According to Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, archetypes are patterns of instinctual behaviour responsible for the organisation of unconscious psychic processes.
Archetypes constitute the structure of the collective unconscious,
which represents a psyche that is identical in all individuals, and contains the images of all creation. It is the master-pattern of life.
The archetypes arrange the psychic material and produce meaningful patterns in the physical world. They cannot be directly perceived or “represented”, in contrast to the perceptible psychic phenomena.
On account of its “irrepresentable” nature, Jung has called it “psychoid” (soul-like), which refers to the relationship between a person’s psyche and the physical world beyond that person’s body.