Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The difference between the sexes and between the generations, the concepts of child, father, mother, grandparents, ancestors and collaterals refer back to archetypal categories of perception, thinking and feeling which ground the very possibility of a diversity of family systems between different civilizations and human cultures. Studies in comparative anthropology show us - if such demonstration were needed - that each family group is different from every other in its concrete realization. Such a diversity is only made possible by the existence of constraints which ultimately enable an alliance to be formed between two families from different cultures, for the purpose of starting a new family. The possibility of such an alliance presupposes that there are common structures of reference, which we shall here, in a perspective deriving from the work of Jung (1933), Lorenz (1954), von Uexküll (1956) and Thom (1972), term ‘family archetypes’. We may throw some light upon the concept of archetype by looking at what von Uexküll has to say about it. In the predator-prey relationship, the predator has no concrete knowledge of a particular prey; it acts in conformity with an ‘original script’, an archetypal pattern, which brings together the essential, habitual and average characteristics of the figure of regulation of prey. ‘Behind the screen of phenomena, the various original images ... log in or subscribe to read full text