Archetype
An archetype, in the sense of Carl Gustav Jung, is a universal image or pattern present in the unconscious of every human being: the Mother, the Hero, the Shadow, the Wise Old Man, the Child. Inherited from the shared ground of humanity, archetypes are not memories but empty forms that fill with each person’s experience. They surface in dreams, myths, fairy tales and art, where they give body to the great figures of the psyche.
Forms that life fills in
Jung distinguished the archetype from its content. The archetype is the form: a capacity, shared by all humans, to imagine a "Mother," a "Hero," a "Sage." What fills it is your own life, your own mother, your own role models. That is why these figures feel at once strangely familiar and deeply personal when they appear in your nights.
A few great figures
Among the figures Jung described most, the Shadow gathers what you would rather not see in yourself and often returns in dreams as a threatening stranger. The Anima and Animus carry the inner feminine or masculine. The Self stands for the wholeness toward which the psyche reaches. So many faces your imagination borrows in order to speak to itself.
Recognizing them in your dreams
In a dream, an archetype often shows itself by its charge: that character who feels larger than life, run through with a strong emotion, a meaning that exceeds you. Rather than labeling it at once, let it act, watch what it stirs. Seeing it as an inner figure, and not as a real person, opens a dialogue with a part of yourself.
Sources
- , Man and His Symbols (1964)
- , The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959)