2022-11-05 Sat 10:34 AM ![[moses_wolf_head_symmetrical_watercolour_bright_colours_whimsica_4ace732c-5067-4fd7-a096-ad6e00d0b7b8.png]] > The archetypes, which are pre-existent to consciousness and condition it, appear in the part they actually play in reality: as a priori structural forms of the stuff of consciousness. They do not in any sense represent things as they are in themselves, but rather the forms in which things can be perceived and conceived. > -[[Ref. Carl Jung 1961 - Memories, Dreams, Reflections]] [[Ref. Sharf 2015 - Theories of Psychotherapy and Counseling 6th Ed.]] gives a better explanation of archetypes than I've seen, and it does indeed map to a way of conceiving it that I had imagined it might: because of our common physiology, physical environments etc, our sense-making abstractions are subject to similar constraints, and as a result, we wind up with common patterns, common forms in the shapes of our lives. > The concept that most distinguishes Jung’s theory of psychotherapy from other theories is that of the collective unconscious, > So collective unconscious refers to “an inherited tendency of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs—representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern” (Jung, 1970a, p. 228). > Because all human beings have similar physiology (brains, arms, and legs) and share similar aspects of the environment (mothers, the sun, the moon, and water), individuals have the ability to see the world in some universally common ways > Jung was quite clear in stating that he did not believe that specific memories or conscious images were inherited. Rather, it is the predisposition for certain thoughts and ideas—archetypes—that is inherited (Hunt, 2012). > Archetypes are ways of perceiving and structuring experiences (Jung, 1960b, p. 137). > Although they do not have content, archetypes have form. So archetypes are made possible by the fact that we humans have so much in common with one another — similar physiology, neurology, morphology, we live in worlds governed by the same physics, with the same sorts of other beings present, we deal with similar questions, struggles, conflicts. And we live, more or less, in the same meme space. So we tend to form and use similar constructs, similar abstractions that we use to make sense of and tell stories about our experience. Maybe we can think of it like this: picture the landscape of possible concepts and abstractions that a person might use to make sense of his experience. That space is constrained by facts about his world — his physiology, physical environment, etc. That set of constraints creates basins in abstraction-space: structural [[Attractor]]s. Attractor: > In the mathematical field of dynamical systems, an attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system. > Wikipedia Why might it be helpful to look at archetypes this way? It's not that I think defining archetypes in this way yields the True Analysis. Rather, it's that the *mapping* of concepts and ontological constructs that are outside of [[Contiguous theory space]] onto concepts within CTS is valuable — [[It is useful to project constructs from outside the working ontology into the working ontology]].