About Archetypes

Jung believed that psychic energy is fundamentally instinctual, and it is organized around archetypes.

For instance, The Mother archetype channels the instinct to nurture and protect into a mother. There is a Father archetype that channels instincts into fathers. We all have different ideas about exactly what a mother or father is because we have all had different experiences of them.

There is a psychic galaxy where there are archetypes instead of suns and experiences and associations instead of planets, moons, asteroids, comets et al. rotating around them.

There are external archetypes, like the Mother and Father, which are about roles in the world and there are internal archetypes, like the ego, shadow, persona, anima and animus which are about the internal structure of psyche and are analogous to the forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, et al) because they determine how the elements of our psychic world interact with each other.  For instance, if it is very important to me that I impress someone, I might experience them through my Persona, which is the image I try to present to the world.

We have varying degrees of awareness of our psychic galaxy and how it interacts with our actual lives.

The Anima (in men) and Animus (in women) are the archetypes of the sexual opposite.   For a woman, her Animus is the way her unconscious male sexual instincts engage the world and for a man, his Anima is the way his unconscious female instincts engage the world.

There is a tension between the ego and the Anima/us because a lot of what is unconscious are things we (our ego) don’t want to deal with.  So, while his Anima may be trying to connect a man to his relatedness, relatedness may be something of which he is terrified and has been avoiding his whole life.

This tension can be very draining if the person winds up switching back and forth, choosing to be either relational or non-relational. 

Instead of letting this either-or switching drain energy, growth comes about by choosing to be both-and: both relational and non-relational.

Holding that contradiction stirs up unconscious material.  And while that unconscious material is being processed and put to rest, a third psychological state emerges that can peacefully hold the both-and.

The resolution of a tension of opposites is a basic process of psychological growth. We grow when our psychic space gets bigger and it gets bigger when we add new psychological states.