ABSTRACT
Philosophically, the archetypes could be defined as a priori images analogous to the a priori categories of Immanuel Kant. Jung envisaged the archetypes as powerful mobilizing images which expressed, in visual and concrete form, the nature of the various human instincts. Jung claimed that if the energy attendant upon the life of instinct were not to be lost, it was essential for individuals to adapt these powerful archaic images to the more complex and differentiated requirements of civilization. The work of such artists as William Blake, Henry Moore and Cecil Collins can be illuminated by the notion of archetype, as can, for example, the operas of Mozart, Wagner and Tippett or the poetry of Coleridge, Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Applied to the wrong kind of art, or applied in too blunt a manner, it can easily give birth to a diffuse, question-begging, pseudo-mystical kind of exegesis.
