Commentary on Chris Nunn's ‘Archetypes and memes’

The concept of archetypes has received a number of fundamentally different interpretations, and there are numerous additional philosophical concepts which can be characterized as modifications of those interpretations. Chris Nunn’s paper (Nunn, 1998) represents an approach to bringing a specific one among those concepts -- Richard Dawkins’ neo-Darwinistic conception of memes (Dawkins, 1976) -- into contact with the notion of archetypes as it has been mainly popularized by Carl Gustav Jung. Nunn states rightly that Jung’s own understanding of and emphasis on archetypes changed considerably during his lifetime. Therefore the difficulty is not only how to relate memes to archetypes, but also to distinguish that concept of archetypes to which memes relate from those to which they do not.