Archetype - Jungian Archetypes

Jungian Archetypes

The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, c. 1919. In Jung's psychological framework, archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex ( e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype). Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological constructs that arose through evolution.

Jung outlined five main archetypes:

• The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation,
• The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities with which the ego does not identify, but which it possesses nonetheless,
• The Anima, the feminine image in a man's psyche, or
• The Animus, the masculine image in a woman's psyche,
• The Persona, the image we present to the world, usually protecting the Ego from negative images (like a mask), and considered another of 'the subpersonalities, the complexes'.

Although archetypes can take on innumerable forms, there are a few particularly notable, recurring archetypal images:

Jung also outlined what he called archetypes of transformation, which are situations, places, ways, and means that symbolize the transformation in question. These archetypes exist primarily as energy and are useful in organizational development, personal and organizational change management, and extensively used in place branding.