Jung’s Archetypes and Theory of the Collective Unconscious
Jung’s Archetypes and Theory of the Collective Unconscious
Introduction
Mythology permeates almost every aspect of everyday life.
Whether it is in the form of fairytales, religious ritual, literary epics, the list goes on.
There are stories of the lionhearted hero, the vulnerable damsel, the mischievous trickster, the world-ending flood, and many more appear in the folk tales and lore of every culture.
Anyone who has ever taken literature, or a Greco-Roman mythology class, has most likely run into one of the most famous collections of mythological stories in the form of Ovid’s the Metamorphoses.
While this epic only includes major Greek Myths and not myths from other parts of the world, its comprehensive coverage of nearly every type of figure in literature and religion makes it a good starting point for delving into Carl Jung’s theory
of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
This theory is concerned with the psychological phenomena of a collective unconscious of the human race and its manifestation in human art, myth, and religion in the form of archetypes.
This ties into the main reason that Ovid’s Metamorphoses is being used to demonstrate this theory.
It is because a great deal of these myths feature characters who very clearly exhibit common symptoms of modern behavioral and mental disorders through their actions and choices.
Identifying these potential diagnoses will show a more practical usage for Jung’s theory concerning archetypes and the collective unconscious.
By doing this, we can better show the continuity of the psychologically relevant aspects of the archetypes as embodied pieces of the collective unconscious in how they reveal themselves in human behavior.
Psychology, as a formal science, may be relatively new, but mythology and storytelling are as old as humanity.
And through the archetypes, mythology may have communicated psychological pathologies to societies before psychology was formally organized and recognized.
In this thesis, we will examine a few of Carl Jung’s archetypes through ten different myths present in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
These myths will be rewritten in the form of poems to highlight specific points of view for psychological analysis.
The ultimate goal of these written poetic responses is to provide as second viewpoint to help elicit a response from the audience that will help energize them into considering the potential psychopathologies that may underpin the
situations presented.
As a Biochemistry and Molecular Biology major, psychology and poetry are not my
expertise. I will not be claiming expert analysis.
But I do aim to provide another way of examining this well-known work and to tie it in a greater context to the modern science of psychology.
It is important to be able to look at a subject from many different viewpoints and in doing this, I am attempting to tie together psychology and English, two subjects which are often closely intertwined, to provide a distinct viewpoint that could ultimately aid in helping academics and the general population to recognize the psychoanalytic application of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Important Definitions
Before we delve into the archetypes and myths that will be presented here, a few terms concerning Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes should be provided to prevent potential confusion.
The important terms are as follows:
Collective Unconscious: The impersonal layer in the human psyche that is “inherited and shared” with other humans (Shiraev, 2017).
Personal Unconscious: “The materials here are of a personal nature in so far as they have the character partly of acquisitions derived from the individual’s life and partly of psychological factors which could just as well be conscious” (Jung, 1959). By the second part of this statement, Jung refers to repression of characteristics by the psyche from the consciousness into the unconscious for one reason or another.
Archetype: The content of the collective unconscious that reveal themselves as images of the “primordial character” (Shiraev, 2017).
Persona: The individual’s public image or “social mask” (Jung, 1959).
Shadow: An archetype identified with the instinctual, primitive, and generally negative traits of the personality that are repressed into the unconscious (Jung, 1972). Also referred to as the “counter-tendencies in the unconscious” (Jung, 1959).
Individuation: The process of “fulfilling the individual’s potential” by integrating the opposing unconscious and conscious self into a “harmonious whole” (Shiraev, 2017).
Lindsay Covington, Applying Jung’s Archetypes and Theory of the Collective Unconscious to Ovid’s Metamorphose Spring 2018, Page 5-8
