AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

In psychoanalysis, an idealized image of another person, such as a parent, or of an instinctual object, acquired in infancy and maintained in the unconscious (2) in later life. The concept was introduced in 1911 by Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who believed that some imagos are derived from archetypes (2) rather than from personal experiences, and it became a key concept of his analytical psychology. In the writings of the British-based Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), it is a fantastically distorted picture of the real object on which it is based. See also anima, animus (3), idealization.

Alan Moore in Promethea talked in a similar way about what he called "the immateria", but it's the same idea, a world that is imaginary in some sense but also perfectly real, because it can be experienced. And maybe it's exactly what Jung meant by the collective unconscious and its population of archetypes .

...since...the archetypes in question are not mere objects of the mind, but are also autonomous factors, i.e., living subjects, the differentiation of consciousness can be understood as the effect of the intervention of transcendentally conditioned dynamisms. (p107)

archetypes , according to Jung, are ‘the introspectively recognizable form[s] of a priori psychic orderedness’; furthermore, ‘as a priori ideal forms, [they] are as much found as invented: they are discovered inasmuch as one did not know about their unconscious autonomous existence, and invented inasmuch as their presence was inferred from analogous conceptual structures’.

A term I just made up to mean: any mental construct that appears to have any sort of independent mental agency. Includes Minsky agents, IFS what-do-they-call-them, Jungian archetypes perhaps. Crazy Jane alters, Imagos and Imprimers.

archetypes

24 Oct 2024 - 24 Oct 2024

To Jung, who along with Freud was pioneering what he believed was the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, gods like Wotan were not real metaphysical entities (a notion he dismissed as ‘childish’). But neither were they simply figments of the imagination, or mere ‘social constructs’, as the lingo would now have it. Rather, they were manifestations of powerful and ancient unconscious forces - archetypes - which existed not only in the psyches of individuals but also of human collectives, such as nations. Why, he asked, had Germany apparently gone mad? No rational explanation would cut it: