ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author is concerned with our relationship to archetypal contents. She believes that psychological growth and maturity consists in the withdrawal of archetypal themes, images, and motifs from actual objects and persons to which they have become attached as a result of the processes of projection, incorporation, and identification. The hypothesis that the location of archetypal experience, in the more mature person, lies in the third area may help the author to throw a bridge across a discrepancy that has puzzled her for a long time. Archetypal contents and forms could then be thought of as helping to lay the foundations of the area of illusion after they have ceased to be either projected or identified with. The transitional object, Winnicott proposed, acts as the foundation of the development of the third area, the area of illusion, which is not the domain of either the exclusively external or exclusively internal worlds.
