The Archetype of Intellectual Activity: A Modern Methodology for the Description of the Protophenomenon

Modern clinical psychology focuses on the problems of the culturological layer, the cultural background and consequences of the formation and development of productive and destructive anomalies, including the abnormal aspects of creative giftedness, the associated and accompanying anomalies of behavior, values expressed in deviations, borderline states, psychoses and somatoses. Endowment with its considerable diversity is a universal phenomenon. Moreover, and like any universal, it can be understood and described in the unity of its cultural, social, psychological and physiological aspects. The article discusses the basics of the organization of the archetype of intellectual function from the standpoint of historical and culturalological genesis. The wide mythological context of the formation of properties, attributes, and symbolic identification inherent in the archetype of the intellectual function is discussed. The statement is postulated that archetypal structures are not only a priori existing mechanisms of cognition from the point of view of the formation of an individual’s mental experience at an early age, but also affect all subsequent processes of development of a person’s cognitive functioning in norm and clinical situations. The concept of “Icarus complex” is introduced as the desired anthropic form of the archetype under study and as a promising model for further research in clinical psychology.