“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”— Joseph Campbell
Few concepts are more seductive — and more philosophically unstable — than the archetype. Campbell draws heavily on Jung to frame myths as expressions of collective archetypes: universal patterns rooted in the collective unconscious, resurfacing in different forms across time and culture. This claim gives myth a kind of timeless authority — as though the symbolic structures that shape meaning today are merely new expressions of ancient, transhistorical truths.
But through the lens of relational ontology, this view begins to dissolve.
There is no “unconscious” outside the symbolic systems through which experience is construed. There are no “archetypes” prior to the symbolic alignments that render them legible. And there is no “collective” except as a phase-shifted coordination of construal.
What we call archetypes are not universal forms. They are symbolic regularities in perspectival alignment — patterns of construal that have stabilised across time, scale, and social formation.
From Archetype to Alignment
The temptation to posit archetypes as metaphysical constants — mother, hero, shadow, trickster — emerges when we mistake construal for structure. If a pattern recurs across different myths, it is not because it expresses a fixed inner form. It is because certain symbolic infrastructures are repeatedly re-used to phase social transformation, maintain collective coherence, or open new ontological possibilities.
The “hero” is not an archetype. It is a relational cut that phases disruption and realignment.
The “mother” is not universal. It is a symbolic node for organising nurture, origin, and continuity.
The “trickster” is not innate. It is a symbolic instability — a pressure point for reconfiguring alignment.
These figures persist not because they are timeless, but because they serve functional roles within symbolic systems that scale, mutate, and reflexively stabilise over time. They are recurring construals, not underlying essences.
The Danger of the Universal
To treat archetypes as universal is to erase the specific social formations that produce them. It detaches symbolic function from context, strips myth of its infrastructural role, and re-mystifies meaning as something derived from psychic depths.
This manoeuvre reintroduces metaphysical idealism through the back door: a claim that meaning is grounded in a timeless realm of forms, rather than emerging from the ongoing coordination of construal in collective life.
Relational ontology insists otherwise:
There is no “source” beyond construal.
There is no “form” prior to phasing.
There is no “unconscious” beneath the symbolic.
There is only alignment — of matter, meaning, and possibility — and the infrastructures that scaffold its construal at scale.
Archetype as Symbolic Shortcut
That said, we need not discard the concept of archetype entirely. Instead, we can reconstrue it as a symbolic compression mechanism — a shorthand for phase-patterns that have stabilised into reusable templates.
In this sense:
Archetypes are not containers of meaning, but triggers of alignment.
They do not express deep truths, but constrain reflexive possibility.
They are symbolic economies of scale, not psychological facts.
When mythic systems deploy archetypes, they are not invoking universals. They are strategically reactivating phased alignments that still hold symbolic currency — and in doing so, they reflexively reshape what is possible to mean, to feel, to become.
From Symbol to System
In Campbell’s hands, archetypes hover between psychology and myth. But from a relational standpoint, they anchor neither. Instead, they instantiate the phase-space of a symbolic system. Their recurrence is not proof of timeless truth, but of the limited pathways available for aligning symbolic transformation at scale.
We do not find the same archetypes everywhere because they are universal. We find them because the infrastructures of construal are themselves constrained — by history, by materiality, by collective reflexivity.
To study archetypes, then, is not to excavate eternal forms. It is to map the infrastructures that organise symbolic reality — and the pressures, cuts, and alignments that keep them in motion.
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