Jung on archetypes and archetypal images

Although Jung named his school of thought “analytical psychology,” he might with equal justification have called it “archetypal psychology.” For no other term is more basic to Jungian analysis than “archetype”; and yet no other term has been the source of so much definitional confusion. Part of the reason is that Jung defined “archetype” in different ways at different times. Sometimes, he spoke of archetypes as if they were images. Sometimes, he distinguished more precisely between archetypes as unconscious forms devoid of any specific content and archetypal images as the conscious contents of those forms.

Both Freud and Jung acknowledged the existence of archetypes, which Freud called phylogenetic “schemata“ (1918/1955), or phylogenetic “prototypes” (1927/1961). Philosophically, Freud and Jung were neo-Kantian structuralists who believed that hereditary categories of the psyche imaginatively inform the individual human experience of external reality in typical or schematic ways. Freud (1918/1955) alludes to Kant when he says that the phylogenetic schemata are comparable to “the categories of philosophy” because they “are concerned with the business of 'placing' the impressions derived from actual experience.” He states that the Oedipus complex is “one of them” - evidently one among many - “the best known” of the schemata. He describes the circumstances under which a schema may exert a dominant influence over external reality: