3.1 Archetypes and dreams

Carl Jung, c. 1919 advanced the concept of psychological archetypes. An archetype is a model of a person, personality or behavior. Some example archetypes are child, hero, great mother, wise old man, trickster, devil, scarecrow, and mentor. These are just people or people described with adjectives, or could be just an adjective if you change it - for instance devil could be someone who is "devilish" and mother could be someone who is "motherly". What makes the archetypes more significant than just being descriptive, however, is that they are models, there is a deep significance to each archetype. They represent a certain personality, they imply certain traits and characteristics of a person.

For instance, "wise old man" implies that there is a lot associated with that archetype. You could call someone a wise old man, but you could take that further and realize that you are implying a lot about the person by saying that. There is a certain place in our psyche for "wise old men". They have had an impact on who we are, they are a big part of our lives, without "wise old men" society would be completely different. Similarly, without those other example archetypes I mentioned in the previous paragraph, society would be completely different.

For instance, without mothers, obviously society would be different. Maybe that is why mother is described as "a great mother". There is a value placed on mothers in my guess would be every culture on the planet. Old men are often considered to be wise, it is incorporated into our psyche, when we think of old men we might think of a "wise old man". There is an understanding or prejudice in the world that old men are smart, I suppose.

You could really say that a lot of stuff has entered into the psyche of different populations in the world. A new toy could enter into the psyche of american people. When someone mentions this toy, it could bring up a lot of emotion to people. That shows that this toy has entered the psychological makeup of the general population. It is like they have been brainwashed to like the toy. Of course, if someone has not heard of the toy, it would probably not mean anything if I mentioned it. That is why archetypes are significant, because for many many reasons, they are extremely important to people. Obviously the archetypes of mother and child are important, there wouldn't be anyone alive if there weren't mothers and children.

So an archetype is just something that means something to people. There could be a collective archetype, which means something to everyone, or maybe there is something in your life that means a lot to just you. You could have your own personal archetype if you want. Maybe something in your life is very important to you. If you really like dogs you could say that dog is an archetype. Other people might not consider dog an archetype, probably because they don't think it has entered the psyche of the general population, but if you think about it dogs probably have. Dogs are extremely important to people. So archetypes are just things that are complex and significant enough to have their own psychological model associated with them. By that I mean a bunch of various things you could associate with the archetype to show its significance to the human psyche.