Jung

What he observed

Jung found in his patients, and in myths, dreams and religious imagery across cultures, the same relational and affective configurations recurring among peoples and epochs that shared no causal history. He called them archetypes, and located them in a collective unconscious: a stratum of the psyche, inherited, common to all, lying beneath each person's consciousness.

He observed, too, that what a person will not be does not disappear. It gathers as the shadow, the excluded part of the personality, and it returns: met in others, onto whom it is projected, and in dreams, which answer a one-sided conscious attitude with its opposite. He called this compensation, and attributed it to a purposive tendency of the unconscious toward wholeness, which he named the Self.

What it shows

Jung mapped the territory that the field tradition kept entering from the clinic: forms that belong to no one person, and an excluded half that reappears around the person who excludes it. His account kept both phenomena inside the psyche, as a stratum of each individual endowed with an intelligence of its own.

In the model

The paper keeps the phenomena and changes their location. The shared field is no stratum of any person; persons are partial expressions of it, and it intends nothing. Archetypes are the field's configurations. Compensation needs no autonomous unconscious: the completeness of a half-expressed form, working through evocation, selection and interpretation, suffices, in both its interpersonal and its symbolic cases.