Where did archetypes come from? how do you know for sure they exist?

You know, maybe there is something at the bottom of archetypes. But I haven't heard anyone making that case successfully yet.

okay but the keyword here should be causality.

first, where do they come from? how did they /first/ arise?

Jung is a bad intellectual. He only goes far enough to prove his point but never looks for evidence to disprove it, or at least not very far. The only thing of merit is his alchemy and occult stuff, so do with that what you will.

why is getting to the first-ness part necessary? see where it goes and if technology and culture don't eventually tell us later on how things came to be this way

ugh just read one of those "very short introduction to jung" or something. its hard to explain it in a few a sentences, he basically spent his entire life studying symbols and patterns in man. joseph cambell is actually easier to grasp and has pretty much a slightly more modern explanation (Still pretty much the same thing). Jung believed all humans share a collective unconscious, as if we are all part of a giant hive mind or mega consciousness and that the reason the same symbols and hero types/characters show up in seemingly unrelated cultures is because we are linked to this experience without being conciously aware of it, thus falling into stereotypes or achetypes without even being able to see it that way (not too far fetched considering findings in neurology, but he didnt have access to modern information so it just seems like hes full of shit). Josephs idea is that the original few hundred people (the first humans) made up a few epic stories to basically describe/preserve their origin story and give reverence to the divine, as thye spread through out the world, the stories changed slightly but maintained same basic plots (strong hero, sun/thunder god, divine knowledge, ages of man, apocalypse, chosen people/hero etc). so when they say disney characters are universally loved characters, is because they appeal to all cultures because they fall within these archetypes that have been influencing human culture for thousands of years.

Anyway this model is great for analysis of stories and history. And its very useful when looking at things from hindsight. However it has very little practical application, you cant cure somebodys anxiety by identifying their archetype and you cant really write a story by invoking archetypes as characters, you have to let it be more fluid. free drawing and free association writing exercises can prove that humans will draw pretty recognizable symbols or write corny repetetive shit even when they arent concentrating on doing anything in particular. great example is star wars (george lucas was a joseph cambell fan), the story and everything is great, and as an epic it is very enjoyable, but every single archetype is invoked and none of the characters seem fluid or provocative. a lot of people feel like they know exactly whats going to happen before it happens, because it feels so familiar.

first of all, sure. I'm totally okay with letting an idea run it's course for it's own sake. that can be rewarding

BUT

I also want to be explicit that this is what we're doing. that we're not really doing science or philosophy. that we're not basing our lives on conclusions that might have nothing to do with reality, in the same way a work of fiction can be rewarding and enriching but not a guidebook to how to live life.

>where did archetypes come from?
From the same place as Chomsky's innate, universal grammar.

How do you learn a language? Is it because you know another and keep translating until you make the new one yours? Which language was there before your first language? Is it an infinite regression of infinite translations or does the process have a beginning?

But the beginning is there: a parent introduces his or her baby to language through baby talk. Were any of the two taught in the ways of baby talk? No, and yet the two try to use and intepret it anyway.

Before baby talk still, there was in-utero voice recognition of at least the mother. At some point you will see that you can escape no longer and you have to acknowledge some biological foundation in order for a biological entity to actually start using whichever cultural acquisition.

What if Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device is connected with other innate behaviors, for example before language you might want to do the baby mammal thing and find your mother's mammary gland, because not starving to death sounds like a great idea to me.

There's the catch that you've never seen, felt, smelled or tasted a tit in person before... if babies reasoned like radical skeptics cursed with a tabula rasa, they would be rather fucked. Somehow you know what to look for, and interpret your unknown world anyway. It has a delicious taste to boot.

What if I told you there is a mother archetype that predates even your earliest understanding of who mom is, and later on you begin to revise such understanding according to particular linguistic and cultural features near to you, as you proceed to learn them?

>From the same place as Chomsky's innate, universal grammar.
symbolic grammar, i like it

okay that answers part one. but even if chomsky is right, what does that really have to do with jung? there are definitely innate things in humans. language acquisition may or may not be there, but we can study that.

how do you study whether or not there is a wise old man archetype with us at birth?

how do you know 1) it's there at all or 2) it has the characteristics Jung says it does? because campbell's () case makes it a matter of historical investigation, but Jung and Chomsky's makes it a matter of infant development, essentially.

KEK no it doesn't

only film school graduates think that. Give me 1 example and i'll blast your ass.

ok

i forgot to include every other hollywood blockbuster ever

i'm not interested in talking about bunuel or alain resnais

>how do you study whether or not there is a wise old man archetype with us at birth?
I don't belive in it, but if the Language Of Thought Hypotesis is correct, all we would ever need are Mentalese-English translations.

Of course I am perfectly aware that much of this is quite difficult to study.

Yet I can always point out that listening to your community's elders has some evolutionary advantages, there was Dawkins' (who is NOT a Jungian or even a psychoanalyst) reading of the placebo effect as getting us to search for a healer, also a likely evolutionary advantage and connected to your local grandad, or Gandalf.

But I should remind you proving any of this stuff is as challenging as proving that oh so much stuff involving the mind exists. Which has never stopped philosophy and psychology in their increasingly less speculative and more scientific quest to unravel what is nothing less than the most complex thing in the universe.

The problem with Jung's archetypes is that they are symbols and only symbols. They are not linguistic units. There is no grammar to them. Ultimately, sense cannot be made of them. All you can do is regurgitate shit like the hero's quest over and over without meaning.

Skeptics say, archetypes are not real. There is no proof for the collective unconscious.

I say, maybe archetypes are real. Maybe they are real, but they suck. They shit on artifice and wit. They make art into priestcraft.

Finally, I would like to point out as a Lacanian that of course the unconscious is collective. The unconscious is outside us.

Literally every single story ever told can be classified by archetypes.

They don't "exist" as a perfect image hovering over you, you can just represent everything in the world with them like a language.

It's like asking how do you know English exists

i disagree with some of this but this is a good post.

>I say, maybe archetypes are real. Maybe they are real, but they suck. They shit on artifice and wit. They make art into priestcraft.
This in particular.

Those patterns are so vague that anything could be made to fit them.

Blame Plato

that's the amazing thing about them tho. all your big-time movies and plots follow this pattern. they're vague but without them there's no drama or it seems off-kilter

this post is p much where I'm at too. Nice

And if we read Jung via Campbell, then maybe his unconscious is just the linguistically absorbed trace of ancient memes which occasionally speak up a la Lacan, but the sheer heterogeneity of language that does run through us doesn't lend itself to the idea that each of us is dominated by myth or that being a man and a woman is just absorbing their corresponding memes and the like. Rather, it lends itself to the vision of an extremely fragmented mind, structured only by the most abstract relation to our energies and desires.

I definitely like this suggestion that Jung is best understood as an alchemistic stand-in for an advanced evolutionary psychology to come, but I think in the end the latter runs into the very same empirical issues

we just have to keep moving the evo-psych plot forward

the original alchemical tropes don't change, they will just keep proving themselves right throughout history

and it's possible that they serve some kind of inscrutable higher function as well to give us a common frame of reference to bind things together (and potentially render them into mythological plots) when things get too crazy and fragmented

the less we believe in them the more persuasive they will inevitably turn out to be when, once again, they are proved to exist

I suspect that has much more to do with the language of film than anything innately psychological

I think you need to watch more movies and most importantly read more books, which can weave characters and plots of incredible complexity and drama having literally nothing to do with a single archetype

of course you're right, chekhov or whoever has no need of alchemical symbols. it's true.

but big movies and so on always will. i'm not saying there's any neat or easy comparison. just commenting on how it is that these things work

...

>having literally nothing to do with a single archetype

the problem with an archetype theory is that it must assume, if it is to have any worth, that the archetypes are ineluctable. an archetype theory that assumes you can "do without" is a worthless mythology. so archetypes have to be absolute to be more than a private hobby. yet if art is discovered that breaks the archetypes, or worse, doesn't even "have anything to do with them," then it seems possible we've fallen back into the previous scenario of uselessness. it is the archetypes' very attempt at absolution that consigns them to the dustbin.

>I say, maybe archetypes are real. Maybe they are real, but they suck. They shit on artifice and wit. They make art into priestcraft.
Guys, guys, what if the archetypes are simply the absolute starting point of the hermeneutic circle?

We've already been over how, despite not knowing pretty much shit, babies still attempt to intepret their world, they need to in order to just survive.

Archetypes would be biologically grounded, innate pre-conceptions, "prejudices" that predate any proper understanding, language, culture, art or inventiveness.

So OF COURSE they would "suck" from an artistic standpoint. But they would also be economically successful as anybody would, apparently, be able to relate to them.

Yes. And they do exist, within his imagination. And what are we to prescribe as the beginning and end of any given individuals imaginative capacities? Did the Odyssey die once Homer bodily departed?

The imagination is more important than knowledge. I forget the bloke who said that, probably a cool guy though.

your post is hung up on whether or not they are possible. yes, they are.

but even assuming they are possible, are they actual? and even assuming they are actual, which ones are actual and what are their characteristics? if we really do a thorough study of all the folklore of the world, how are we to isolate, from across all variations, what are the truly fundamental universal entities? wouldn't every aberration and exception serve as a counter-example and if not, what counts as a counter-example? what makes something an exception to the universal produced by aberrant historical forces versus a prototypical example generated by that universal?