The Archetype as Form of Ontological Difference

It has often been argued that Jung failed to explain and ground his theory of the archetypes sufficiently, as he remained caught between a psychological, a biological, and a transcendent model of explanation. Inspired by Martin Heidegger’s methodology in Being and Time, this paper will combine an ontological inquiry with a phenomenological analysis of the archetype, to re-interpret it beyond the Jungian psychology and its inherent paradoxes. I will outline a distinction between a psychological appropriation of the archetype, and one that approaches its numinosity as such. According to my argument, this twofold phenomenology of the archetype reveals it to be a form through which we become aware of an ontological difference within our being. The argument will mainly be unfolded through an interpretation of the nymph-maiden in Lucas Cranach’s 16th century painting series Nymph of the Spring, followed by an assessment of our contemporary relation to the same archetype.