ABSTRACT
One of the most essential components of the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung is the concept of archetypes. In this chapter the concept of archetypes is described in detail in order to better understand the processes that can occur between grandparents and grandchildren. Jung struggled for a definition of the archetypes throughout his whole life. There are very different and conflicting observations and definitions in his work regarding the concept and the nature of the archetype. One of the results is that today different tendencies in analytical psychology have emerged (for an overview, see Hogenson, 2004a; Knox, 2003; Roesler, 2012a). Jung’s point of view was influenced by different scientific perspectives in the early twentieth century – on the one hand from the philosophy of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but on the other hand he was also open to the biological approach of Darwin or Lamarck, and later to the physical conceptions of Pauli. Moreover, Jung, as Freud, stands in the tradition of psychiatric Romanticism and the philosophy of nature, according psychiatry and psychology historian Henri F. Ellenberger (Ellenberger, 2011). One has to keep these various influences in mind when it comes to Jung’s perspective of the concept of archetypes. Jung makes a key difference that he maintains in his work: he distinguishes the archetype per se from the archetypal image. He assigns to the archetype per se an a priori structure, which is inherent to humans of all ages and characterizes our perception possibilities. With the use of the terms ‘a priori’ and ‘per se’ the epistemological influence of Kant is proven with the distinction of an unexperienced thing in itself (‘natura archetypa’) and the phenomena perceived with our senses (‘natura
ectypa’) without Jung having done this intentionally or getting deeply into it. The archetype in itself is abstract and unconscious – and transcendent. Jung writes in 1947 in On the Nature of the Psyche: ‘it seems to me probable that the real nature of the archetype is not capable of being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I call it psychoid’ (Jung, 1947, §417). On the other hand, he uses scientific analogies from physics and chemistry for the definition of the archetypes. In 1919 he assumed that the archetype is like a form without content, comparing it to a (crystal) structure which has no special features but when in a solution a structure (a crystal) is formed. The specific crystal is different in each case, but the general arrangement of the molecular structure is always the same for all crystals (Jung, 1919, §589, fn 6). In the much-discussed paper ‘Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle’, Jung uses biological analogies: ‘The archetypes are formal factors responsible for the organization of unconscious psychic processes; they are “patterns of behaviour” ’ (Jung, 1952, §841). With this definition Jung moves the archetypes per se into the vicinity of instincts and impulses, referring to animals that also know such archetypal backup-and-response systems:
There is nothing to prevent us from assuming that certain archetypes exist even in animals, that they are grounded in the peculiarities of the living organism itself and are therefore direct expressions of life whose nature cannot be further explained. Not only are the archetypes, apparently, impressions of ever-repeated typical experiences, but, at the same time, they behave empirically like agents that tend towards the repetition of these same experiences.
