Archetypes and Dreams

The Unconscious

Modern psychology was founded on the idea that, besides their conscious stream of

life, human beings also experience another set of subconscious experiences whose role

in their development is just as important to their fulfillment as human beings, if not more

so. This insight was first articulated in 1889 by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of

Dreams. Freud believed that his patients were expressing neurotic behavior based on

feelings they experienced in infancy. He argued that these emotions survived in an area

of their mind that stored memories, ideas, feelings, fears, and wishes that were

“repressed,” that is, preserved without conscious awareness. Freud felt that, in order to

help his patients deal with neurotic behavior, he must enable them to deal with their

unconscious processes, and that their dreams, which originated from the same source,

could offer signs indicating the content of the unconscious.

Jung, who was a student of Freud, also believed in the

existence and importance of the unconscious, but

explained its function differently from his teacher. Jung felt

that the unconscious contained not only the feelings of the

individual, but also the results of the collective

experience of humankind. He reasoned by analogy with

the other capacities he saw in human beings. That is, a

human baby is born with a range of physical potentialities

that she will develop in the course of maturation: the

ability to walk upright, the power to reason logically, and

the capacity to express herself through a language. Jung

would say that in addition to these “innate” (inborn)

abilities, a human being also is born with the potential to

form archetypal images and express them in dreams and

myths.

Jung’s examination of the structure of the psyche led him to divide the mind into three

major sections which he labeled the conscious ego, the personal unconscious, and the

collective unconscious. The conscious ego consists of self-awareness as well as the

impressions made by both internal and external events. The personal unconscious

consists of all of those impressions that have become unconscious because the

conscious mind no longer specifically focuses upon them. Much of the content of the

personal unconscious remains accessible to the conscious mind in the faculty called

memory, but some of the content may be made unavailable to the conscious mind by

the process of repression if the motives, ideas, or impulses it contains are unacceptable

to the controlling ego. Freud believed the unconscious mind dealt mainly with past

experiences, but Jung discovered that many of the elements in the personal

unconscious were prospective or forward looking. This allows the unconscious mind to

compensate for a conscious mind that tends to be directed towards only a single

solution to a problem. Through dreams, Jung theorized, the unconscious mind is able to

present opposite viewpoints and suggest alternate solutions symbolically. The close

association between myths and reams has often been noted; myths may be understood

as the collective dreaming of a culture.

Jung’s theory of the existence of a collective was one of his greatest departures from

Freudian psychology. Jung suggested that the collective unconscious stores images

and ideas common to all members of the human race. These images predispose

mankind to respond to external phenomena in specific ways. Jung called these images

archetypes after a Greek word which may

be translated as the original source, the

prime imprinter, or the basic form for all

later copies.

Archetypes are the cumulative, inherited

images created by the repeated

experiences of our ancestors. Archetypes

represent the patterns of human life that

are themselves hidden from conscious

perception but which become indirectly

understood through their manifestations in

our conscious mind. In other words, we

can observe the effects of the archetypes

but we cannot directly experience the

archetype itself. Jung believed, therefore,

that the primitive mind did not “invent”

myths but rather it “experienced” them

through the projections of the collective

unconscious.

Theoretically there are no limits to the number of archetypes that may inhabit the

collective unconscious. Through the studies of Jung and his followers and through

examination of the themes in myths, dreams and fantasies, some of the most common

archetypes have been identified.

The great mother archetype, in both its good and evil aspects; the

hero archetype and its opposing and supporting partners; the

shadow, the trickster, the wise old man and the helpful animal; the

divine child; the holy fool; the anima and animus, the female

aspect of a male personality and the male aspect of the female

personality; the persona or public mask behind which we hide our

true selves; and the totality of all of these, the ultimate archetype,

the self.

In the following sections we will examine some of the archetypes.