Archetype

The word comes from the Greek arkhetupon, formed from arkhe (beginning, principle) and tupos (imprint, model). The term appears in Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century CE, then in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint Augustine to designate the original ideas in divine thought. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) made it a central concept of his analytical psychology as early as 1919, and developed it systematically in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (a collection published 1934-1954). For Jung, archetypes populate the collective unconscious, a psychic structure common to all humans, distinct from the Freudian personal unconscious. The main archetypes identified are the Anima, the Animus, the Shadow, the Self, the Persona, the Divine Child, the Wise Old Man.

Jung's disciples extended his cartography. Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949) proposed an archetypal genealogy of the psyche. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), articulated world myths around the archetype of the hero's journey. Marie-Louise von Franz applied the archetypal grid to fairy tales. James Hillman founded archetypal psychology, which multiplies the figures and refuses to reduce them to a single grid. The concept has largely spilled beyond clinical psychology to nourish literary criticism, mythocriticism (Gilbert Durand), marketing (Carol Pearson) and contemporary tarot practice (Sallie Nichols, Mary Greer).

In tarot practice, particularly since Sallie Nichols and her Jung and Tarot (1980), each Major Arcanum is generally read as the embodiment of an archetype: the Fool as the archetype of the innocent on the road, the Empress as the Great Mother, the Hanged Man as the initiatory sacrifice, and so on. On Tarotoui, the tarot entries often draw on this Jungian archetypal grid. Recognizing an archetype in a situation helps you step back and understand what is being replayed. Meditative practice can also consist of inwardly dialoguing with an archetypal figure.

The scientific status of the theory of archetypes remains debated. Contemporary cognitive psychologists question the existence of a collective unconscious in the Jungian sense. Confusing archetype with stereotype is a frequent mistake: a stereotype is a frozen cultural image, an archetype a dynamic deep structure. Note also that the list of archetypes is not closed: Jung himself varied in his enumerations.