an OOO’ish passage from Jung

Here Jung is sounding OOO’ish, though perhaps more like Levi (or DeLanda) than like my own position. It comes from pages 12-13 of the Routledge Classics edition of Four Archetypes:

“It is necessary to point out that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience. Its form, however, as I have explained elsewhere, might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own… In principle, [the archetype] can be named and has an invariable nucleus of meaning– but always only in principle, never as regards its concrete manifestation.”

The point he’s trying to make in this passage is that archetypes as found in dreams, religions, or fairy tales are simply translations of the true underlying archetypes.

He makes another interesting point in this essay, which is that the unconscious was becoming a popular concept in philosophy through Carus and von Hartmann before being obliterated by empiricism, but that it then strangely returned via the route of medical psychology.

I’m not the world’s biggest Jung fan (his ideas often seem to end up in vagueness where more was promised). But he certainly has great moments.