According to Jung, myth best represents the archetypes. But myth proceeds from a realm that cannot legitimately be considered altogether human. Like the mythical, the archetypal transcends the human psyche, which implies the psyche’s organs do not altogether belong to it.
A true depth psychology is obliged by the nature of the psyche to go below or beyond the psyche. This fortunately offers a way out of the impasse of psychologizing, which has hindered the collaboration of some who, too, take their perspective from the archetypes but do not allow their location in the psyche. But we do not have to take the archetypes as primarily psychic structures; the psyche is only one place where they manifest. By psychologizing I also mean the tendency to attribute too much to the human and the psychic, burdening our lives with an overweening sense of responsibility for matters that are not ours, but are archetypal, i.e., historical, mythical, psychoid—or instinctual in the sense of Robert Stein.
Insights for this approach call for an archetypal eye that is difficult to acquire through focus upon persons and cases. This eye needs training through profound appreciation of history and biography, of the arts, of ideas and culture. Here, amplification becomes a valid way of doing psychology, necessary and sufficient in itself. Amplification can be a method of soul-making by finding the cultural in the psyche and thereby giving culture to the soul. A great deal can be done for the psyche and its healing, indirectly, through archetypal elucidation of its problems.
— Why Archetypal Psychology?, Archetypal Psychology UE 1