Some Recent Studies in Archetypology

Extract

There is no such word as archetypology, nor is there any one discipline which could fittingly be so named. But we might invent the word to cover all those very various studies which, in very different ways, contribute to our understanding of what the analytical psychologists call archetypes—the primordial images and patterns of behaviour of a supra-personal character which the depth-psychologists find in their clinical work, and which have been expressed in manifold ways by human beings throughout the ages and throughout the world. Whatever else may he said for or against Jung’s concept of the archetype, it has undoubtedly provided a meeting place for specialists in the most disparate fields of inquiry.

This is particularly manifest at the yearly ‘Eranos’ meetings at Ascona, Switzerland, whose proceedings are subsequently published in the Eranos Jahrbuecher. The sciences, as distinct from the humanities, were, however, rather poorly represented at the 1956 meeting, which was devoted to ‘Man and the Creative’. But it had some notable contributions from Professor Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, Chung-Yuan Chang, Laurens van der Post, Hellmut Wilhelm and Sir Herbert Read. Meanwhile we have another volume of previous Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks translated into English. Its theme is ‘Man and Time’, and here the sciences are represented by the physicist Max Knoll and the biologist Adolf Portmann. The arrangement of the contributions is somewhat haphazard, and readers may be recommended to begin at the end with the late Professor G. van der Leeuw’s brilliant essay on ‘Primordial Time and Final Time’, with its careful analysis of basic concepts and its profound theological and philosophical insights.