The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton Classics Book 9)

Besides possessing an “eternal” significance, the archetype also has an equally legitimate historical aspect. Ego consciousness evolves by passing through a series of “eternal images,” and the ego, transformed in the passage, is constantly experiencing a new relation to the archetypes. Its relation to the eternality of the archetypal images is a pr

Images and symbols have this advantage over the paradoxical philosophical formulations of infinite unity and unimaged wholeness, that their unity can be seen and grasped as a unity at one glance.

If, on the other hand, transpersonal contents are reduced to the data of a purely personalistic psychology, the result is not only an appalling impoverishment of individual life—that might remain merely a private concern—but also a congestion of the collective unconscious which has disastrous consequences for humanity at large.

THE FOLLOWING ATTEMPT to outline the archetypal stages in the development of consciousness is based on modern depth psychology.

excessive. It is necessary for the structure of personality that contents originally taking the form of transpersonal deities should finally come to be experienced as contents of the human psyche. But this process ceases to be a danger to psychic health only when the psyche is itself regarded suprapersonally, as a numinous world of transpersonal ha

This is not to say that early man was something of a philosopher; abstract questions of this kind were wholly alien to his consciousness. Mythology, however, is the product of the collective unconscious, and anyone acquainted with primitive psychology must stand amazed at the unconscious wisdom which rises up from the depths of the human psyche in

The materialization of psychic contents, by which contents that we would call “psychic”–like life, immortality, and death—take on material form in myth and ritual and appear as water, bread, fruit, etc., is a characteristic of the primitive mind. Inside is projected outside, as we say.

The archetypal structural elements of the psyche are psychic organs upon whose functioning the well-being of the individual depends, and whose injury has disastrous consequences: Moreover, they are the unfailing causes of neurotic and even psychotic disorders, behaving exactly like neglected or maltreated physical organs or organic functional syste

The relation of the ego to the unconscious and of the personal to the transpersonal decides the fate not only of the individual, but of humanity.