ABSTRACT
Like all great ideas, the archetypal hypothesis was not entirely original. It has a long and respectable pedigree, which goes back at least as far as Plato. Jung himself acknowledged his debt to Plato, describing archetypes as ‘active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions’ (CW 8, para.154, italics added). For Plato, ‘ideas’ were mental forms which were superordinate to the objective world of phenomena. They were collective in the sense that they embody the general characteristics of groups of individuals rather than the specific peculiarities of one. Thus, a particular dog has qualities in common with all dogs (which enable us to classify him as a dog) as well as peculiarities of his own (which would enable his mistress to pick him out at a dog show). So it is with archetypes: they are common to all humankind, yet we all experience them in our own particular way. But there the similarity ends, for the Jungian archetype is no mere abstract idea but a biological entity, a ‘living organism, endowed with generative force’ (CW 6, para. 6, n. 9), existing as a ‘centre’ in the central nervous system, acting, as we have seen, in a manner very similar to the innate releasing mechanism much later postulated by the ethologist, Niko Tinbergen.
