The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works 9i)

This is C.G. Jung's own primary psychological text setting out his archetype concept, treating the mother, the child, the trickster and the wise old man as recurring patterns of the collective unconscious as Jung himself defined it, part of the Bollingen series critical edition of his collected works. As a primary text it is authoritative for what Jung himself argued about these archetypal figures, checkable against the text, not for whether archetypes as Jung described them are an empirically established psychological reality, a question psychoanalytic scholarship continues to debate. It is a direct companion to Aion, Jung's further study of the self, already held in this register. Use it to establish Jung's own psychological theory of a named archetype; a claim about a specific culture's own myth needs that culture's own primary source instead.