Please see my two CG Jung Videos; including a brief point by a student of Jung: a Baroness on "wholeness." Also the Jung video on relationships, transference, etc.

Jung introduced the new (at that time) expression “collective unconscious” to denote a compartment of the psyche whose contents are not specific to our individual Egos or the result of personal experience, but derive from inherited structure of the brain and from the inherited potential of psychic functioning in general.

It is conceived of as incorporating all the types of psychic reaction and all human experiences right from the beginning of mankind. This is the reason for using the word ‘collective.’ The assumption is made that we are a (all living a) part of one another when-we-communicate-with-one-another and that we share this unconscious mind with all our fellow men.

For example, a five-year old child is traumatized to find a strange man in bed with his mother in a seemingly loving situation. The child is unaware of any cultural proscriptions, yet is deeply affected. Why?

Within this collective unconscious lies the source of those motifs which the whole world has in common. Motifs, which, as we have already seen, can also play an important role in the individual psyche. How this process takes place is explained by Jung in a detailed analysis of the collective unconscious.

Jung offered this definition:
The archetype is a formal element, empty in itself, which is nothing more than an a priori possibility of the form in which the idea appears. It is not our ideas themselves that are inherited but merely their forms, which, in this respect, are the exact equivalents of the equally formerly determined instincts. Nor can the archetype, any more than the instincts, be shown to be present as such, until they are brought to concrete manifestation.

Therefore, one can see the collective unconscious is no storehouse of dead or personal memories. We must not make the mistake of confusing the archetype itself with the “archetypal image” in its personal manifestation.
For example, you may unconsciously believe your husband to be almost godlike, but that is your personal manifestation of the archetype. The archetype itself dwells in the collective unconscious, and one has, plucked it out - as it were – from that space by projecting its qualities into another human based on a multitude of personality factors.

The archtype is important because it has an autonomous energy that has an individual unsuspectingly (unconsciously) investing - or PROJECTING - this trait onto others; so that someone "takes on" the properties of a "Wise Old Man," and everything he (or she) says or does is full of those properties.

"Falling in love" at first sight is such a case.
Hero-worship of politicians is another.

Movies such as "Being There" do a good job of demonstrating this situation in its most extreme form; as "The Trickster" masquerading behind the "Wise Old Man."

A Jungian Archtype of the "The Great Mother,"

I am about to release a link (Years in the making) to ADD to your undersatanding of this archtype. Give me another week, and it'll be REPLACING THIS.
It will blow ur MIND!)

The "Great Mother," within her all-encompassing, inexorable ‘world’ clad in the starry mantle of heaven, seated beneath golden fruit in the soft light of the crescent moon, looks down compassionately at the poor creature who she herself is tearing in two with her rough hands, gauging out a deep wound from which blood drips down. Torn between the two opposites, the upper and lower realms of being, caught up in their tension, dher cries out facing martyrdoim. martyrdom. Spiritually ascending, she willingly relinquishes the ego’s resentment over injustice. This female ego-death is her martyrdom, but this martyrdom is indispensible if she is to be reborn in the child symbolizing new life and if the sun is to shine forth in the unfathomable womb of the world.

A visual representation of the concept of The Wise Old Man.

This is a dream-figure example of one of the numerous forms taken by the archtype as drawn from the dream of a patient of CG Jung. The face is marked by age-old, boundless knowledge and understanding. The eyes are turned inward, the immobile features and the closed mouth express an extreme spirituality which has become one with nature, which indeed has become nature. Chest and shoulders have turned to earth, overgrown with grass and mosswhich provide food for the doves, the birds of Aphrodite, Goddess of kindness and love. The sun disk behind his head indicates his logos and Christ-like character, and the crystal in his hands, a symbol of wholeness, points to the highest goal of psychic development. The Wise Old Man is one of the archetypal figures which represent this Jungian 'Self' – it is its masculine half.

The aspects of this is as numerous as there are 'types.' However. whether you are a lawyer in New York or a cannibal in Borneo, you have a sense of someone in your life whom you may look-up-to; to whom you instinctively show respect, and whose approval you seek, and whose disapproval you fear, and that within that individual lies this (projection of an) archtypal energy known as the "Wise Old Man."

The idea of the archtype of the "Trickster" could be something used to demonstrate a situation in which an individual "puts on" the "face" of one archtype, while he is quite usually something very "other" than what he would like you to believe.