Psychological Types (Jung, 1921/1923)

Jung's Psychologische Typen (Rascher, Zurich, 1921), translated by H. Godwyn Baynes and published in 1923 by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner in London and Harcourt, Brace in New York. The copy read here is a scan of that first English edition, digitized by the University of Victoria and public domain. This is the second primary Jung text in the spoke, after psychology-of-the-unconscious, and it was read for one thing in particular: the chapter of definitions Jung appended to it, which is where he writes down what he means by the terms analytical-psychology is built from.

Introversion and extraversion — the pair this book is famous for, and the ancestor of every personality questionnaire that inherited the words — are the bulk of it. What follows concentrates on the other half, because that is where the wiki had nothing but paraphrase.

The archetype is not a headword

Chapter XI numbers 57 definitions, and "archetype" is not one of them. Nor is "collective unconscious". The word appears once in the lexicon, inside definition 26, Image, as an aside:

The primordial image (elsewhere also termed the 'archetype') is always collective, i.e. it is at least common to entire nations or epochs.

Jung's footnote to that parenthesis points at his own 1919 paper Instinct and the Unconscious (Journal of Psychology, vol. x). So the term existed by 1921 and he had already used it in print. But in the book that fixed his vocabulary it travels as a synonym for primordial image, and the collective unconscious enters not as a defined thing but as the place primordial images come from. The concept the wiki has been calling Jung's central one is, in his own reference chapter, a parenthetical.

And the definition arrives six years later (2026-08-28). analytical-psychology-and-poetic-art (1922 lecture, tr. Baynes, England 1928) does give the archetype a headline definition and a derivation — so the absence recorded here is a fact about Types, not about Jung's vocabulary as a whole, and the two texts together date the term's arrival in English prose.

What an archetype was supposed to be made of

The part that changes how the claim should be read is the mechanism, which is biological and specific:

The primordial image is a mnemic deposit, an imprint ("engramm" — Semon), which has arisen through a condensation of innumerable, similar processes.

And a page later:

The primordial image, then, is the psychic expression of an anatomically and physiologically determined disposition.

Richard Semon's mneme was a theory of inherited memory traces, and Jung builds on it directly: recurring experience deposits an engram, the engram is inherited with the brain's structure, and the myth is what the deposit looks like from inside. He then argues the deposit cannot be a copy of the environment alone. If it were, the sun would appear in myth "frank and unveiled" rather than allegorized, so living matter must contribute something of its own.

This is worth holding carefully. The inherited-symbol claim is usually described, in this wiki included, as the untestable part of Jung. In the primary text it is not vague at all: it is a claim about heredity, resting on a mechanism of acquired-trace inheritance that biology afterwards abandoned. That is a stronger thing to say than "untestable" and a worse one for the theory. The claim is checkable in principle and its stated physical basis did not survive.

The evidence offered for universality

One sentence, in the same definition:

I have, in fact, demonstrated a whole series of motives from Grecian mythology in the dreams and phantasies of thoroughbred negroes suffering from mental disorders.

That is the support the lexicon gives for motives being "common to all times and races" — his own clinical observation of psychiatric patients, cross-referenced to Psychology of the Unconscious, with no procedure stated and no comparison group. The wording is Jung's and belongs to 1921. The methodological point stands on its own and is the same one psychology-of-the-unconscious raised about Miss Frank Miller: the universality thesis rests on the proposer's reading of his own cases.

Jung denies the metaphysics

Definition 56, Unconscious, opens by refusing the reading this wiki has given it:

The concept of the unconscious is for me an exclusively psychological concept, and not a philosophical concept in the metaphysical sense. In my view, the unconscious is a psychological boundary-concept, which covers all those psychic contents or processes which are not conscious.

His justification is "derived purely and solely from experience, and in particular from psychopathological experience": hysterical amnesia, where contents the ego cannot reach come back under hypnosis. He also declines to speculate about how an unconscious content exists when nothing is attached to it, calling conjectures about cerebration "phantasies".

analytical-psychology and carl-jung both describe the collective unconscious as a metaphysics-of-mind claim. Jung says it is not one. Both readings are now on the record and the conflict is flagged in synthesis. Intent and method can diverge, and what a boundary-concept justified by amnesia cases can carry is exactly what is in dispute.

Individuation, defined

Definition 29 gives the process a plain statement:

The concept of individuation plays no small role in our psychology. In general, it is the process of forming and specializing the individual nature ... a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality.

He calls it "a natural necessity" whose obstruction — "levelling to collective standards" — injures the individual, and insists it leads toward a wider collective relation rather than away from one. Note what is not here: any claim about when in a life this happens. The second-half-of-life timing second-half-of-life rests on comes from the 1930 essay, not from this book, and that page still has no primary source under it.

Soul, persona, projection

Definitions 48 and 49 supply the anima machinery. Jung separates psyche (all psychic process) from soul, "a definitely demarcated function-complex that is best characterized as a 'personality'", and grounds the split in the French dissociation literature (Azam, Ribot, Morton Prince, Flournoy) plus everyday character-splitting: "angel abroad, and devil at home", a man's work self and home self as two habitual attitudes.

The soul-image is what the unconscious sends to represent the inner attitude, as dream figures represent the persona. When someone is unconscious of their own anima, the image "is transferred into a real person", who then becomes an object of compelling love, hatred or fear. Adaptation to a projection is not possible, so libido dams up and affect discharges. "Affects always occur where there is a failure of adaptation."

Why it matters here

The spoke can now quote Jung on the archetype, on what he thought it was made of, on individuation and on projection from Jung, with a translator and a date. It also has three things the essayists do not supply: that the archetype was a minor term in 1921, that its stated basis was Semon's inherited engram, and that Jung explicitly denied the metaphysical reading.

Still second-hand after this: the archetype essays proper (1934–1954, in copyright), the life-stages argument of 1930, and the poetry essay jung-on-creativity draws on.

Connections

• author carl-jung · translator H. Godwyn Baynes · publisher Kegan Paul / Harcourt, Brace
• the school it defines the vocabulary of: analytical-psychology
• the earlier primary text: psychology-of-the-unconscious
• the break it postdates: sigmund-freud

Related

carl-jung · analytical-psychology · psychology-of-the-unconscious · jung-on-creativity · second-half-of-life · sigmund-freud · synthesis