For pioneering psychologist Carl Jung, the goal of life was to see the “individuation” of the self, meaning a uniting of your conscious and unconscious minds so that your original unique promise might be fulfilled.

Sigmund Freud had assumed the unconscious to be a personal thing contained within an individual. Jung, on the other hand, saw the personal unconscious mind as sitting atop a much deeper universal layer of consciousness: the collective unconscious.

This collective unconscious existed independent of particular individuals, constantly generating the customs, art, mythology and literature of culture.

Jung admitted that the idea of the collective unconscious “belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions.” He had to fight the perception that it was only mystical.

The collective unconscious is expressed through “archetypes”, universal thought-forms or mental images that influence a person’s feelings and action. Archetypes often pay little heed to tradition or cultural rules, which suggests that they are innate projections.

A new born baby is not a blank slate but comes wired ready to perceive certain archetypal patterns and symbols. Children fantasize so much, Jung believed, because they have not experienced enough of reality to cancel out their mind's enjoyment of archetypal imagery.

Archetypes have been expressed as myths and fairy tales, and at a personal level in dreams and visions. German ethnologist Adolf Bastian referred to them as “elementary” or “primordial” thoughts that were expressed again and again in the cultures of tribal and folk peoples.

Yet archetypes are not simply of anthropological interest. Usually without knowing it, they shape the relationships that matter in our lives.

Jung highlighted archetypes including the 'anima', the 'mother', the 'shadow', the 'child', the 'wise old man', the 'spirits' of fairy tales, and the 'trickster' figure found in myths and history.

The mother archetype can take the form of real-life personal mother, grandmother, stepmother, mother in law, nurse, or governess. Other mother symbols include the Church, country, the Earth, the woods, the sea, a garden, a ploughed field, a spring or well.