The observations in the following section are primarily those of Thomas Belmonte from his essay, The Trickster and the Sacred Clown: Revealing the Logic of the Unspeakable. Belmonte's scholarly text is very informative, yet a challenge to interpret, so most of the information in this section will come directly from his text.
Archetype as A Deep Stucture
"Cultural anthropology—especially its American variant—continues to display an evangelical hostility toward any theory of mind that asserts the priority (or even parity) of essence (nature) in relation to experience (nurture), an extract of the nature vs. nuture argument."(Belmonte)
"For many in the field of academic anthropology, Jung has been exiled to a place far beyond the borders of admissible argument because of his own failure to invent and refine a terminology that would do justice to the novelty of his ideas. Jung was also accused of never clarifying with any rigor the evolutionary premises of his psychology. He was uneasy with the Newtonian notions contained in Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, and he knew that Darwin’s survivalist materialism could not easily account for the creative and transcendent character of human mentality." ( Belmonte)
Jung was certainly no special creationist."He uncritically accepted an instinctual and Lamarckian ground for the evolution of the mind and embraced Haeckel’s notion of ontology recapitulating phylogeny in the embryo as a fair description of the individual psyche. Like Konrad Lorenz and Edward Wilson, Jung was a sociobiological structuralist for whom the terms of mental life were at once transpersonal and preformed. But he was not by implication a genetic determinist."
(Belmonte)
For Jung, archetypes were always “forms without content,” the structures of which were comparable to the “axial system of a crystal.” Just as particular crystals of water or carbon might vary endlessly, as snowflakes or diamonds, so might the objects, events, and personages of an archetype assembly.
(Belmonte)
“The only thing that remains constant is the axial system, or rather, the invariable geometric propositions underlying it. The same is true of the archetype. In principle, it can be named and has an invariable nucleus of meaning—but always only in principle, never as regards its concrete manifestation.” (CW9i:par.155,pp.79-80)
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