Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

14 Archetype, Instinct and Complex
Archetypes are not knowable in themselves, but their myriad
manifestations—as images, patterns and motifs—are well documented
in art, literature, history and mythology. Odysseus, Joan of
Arc and Pinocchio are archetypal images of the hero archetype; the
goddess Demeter is an archetypal image of the mother archetype;
the gods Saturn and Zeus are archetypal images of the father; Satan
is a personified image of the archetype of evil; political parties on
right and left act out the “two brothers” motif (as in the enmity of
Cain and Abel), and so on. Needless to say, the names given to archetypal
patterns differ according to the prevailing culture.
Jung used the simile of the spectrum to illustrate the difference
between instinct and the archetype as an “instinctual image”:
The dynamism of instinct is lodged as it were in the infra-red part of
the spectrum, whereas the instinctual image lies in the ultra-violet
part. . . . The realization and assimilation of instinct never take place
at the red end, i.e., by absorption into the instinctual sphere, but only
through integration of the image which signifies and at the same
time evokes the instinct. 9
Here is how he pictured the relationship between instinct and
archetype, and the ways in which each may manifest:
INSTINCTS ARCHETYPES
infrared ________________________________________ ultraviolet
(Physiological: body (Psychological: spirit,
symptoms, instinctual dreams, conceptions,
perceptions, etc.) images, fantasies, etc.)
So, an archetype is a primordial, structural element of the human
psyche—a universal tendency to form certain ideas and images and
to behave in certain ways. Instincts are the physiological counterparts
of archetypes. Complexes, arising from our individual experience
in the here and now, put skin and flesh on the collective bones
of instinct, archetype and archetypal image.
9 Ibid., par. 414.