ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the nature of the concept ‘archetype’, to look at it as one might look at a patient, listening and receptive to what is overt or covert. He also explores its meaning, its function, and the mood, feelings, and phantasies communicated by it. The author examines what experience of the subject, the patient, may characterize as archetypal, and what reaction such an archetypal experience evokes in the object, the observer, the therapist. Archetype is a metapsychological model to account for the recurrence and apparent universality in humans of certain experiences and images, the archetypal images. The author has used the title ‘archetypes on the couch’; not from the couch but on the couch. Carl Gustav Jung, being ever aware of the danger of confusing model and reality, insisted again and again that the archetypes are devoid of form and content; that they are non-perceptual and irrepresentable.
