An Archetypal Inventory

What This Is Not

This document is not a personality test. It does not assign types, calculate scores, or produce a label that the ego can appropriate as a new form of self-knowledge. The popular reduction of archetypes to personality categories — "I am the Warrior," "I am the Sage" — is precisely the operation this instrument is designed to disrupt.

What This Is

An archetype, in Jung's formulation, is not a character in the psyche. It is a pattern of force — an organising structure that precedes individual consciousness and operates independently of the ego's will. The archetype-as-such can never be observed directly; what can be observed are archetypal images, affects, and behavioural patterns through which the underlying structure manifests in a given life at a given moment.

Hillman's contribution deepens this: the archetypal is not a noun but an adjective — a mode of apprehension in which any image, any event, any symptom can be perceived in terms of the pattern that moves through it. To see archetypally is not to identify which archetype "you are." It is to observe which archetypal patterns are most active in the current field of your psyche.

The Twelve Figures

The twelve figures presented here are drawn from the primary sources: Jung's clinical descriptions in the Collected Works, Hillman's archetypal phenomenology in Re-Visioning Psychology, Neumann's developmental mapping in The Great Mother and The Origins and History of Consciousness, von Franz's work on the Puer Aeternus, Emma Jung's formulation of the Animus, and the mythological substrates from which these figures originally emerge.

The Practice

For each figure, five questions are provided. They are not diagnostic. They are observational — designed to bring the practitioner into direct phenomenological contact with the figure's current activity in her life.

After completing the twelve figures, return to the three that produced the strongest charge. These constitute the dominant triad of the current constellation. Note: "dominant" does not mean "most developed." It means "most energetically present" — which may include the figures you least want to claim.

The Constellation

The inventory is taken once, producing a snapshot of the current archetypal constellation. It is not a permanent portrait. The archetypal field shifts as the psyche moves through different phases of its own development. An inventory taken during a period of creative beginning will look different from one taken during a period of loss. This variability is not a flaw. It is the point: the archetypes are alive, and what is alive does not hold still.