Analysis:
Your question involves literary theory, which is quite complicated. You need a little patience to understand it. I looked through my college textbooks and found some information that might be helpful to you.
Image is an inherent concept in China's ancient literary theory. However, this concept, like other concepts in China's ancient literary theory, has neither definite meaning nor consistent usage.
In the Course of Literary Theory edited by Tong Qingbing, a higher education press (1997 edition), the definition of image is:
Image has four main meanings in literature and art, psychology, linguistics and other disciplines: 1 and "representation", which refers to various perceptual images formed on the basis of perception and presented in the mind. 2. Internal image, that is, a new and advanced intentional design image conceived by human beings to achieve a certain purpose. In literary creation, it is expressed as an image in the mind formed by artistic conception or "no thoughts in the heart". 3. Generalized image is the general name of all artistic images or linguistic images appearing in literary works, which is basically equivalent to the concept of "artistic image" or literary image, referred to as "image". Not only in Britain and the United States, but also in China since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, it has evolved into the equivalent of the word "elephant". Because its meaning is too broad, it is easy to cause confusion, so this book tries to revive the concept of "literary image" or "image" that has been neglected in recent ten years, and instead revive the ancient meaning of the word "image" to refer to a special expressive artistic image. This is: 4. Conceptual image and its advanced form.
The archetypal image you mentioned involves the third generalized image in this definition. The archetypal image should be the earliest and most primitive creative theme or object in literary works. It is a prototype because it is constantly developing, and many images based on it will be generated by different writers. For example, the archetypal image of Yi Dao's poetry began with Ban Jieyu's "Fu Su" in the Han Dynasty, and her dedication to expressing things and feelings directly contributed to the creation of Yi Dao. In the development and evolution of literature, poems with Tao as the prototype image are also undergoing changes from gorgeous to distant and gradually close to real life.
If you are a middle school Chinese teacher, you don't have to look at the front. Images in middle school textbooks refer to objective things with the author's subjective feelings in poetry. That is, emotional images. Ma Zhiyuan's Qiu Si quoted upstairs should be a typical example. On the surface, this poem is just a bunch of scenery, but in fact, they all share the author's sad homesickness, so they have become the images in the poem and the most powerful support for this poem to spread through the ages.