Jung

If Jung’s theory of archetypes is so fundamental that it keeps being rediscovered by the practitioners of many other disciplines, why did it not receive the enthusiastic welcome it deserved when Jung proposed it?

Archetypes similarly combine the universal with the individual, the general with the unique, in that they are common to all humanity, yet nevertheless manifest themselves in every human being in a way peculiar to him or to her.

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.

specialists in linguistics maintain that although grammars differ from one another, their basic forms – which Noam Chomsky calls their deep structures – are universal (i.e. at the deepest neuropsychic level, there exists a universal [or ‘archetypal’] grammar on which all individual grammars are based); an entirely new discipline, sociobiology, has

Essentially, the theory can be stated as a psychological law: whenever a phenomenon is found to be characteristic of all human communities, it is an expression of an archetype of the collective unconscious.

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,

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

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