We all know what genetics is. A gene is a basic unit of heredity. Of physical heredity.
But what if not only our physical characteristics are inherited. What if there are also some psychological patterns, some psychological structures that get codified somewhere before a person has been born.
Such structures do exist. They are called archetypes. And I am not talking here about the situation when your father is bad-tempered, and you are bad-tempered too. No. I’m talking about a certain pattern of anger that pre-exists in our Universe. It’s inbuilt in everyone’s psychological inheritance to some extent. Some people have more of it, while other people have less. But this archetype allows all human beings to have the same idea of anger. Feel anger in the same situations. Understand why and when other people get angry.
Archetypes were described and called like this by Carl Gustav Jung. Jung discovered that the psychic reactions of human beings can influence and stimulate so-called complexes. These psychological complexes are conglomerations of emotional ideas and mental images. They all unite around their cores. Some of these complexes are gained through your life but most of them are congenital in every human being. It can be proved by the same reactions which people of different origins demonstrate in the same situations. Without any external influence.
So, are we born tabula rasa? Absolutely not. Like all of us have eyes, ears, and noses, we all have the same fundamental structures in our psyche.