When Archetypes Become Stereotypes
I’ve contemplated on how paradoxical it seems that people claim a group identity to individuate. That is, until I learned about archetypes.
Schemas
Archetypes are like schemas, in pedagogical terms (I wanted to be a teacher, can you tell?). Children use schemas to categorize their life through a process of elimination, once a pattern is established. For instance, a child may ask, “Mommy, what is that?” and learn a new word like “cat”. But without anything to contrast it with, from this initial perspective, the child might think everything that walks on four legs is a cat. Once the child is introduced to a dog, they’ll have to figure out what makes a cat different from a dog. Its a long arduous process but fortunately kids are so fascinated by life they never stop asking questions… until they become adults. For more on schemas, check out this informative post.
Now that we have an idea of what a schema is, lets determine how it is different from an archetype. (see what I did there?)
Archetypes
Archetype: ar·che·type /ˈärkəˌtīp/ noun
a very typical example of a certain person or thing.
Archetypes are established models of something particular. One could probably even argue that archetypes are one schema of schemata (plural for schema and just also really fun to say). Archetypes are an important source of schemata. So, I’m thinking of schemata as the proverbial cells of archetypes. Archetypes are made up of schemata, to put it another way.
Now that we have that established, the real question is, how do humans use archetypes? Interestingly, Carl Jung uses the word ‘archetype’ to describe the basic building blocks of the collective unconscious.
The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif- representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern.
— Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung
What we are finding out today is that these archetypes can only lose their basic pattern if stereotypes are developed and perpetuated, while prototypes never learned. This is why ancient wisdom is crucial to understanding our world today. Our stories will still contain archetypes, but they will be more exaggerated forms as they become exponentially more detailed. Religion, and fairy tales for that matter, give us a frame of mind to think from. We threw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to religions. Nobody says you have to be a paid member to subscribe to the stories. Seriously, you don’t have to sell your soul to any other entity to read and gather information. In fact, its important to be able to separate from identifying with the character too much to have a bird’s eye perspective. The God perspective, so to speak.
It’s certainly much better than forming archetypes from the lives of celebrities, who are also flawed humans. Hollywood hacked that human desire to develop archetypes from story lines and applied them to relatable characters. On the surface, not a bad attempt to inspire people, but it restricts their imagination to only what is possible in the 3D world. Archetypes are a fundamental form and not the story of just one person’s life. If they contain fantastical magic and characters wielding superhuman powers, it allows humans to never stop dreaming and therefore they can stay creative and motivated to keep on living.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
