Archetype

The origins of the archetypal hypothesis date back as far as Plato. Jung himself compared archetypes to Platonic ideas. Plato's ideas were pure mental forms, that were imprinted in the soul before it was born into the world. They were collective in the sense that they embodied the fundamental characteristics of a thing rather than its specific peculiarities.

The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, c. 1919. In Jung's psychological framework archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex, e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype. Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological constructs that arose through evolution. ^[4]

Jung outlined five main archetypes:

• The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation
• The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless
• The Anima, the feminine image in a man's psyche; or:
• The Animus, the masculine image in a woman's psyche
• The Persona, how we present to the world, usually protects the Ego from negative images (acts like a mask)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype