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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Technic and Magic
  • archetypes , according to Jung, are ‘the introspectively recognizable form[s] of a priori psychic orderedness’; furthermore, ‘as a priori ideal forms, [they] are as much found as invented: they are discovered inasmuch as one did not know about their unconscious autonomous existence, and invented inasmuch as their presence was inferred from analogous conceptual structures’.
from Answer to Job
  • Did not realize how agential Jung's archetypes are:
    • ...since...the archetypes in question are not mere objects of the mind, but are also autonomous factors, i.e., living subjects, the differentiation of consciousness can be understood as the effect of the intervention of transcendentally conditioned dynamisms. (p107)
from Weird Studies/Ballard & Leguin
  • Alan Moore in Promethea talked in a similar way about what he called "the immateria", but it's the same idea, a world that is imaginary in some sense but also perfectly real, because it can be experienced. And maybe it's exactly what Jung meant by the collective unconscious and its population of archetypes .
from imago
  • In psychoanalysis, an idealized image of another person, such as a parent, or of an instinctual object, acquired in infancy and maintained in the unconscious (2) in later life. The concept was introduced in 1911 by Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who believed that some imagos are derived from archetypes (2) rather than from personal experiences, and it became a key concept of his analytical psychology. In the writings of the British-based Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), it is a fantastically distorted picture of the real object on which it is based. See also anima, animus (3), idealization.
from Weird Studies/Fairy Stories (Tolkien)
  • archetypes and their nature, often misunderstood (didn't quite follow). They are kind of like Platonic forms I think?
from tulpoid
  • A term I just made up to mean: any mental construct that appears to have any sort of independent mental agency. Includes Minsky agents, IFS what-do-they-call-them, Jungian archetypes perhaps. Crazy Jane alters, Imagos and Imprimers.
Twin Pages

TwinPages: WikiWikiWeb

archetypes

24 Oct 2024 - 22 Jun 2026
Open in Logseq
    • Just what is an archetype, and how is distinguished from a mere prototype?
      • This is a genuinely interesting conceptual question that cuts across philosophy, psychology, and literary theory.

      • The Basic Distinction

      • A prototype is simply an early or typical example of a category - the first instance, or the most representative member. It's essentially empirical and descriptive. A robin is a prototypical bird. The first iPhone was a prototype smartphone.
      • A archetype carries stronger claims - it refers to an original pattern or form that in some sense generates or underlies particular instances, rather than merely being one instance among others.

      • What Makes Archetypes Distinctive

      • Ontological priority - the archetype isn't just first chronologically but is somehow more real or fundamental than its instances. This reflects the Platonic heritage of the concept.
      • Generative function - archetypes explain why instances resemble each other, not merely describe that they do.
      • Normative force - archetypes often carry a standard against which instances are measured, not just classified.

      • The Complications

      • The concept gets genuinely contested depending on context:
      • Jung treated archetypes as psychological structures in the collective unconscious - nearly real entities
      • Literary critics use the term more loosely, meaning recurring patterns (the Hero, the Shadow)
      • Platonists meant something metaphysically robust - the Form itself
      • A fair criticism is that archetype sometimes functions as a prototype dressed up with unearned metaphysical weight.
      • What context are you approaching this from?
    • To Jung, who along with Freud was pioneering what he believed was the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, gods like Wotan were not real metaphysical entities (a notion he dismissed as ‘childish’). But neither were they simply figments of the imagination, or mere ‘social constructs’, as the lingo would now have it. Rather, they were manifestations of powerful and ancient unconscious forces - archetypes - which existed not only in the psyches of individuals but also of human collectives, such as nations. Why, he asked, had Germany apparently gone mad? No rational explanation would cut it: