archetype

1. (literature) A character, object, or story that is based on a known character, object, or story.Examples: "Archetypes are figures and creatures that inhabit the pools of the world's mythology, folk tales, epics, and ballads. […] Thus archetypes are universal essences that we all recognize: the Mother, the Lover, the Trickster, the Spiritual and Temporal Leader, the Devil."

2. (psychology) According to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung: a universal pattern of thought, present in an individual's unconscious, inherited from the past collective experience of humanity.Examples: "The three archetypes so far discussed—the shadow, the anima, and the wise old man—are of a kind that can be directly experienced in personified form. In the foregoing I tried to indicate the general psychological conditions in which such an experience arises. But what I conveyed were only abstract generalizations. One could, or rather should, really give a description of the process as it occurs in immediate experience. In the course of this process the archetypes appear as active personalities in dreams and fantasies."; "It has been suggested that Prothean data recording is highly dependent on a certain point of view, what Carl Jung described as the collective unconscious. The 'cipher' needed to comprehend the images implanted in Shepard's mind is the cultural knowledge of a Prothean: the archetypes, biological instincts, and common experiences universal to the race."; "According to [Carl] Jung, all the most important ideas, in both science and religion, originate from archetypes. People acquire archetypal images and notions and consciously convert them to ideas, art, technology, and other products of culture and civilization. Archetypes also play a crucial role in the development of the individual. […] Typical archetypes connected with individuation are the archetypes of transformation, like birth, death and rebirth."

3. (textual criticism) A protograph (“original manuscript of a text from which all further copies derive”).Examples: "The outstanding importance of this manuscript for the text of Aeschylus has long been recognized. In the last century some scholars even persuaded themselves that it was the archetype of the whole extant tradition."