Archetypes According to the Depth Psychological Perspective
This paper explores the depth psychological understanding of the archetype, the inherited, autonomous pattern that C.G. Jung placed at the foundation of the collective unconscious. The paper begins with the theoretical foundations of the archetype itself, briefly going over the history, drawing on Neumann’s account of its dynamic, symbolic, material, and structural dimensions, and on Jung’s distinction between the archetypes. The paper then positions this encounter within the larger architecture of the psyche that Jung and Von Franz describe: the shadow, the anima and animus, and the Self, each a presence on the path toward individuation. Taken together, I intend to show how an archetype, however singular and intimate its appearance, carries within it a pattern far older and larger than any single life.
Archetypes Explained
Every major civilization throughout history has had some version of archetypes baked into its worldview (Le Grice, 2024). The earliest versions were mythological: gods and goddesses meddling in human affairs from the heavens or Mount Olympus, watching over us from above. Or they showed up as animals, plants, and natural forces: the wind, fire, thunder, the ocean, mountains. Ancient Greece eventually started changing out the mythic gods-and-goddesses framing for more conceptual models, though those models were still deeply rooted in the mythic tradition they came from.
Building on earlier creation stories, the Presocratic philosophers introduced the idea of archai, or "first principles": the fundamental building blocks behind everything we experience (Le Grice, 2024). Pythagoras and Plato took it further, describing archetypal Forms or Ideas as eternal, universal principles living in a metaphysical realm behind the everyday world of change and flux. These Forms, which cover everything from numbers and moral qualities like Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, to the ideal prototypes of dogs, horses, chairs, and tables, are, in Plato's view, imperfectly copied in the actual objects around us. Every dog participates in the ideal Form of Dog, even though no two dogs are exactly alike. Every person can get a feel for what "good" means because we all tap into that underlying metaphysical principle.
Then there's the other history running quietly underneath the dominant Western narrative, where paganism never really went away (Le Grice, 2024). It kept alive a whole world of magical beings: nixies, fairies, pixies, elves, angels, goblins. The kinds of figures that fill fairy tales and folk traditions, and that most people loosely call spirits. Maybe they were just products of a primitive imagination. But Jung wondered, maybe not. He asked: "Were there not such beings long ago, in an age when dawning human consciousness was still wholly bound to nature? Surely there were spirits of forest, field, and stream long before the question of moral conscience ever existed" (p. 25) These figures, like the gods and goddesses of mythology, might just be archetypes wearing a personal face.
Erich Neumann (1955), who worked closely with Jung, suggests that an archetype is best understood not as a single image or idea, but as a living pattern that expresses itself through several interwoven dimensions at once: a dynamic, energetic force; a set of symbolic images; a body of meaningful content; and an underlying structure that holds all of these together. Each of these dimensions was present in my encounter with Hekate. The dynamic dimension is the energetic charge of the archetype, the movement it generates both within the unconscious and between the unconscious and the conscious mind (Neumann, 1955). We feel this dynamism through emotion, fascination, projection, anxiety, depression, mania, or the sense that the ego is being overtaken by something larger than itself. Any mood that seems to engulf the whole personality can be read as an archetype at work, whether or not consciousness welcomes it. As the sign that C.G. Jung had hanging above his door:
“Vocatus atque non Vocatus, Deus aderit”, translated as “Called or not called, God is present.”
The symbolic dimension is the form the archetype takes when it surfaces into awareness (Neumann, 1955). Each archetype carries its own symbolic vocabulary, and even opposing aspects of a single archetype, such as the nurturing and the devouring faces of the Great Mother, will express themselves through entirely different images. The material dimension, by contrast, is the meaning that becomes available to consciousness once the symbol has appeared, the content we begin to assimilate, interpret, and integrate. Finally, the structural dimension is the larger organization that binds the dynamic, symbolic, and material aspects into a single coherent pattern, with the archetype itself acting as the invisible center that holds the whole together (Neumann, 1955).
Ultimately, an archetype reveals itself through the way it shapes human behavior according to its own inherent pattern, independent of any individual's personal history (Neumann, 1955). Archetypes are not consciously invented, they are inherited organizing principles, psychological expressions of the same deep patterns that shape life itself, and because of this autonomous quality they arrive carrying a compelling, often intensely emotional force capable of guiding, challenging, and transforming the person through whom they emerge.
Jung's understanding of the archetype reaches further still. For Jung, the archetype is not simply a psychological concept or symbolic image, but a condition woven into the very fabric of life itself, present in the highest reaches of human consciousness (religion, art, mythology, metaphysics) and equally present in the hidden, primordial layers of existence, including the unconscious foundations of organic and inorganic matter alike (Stevens, 1982). Jung repeatedly insisted that the archetype is not a dry intellectual idea; it is a living reality.
This is why Jung (1983) turned so often to dreams, visions, and what many traditional cultures call "big dreams": experiences whose imagery cannot be explained by personal history alone, and which carry the weight of myth and the recurring motifs of the collective unconscious. A well-known illustration he used of this came from outside psychology altogether. Jung (1964) describes how the nineteenth-century chemist Friedrich Kekulé, struggling for years to understand the molecular structure of benzene, dreamed of a serpent devouring its own tail, the ancient image of the ouroboros. On waking, Kekulé realized the dream had handed him the answer: benzene was not an open chain of carbon atoms but a closed ring. Like Kekulé's serpent, Hekate arrived unbidden, from somewhere beneath my conscious effort, carrying an answer to a question that I couldn’t find in my conscious awareness.
For Jung, such experiences point to the collective unconscious at work: an archetypal pattern surfaces from the depths of the psyche and clothes itself in an image the individual can grasp, an image that feels intensely personal even though its roots extend far beyond any one life. Reflecting on experiences of this kind, Jung (1983) asks, "Whence this new idea that thrusts itself upon consciousness with such elemental force?" (p. 69) and answers his own question by pointing to the primordial images/archetypes that lie dormant in the collective unconscious until circumstances call them forth. These images, he suggests, arise from the accumulated experience of humanity itself, "deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity" (Jung, 1983, p. 70).
In "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype," Jung (1983) emphasizes this further saying that the archetype itself has no predetermined content, it exists as an underlying form or organizing principle waiting to be filled by lived experience. He compares it to the invisible structure of a crystal: before the crystal takes shape, an unseen pattern already exists within the solution, guiding its formation, a pattern with no material substance of its own yet decisive for everything that grows from it. The archetype works the same way. It is an empty form, a latent possibility, a psychic blueprint that precedes any particular image (Jung, 1983), what Jung called the archetype per se (Jacobi, 1959).
This is precisely the distinction I needed in order to make sense of my own experience. The dark mother who has appeared to me as Hekate was not Hekate herself in any literal sense. Hekate was the symbolic form, the "archetypal image" (Jacobi, 1959, p. 35), through which the “archetye per se” revealed itself to me. Someone else might meet this same underlying pattern through a dream, a different mythic figure, a religious image, or an entirely different life event, one that on the surface bears no resemblance to mine at all. The outer forms vary endlessly; the underlying pattern endures, the way crystals take countless shapes while expressing the same invisible geometry.
Even the task of defining "archetype" tends to take on this same elusive quality. Jacobi (1959) admits that no exact definition is really possible; the best one can do is circle the concept, "talking around" it, because the archetype remains a riddle that surpasses rational comprehension, rooted as it is in a collective unconscious to which we have no direct access and which we know only indirectly, through its effects.
Jung's own description of the unconscious carries this same flavor. Drawing on a passage Jacobi (1959, p. 36) quotes from Jung's "Structure of the Psyche," the unconscious can be understood as the deposit of all human experience reaching back to its remotest beginnings, a living system of reactions and tendencies that shapes an individual's life all the more powerfully because it remains invisible. It is, in this sense, not only an inherited historical condition but also the very source of the instincts, since archetypes are simply the forms that instincts take. Archetypes, then, exist prior to conscious thought, as autonomous forces shaping experience from behind the veil of awareness, knowable not because we can see them directly but because of the effects they have on consciousness. They are part of the hidden architecture of the soul, waiting beneath ordinary experience for the moment when they surface through dreams, myths, symbols, emotions, and life events, often arriving with a numinous quality, the unmistakable sense that something larger than the individual has entered the room. As Jacobi (1959) puts it, archetypes are living potentials, patterns of feeling, imagination, and action woven into the fabric of the psyche, as instinctive to the soul as instincts are to the body, and through them we touch the timeless stories and motifs that bind an individual life to something ancient, collective, and enduring.
One of the most accessible routes into this territory is through mythic images themselves. Whitmont (1969) argues that lasting change requires reaching the archetypal core of whatever complex is disturbing us, and that this core characteristically appears in mythological form, images such as the horned power or the renewing pool of water, which he calls mythologems precisely because we recognize them from myths, fairy tales, and religious traditions across every era and culture (p. 73). My experience with Hekate mirrors this kind of mythologem. What first appeared to me as a private catastrophe, one woman's grief on one ordinary afternoon, turned out to be the doorway into something far older and far larger than my own story: an archetypal pattern that countless people across history have met through their own symbols, myths, and life circumstances, even when those outer forms looked nothing alike.
The Shadow, the Anima and Animus, and the Self
Asked how many archetypes there are, Jung reportedly answered that there are as many as there are typical human experiences, though some present themselves with special clarity. In no way is this paper intended to be a reference to the vast plethora of archetypes that exist. The intention is, in describing some of the main archetypes that Jung refers to, it can illuminate some light on a very elusive and mysterious realm. In this regard, Jung (1983) singles out three in particular: "The archetypes most clearly characterized from the empirical point of view are those which have the most frequent and the most disturbing influence on the ego. These are the shadow, the anima, and the animus" (p. 91), adding that of the three, the shadow is the most accessible, since its contents can largely be traced to the personal unconscious.
The shadow is perhaps the most well known of these figures. In Jungian psychology, it presents the ego with a moral challenge: to recognize, with honesty and courage, the darker and less flattering dimensions of one's own personality as genuinely one's own (Jung, 1983). Hekate exists in this realm. This recognition is a necessary step toward authentic self-knowledge, yet it is met with resistance precisely because it disturbs the ego's preferred self-image. Von Franz (1964) observes that the first sign of this confrontation is often a flash of shame: a person notices, in themselves, the very faults they have long condemned in others. Facing the shadow means giving up comforting illusions about oneself and acknowledging the smaller, previously hidden shortcomings that have quietly shaped one's life. As Von Franz (1964) puts it, an overwhelming surge of rage at a friend's mild criticism is usually a sign that "you will find a part of your shadow, of which you are unconscious" (p. 176).
But the shadow is too easily reduced to its negative reputation alone. Von Franz (1964) reminds us that whether the shadow becomes friend or foe is largely a matter of how the ego meets it; the shadow also carries vital, even treasured energies that can serve the individuation process, "if the shadow figure contains valuable, vital forces, they ought to be assimilated into actual experience and not repressed,” which asks the ego to set aside its pride and live out something that looks dark but may not be, in essence, at all (p. 183). I recognize this in my own encounter with Hekate. She arrived as the dark, devouring face of the mother, and in any first glance she might be mistaken for evil. Yet what she carried, once I stopped resisting it, were precisely the "valuable, vital forces" Von Franz describes.
Confronting the shadow, difficult as it is, does not represent the deepest challenge of psychological development (Von Franz, 1964). As shadow material is brought into consciousness, the psyche tends to reveal a further layer of complexity, a figure that for a man typically appears in feminine form and for a woman in masculine form. Jung named these inner archetypal counterparts the anima, in men, and the animus, in women: personifications of a deeper unconscious dimension that continue to shape the journey toward self-understanding once the shadow has been met.
The anima embodies the feminine dimensions of a man's psyche: emotional sensitivity, subtle moods, intuitive insight, openness to the irrational and the mysterious, the capacity for deep relationship, a connection to nature, and a living relationship with the unconscious itself (Von Franz, 1964). Her guiding function emerges when a man attends carefully to the feelings, moods, intuitions, and fantasies that arise from the unconscious and gives them form through some creative medium. Once given form, these images must be reflected on intellectually and ethically, and met with genuine emotional response, treated as psychologically real rather than dismissed as "just imagination." Where the anima's character is shaped by a man's relationship to his mother, the animus, its counterpart in a woman, is shaped above all by her relationship to her father, which often gives the animus the character of fixed convictions and unquestioned "truths". These inner certainties can grow so authoritative that they operate independently of a woman's actual experience, speaking with a tone of judgment that feels indisputable even as it remains disconnected from who she really is. Like the anima, the animus is not only a source of difficulty. It can certainly appear as rigidity, aggression, recklessness, or stubborn, harmful conviction, but it also has a constructive and transformative side, one that can nurture clarity, creativity, courage, discernment, and a deeper engagement with meaning (Von Franz, 1964). Consciously related to, it can become a bridge to the Self, supporting individuation through its own generative capacities. Von Franz (1964) describes the reward of this long, often painful work: a woman who comes to understand her animus, who faces it honestly rather than being possessed by it, may find that "her animus can turn into an invaluable inner companion who endows her with the masculine qualities of initiative, courage, objectivity, and spiritual wisdom" (p. 205).
The encounter with the anima or animus marks a crucial stage of individuation, though never the final one, since individuation has no final destination. These figures mediate between ordinary consciousness and the deeper layers of the psyche, preparing the way for something more encompassing than the ego. As a person works persistently with what the anima or animus presents, gradually loosening unconscious identification with these inner figures, the unconscious begins to take on a different symbolic form (Von Franz, 1964). It no longer appears as anima or animus but increasingly as images that point toward the Self: the central organizing archetypal principle and deepest core of the psyche. Attention shifts from the dynamics of the inner masculine or feminine toward a deeper encounter with the wholeness of one's own being.
The forms the Self can take are correspondingly vast. Von Franz (1964) notes that the Self often appears as a figure of almost cosmic proportions, a being who seems to embrace and contain the entire universe, the Cosmic Man found across mythology and religion in figures such as Adam, the Persian Gayomart, or the Hindu Purusha, generally portrayed as helpful and life-giving (p. 218). One of the most salient versions of this image, which Von Franz also recounts, comes from ancient Chinese mythology: before creation, a colossal divine being named P'an Ku gave heaven and earth their shape, and when he eventually died, his body became the world itself, his breath the wind, his voice the thunder, his tears the great rivers, his limbs the sacred mountains, and his eyes the sun and moon (p. 218). Read this way, the Self is a vast, world-shaping presence that the individual participates in rather than owns.
The journey through these archetypal realities, the shadow, the anima or animus, and ultimately the Self, suggests that individuation is a gradual awakening to the deeper structures of the psyche. The shadow confronts us with what we have rejected; the anima and animus ask us to relate consciously to the hidden dimensions of our inner life; and beyond both stands the Self, the organizing center of psychic wholeness that continually draws us toward a fuller realization of who we are.
References
Jacobi, J. (1959). Complex, archetype, symbol. Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Dell.
Jung, C. G. (1983). The essential Jung. (A. Storr, Ed.). Princeton University Press.
Le Grice, K. (2024). The way of the archetypes: Volume I: Universal principles and individuation. ITAS Publications.
Neumann, E. (2015). The great mother: An analysis of the archetype. Princeton University Press.
Whitmont, E. C. (1969). The symbolic quest. Princeton University Press.
Stevens A. (1982). Archetypes, a natural history of the self. New York: Morrow.
