Archetypes actively seek their actualization in the personality and the behaviour of the individual, as the life cycle unfolds in the context of the environment.

Two of these laws are particularly apposite: they are the law of similarity and the law of contiguity. Thus, the mother archetype is actualized in the child’s psyche through the contiguity of a female caretaker whose behaviour and personal characteristics are sufficiently similar to the built-in structure of the maternal archetype for the child to

researchers working in university departments of psychology were in the grip of behaviourism, which discounted innate or genetic factors,

The most important archetype to be actualized in the personal psyche of a child is the mother archetype.

All those factors, therefore, that were essential to our near and remote ancestors will also be essential to us, for they are embedded in the inherited organic system. (CW VIII, para. 717)

it proved to be his most significant departure from Freud, and his most important single contribution to psychology.

Thus, on appropriate occasions, archetypes give rise to similar thoughts, images, mythologems, feelings, and ideas in people, irrespective of their class, creed, race, geographical location, or historical epoch. An individual’s entire archetypal endowment makes up the collective unconscious, whose authority and power is vested in a central nucleus,

An archetype, he said, is not ‘an inherited idea’ but rather ‘an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a “pattern of

Archetypes are ‘identical psychic structures common to all’ (CW V, para. 224), which together constitute ‘the archaic heritage of humanity’ (CW V, para. 259).