Is the mind of a newborn a blank slate? Or does it have a preformed structure?

Carl Jung – 20th Century psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology. Believes that there exist identical psychic structures common to all (The Archetypes). These are heritable and influence the way all humans experience the world. 

In studying the myths and relations of cultures past and present Jung noticed that many of them share similar patterns, themes, and symbols. 

The Psyche contains elements which are pre-personal, or transpersonal, and common to all. 

The Conscious Realm is one’s field of awareness, consisting of those psychic contents that one has knowledge of. 

The Personal Unconscious consists of events of one’s life that are deemed insignificant, are forgotten or are repressed due to their distressing nature. 

The Collective Unconcious consists of psychic structures or cognitive categories which are not unique to the individuals, but rather are shared by all; influencing our thoughts, behaviors, and the way we look at the world. 

Just as a body that is structured by organs that are formed largely prior to birth. So the mind possesses psychic organs that structure it. Furthermore, just as the physical organs operate without once own awareness, so do the archetypes. 

Archetypes cannot be directly observed. The existence of archetypes is revealed by the arrangements they produce in consciousness through the manifestation of symbolic imagery. 

The archetypes provide the structure, not the specific form of the symbolic images found throughout the world across many cultures. 

The form of representation peculiar to the unconscious is not that of the conscious mind. It neither attempts nor is able to seize hold of and define its objects in a series of discursive explanations and reduce them to clarity by logical analysis. The way of the unconscious is different. Symbols gather round the thing to be explained, understood, interpreted. The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric groupings of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many sides. Each symbol lays bare another essential side of the object to be grasped, points to another facet of meaning. Only the canon of these symbols congregating about the center in question, the coherent symbol group, can lead to an understanding of what the symbols point to and of what they are trying to express

Man “possesses” many things which he has never acquired but has inherited from his ancestors. He is not born as a tabula rasa, he is merely born unconscious. But he brings with him systems that are organized and ready to function in a specifically human way, and these he owes to millions of years of human development.

Whether this psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever “originated” at all is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable. 

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.