Jungian Archetypes in Analytical Psychology
According to Carl Jung, an archetype is a behavioral model or symbolic image present in the consciousness of all people. Archetypes are collective and universal, embodied and transmitted as archetypal “figures.”
The Essence of Archetypes
While studying the dreams and fantasies of his patients, Carl Gustav Jung discovered images and ideas that could not be explained by a person’s past experiences. He linked this layer of the unconscious to mythological and religious themes found even in cultures far removed from each other. Thus, the concept of the archetype emerged—a primordial psychic image, hiding innate universal ideas deep within the unconscious.
The concept of archetypes is a key aspect of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, which suggests that there are experiences inherent to all of humanity. The individual unconscious, according to Jung, arises from a person’s own experiences and contains their impressions and memories. The collective unconscious preserves the universal human experience in the form of archetypes—universal patterns of behavior, thought, and worldview. These are present in people from birth, much like instincts. They cannot be directly observed, but they reveal themselves in dreams, visions, and intuitions.
Archetypes are present in many cultural phenomena, but are especially clear in myths. For example, many mythologies feature such primordial images as the Earth Mother, the Child, the Shadow, and so on.
Jung first introduced the term “archetypes” in his 1919 essay “Instinct and the Unconscious.” The word archetype comes from Greek: arkho means “beginning, origin, cause,” and typos means “imprint, form, image, prototype, model.”
In his 1929 work “The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology,” Jung wrote: “…in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states, the most elaborate mythological motifs and symbols can appear spontaneously at any moment, often apparently as a result of certain influences, traditions, and stimuli acting on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These ‘primordial images’ or ‘archetypes,’ as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they form that psychic layer which has been called the collective unconscious.”
In later years, Jung revised and expanded the concept of archetypes, viewing them as psychophysical patterns existing in the universe and finding specific expression in human consciousness and culture.
What Are Archetypes?
Archetypes are fundamental patterns of thinking, emotional experience, and worldview, independent of culture or education. They are primary representations of the world and life, passed down from generation to generation in some mysterious way, forming the structure of our worldview. Life experience does not change them, but only adds new content.
Main Archetypes According to Jung
Jung described many archetypes, giving them unique and precise names: the Self, Persona, Shadow, Anima, Animus, Mother, Child, Sun, Wise Old Man, Hero, God, Death, and more.
The Wise Old Man archetype from Carl Jung’s “Red Book.” This handwritten book was intended for personal notes and drawings. Over 16 years, Jung developed his theories of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and individuation. The wise man Philemon, drawn by Jung, served as his “imaginary guru” and guide to the mysterious world of the unconscious.
According to Jung, the central archetype of the personality, uniting the conscious and unconscious into a whole, is the Self. The Self is the core of the personality, around which all other aspects of the psyche are organized. Its main purpose is to synthesize the opposing but complementary parts of the soul. A person is able to combine good and bad sides, hidden desires, and high conscious goals. By “fusing” contradictory psychic material, the personality gains greater wholeness, individuality, and freedom in self-expression and self-knowledge.
The Persona (Latin for “mask”) is our public face, the roles we play to meet social expectations. It is necessary for maintaining contact with others.
The Shadow is the repository of all drives repressed from consciousness. “The shadow consists not only of morally reprehensible tendencies,” Jung wrote, “but also includes a number of positive qualities, such as normal instincts, collected reactions, realistic perceptions of reality, creative impulses, and so on.”
The archetypes of Anima and Animus are linked to the duality of human nature, containing both masculine and feminine elements. Animus is the sum of masculine traits unconsciously present in a woman’s psyche, forming an ideal image of a man. Anima is the image of the ideal woman, living deep within a man’s psyche. “To the ancient man, the Anima appeared either as a goddess or a witch; the medieval man replaced the goddess with the Heavenly Lady or the church…” Jung noted. Now, he believed, the Anima is found “mainly in projections onto the opposite sex, making relationships with them magically complicated.”
Jung’s own Anima appears in the “Red Book” as a figure named Salome. Jung directly states: “…she is my own soul…” (Salome is a biblical character, a dancer for King Herod who seduced him into beheading John the Baptist).
According to Jung, archetypes are the structural elements of the unconscious. From these elements arise archetypal images (of people, animals, natural forces, demons) that dominate both human thought and culture. The Mother archetype, for example, can appear as a life-giving woman, Mother Nature, a seductress, a witch, and so on.
Symbolism of Archetypes
Each archetype, according to Jung, is associated with many symbols. For example, the concept of “ordered wholeness” in primitive cultures and in our unconscious is conveyed by figures such as the circle, square, cross, or a combination of a circle with a figure dividing it into four parts (cross, diamond, square inscribed in a circle).
Symbolism is universal for all humanity, as it originates from archetypes common to everyone. The same symbols for life and death, male and female, sky and earth, sorrow and joy, illness and health, strength and weakness, order and chaos are found almost everywhere. In different cultures, the symbol of the Self archetype is the mandala, a circle, or a saint’s halo. The symbolic completeness of the mandala and circle reflects the wholeness, unity, and harmony of all aspects of the soul.
The first mandala drawn by Carl Jung. “Mandala” means “circle,” a term from Sanskrit. Jung believed mandalas are visual reflections of deep psychic processes. He used them to explore his own unconscious, identify and understand archetypes and other aspects of personality.
The symbolism of archetypes, like all symbols, is extremely multivalent. Archetypes are “rich in premonitions and ultimately inexhaustible,” “indescribable due to the wealth of their relationships.” They have “almost unimaginable fullness of associations, resistance to unambiguous definition,” and “fundamental paradoxicality.” This distinguishes them from our rational concepts and judgments. The multivalence of archetypes creates a kind of multilayered cluster—a concentrate of meanings and the energy of emotions and actions, enriching and multiplying each other.
Many images we see in dreams are projections of one archetype or another. In dreams, they appear in forms accessible to our perception. If someone dreams of something resembling a mandala, it is a clear sign that they are on the path to new wholeness and fullness of life. Archetypal images can also be found in mythology and folklore, literature, painting, and sculpture.
The “Princess Imprisoned in the Castle” archetype. In the “Castle in the Forest” episode from the “Red Book,” Jung is alone in a dark forest, where he soon loses his way. In a medieval castle, he meets an old scholar, absent-minded and rude, who orders his servant to give Jung a room for the night. Late at night, the scholar’s beautiful daughter visits Jung in his bedroom and asks if he loves her. She says she has waited so long for someone to free her… Jung implies that everyone has such a girl deep in their soul, imprisoned by the old scholar-father. In his commentary, he emphasizes the need to integrate anima and animus into a harmonious whole.
Harmony of the soul requires interaction between the personal and collective unconscious. Thus, the archetypes of the masculine and feminine—Anima (in men) and Animus (in women)—are complementary parts of sexual identity. These are the parts of the soul that reflect ideas about the opposite sex. The ability to discover them within oneself, to accept their mutual complementarity and necessity, increases creative potential and allows for harmony and self-discovery. The foundation for this is laid by parents of the opposite sex (the mother for a boy and the father for a girl).
Jung called archetypes “organs of the soul.” They help us process, experience, understand, and accept life’s twists and turns, and achieve inner unity disrupted by these events. Archetypes suggest previously unknown but necessary answers to the complex questions life poses.
Why do archetypes have such healing and prophetic power? In symbolic, concentrated form, archetypes contain the accumulated human experience of living through typical life dramas—time-tested models of behavior in critical situations and ways of understanding and accepting them. Jung wrote: “In each of these images, a fragment of the human psyche and human destiny has crystallized, a fragment of suffering and joy—experiences repeated countless times by an endless line of ancestors and, in general, always taking the same course.” An archetype is activated and begins to act when our life repeats the same “specific combination of circumstances.”
Any archetypal situation is symbolic: funerals, the birth of a child, spiritual crisis, love triangles, pursuer and victim, Othello and Desdemona, Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus, Sisyphus, or Prometheus. It differs from other life events in that it triggers an especially powerful stream of emotions, touching strings of the soul a person never knew existed. And so, one begins to “experience the archetype,” as many generations before have done, using their experience and relying on their invisible support. Archetypal experience, as Jung said, “awakens in us a voice louder than our own.”
Brazilian folk hero Prince Oscar saves the Queen of the Waters from a dragon (illustration for a book by José Bernardo da Silva). In the film “Star Wars: A New Hope” (1977 poster), the archetypal journey of Luke Skywalker is told: he battles the dark Sith “dragon” Darth Vader, saves Princess Leia, and is guided by the wise old man Obi-Wan Kenobi. Myths of the hero slaying the dragon to save the princess and then marrying her are found in many cultures. Jung believed this story represents the struggle to gain control over unconscious forces: “Only he who has risked fighting the dragon and was not defeated by it wins the treasure, the ‘hard-to-attain treasure’… he has faced the dark foundation of his ‘I’ and thereby found himself.”
The effectiveness and power of archetypes are based on the experience of hundreds of generations. An archetype contains eternal answers to the eternal questions of our lives; there is always “something greater” and even “something higher” behind it.
The Influence of Archetype Theory on Modern Culture
The Jungian idea of archetypes has had a tremendous impact on society. It has inspired countless artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, theologians, ethnographers, and anthropologists. Notable figures influenced by Jung include expressionist painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), dancer and choreographer Martha Graham (1894–1991), renowned film directors Federico Fellini (1920–1993) and George Lucas (b. 1944), writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1993), mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), and many others.
Italian film director Federico Fellini, winner of four Oscars, first read Jung in 1961. Many of his famous films, especially “8½,” were deeply influenced by Jung’s concept of archetypes and the collective unconscious.
Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges admitted: “I have always read Jung… I read him as a kind of mythology, a museum or encyclopedia of curious knowledge.” Borges made a significant contribution to “magical realism,” a literary genre where fantastic elements are mixed with a realistic atmosphere.
American mythologist and scholar of religion Joseph Campbell became famous for his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (1949). It popularized Jung’s ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious, introducing them to a wide audience. Campbell argued that all heroic stories in the myths of different peoples and cultures are expressions of the same archetypal pattern, which he called the “Hero’s Journey” or “monomyth.”
After reading “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” in college, future filmmaker George Lucas rewrote the draft of his first screenplay, introducing archetypal motifs of the “hero’s journey.” This gave us the famous “Star Wars” universe.
Since then, Jungian archetypes have been actively used in mass culture and popular media—from YouTube to Netflix, in movie plots, video games, and TV shows.