Response to Hugh Gee’s ‘A Simple Statement about the Concept of Archetypes’

Hugh Gee describes with elegant clarity a heuristic adaptation of Jung’s rather unwieldy theory of archetypes for clinical use. However, he rather gives the game away in his second sentence where he says, ‘For me archetypes are the same as potentials’. If so, then surely the concept of archetypes is redundant since we can use the concept of potentials equally well. In other words, Gee has unwittingly demonstrated my own argument.

We can soon see that, while potentials are certainly one aspect of what archetypes are supposed to be about, the two concepts are not really equivalent. Take the example of Mozart - what would be the ‘archetype’ that is equivalent to Mozart’s outstanding musical potential? An archetype of music? An archetype of musical ability? Either way there is nothing like this to be found in Jung’s theory. Like music, singing and dancing do seem to be virtually universal amongst human groups yet we never see Jung discussing archetypes in terms of activities of this kind. That does not seem to be what he had in mind at all. So if we are really to equate archetypes with potentials, we are in danger of loosening an already baggy concept even further. We can see this difficulty when Gee refers to the potential to suck as ‘only one of the millions of potentials we have’. Again this bears little resemblance to the rather small group of archetypes that Jung describes as elements of the individuation process - the persona, the shadow, the anima and the wise old man. We might add in the other familiar suspects - mother, father, trickster, child, spirit and the archetype of archetypes, the self - but we are a very long way from ‘millions’. How could we ever enumerate or classify such a vast conglomeration? And so, once again, the concept of these millions of potentials as ‘archetypes’ loses meaning and significance.

Nor does the concept of potentials take us very far in Jung’s major quest to provide an explanation for the more or less ubiquitous re-occurrence of s