While Plato’s Forms provides an explanation for our limited conceptualization abilities in how the conceptualization is related to the collective co-understanding of phenomena, it lacks phenomenological evidence as to its claims of our access to the permanency of concepts. It claims to deduce a linking between individual conceptualization and the totality of knowledge, but it is unverifiable in experience, and incompatible with modern scientific understanding of linguistics. The forms regarded as the source of our concepts of objects in themselves, we are told they are from which we draw our understanding of objects in ourselves, from a transcendental realm which we draw from. The case is, we conceptualize bottom up, not from a transcendental realm down to the conscious, but from the genetically inherited on up to conscious understanding –  from our sensory and bodily perceptions, filtered through the biologically ingrained value systems, up to conscious manifestation. Regardless of the efficacy of Plato’s rationale, the understanding of how our perception and linguistic systems formulate conceptualizations in regards to objects is useful to an understanding of ourselves, and these are, as he regarded, shared amongst the set of all humans, to a degree. While we don’t necessarily have access to a realm of forms in which to draw our concepts from, there are internal consistencies in regards to evolutionary structures and aspects of our psyches that we can uncover as modifying our perceptions and thus our experience in the way in which our value system filters content, and influences our actions. Towards these collective unconscious foundations, Carl Jung has delineated several that markedly present themselves in our own Being, and are recognizable across cultures and languages. These aspects of the collective unconscious which are relics as well as influencers, affecting our development and our current experience, Jung defined as archetypes. The formulation and social implications of concepts is developed by our minds in the organizing of symbolic representations of reality, the concepts themselves do not exist outside of us, rather they exist below our conscious instantiation of action. Their definitions are modified by us, their linguistic “creation” is done by us, and their usage and application is derived from the neural structure within us. While these archetypes are surely unconscious, we can recognize our relation to them, and their essential structures, at least in part, through methods of introspection and in recognizing projections.

It is useful in the continuing development of one’s own psyche to have a personal experience of recognizing the emergence of archetypal personalities, more so than a merely conceptual, scholarly understanding of the concepts used to denote them. While our own individual psyche may not have had an archetypal personality rise to the surface and manifest itself in complete possession of the mind, which would be obvious upon retrospect, it often is the case that the archetypes merely manifest themselves in certain modes of being, small periods of time, in our perceptions, evaluations, judgments, and actions. While it is rare that a single aspect of our psyche hijacks the entire system, their interrelated influences upon our lives is available to be deduced by a phenomenological analysis of the content of our own subjective experience. Whether the archetypes are obviously presented or not, we can always recognize their influence within us in some way. It will be useful for this exercise to have a conceptual understanding of what the shadow, the anima, the trickster, the wise old man, and the hero archetypes mean mythologically as well as a knowledge of the analytic psychology tradition and their roles in the psyche.

The most popular method in recognizing features of these personalities as existing within our own unconscious psyche is through reflective conscious recognition of their manifestations in relation to adequately defined characteristics of their essence, yet, here I am posing another method. Through identification of the manifestation of them interpersonally, we can utilize our personal relationships in discovering how we have projected these personalities onto others, and in noticing how our distinct relationships cause a modification of our own mode of Being, look to how and why that being is modified in such a manner. Often times others seem to reflect characteristics which we subjectively notice as being in a certain meaningful relation to us, whether it is in representing a pattern common to certain archetypes, or whether it is something agreeable, disagreeable, etc. In analyzing our individual response and interpretation of others manifestations, and our reactions to them, we can learn about the structures which have developed within us to produce such judgments or perceptions. The way in which we perceive and judge others, is necessarily formulated through our current inbuilt value system, and in recognizing our subjective experience in how and what perceptions arise to conscious awareness, we can learn, not only of the values and beliefs in which we use to perceive and signify content of consciousness, but also of the archetypal structure which has been unconsciously at play in our own psyches. By recognizing that a certain person displays qualities that relate to the mythological formulations of the archetype, we can narrow them down and find if we are projecting an archetypal image onto them. Apart from analysis in this way, the feeling someone gives us can point us in the right direction in determining the archetype projected onto the individual.

Conversely, once we have realized that a person contains traits that are comparable to a previously conceptualized archetype, and identified that archetype, we can further analyze that individuals’ character and personality, and understand something about ourselves through our own repetition of similar actions and traits stemming from the psychological state. In other words, we notice that those traits they are embodying can be categorized into an archetypal structure, and extrapolate that those qualities we notice in others are noticed due to our own perceptive system containing a representation of them unconsciously. We contain the traits, and the evaluation, that make up our interpretation of the archetype represented in the other person. Perhaps these regarded archetypes in our own experience have previously possessed the psyche, came to the forefront and revealed themselves, maybe they are suppressed, or maybe they have previously been integrated and accepted into the whole. Regardless, the traits within the projection, if they are noticed, can be learned to be qualities of potential we contain within, as the way through which we view the world, the perspectives, ideas, feelings and actions which we embody in experience is conditioned by the archetypal influence upon the unconscious, the conscious conceptualization arising out of that inbuilt structure. By consciously recognizing a projection of a previously conceptualized classification, whether it’s a Jungian classification of an archetype, or personality, or otherwise, we become enabled to see how that archetype is at play within our own daily lives, and how it is affecting our own minds.

For example, if we find an individual which we despise, hate, regard as immoral, holding beliefs and values completely opposite of our own, perhaps we have discovered, through our own judgment and our awareness of it, a projection of our own shadow. That feeling of disgust in viewing or experiencing that individual, in noticing these phenomena in our perception of another as representing at least some aspects of immorality and content we wish not to be part of our own character, we effectively learn something about the constitution of our own character, and its developed relationship to morality. The reason this hate arises, or the negative connotation we embody in relation to that person, is due to it being a projection of an unconscious archetype of the shadow within ourselves, we are recognizing outside of ourselves, part of ourselves, through an internal process. The only reason that reaction would take place, is if that external idea, or archetype, has been developed within us prior. This isn’t saying it has manifested or taken over our psyche, just that it exists as potentiality, or as influencing manifestations we don’t recognize as derivatives of that source. Our own inner comprehension of the shadow is what enables us to perceive others as immoral, manifesting an inner feeling of repulsion, dislike, unpleasant emotion, and other such negative modes of being conditioned by the perception of the individual embodying the archetype. We unconsciously contain the potential for all the same actions which reflect personality traits, and they can be symbolized and conceptualized with the overarching term of shadow, as well as seen to be present in the other person. In consciously recognizing a projection of an archetype, and then drawing the conclusion that this archetypal understanding and projection is a symbolic representation of the inner content, we can connect our interpersonal discoveries reflexively to understand our own psychological inclinations and their underpinnings.

All archetypal conceptualizations become inherited to a greater or lesser degree in a nascent state, containing universal hereditary and shared functionality as biological structures. Through development, a second layer is developed above the initial inclinations which affect our perceptions, and become modified by individual experience, culture, society. We have the blueprint in which our Being is constituted from the start, in the perceptive value structure and the ability to recognize and relate to phenomena in a specific way, as inherited by our genetic material, and psychologically conceptualized, additionally, in archetypal structures. Both conceptually delineated systems, the biological, and the archetypal, become modified as we develop from that initial starting point, they build upon the foundation that is inherited in vast, yet limited and guided directions.

The personal nature of the archetypal layer of the unconscious naturally grows out of the universal unconscious, as does the personal shadow archetype grows from the original propensity to have a shadow that is inherit in humans and has the same qualities across all mankind. What you perceive as projected is necessarily a combination of both, as the foundation lies inherent and is built upon and modified by the subjective experience. This process, recognition, and structure is shared among all the basic, large, Jungian archetypes. As Jung said, it shouldn’t be forgotten that these archetypes are impossible to pin down and define, and seriously are unconscious, but we can still obtain, an albeit small inference, into their nature and their roles in our lives by understanding them broadly and abstaining from ever admitting that our conscious conception is all encompassing nor sufficiently precise.  Basically, it takes one to know one.