ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews notions of the classical perspective on archetypes, and reconsiders them in relation to the revision that Jean Knox made of their developmental emergence and activation. Knox offered a model whereby the archetype-as-such is seen as an image schema, that is, a redescriptor of perceptual events that, in coding patterns of sensorimotor experience through observing and/or acting within relationships, schematises perceptual inputs in terms of consolidating dynamic pre-conceptual, non-conscious meanings to individuals’ bodily experiences. Supporting Knox’s revision, it introduces the concept of primordial mental activity (PMA), coined by Michael Robbins, arguing it as the subcortical brain circuitry that adds the affective dimension that enlivens archetypes-as-such/image-schemas, making of them affect, ‘image’, and action, the basis for imaginative and cognitive functions. Thus, it is demonstrated how the diffused emotional background to the infant’s internalisation of the interactions that occur in its externality, involving it in psychosocial networks of activity, is also an essential feature of the process of conceptualisation, and that, depending on the affective regularities the infant undergoes in its learning to name emotions and categories of connectedness, it is possible to identify the personalised character of relatedness and recurrency the individual embodies in her archetypal fields of experience.
