Jungian Archetypes - Origins

Origins

Jung began seeing patterns in his dreams and daily life in his early age. However, it was not until his later life, when he began piecing them together through archetypes, that he came to understand what these dreams actually meant. These times were covered in the Red Book, and the symbols that the archetypes represented and their origins in detail could be found in a Man and His Symbols. Jung suggested that the archetypes have always existed and will always exist as part of the collective unconscious It is sometimes assumed that people are creating new archetypes. However, they are not actually being created but rather discovered, and the number of archetypes in the world is limitless. Finding new archetypes is a matter of searching deep within one's self. The origins of the archetypal hypothesis date back to Plato. Jung himself compared archetypes to Platonic εἶδος (eidos): Plato's ideas which were pure mental forms imprinted in the soul before born into the world. They were collective in the sense that they embodied the fundamental characteristics of a thing rather than its specific characteristics. In fact, many of Jung's ideas were prevalent in Athenian philosophy. The archetype theory can be seen as a psychological equivalent to the philosophical idea of forms.