Carl Jung & Archetypal Criticism

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Carl Jung Archetypal Criticism
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Carl Jung

• Born July 26, 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland. Died
  June 6, 1961 in Zurich, Switzerland.
• A prominent Swiss psychiatrist, and influential
  thinker and founder of analytical psychology.

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• Jungs investigations into the human mind brought
  forth two ideas especially important and
  influential for literary criticism
• Collective unconscious
• The theory of the archetype

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Collective Unconscious

• Jung agreed with Freud on the idea that everyone
  has a personal unconscious from which our
  motivations derive, however, Jung developed this
  theory further to suggest that one aspect of an
  individuals psyche is identical to all other
  members of the same species.
• Therefore a part of all minds go beyond personal
  experience and draw upon a common source.

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Collective Unconscious

• For Jung, the experiences of the individual are
  conditioned by the experiences of the human race
  (all who have gone before). The unconscious
  mental record of these experiences, Jung called
  the collective unconscious.
• Jung believed that the collective unconscious is
  not directly knowable but that it expresses
  itself in the form of an archetype.

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Archetype

• According to Jung an archetype is a figurethat
  repeats itself in the course of history whenever
  creative fantasy is fully manifested.
• The three fundamental qualities of an archetype
  are
• An archetype is a preconscious, instinctual
  expression of mans basic nature.
• An archetype is universal it is generated by
  mans psyche regardless of time of place.
• An archetype is recurrent. From prehistoric
  times until the end of the earth, it expresses
  mans reaction to essentially changeless
  situations.

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Putting Jungs Theory to the Test

• Archetypes are preconscious, instinctual
  expressions of mans basic nature.
• Biologists have never been able to explain the
  nesting of birds, the ritual dance of bees, the
  spinning instinct of spiders, and the migratory
  habits of certain birds. Never have they
  observed these actions being acquired but rather
  them seemed to have derived from the remotest
  beginnings of the species.

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Putting Jungs Theory to the Test

• Archetypes are universal.
• The Ancient Mayans, Buddhists, Hindus and
  Christians are just a few of the earliest
  religions from across the globe who have all
  tried to understand their own existence and have
  subsequently introduced their explanations into
  holy books.
• Anthropologists constantly discover stories of
  destruction of the world by flood, famine,
  plague, or earth quake as well as stories of the
  slaying of monsters.

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Putting Jungs Theory to the Test

• Archetypes are recurrent.
• One reason why audiences applaud such characters
  as Othello and Macbeth is because they possess
  some eternal quality, some enduring feature of
  the human race. For these two characters,
  jealousy and greed got the best of them. This is
  an experience all humans can relate to at one
  point in their lives or another.

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• The number of possible archetypes is as unlimited
  as mans experiences, however, they may be
  grouped in three major categories
• Characters
• Situations
• Symbols or associations