Our thinking is completely unique – but is that really true? When we speak of the mind and consciousness of a person, then we usually have the opinion that we are talking about a completely individual entity. Then how can we explain similar ideas within all cultures of human history? Doesn’t one have to start from a certain basis within the human mind?

Similarity of Myths

The founder of analytical psychology  Carl Gustav Jung  [4] (1875-1961) sees in a depiction of motifs that we often ridicule – myths, fairy tales and metaphors – a system within the unconscious of our psyche that is identical in all of us.

If we look at the myths of human history known to us, then we notice amazing similarities without having to make meticulous observations, despite the fact that between countless narratives of different cultures (thousands of kilometers apart) and ages (centuries apart) huge ones Distances prevail.

The Gilgamesh epic, Herakles, Siegfried the Dragon Slayer, Achilles, Nergal and Sandan are just a few examples. Among other things, we have represented a figure from Germanic legends of the 13th century, another from Troy around the 8th century BC, then one around 3000 BC from Mesopotamian territory and so on. It seems as if humans are programmed to create such images.

What brings all these figures together are their distilled properties, i.e. what remains when you separate the concrete hero as a historical person from what he embodies – it remains his abstraction: in this case the warrior type.

As an expert in religious and mythological symbolism, Jung recognized these and many other suspicious similarities and continued to find them again in the dream analysis of his schizophrenic patients. How can that be the case? Jung suggested a level in the hierarchical structure of the psyche that is universally human.

The character facets of man

The writer Hermann Hesses provided a modern representation of a concept very similar to the archetypes in his famous novel Steppenwolf , in which there is repeated talk of so-called character facets, which a healthy person basically consists of:

You are familiar with the erroneous and unfortunate notion that a person is a permanent entity.
You also know that man consists of a multitude of souls, of very many I’s. [1]

Hesse formulated the same observation from Jung from a slightly different perspective. These many egos are played out as chess pieces in the further course of the novel and in themselves symbolize nothing other than the above-mentioned abstraction of a special life figure – a hero, strategist, artist, lover, et cetera.

One could ask what all this has to do with us. After all, these myths have nothing to do with us modern humans, so why should we pay attention to them? But right here, one could say, there is a mistake!

Each of us forms his character, which he embodies in his life and dealings with other people, based on various individual parts that when put together form our personality. There is also a precise reason we think so derogatory about myths that I will discuss later.

First we should take a closer look at the nature of the human psyche and then the nature of the archetypes. Only then do I want to clarify why this negative attitude to the myths is actually stupid and how we came to this opinion.

The human psyche

Jung understands the term psyche to be much more than what we would commonly call the soul. Popularly we mistakenly speak of a soul-body dualism. By soul we mean the totality of the spiritual of a person. In psychology, on the other hand, the soul is only a functional complex of the much larger psyche.

According to Jung, the psyche itself comprises the entirety of all psychic processes, including both unconscious and conscious ones. All feeling, thinking, all mental attributes and characteristics of character fall under this category.

The components of the psyche have a strong hierarchical order, the entire structure of which ultimately flows into the ego – but they are not separated from one another and constantly enter into a more passive than active interaction.

The human psyche – simplified according to Jung

1. That I
2. Awareness
3. The personal unconscious
4. The collective unconscious
5. The part of the collective unconscious that can never be made conscious

The I, which is only the tip of the psyche, is the area that we perceive the most together with the conscious. Carl Jung describes his understanding of the self in the following way:

By I I understand a complex of ideas that make up the center of my field of consciousness and that seem to me to have a high degree of continuity and identity with itself. [2]

One could also say that I is the subject of consciousness, while consciousness is the function or activity that maintains the relationships of psychic contents to the ego [2, p.67].

All of our experience of the outer and inner world has to pass through our self in order to be perceived at all. Because if the ego does not perceive a relationship as a relationship, it is unconscious from the start.

The problems that can arise from an imbalance in psychological structures, especially when there is an excessive stiffening on the I-Am, is dealt with in particular in Buddhist philosophy .

The common structure of all people

It would go beyond the scope of this article to go into every detail of the psyche structure, which is why I will now only briefly focus on the critical aspect of the collective unconscious.

In contrast to the area of ​​the personal unconscious, which includes deferred content, repressed, forgotten et cetera, the collective unconscious is a “huge spiritual hereditary mass of human development, reborn in every individual structure” [3] and also a part of what is not through Reason, for example, can be recorded directly through scientific understanding.

This huge area (see point 4 of the figure) is not unique to the individual, because the psychological structures and cognitive categories from which the collective unconscious is constructed are shared by all people and accordingly influence our thoughts, our behavior and the way we act how we see the world.

The archetypes

We have already briefly set out how Jung came to the hypothesis of archetypes. The task now is to analyze the structure and the colossal importance of the archetypes. First of all, we have to ask ourselves how we can define archetypes or make them tangible, and we can hardly do this through reason, but rather through the experience of archetypal images. The archetypal ideas could be called [4, p.51]:

1. Self-portrayals of instincts in the psyche
2. Psychological processes become picture
3. Patterns of human behavior.

A very useful analogy to clarify the archetypes is a comparison by Erich Neumann: Just as the biological organs all have the same structures and only arise during human development, there are also psychic organs , the archetypes.

We are not aware of how they work with either of them. However, unlike physical organs, archetypes cannot be observed directly.

In connection with archetypes, which form a fundamental component of the collective unconscious, we always speak of myths or symbols, but we must not confuse anything. The symbol, the myth, the hero or the figure are not the archetype, but only its image – the former are therefore only archetypal ideas and images.

Representation of a well-known myth: Anselm Feuerbach – Battle of the Amazons – 1873 – archetypes

We must therefore distinguish between the “only potentially inherent in every psychic structure, imperceptible archetype on the one hand and the updated, perceptible archetype that has entered the field of consciousness on the other” [4, p.48].

To recall the illustration of the structure of the psyche, one can also imagine this in such a way that the archetype rises from the collective unconscious as a concrete image into the realm of the conscious and unfolds its effect. Such a process is possible because the psyche has a hierarchical, not closed structure.

Why are archetypes relevant?

I would like to reverse this question: Why do we have to ask ourselves why archetypes are relevant when the area of ​​the collective unconscious in which they are collected is a huge cornerstone of our psyche? It seems we have lost the fixed reference or the feeling for the archetypal images – but how can that happen?

The answer is very simple when you consider that the realm of the conscious is dominated by reason, which is arguably the highest principle in our modern society. The archetypes, however, are not objects of reason, and this creates a powerful problem for an age that relies only on the conscious realm.

The much deeper advancing areas of the unconscious are just as hard to accept for a cerebral person as swallowing quantum mechanical phenomena in the physics of the early 20th century. The archetypes and the entire area of ​​the unconscious have of course not disappeared, they are merely bitterly denied or ignored.

Only exactly where belief and dogma have frozen into empty forms, and this is for the most part the case in our highly civilized, technicalized western world dominated by reason, have the archetypes also lost their magical power and held people helpless, abandoned the hardships outside and inside, left behind. [4, p.56]

Conclusion: the power of archetypes 

This little introduction to the psychology of archetypes, which I have hereby tried to pass on, only makes sense if it is put into concrete terms, i.e. if it is projected onto yourself as human beings. The archetypes and the even if only metaphorical reference to them is, as already mentioned, not a process that can be completely resolved in the rules of reason, but a process of the interior, of feelings and experiences.

Archetypes form an “inexhaustible material of ancient knowledge about the deepest connections between God, humans and the cosmos” [5]. The book recommendations at the end of the article, including in particular Joseph Campbell’s work The Heros in a Thousand Forms, provide a good start into practice .

Developing this material in your own psyche, awakening it to completely new life and integrating it into your consciousness means nothing less than removing the cold loneliness of the individual and integrating it into the course of eternal events. So what has been suggested here becomes more than knowledge and psychology. It becomes a teaching and a way. [4, p.54f.]

Practical perspectives and gender discussion

The whole subject of archetypes also plays an important role in the area of ​​gender identity and gender confusion. Namely to the extent that the lack of the development of archetypal images, roles and symbols is seen as a cause for these special problems of modern times.

The questions about the distribution of roles, the nature of the masculine and feminine, as well as supposedly classical family structures et cetera can all be illuminated profitably by examining the archetypes. A confrontation with the psychology influenced by archetypes thus contributes to the holistic development and maturation of the human being.