“All the most powerful ideas from history go back to archetypes.”
Carl Jung
Archetypes are collective creations present in the same form in all people.
They make up the inherited, general framework of an entire experience incorporated into your unconscious psyche in the form of innate patterns or schemes of thinking, feeling, and behavior.
Their primary function is to help you in challenging situations where you have no previous personal experience.
For instance, when you face the themes of birth, death, mother, father, sexuality, power, illness…
Although you may not have previous experience with some of these themes, you unconsciously carry innate predispositions towards them that have been shaped by the generations of ancestral experience built up around them over centuries.
Archetypes are both positive and negative since they hold the most significant achievements of humanity and the greatest misdeeds humans have committed in their history.
Archetypal images come to you in dreams when you are at a turning point in life: starting education, separating from your parents, changing jobs, getting married or divorced, doing military service, or suffering from an illness – to help you deal more effectively with these challenges.
They are mainly activated when you have resistance or an ambivalent attitude towards these critical events.
If you pay attention to those “inherited predispositions in your psyche,” you can use their potential and apply it to your conscious life. That will give you the impression of handling life challenges more efficiently and having better control over your life.
How can you use the archetypal potential?
By mapping your unconscious psyche to determine the most prevailing archetypes in your particular case.
We have developed a psychological tool that we use in working with our clients to help identify each of these categories of archetypes. It will be available on our site for a wider use later this year.
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