and behaving. As Jung put it, the instincts “form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is 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.” 5

The archetype is a biological concept extending naturally into psychology, and so it connects biology to psychology. Jung presented this key insight to the psychological community on a silver platter. But to his great frustration he found his colleagues unable to comprehend or accept it.

Is the archetype concept difficult?

The goal of this little essay is to explain archetypes clearly. The basic idea is not really hard to understand. It’s a mistake to prepare for a “difficult” concept. Think of tensing up to lift a heavy boulder, only to find the “boulder” is just a pebble. Your extra effort can shoot the pebble over your head.

An archetype is just an instinctual pattern. It is an inherited predisposition toward a specific way of perceiving, thinking, feeling, or behaving. Like any other part of an animal – a leg or a heart or a liver – it is a legacy bequeathed by all the generations that went before. Jung’s (unnecessarily mysterious) name for the entire collection of inherited forms is “the collective unconscious.”

Jung argued that if animals have instincts – and they obviously do – then these instincts must be imprinted not just in their behaviors, but in their psychology as well. So instincts and archetypes are really part of the same bundle. This is as true for human beings as it is for all other animals.

Jung wrote,

Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists… I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal. This immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind, just as much as the structure of our body is based on the general anatomical pattern of the mammal. 6

The collective unconscious of any particular animal is simply the entire collection of the species’ archetypes. As historian Jacqueline Elliott puts it, the collective unconscious is …

… part of the unconscious mind present in all species with nervous systems, and represents how structure of the psyche organizes experience. It is distinct from the individual unconscious, which is a personal collection of experiences pertinent to that particular person. The collective unconscious contains archetypes and emotionally toned experiences derived from our ancestors which affect our behavior whenever experience simulates a biologically inherited response tendency, and is also responsible for myths, legends, and religious beliefs. 7

Jung stressed over and over that accepting the reality of the collective unconscious is “no more daring than to assume there are instincts.” It should be easy to believe that instincts are expressed not just in our behavior, but in our mental life as well. He wrote, “One admits readily that human activity is influenced to a high degree by instincts, quite apart from the rational motivations of the conscious mind.” 8

Nobody seems to be confused by instincts. We accept them at a common-sense level. Suppose I were to talk politely to a rattlesnake and pat it kindly on the head. Would anyone be shocked if it bit me anyway? Its behavior is guided by its instincts, and those instincts are common to its species. Striking in that way is part of the rattlesnake’s nature. We have to assume that the idea of a “threat” is somewhere in the snake’s inherited psychology, in its collection of inherited archetypes. It experienced me as a threat despite my kind words, and dealt with me accordingly.

When my dog barks at my neighbors, I may be irritated, but I’m not surprised. My dog’s behavior is guided by its instincts. And those instincts are common to its species. We have to assume that somewhere in the dog’s inherited psychology, in its collective unconscious, is the idea of an “intruder on its territory.” The dog perceives the neighbors as intruders, and acts accordingly. That’s not really confusing either.

We can apply the same idea to people. To illustrate, most of us perceive some of our peers as “friends,” and others as “enemies.” Humans do this, and do it in a way that’s pretty much the same from person to person. The readiness to classify others this way is part of our archetypal heritage. The ability to experience “friends” and “enemies” implies that the readiness to see others this way is built into us. These images are part of our collective unconscious.

That shouldn’t be confusing. But apparently it is. Especially mind-blowing, it seems, is Jung’s insistence that we remain completely unaware of our archetypes until they become actual thoughts, percepts, or behaviors. Though archetypes shape all our ideas, and though they are the backbone of our every mental image, they are neither ideas nor images themselves. Yeah, that’s an uncommon idea. And one that definitely adds to the confusion. Omnipresent but unconscious. Whatever could Jung be saying?

“Forms” of experience

The paragraph that follows is one of Jung’s many attempts to reveal the nature of the archetype. Each sentence is entirely accurate. Is the end result greater clarity?

The archetypes, which are pre-existent to consciousness and condition it, appear in the part they actually play in reality: as a priori structural forms of this stuff of consciousness. They do not in any sense represent things as they are in themselves, but rather the forms in which things can be perceived and conceived. Naturally, it is not merely the archetypes that govern the particular nature of perceptions. They account only for the collective component of a perception. As an attribute of instinct they partake of its dynamic nature, and consequently possess a specific energy which causes or compels definite modes of behavior or impulses; that is, they may under certain circumstances have a possessive or obsessive force … 9

Though it is technically accurate, you could easily get heartburn trying to digest this “clarification.” Jung’s illuminations frequently failed to illuminate. Yet in the above paragraph he comes maddeningly close to communicating what he really means! He says archetypes are “a priori structural forms.” If only he had used the analogy of an actual paper form! He could have compared an archetype to a literal form, a sheet of paper with blank spaces waiting to be filled in. That really would have made things clearer. Everybody understands forms! That’s something we’ve all experienced, something to which each of us can relate.

When all the spaces are filled the whole becomes an object with meaning. It becomes a real tax return, your tax return. When Jung uses the word “forms,” this is exactly the kind of thing he is talking about. An archetype is a structure already set up to contain an experience, an inherited blank form that hasn’t been filled in yet. It can be filled in many different ways. The form itself never changes. It can’t change, because it’s part of the inherited structure of the brain. Yet each different filling will become a separate, distinct experience. And not until the form is filled in with data will it enter our awareness. Only then will it become a conscious thought or image, or an actual behavior.

These “blank forms” are the instinctual predispositions reflecting the way an animal’s ancestors have gone about making their living in the world. Forms waiting behind the scenes, so to speak. Each is a thing that will not come alive until it acquires content. The blank form is the unconscious archetype; the filled-in form is the conscious image or percept, or the concrete behavior. The structure exists before the experience.

Here’s a concrete example. All primates are born with brains “pre-wired” to recognize faces (and hands, and presumably other body parts). That is, there is a form built into the neural structure of the primate brain that transforms a certain set of incoming stimuli into “a face.” And another structure that enables the subjective experience of “a hand.” 10

People are primates. Babies are fascinated by faces as soon as they are born. Over the course of a person’s life he or she will come to know many different faces. Though each face is a different experience, all are based on the same brain structure. Should that structure be destroyed through illness or injury (as sometimes unfortunately does happen), the individual would no longer recognize a friend’s face even if staring directly into it. The data would still be coming in through the eyes to the brain. They would still see something there. But without the archetypal form to contain the data and give it meaning, that something wouldn’t be “a face.”

The same is true of animal activities. We know that both dogs and people come into the world instinctively equipped to recognize certain activities as “play,” and other activities as “serious.” The classification is based on archetypes. Neither dogs nor people have to learn that distinction. The archetypes stay out of our awareness until they become actual experiences of one sort or the other.

Archetypes and OOP

Comparing archetypes to blank forms helps clarify how psychological structure can exist without there being anything definite in awareness. Surely Jung must have had experiences with paper forms, so we might wonder why he didn’t use the analogy.

But in modern times, in the computer era, we can make use of an analogy that’s even more accurate. Computers didn’t exist in Jung’s time, and neither did computer programming. So he had no opportunity to compare archetypes to the “classes” of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Archetypes and OOP classes are amazingly similar.

As one programming textbook puts it, a class serves as “a blueprint or archetype” 13 for a general category of specific computer behaviors.

An OOP class is like a blank form that hasn’t been filled out yet. Until it is filled out, it’s nothing. It doesn’t make anything happen on the computer. But when properly filled out it springs to life as an active “object,” a computer activity that is one instance of the class. An example will help clarify the relationship between an OOP class and an object of that class.

Suppose a programmer is writing the code for an auto-racing game. She might set up a class that she names “Vehicle.” Her Vehicle class is like a form that hasn’t been filled out yet. It might have blank spaces for Make, Model, Engine Power, Color, Special Equipment, Weight, and so on. 14 When she has finished writing the code for the class, she can create objects of that class simply by filling in all the blanks. Each time they are filled in, a newly created vehicle will spring to life on the screen. The class itself is only a structure, a blank form. But the vehicles, objects of the class, are real. Each becomes an actual car on the computer screen, one that looks and handles like the one she has defined. 15

The Vehicle class can be filled out or “instantiated” as additional objects as many times as the programmer wishes. She doesn’t have to create the class again. She can if she wants, and without any additional work, create hundreds of cars of different types. Each time she fills in the blank spaces with different information, an additional car appears on the screen. And the new car will look and act very differently from the others. Yet all of the cars are objects of the same class. That single class can – without any coding changes – be used to instantiate a Ferrari, or a 10-ton truck, or any one of thousands of other vehicles. 16

Setting up a reusable Vehicle class takes a lot of work up front. But it’s worth it, because from then on the programmer is home free. She can use the Vehicle class to create any kind of car she wants. Each new car object is just another instance of that single Vehicle class. So the relationship between the single class and the many instantiated objects is just like the one that exists between a single unconscious archetype and the many conscious mental images based upon that archetype.

OOP classes are forms without content – blueprints for something that can become real. But they don’t become real objects until they are instantiated, until they have been fleshed out with specific data.

This is just the way Jung’s archetypes work. They are forms that can be instantiated as often as needed. Archetypes aren’t actual experiences until fleshed out to become specific percepts, concepts, or behaviors. And instantiating an archetype doesn’t change it in any way. Each is an inborn pattern, a form we don’t experience until it is given concrete expression. Archetypes are universal internal blueprints for the percepts, ideas, figures, emotions, and actions that have been important in the lives of our ancestors. We re-use these blueprints as required to assist us in our survival – much as the programmer instantiates new cars that express her Vehicle class.

Is this just an analogy?

I have expressed the idea that OOP classes are a wonderful analogy for Jung’s archetypes. But when an analogy is point-for-point perfect, we start to wonder if it’s more than an analogy. We can explain the flight of an airplane through analogy to the flight of a bird. Both plane and bird have wings, both can sail through the air, both must expend energy to sustain their flight. Although a plane is certainly not a bird, comparing the two can aid our understanding. So it’s sensible to compare them. On the other hand, it is not sensible to say that robins or seagulls or finches are like birds. They aren’t just like birds; they are birds.

When something is like something else, we can use one in an analogy to help us understand the other. But when two things are very, very similar we usually decide they are two instances of the same thing. I hope I have made it clear that Jung’s archetypes are indeed very, very similar to OOP classes. So I’d like to suggest that archetypes actually are OOP classes.

If archetypes are OOP classes, they somehow came into being without a human OOP programmer. Classes are composed by humans, but humans didn’t create their own archetypes. So some would argue that they can’t be the same thing. But that’s just a variant of the “intelligent design” argument, the one used by people who reject evolution by natural selection. Some folks can’t fathom how any of the complex features of living things could have evolved naturally. The vast majority of scientists, on the other hand, do believe even the most complex biological features were created through natural selection.

The behavior of lower animals like jellyfish, bacteria, and insects is rigidly programmed by evolution. Lower animals live a kind of robotic life. There is much more flexibility in the behavior of higher animals – animals like dogs, rats, horses, and people. Their flexibility depends entirely upon their inborn archetypes, the very insight Jung was trying to convey. Higher animals inherit not specific behaviors, but forms of behavior that can be instantiated in different ways through individual learning. Everything we see, think, or do begins with an inborn archetype. We flesh out that instinctive pattern by filling in blanks through our personal learning. Our every act starts with an archetype framework, is developed through individual learning, and ends as an established habit.

In striking contrast to what the behaviorists believed, Jung held that learning is not simply a matter of behavioral sequences being written on the blank slate of memory through “reinforcement.” All parts of our human behavior – including our experiences – are pre-structured by our inborn archetypes. Psychologist David Elkind expressed this truth rather poetically, describing our daily lives as a myth bequeathed to us by our ancestors – “a drama, if you will – in which archetypal characters, themes, plots and settings play a considerable role.” 17 Though the variety of human experience is staggeringly complex, each object within that variety is rooted in the standard equipment of an unchanging archetype. In Jung’s words,

There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will … 18

A happy ending

Jung may not have convinced the scientists of his era that his insights would prove central to the development of a scientific psychology. But he himself did not doubt it, and neither do I. Toward the end of his life he expressed deep satisfaction with his contribution.

Thus my task was finished, my work done, and now it can stand. The moment I touched bottom, I reached the balance of scientific understanding, the transcendental, the nature of the archetype per se, concerning which no further scientific statements can be made. 19

Notes and references

1. Jung CG. John Freeman interviews Professor Jung at his home in Switzerland. Face-to-Face: Carl Gustav Jung (1959). Published October 10, 2017. Available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AMu-G51yTY&t=1008s
2. Jung CG. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press, New York, 1990. Page 42.
3. Elkind D. Freud, Jung and the Collective Unconscious. The New York Times Archives, 1970. Page 218. Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/04/archives/freud-jung-and-the-collective-unconscious-jungs-has-been-the-only.html
4. Elkind D, 1970. Page 218.
5. Jung CG, 1990. Paragraph 91, page 43.
6. Jung CG. Approaching the unconscious. Chapter in CG Jung (ed.) Man and His Symbols. Dell Publishing, 1968. Page 57.
7. Elliott, Jacqueline. Biographical documentary on the life and work of Carl Jung. A video in the series “The People Profiles,” published August 19, 2018. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnDEU96SdQ8
8. Jung CG, 1990. Paragraph 92, page 44.
9. Jung CG. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage books, New York, 1961. Page 347.
10. Gross C. Single neuron studies of inferior temporal cortex. Neuropsychologia, 2008, 46, 3, 841-52. Page 844.
11. See for example Lutz M. Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming. O’Reilly Media, Inc. 2013.
12. See for example Flanagan D. and Matsumoto Y. The Ruby Programming Language. O’Reilly, 2008.
13. Boudreaux TJ. PHP 5: Your visual blueprint for creating open source, server-side content. Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis IN, 2005. Page 194. In this introductory text for the object-oriented programming language PHP the author notes that “Objects are created, or instantiated, from a class definition. You can think of a class as a blueprint or archetype from which tangible instances are created.”
14. The details in this example are not very realistic, as it is contrived simply for illustration of the concept.
15. These things happen because the programmer has tediously set up code to make them happen. For example, the Color variable is set up to display one of a variety of screen colors, and the Model variable causes a pre-programmed vehicle shape to be displayed. Setting up a class is quite labor intensive. But once that work is done, the class can with virtually no additional effort be used to create a variety of different instances (objects of that class).
16. Each new vehicle behaves the way it does because it operates within an environment simulating certain features of the physical world like gravity, inertia, and friction. Going into all that here would only muddy the illustration.
17. Elkind D, 1970. Page 218.
18. Jung CG, 1990. Paragraph 99, page 48.
19. Jung CG, 1961. Page 221.