mr. mxylplyx

The Role of Jungian Archetype

As a basis of his theory, Carl Jung lays out dreams as the very fabric of the analytical process in human psychology, and grounds his expositions of dreams in the research and analysis of hundreds of individual dream accounts. Jung posited that because of the fact that the deep roots of our psychic makeup lie hidden within the recesses of our consciousness, in what both he and Freud dubbed the “unconscious,” only through an examination of the effects of this unconscious, exhibited commonly in such states as dreaming and religious transcendental expressions, could we come to a fuller understanding of the nature of our inner and fuller selves. Both Sigmund Freud and Jung have maintained that unconscious contents of the human psyche continually project themselves out onto the real world. Freud tended to see all of the myriad forms of human art and religion, as well as dreaming, as sublimated forms of infantile sexual projections, but Jung saw that art, religion, and dreaming were in actuality archetypical representations of how the human soul, or psyche, experienced the world.

Jung's explanation of symbolism in dreams--that symbols in dreams have an intrinsic value, and not, as Freud believes, one that derives from a uniformity of meaning--is important. Jung showed that because of the fact that dreams convey meaning to us in the figurative language of an older phylogenetic mode of thought, they express and interpret the world in a symbolic way. Thus, the things important for the maintenance of our conscious health, the mind in sleep can be seen as dealing with rather than concealing, by symbolically representing scenarios pertinent to our real life in dreams. Overlooked, underappreciated, and even disturbing stimuli, and also the consequent subconscious thoughts they engender, get processed in this manner, and so this final standpoint of interpretation of dreams needs necessarily to be adopted in conjunction with the causal (the method of interpretation that Freud so heavily, and egregiously, overrelies on to make the case for his theory of universal infantile wish-fulfillment as the overarching purpose of dreams: that repressed wishes cause dreams).

Jung’s conception of archetypical significance is rooted in the hard-wiring of the human brain itself. It is an understanding of the way in which the universally shared perceptual and developmental experience of creatures manifests itself in the nature of their understanding of the forces in the world around them. Though there are specific cultural contexts at play when considering individual psyches,underlying those is the nature of how a being is hard-wired to perceive—the capabilities inherent in one's biological makeup which delimit our range of choices. All creatures formulate archetypes based on a combination of their hardwiring, perceptive abilities, and the universal forces and figures present in their world. The archetypes are what exist in what Jung calls the collective unconscious of the species, embodying the experience of these universal forces. These archetypes are interpolations of those forces.

The Jungian archetypes have profound importance with regard to how we interpret the world. As we all know, the human being is a rational creature, capable of self-awareness, but that awareness is built over time, in developmental stages which progress from infancy through adolescence and later adulthood. The passing of each of these stages is necessarily the crossing of a threshold into a new existence, a cycle of death and rebirth which, as the consciousness of the individual grows, calls for ever more intricate forms of ritualistic initiation to transition that individual between the new stages of awareness. Culture and religion provide these ritual transition vehicles. However, as numerous literary theorists, including mythologist Joseph Campbell, have shown, it is the “collective unconscious that is largely responsible for the existence in this world of art [and by implication culture], for its relationship to art is that art is the spontaneous emergence from the depths of one’s soul of the universal archetypes” (Campbell, The Power of Myth). The mysteries of life and death, our relationship to the plant and animal world, the elemental world, and our own developmental transformations are the first things to find expression in human art, because these were the first things that came out of the nature of human beings, before the introduction of a deliberate aesthetic or a supernatural conceit that was separate from nature and the body. The first art that thus came into mythological existence for human beings was one that was an almost pure expression of the joy, fear, and wonder of the natural forces of the human environment. As we see, dreams are a similar expression, for dreams according to Jung are the subconscious representations of these same things.