Psychosocial Wednesdays: Towards an Ecological Theory of Mind

What if archetypes arise not from the mind alone, but from the dynamic relation between organism and environment? In this issue of Psychosocial Wednesdays Stefano Carta proposes an ecological model of the psyche that traces the evolutionary roots of Jungian archetypes as functions-between rather than fixed inner forms. At their most basic level, these functions couple organism and environment, following James Gibson’s theory of perception-action, where meaning emerges through direct engagement with environmental affordances. From this perspective, the richness of archetypal images reflects not only mental complexity but the structure of the environment itself. Archetypes emerge through the interiorization of ancestral environments, forming networks of meaning grounded in perception and action. These networks are then abstracted and generalized through constructivist processes, aligning with predictive processing accounts of priors under the Free Energy Principle. The psyche transforms these affective-perceptual patterns into abstract meanings expressed through imagined (noetic) images—at their core, archetypal. Within this framework, the Self emerges as the dynamic entanglement of individual and world.