Annotate the following article by ​summarizing​ each of the paragraphs in the space provided.

Add your own thoughts about what you just read after your summary.

When you have finished, identify the ​main idea​.

***Pro tip: use the footnotes to help you with difficult words - if there’s a word you don’t know and isn’t
in a footnote, you can use the dictionary function in Google Docs or search for the definition***

Carl Jung, part 4: Do archetypes exist?

Mark Vernon

Jung's theory of structuring principles remains controversial – but provides a language to talk
about shared experience

J​ung took the inner life seriously. He believed that dreams are not just a random jumble
of associations or repressed wish fulfilments. They can contain truths for the individual
concerned. They need interpreting, but when understood aright, they offer a kind of
commentary on life. A dream Jung had in 1909 provides a case in point.

Summary:

Thoughts:

He was in a beautifully furnished house. It struck him that this fine abode1 was his own
and he remarked, "Not bad!" Oddly, though, he had not explored the lower floor and so he
descended the staircase to see. As he went down, the house got older and darker, becoming
medieval on the ground floor. Checking the stone slabs beneath his feet, he found a metal ring,
and pulled. More stairs led to a cave cut into the bedrock. Pots and bones lay scattered in the
dirt. Then he saw two ancient human skulls, and awoke.

Summary:

Thoughts:

Jung interpreted the dream as affirming2 his emerging model of the psyche. The upper
floor represents the conscious personality, the ground floor is the personal unconscious, and the
deeper level is the collective unconscious – the primitive, shared aspect of psychic life. It

1
​a place of residence; a house or home
2
​offer (someone) emotional support or encouragement.
contains what he came to call archetypes, the feature we shall turn to now. They are
fundamental to Jung's psychology.

Summary:

Thoughts:

Archetypes can be thought of simply as structuring principles. For example, falling in

love is archetypal for human beings. Everyone does it, at least once, and although the pattern is
common, each time it feels new and inimitable.

Summary:

Thoughts:

A related feature of archetypes is that, while they shape our perceptions and behaviour,
we only become conscious of them indirectly, as they are manifest in particular instances. This
would explain why, for example, Buddhists tend not to have visions of Jesus, and Christians
tend not to have visions of Siddhartha Gautama. Instead, religious believers relate to the
archetype of the wise man via the images available to them in their culture (given, for the sake of
argument, that wisdom is what Jesus or the Buddha represent).

Summary:

Thoughts:

The theory of archetypes is controversial, and Jung did not help himself in this respect.
For one thing, he is not very consistent in his definition of archetypes – though he can perhaps
be forgiven as he explicitly called himself a "borrower" of models and insights from other fields
of knowledge, in his attempts to grapple with his own. Archetypes have also been accused of
being superfluous,3 on the grounds that cultural transmission provides an adequate explanation
for the phenomena that Jung would put down to psychic universals.

Summary:

Thoughts:

That said, striking parallels to archetypes have emerged across a number of fields since
Jung's own formulation. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote of "unconscious infrastructures" that shape
common customs and institutions. Noam Chomsky calls the basic forms of language "deep
structures". Sociobiology has the notion of "epigenetic rules", laws of behaviour that have
evolved over time.

Summary:

3
​unnecessary, especially through being more than enough.
Thoughts:

In fact, the possibility that Jungian archetypes might be commens4urate with biology was
implied by EO Wilson in his book ​Consilience​. He raised the possibility that science might make
them "more concrete and verifiable". Following Wilson's lead, the psychiatrist Anthony Stevens
sees archetypes at work in ethology, the study of animal behaviour in natural habitats. Animals
have sets of stock behaviours, ethologists note, apparently activated by environmental stimuli.
That activation is dependent upon what are known as "innate releasing mechanisms". The
fungus cultivated by the leafcutter ant ensures the ant only collects the kind of leaf that the
fungus requires. The emerald head of the mallard drake causes the mallard duck to become
amorous. Other characteristics from maternal bonding to male rivalry might be called
archetypal too.

Summary:

Thoughts:

How far you might want to follow Jung along this path is moot,5 as it is among
contemporary Jungians too. The shadow is a useful concept to many, as that side of our
character which is often buried and sometimes, suddenly emerges, in behaviour from road rage
to crimes of passion. The notion of the animus and the anima, say, are more contested.

Summary:

Thoughts:

However, Stevens argues that archetypes are valuable nonetheless. They provide a
language to talk about the kind of behaviour and, importantly, experience that seems resistant to
the vicissitudes of time and which cultural transmission would otherwise erode. As the biologist
Jacques Monod noted: "Everything comes from experience, yet not from actual experience… but
instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its
evolution." Jung would have agreed.

Summary:

Thoughts:

Main Idea:

4
​corresponding in size or degree; in proportion.
5
​subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty. 
Vernon, Mark. “Carl Jung, Part 4: Do Archetypes Exist? | Mark Vernon.” ​The Guardian​, Guardian News and Media, 20 June
2011, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/20/jung-archetypes-structuring-principles.