Archetypes in analytical psychology: a triadic model and its clinical consequences

Abstract

The concept of the archetype occupies a structuring yet persistently ambiguous position within analytical psychology: it designates at once an inherited, unrepresentable disposition and the image that emerges from it in experience. This article reconstitutes the elaboration of the concept in Jung's work, emphasising the distinction between the archetype-as-such and the archetypal image, and proposes a triadic model discriminating three levels of archetypal operation: structural, regulatory and representational. The discussion examines the Jungian position on the unconscious as an autonomous matrix, as opposed to the conception of the unconscious as a repository of discarded contents; it confronts this position with contemporary formulations from the neuroscience of dreaming and with emergentist objections deriving the archetype from experience; and it discusses resonances of the concept in ethology, structural anthropology and linguistics. It is argued that the recurrent conflation of the three levels accounts for much of the criticism directed at Jungian innatism, and that discriminating them bears directly on clinical practice, particularly in the use of expressive techniques and in reading symbolic material along the axes of causality, finality and synchronicity.