SolitaryWalker
Tenured roisterer
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 3,504
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
I presently regard Jung's claims regarding a collective unconscious and its archetypical contents as fanciful conjecture; my purpose was not to offer an apology for Jung's position, but only to correct your explanation of Jung's position, viz.
Your response to my correction indicated a misapprehension of my purpose. The issue was not whether what Jung claims is true, but what it is Jung claims. Regardless, I do find the following challenge inadequate, specifically because it is an instance of the Straw man fallacy:
"Archetypes" are defined by Jung as, "only those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration and are therefore an immediate datum of psychic experience". This elaboration, much of (but not all of) which cognitive development is needed to facilitate, is an elaboration of the already present archetypes; even if most of this elaboration cannot be performed at birth, that does not require that those archetypes not already be present in the collective unconscious. It seems, however, that a certain form of "conscious elaboration" is available even to newborns: Jung believes that archetypes can be immediately manifested in dreams and visions. Presumably, as even infants dream, they too elaborate archetypes in this manner, though this is altogether different from the other modes of elaboration requiring cognitive development, such as mythologizing processes.
A straw man fallacy is a representation of one's position, and a very specific kind of a misrepresentation. It is a distortion of the view's of one's interlocutor which presents his position as less defensible than it truly is.
In literature it appears far from clear with regard to specifically what 'archetype' means and what this term is taken to mean in Jungian writings. Several ideas have been advanced to define the term in both contexts all of which are closely linked yet have not been synthesized to form a single, unequivocal definition. I was under the impression that what Jung meant by archetypes is coherent ideas or at least coherent images, E.G, the mother archetype. Such things, I maintain cannot be innate. I regarded no other concept but this one as an archetype.
If it is the case that an archetype as you suggest is not what I had in mind, but simply any content of our unconscious mind that has not yet been subjected to conscious scrutiny, than yes archetypes are inborn.
In the most technical sense, some experience is required in order for us to have some content within our unconscious mind. To a minor degree, fetuses are able to cognitively process information before being born. As a result when they are born, they have archetypes or some content in their unconscious.
In the strictest sense, no idea as archetypal, yet all ideas are ectypal as all ideas in our mind have derived from the external world. Jung would be correct to maintain that some content of our unconscious was present at our birth, yet it would be a mistake to suggest that it has originated from within and not from without. The notion of 'having derived within and not from without' is close in meaning to 'archetypal', which I find to be fundamentally mistaken for the reasons stated above.