Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2018, 63, 3, 336–346

Are Archetypes Essential?

Warren Colman, St. Albans

Abstract: This paper distinguishes between Jung’s theoretical discourse regarding the
archetypes and his phenomenological account of numinous experience. For this
author, the initial attraction of ‘my Jung’ came from both the vivid Romanticism of his
descriptions of the anima and the apparent ‘ground of being’ offered by his theory of
archetypes. However, the essentialism inherent to archetypal theory in general and the
anima in particular has necessitated a re-evaluation of Jung’s theory in terms of
emergence theory. My own version of this emphasises the role of symbols in the
constitution of affect through collective human action in the world. In this
reconfiguration, the visceral energy of numinous experience is retained while the
problematic theory of archetypes is no longer needed.

Keywords: affect, anima, archetypes, emergence, essentialism, ground of being, symbols

The archetypes of the collective unconscious are often considered to be Jung’s

signature concepts. Even as radical a thinker as Louis Zinkin said that
‘Nobody could claim to be Jungian who did not make use of the theory of
archetypes’ (Zinkin 2008, p. 397). However he went on to add that the
theory can be used in quite different ways. His way of using it was to
reconfigure the collective, impersonal aspect of archetypes as shared and
social. Similarly, Jean Knox (2003) retained the idea of archetypes but
reconfigured them to highlight only the notion of ‘original forms’ which she
then identified with ‘image schemas’, the earliest form of representations that
become established in an infant’s mind. Many of you might think that neither
of these reconfigurations look much like Jung’s original notion of archetypes
and I would be inclined to agree with you. So in my own reconfiguration of
Jungian thinking, I have taken a different approach which aims to maintain
the spirit and quality of Jung’s original notion, while abandoning the
theoretical concept of archetypes altogether.
So can I still claim to be a Jungian? Well, yes I can and I do. And that’s
because while I no longer accept the theory of archetypes, there is one key
feature of archetypes that remains for me the defining feature of being a
Jungian and that is a feeling for the numinous as a central and
irreducible quality of our human way of being in the world. It seems to

0021-8774/2018/6303/336 © 2018, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Wiley Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12414
Are archetypes essential? 337

me that for those who don’t feel this way, being a Jungian is likely to be
rather more uncomfortable than it is for those like me who no longer
believe in archetypes.
In any case, the notion of ‘belief’ is itself problematic, indicating the way
Jungian thought can easily slip over into the kind of revelatory knowledge
that would make analytical psychology a sort of religion. Jung’s theory was,
at least in part, an attempt to explain revelatory, transformative experiences
which compel acceptance by their very nature. I think that’s what he meant
when he said that ‘the approach to the numinous is the real therapy’,
referring to ‘certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone’
that were ‘the real milestones’ (Jung 1945/1973 p. 377). Note that this is an
experiential, even phenomenological account, not a theoretical one. And that
I think highlights the distinction between the theory of archetypes and the
experience of the numinous.
When I first became interested in Jung around forty years ago, the two
notions were fused together for me. Jung spoke directly to my emotional
experience and to my philosophical concerns. I’ll start with the emotion. Otto
Kernberg says it’s easy to tell whether someone has ever been in love. You
just ask them and, if they hesitate, you have your answer (Kernberg 1994;
1998). I think he’s referring to the numinous aspect of falling in love – a
simple twist of fate that feels like a thunderclap tearing into your soul. The
experience is self-validating, unarguable and unforgettable. If we are
fortunate, it may also lead to transformation, though it hardly feels like that
at the time. For me, the soundtrack to love was Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks
– the violent swings between torment and joy echoed with the fury of an idiot
wind. I was tangled up in blue with a corkscrew to my heart. During this
time, I wrote a song of my own called the ‘Siren’s Cry’ that included the line
‘Feed the flame that keeps my soul alive’. So when a mystic sister suggested I
should read what Jung had to say about the anima, I must have been more
ready than I knew.
I’d been interested in psychoanalysis since my late teens but nothing I could
find in Freud made sense of what I was going through. Sex and Oedipus were
part of it, for sure, but there was something else going on which I now
recognise as an encounter with the numinous. When I began to read Jung, his
descriptions of the anima spoke to my own experience like the book of poems
in Dylan’s song – pouring off of every page like they was written in my soul
from me to you. Here are a couple of examples:

Occasionally she causes states of fascination that rival the best bewitchment, or
unleashes terrors in us not to be outdone by any manifestation of the devil. She is a
mischievous being who crosses our path in numerous transformations and disguises,
playing all kinds of tricks on us, causing happy and unhappy delusions, depressions
and ectasias, outbursts of affect etc.

(Jung 1934/54, para 54).

338 Warren Colman

With her cunning play of illusions, the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that
does not want to live … She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should
fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life
should be lived.

(ibid., para 56).

Jung does more than describe the mysterious fascination of the anima – what
was perhaps most appealing of all to me was the way he embeds these
phenomena in a context of meaning and purpose:

Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even
the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us to experience an
archetype that up till then had laid hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played
out by the anima. This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the
archetype of life itself.

(ibid., para 66).

No wonder I was soon sold on Jung. Here was the Wise Old Man reaching out
across time to invest the darkness and confusion of my personal suffering
with the stardust of archetypal glory. What could be more alluring to a young
hero-identified wanderer and would-be magician?
For Jung, the uncontrolled and unfathomable energy of the unconscious is
not merely sexual and instinctive as it is in Freudian psychology. Jung
spiritualises the unconscious but retains its chthonic power, uniting its
instinctual forces with the mysterium tremendum, the fascinating power of the
divine. His vision of the unconscious is firmly in the Romantic tradition
of Imagination and the sublime, epitomised by Coleridge’s dream vision of
Kubla Khan:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

From there, ‘the sacred river ran/ Then reached the caverns measureless to man’,
an image redolent of the infinite depths of the collective unconscious.
Like the Romantics, Jung speaks of the numinous as something that
‘transports the subject into the state of rapture’ (Jung 1947, para 383). This,
he tells us, is the distinctive character of archetypal experience:

Often it drives with unexampled passion and remorseless logic towards its goal and
draws the subject under its spell from which despite the most desperate resistance he
Are archetypes essential? 339

is unable, and finally no longer even willing, to break free, because the experience
brings with it a depth and fullness of meaning that was unthinkable before.

(ibid., para 405).

Wow! That’s my Jung alright! And I could almost stop there were it not for the
theoretical superstructure in which this passionate Romantic vision is encased.
The fact that my first route into Jung came via the anima led me straight into
one of the most problematic aspects of archetype theory – its essentialism. This
is the philosophical doctrine going back to Plato’s Ideal Forms that the essence
of a thing is prior to its existence. That is, all the things that exist have a primary
essence that makes them what they are. Archetypes as Jung conceived them are
undoubtedly essentialist in this sense since they are, by definition ‘pre-existing
psychic images’. For example, in his exposition of the ‘archetype of meaning’
quoted above he states that ‘the eternal ideas are primordial images stored up
… as eternal, transcendent forms’ (Jung 1934/54, para 68). Elsewhere he
writes ‘Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the
image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image’. (Jung
1925, para 338).
In an era when feminism was just becoming mainstream, Jung’s essentialist
views about masculine and feminine were already pretty uncomfortable in the
late 1970s. Forty years later, they are frankly unacceptable. Consider for
example his view that ‘by taking up a masculine profession, studying and
working like man, woman is doing something not wholly in accord with, if
not directly injurious to, her feminine nature’ (Jung 1927, para 243) or his
comment that ‘in women, Eros is an expression of their true nature, while
their Logos is often only a regrettable accident’ (Jung 1951, para 29).
Now I know better than most the variations that can be used to get around
this embarrassment since I spent a good part of the 1990s thinking and
writing about them.1 For example, I used to distinguish between this
‘absolutist’ view of gender and a more ‘contingent’ view that also runs
through Jung’s writing (Colman 1998). In the ‘contingent’ view, anima and
animus are not ‘masculine/feminine’ in themselves and so do not have fixed
qualities; they simply acquire these aspects through their association with the
inner otherness of the unconscious (especially its shadow aspects) and by
means of being projected and personified as men and women in a particular
cultural context.
This argument is a specific version of Jung’s more general attempt to
distinguish between the specific forms in which archetypes appear and their
essential qualities, a distinction summed up as that between the archetype in

1
By this time there was already a sizeable literature on Jung’s gender essentialism – see, for
example, Samuels (1989), Young-Eisendrath (1992) and Hopcke et al. (1993).
340 Warren Colman

itself and the archetypal image. But does this distinction really work in practice?
Jung insists that anima and animus, for example, simply appear as masculine
and feminine images (or projections) but are not necessarily like that ‘in
themselves’. But he is then at a loss to say what the archetypes are like in
themselves – in fact, he sometimes concludes that we can’t say much about
them at all. The archetype, he says, has ‘no exactly determinable form but is
itself an indefinite structure which can assume definite forms only in
projection’ (Jung 1936/1954, para. 143). The problem is that if we can only
describe archetypes in terms of their images and can know nothing about
them in themselves, how can we know they exist at all and what purpose do
they serve anyway?
This brings me to the second strand of my early interest in Jung which, while
more intellectual and philosophical was also rooted in the psychological need
for security in what might be called a ground of being. This concern had a
significant collective aspect to it as a response to the prevailing view of the
time that there is no definite or necessary form to human nature but that we
are ‘constructed’ by our social and cultural circumstances. These intellectual
currents reverberated with a time of massive cultural upheaval for which the
so-called ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s was merely the tip of the iceberg. The
overthrow of all the old certainties left many of us with a deep sense of
personal, moral and philosophical doubt: there was a sense of an existential
void of Nothingness that lay like a cold chasm beneath the rock’n’roll
kaleidoscope of the time. Later I came to understand that this went back to
the dethroning of religion in the nineteenth century summed up in
Zarathustra’s assertion that ‘God is dead’. Jung himself faced this void and
his descent into the underworld of his unconscious visions was his own
attempt at self-healing.
The idea of an archetypal world of primordial images offered a sense of
psychological grounding in something that was fundamentally ‘there’,
something for which my own emotional experience of the numinous seemed
to offer a guarantee. That, after all, was something I knew indisputably to be
true and if, as Jung argued, such numinous experiences were the
manifestation of eternal archetypes, then this offered an experiential basis for
a philosophical and spiritual ground of being.
Finding this in psychology made complete sense to me since it was precisely
this that other more sociological intellectual currents such as Marxism and
feminism had been unable to provide. Even though I was (and still am)
persuaded by the Marxist-inspired view that the ideological and cultural
world is shaped by social and material forces, the one thing that this always
seemed completely unable to account for was the nature of consciousness
itself – the fundamental quality of what it is like to be something that
philosophers call ‘qualia’. Here too Jung’s attacks on ‘the materialist
hypothesis’ were music to my ears. Jung always insists on the psyche as the
primary datum, through which any and all experience of the world is
Are archetypes essential? 341

possible. Unlike Freud, he says … ‘who [tried] to turn everything back in theory
into instinctual processes conditioned by the body, I start with the sovereignty
of the psyche’. The psyche, he argues, is ‘essentially different from
physiochemical processes’ (Jung 1936, para. 968).
So however difficult it may be to distinguish between the eternal archetype in itself
and the multitudinous variety of its phenomenal imagery, the theory of archetypes
seemed to offer a set of parameters within which human nature was organised.
It frees us from the threat of an anything goes relativism with no signposts as to
how we should live or why – adrift without a rudder, at sea without a map.
For some years, it seemed possible to square this with the problems of
essentialism. The best exposition of this I know is George Bright’s paper on
‘Synchronicity as a basis of analytic attitude’, published in 1997. Bright takes
Jung’s late work on the psychoid as a limiting factor against analytic omniscience:
he argues that there is a realm of objective transcendent meaning but, since it is
essentially unconscious, it can never be fully elucidated or comprehended.
Therefore, in practice all attributions of meaning, pattern and order are
necessarily provisional. What I did not recognise then is that this is fundamentally
an attitude of faith. It may work for analytic practice but it leaves untouched
Jung’s purportedly scientific assertions of an a priori realm of archetypes that has
become, if anything, more obscure by the introduction of the psychoid.
Over the past twenty years, these problems have been addressed by several
authors who have proposed in various ways that archetypes are not essential
and pre-given a priori but are emergent properties of dynamic interactive
systems of brain, body, environment and/or symbolic narratives. (Cambray
2002, 2006, 2012; Hogenson, 2001, 2005; Knox, 2003, 2004; Sanders and
Skar, 2001; Skar, 2004).
My own version of emergence theory has focused on the relation between
symbols and affect. In my book, Act and Image: the Emergence of Symbolic
Imagination (2016), I propose that the symbolic systems that Jung drew on as
evidence for the existence of archetypes are emergent from human action in
the world. Humans are group animals who co-operate in their engagement
with the physical environment and in so doing create tools to act on the
world as well as tools to think the world, namely symbols. The limited
evidence we have of early human symbolic objects (such as the 40,000 year
old ‘Lion-Man’) and the limited comparisons we can make with those hunter
gatherers who live in similar ways today suggest that these objects were
associated with ritual activities through which they were invested with great
affective significance. In other words, they were a way of realising the
numinous in symbolic form. Unlike Jung, though, I argue that these symbolic
forms are not representations of something pre-existent but are constitutive of
the affective-numinous realm to which, in Shakespeare’s evocative phrase,
they give a local habitation and a name2. That is, symbols are not merely the

2
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, sc.1, 18
342 Warren Colman

clothing for affect as I once thought, making visible the invisible. They are the
means by which unformulated, inchoate affective states are transformed into
recognisably human – and more than human – form. I see Jung’s archetypes
as being symbolic forms of this kind. That is, they belong to the class of
numinous symbols rather than providing an explanation for the existence of
such symbols.
This is an anthropological view of symbolic activity that sees culture as the
necessary condition for becoming fully human. Culture has become the sine
qua non of our species-specific milieu, our Umwelt. As the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz vividly expressed it,

without the assistance of cultural patterns [man] would be functionally

incomplete, a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor
power of self-control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions. Man
depends upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be
decisive for his creatural viability.

(Geertz 1973, p. 99).

So where would I now place that elusive ground of being? I would say that it
lies in our affective engagement with a physical and social environment that
is mediated by the symbolic systems of culture. Deep in the rooted earth from
which this view has developed, there remains the affective fire of my early
encounter with the numinous – the flame that keeps my soul alive. Where my
view has changed is that I now see that the symbolic images which express
such visceral states do not simply represent what is already there but
constitute and transform those states in the process of giving them form. As I
have argued elsewhere, symbols do not merely represent the gods, they are
the gods (Colman 2015, p. 531) or, at least, they are that which makes it
possible to apprehend the numinous as gods. This is why all archetypal
images evoke something that feels more than cultural (in the sense of being
universal, infinite, divine etc.) yet can only be apprehended through cultural
forms.
Jung, typically, comes close to this view even while asserting its opposite.
Questioning the notion of ‘types’ he writes:

… as soon as you divest these types of the phenomenology presented by the case
material, and try to examine them in relation to other archetypal forms, they branch
out into such far-reaching ramifications in the history of symbols that one comes to
the conclusion that the basic psychic elements are infinitely varied and ever
changing, so as utterly to defy our powers of imagination.

(Jung 1936/54, para 143, ital. added).

Here Jung seems to acknowledge not only the impossibility of formulating

what archetypes are but also implies that our only means of doing so is
Are archetypes essential? 343

through the power of our imagination. However, in my view, imagination is

not something that operates in some free-floating psyche located either ‘in our
heads’ or in an obscurely defined ‘collective unconscious’ but is grounded in
and emergent from our embodied activity in the world. Fundamentally,
symbols are imagined things; without the things of this world and the
particularly affective and human ways we engage with them we could not
have imagination. Indeed we could not even have psyche. Psyche itself is
emergent from our species-specific way of engaging with an environment.
The early human use of symbolic communication created the conditions for
the mind of which it then became the expression in an emergent circle of
co-evolution.
In conclusion, it seems to me that there are three possible reasons why
Jungians are reluctant to let go of archetypes.

1) They seem to be a sine qua non of being a Jungian. Would we have any Jung
at all if we did not have the archetypal Jung?
2) They offer a limit and a ground to the threat of an infinite relativism.
3) They are representative of a psychological theory that takes seriously the
spiritual and numinous aspects of our human being.

In this short presentation I have tried to show how all these elements have
been significant to me over the years but how I have now come to a view
which makes the idea of archetypes redundant. It is not the theory of
archetypes that makes me a Jungian but the things that the theory of
archetypes was intended to be about. That remains of vital importance –
especially the value of the numinous as an essential element of being human.
And so I conclude with a familiar call to action: ‘Jungians of the world
unite, you have nothing to lose but your archetypes!’

References
Bright, G. (1997). ‘Synchronicity as a basis of analytic attitude’. Journal of Analytical
Psychology, 42, 613-635.
Cambray, J. (2002). ‘Synchronicity and emergence’. American Imago, 59, 4, 409-434.
——— (2006). ‘Towards the feeling of emergence’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 51,
1-20.
——— (2012). Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe. College
Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Colman, W. (1998). ‘Contrasexuality and the unknown soul’. In Contemporary Jungian
Analysis, ed. I. Alister & C. Hauke, London: Routledge.
——— (2015). ‘A revolution of the mind: some implications of George Hogenson’s “The
Baldwin Effect: a neglected influence on C.G. Jung’s evolutionary thinking”(2001)’.
Journal of Analytical Psychology, 60, 520–539.
——— (2016). Act and Image: the Emergence of Symbolic Imagination. New Orleans,
LA. Spring Journal Books.
344 Warren Colman

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. New York: Basic
Books.
Hogenson, G.B (2001). ‘The Baldwin effect: a neglected influence on C. G. Jung’s
evolutionary thinking’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 46, 591-611.
——— (2004). ‘Archetypes: emergence and the psyche’s deep structure’. In J. Cambray
and L. Carter (Eds.), Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspective in Jungian
Analysis, London & New York: Routledge 2004.
——— (2005). ‘The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity: virtual realities and the
emergence of the psyche’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 50, 271-284.
Hopcke, R.H., Lofthus-Carrington, K. and Wirth, S. (Eds.), (1993). Same Sex Love and
the Path to Wholeness. Boston and London: Shambhala.
Jung, C.G. (1925). ‘Marriage as a psychological relationship’. CW17.
——— (1927). ‘Woman in Europe’. CW10.
——— (1934/1954). ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’. CW9i.
——— (1936/1954). ‘Concerning the archetypes, with special reference to the anima
concept’. CW9i.
——— (1936) ‘Psychological typology’. CW6.
——— (1945/1973). Letter to P.W. Martin, 20th August, 1945. In C.G. Jung Letters, Ed.
Gerhard Adler & Aniela Jaffé, Vol 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
——— (1947). ‘On the Nature of the Psyche’. CW8.
——— (1951). Aion. CW9ii.
Kernberg, O. (1994). Seminar on ‘Love Relations’ at Tavistock Institute of Marital
Studies, London, 20th March.
——— (1998). Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press.
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Emergent Mind. Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2003.
——— (2004). ‘From archetype to reflective function’. Journal of Analytical Psychology,
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and New York: Routledge.
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Analytical Psychology, 46, 305-323.
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TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article marque la différence entre le discours théorique de Jung concernant les
archétypes et sa description phénoménologique de l’expérience numineuse. Pour
l’auteur, l’attirance initiale pour ‘mon Jung’ provint du Romantisme coloré de ses
descriptions sur l’anima et du ‘fondement de l’existence’ apparemment fourni par sa
théorie des archétypes. Cependant, l’essentialisme inhérent à la théorie des archétypes en
général et à celle de l’anima en particulier a rendu nécessaire une réévaluation de la
théorie de Jung à la lumière de la théorie de l’émergence. Ma propre version de ceci met
Are archetypes essential? 345

l’accent sur le rôle des symboles dans la constitution de l’affect par l’action humaine
collective dans le monde. Dans cette reconfiguration, l’énergie viscérale de l’expérience
numineuse est conservée, alors que la théorie problématique des archétypes n’est plus
nécessaire.

Mots clés: affect, anima, archétypes, émergence, essentialisme, fondement de l’existence,

symboles

Dieser Artikel differenziert zwischen Jungs theoretischem Diskurs bezüglich der

Archetypen und seiner phänomenologischen Darstellung numinoser Erfahrung. Für
den Autor stammt die einleitende Anziehung von ‘meinem Jung’ sowohl von dem
lebhaften Romantizismus seiner Beschreibung der Anima, als auch von dem
scheinbaren ‘Seinsgrund’, der von seiner Theorie der Archetypen angeboten wird.
Jedoch hat der der Archetypentheorie im Allgemeinen und der Anima im Speziellen
innewohnende Essentialismus eine Neubewertung von Jungs Theorie in Bezug auf die
Emergenztheorie notwendig gemacht. Meine eigene Version hiervon betont die Rolle
von Symbolen bei der Bildung von Affekten durch kollektives menschliches Handeln in
der Welt. In dieser Rekonfiguration bleibt die viszerale Energie der numinosen
Erfahrung erhalten, während die problematische Theorie der Archetypen nicht mehr
benötigt wird.

Schlüsselwörter: Affekt, Anima, Archetypen, Emergenz, Essentialismus, Seinsgrund,

Symbole

Questo lavoro distingue tra il discorso teorico di Jung sugli archetipi e la descrizione
fenomenologica dell’esperienza del numinoso. Per l’Autore, l’iniziale attrazione per il
“mio Jung” deriva sia dal vivo romanticismo delle descrizioni dell’anima, sia dal
contesto ontologico offerto dalla teoria degli archetipi. In ogni caso, l’essenzialismo
inerente la teoria degli archetipi in generale, e dell’anima in particolare, ha imposto
una rivisitazione della teoria di Jung nei termini della teoria dell’emergente. La mia
interpretazione enfatizza il ruolo dei simboli nella costruzione dell’affetto attraverso
l’azione umana collettiva nel mondo. In questa riconfigurazione, l’energia viscerale
dell’esperienza del numinoso viene conservata mentre la problematica teoria degli
archetipi non è più necessaria.

Parole chiave: affetto, anima, archetipo, emergente, essenzialismo, contesto ontologico,

simboli

В статье проводится различие между теоретическими размышлениями Юнга об

архетипах и его феноменологическим описанием нуминозного опыта. Для автора
первоначальное очарование «моим Юнгом» пришло из романтизма историй об аниме
и мощи «основы сущего», которую предлагает теория архетипов. Однако,
эссенциализм, присущий теории архетипов в целом и аниме в частности, нуждается в
пересмотре с точки зрения теории возникновения (emergence theory). Моя собственная
346 Warren Colman

версия данной теории подчеркивает роль символов в формировании аффекта через

коллективное человеческое действие в мире. В этой переконфигурации висцеральная
энергия нуминозного опыта остается, а в проблематичной теории архетипов больше
нет необходимости.

Ключевые слова: аффект, анима, архетип, возникновение (emergence), эссенциализм,

основа сущего, символы

El presente ensayo distingue entre el discurso teórico de Jung sobre los arquetipos y su
aproximación fenomenológica de la experiencia numinosa. Para el autor, la atracción
inicial de ‘mi Jung’ vino tanto del vívido Romanticismo de sus descripciones del anima
como del aparente ‘fundamento del ser’ ofrecido por su teoría de los arquetipos. Sin
embargo, el esencialismo inherente a la teoría arquetipal en general, como al anima en
particular ha necesitado una reevaluación de la teoría de Jung en términos de la teoría
de la emergencia. Mi propia versión de esto enfatiza el rol de los símbolos en la
constitución de las emociones a través de la acción humana colectiva en el mundo. En
esta reconfiguración, la energía visceral de la experiencia numinosa es retenida
mientras que ya no es necesaria la problemática teoría de los arquetipos.

Palabras clave: afecto (emociones), anima, arquetipos, emergencia, esencialismo,

fundamento del ser, símbolos

原型必要吗?
这篇文章将荣格关于原型的理论叙述与其关于神秘经验的现象描述进行了区分。对文
章的作者来说,“我的荣格”最初吸引他的是,荣格关于阿尼玛描述中那些生动的浪漫
主义色彩,以及他的原型理论中关于“存在的根基”的呈现。然而,在原型理论中普遍
固有的,特别是在阿尼玛理论中固有的本质主义,迫使我们从涌现理论的视角去重新检
视荣格的理论。我的版本的理论是,在通过世界人类集体行为而聚集起来的情绪中,去
强调象征的作用。通过这一重新的配置,神秘经验中本能的能量被保留,原型这一有问
题的理论就不再是必须的。

关键词: 情绪, 阿尼玛, 原型, 涌现, 本质主义, 存在的根基, 象征