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CriticaLink | Plato: Phaedrus | Terms
archetype
Our word archetype incorporates the Greek word arche, meaning "origin" or "source". Plato's idealist philosophy envisions eternal, perfect archetypes of all phenomena in the physical world--the Forms. Some translations of Plato's texts refer to the particular phenomenal manifestations of the Forms as types.
The concept of the archetype plays a role in the psychological theory of Carl Gustav Jung, who argued that individual personality types and different components of individual psychic lives could be correlated with archetypes that lay in the collective unconscious of the human species.