Jung’s Archetypes

According to Jungian approach of psychology, some highly developed elements of the collective unconscious are called “archetypes”. Carl Jung developed an understanding of archetypes as universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct
They are autonomous and hidden forms which are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular expression by individuals and their cultures. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths, religions, or dreams. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world.

• The Self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man. It expresses the unity of the personality as a whole.
• The shadow is a representation of the personal unconscious as a whole and usually embodies the compensating values to those held by the conscious personality. Thus, the shadow often represents one’s dark side, those aspects of oneself that exist, but which one does not acknowledge or with which one does not identify.
• The anima archetype appears in men and is his primordial image of woman. It represents the man’s biological expectation of women, but also is a symbol of a man’s feminine possibilities, his contrasexual tendencies. The animus archetype is the analogous image of the masculine that occurs in women.

In Jung’s opinion the archetypes which ordered our perceptions and ideas are themselves the product of an objective order which transcends both the human mind and the external world.

source: Wikpedia