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Jungian Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

            In understanding myths and religion cross-culturally, Carl Jung observed archetypal themes and entities. These themes and entities originated in the dreams and fantasies of individuals; however, their widespread occurrences suggest a link to the underlying connectedness of mankind. In this manner, Carl Jung establishes the collective 'dreams' of cultures and coins the term "Collective Unconscious" (Relke, 2007). The Collective Unconscious refers to instinct shared by all humanity (Collective) that manifests in universal images or concepts whose origin lies deep within the human psyche (Unconscious). Such images and concepts are known as archetypes and according to Jungian theory are core to understanding the stories shared in myths for they elucidate fundamental aspects of human psychology. In this manner the epic of Gilgamesh lends itself to analyses, particularly when surveying the representation of the anima.
             According to Jung, the anima refers to the archetypal female in mythology and religion as an embodiment of profound female attributes located in the male's subconscious. Dr. Joan Relke, in his article "The Archetypal Female in Mythology and Religion: The Anima and the Mother of the Earth and Sky" states that the anima is many times represented as goddesses in myths. In this vein Siduri, and Ishtar may be viewed as the anima manifest within the myth of Gilgamesh; moreover, Gilgamesh's final acceptance of his mortality and the ineffability of the eternal may be viewed as a reflection of the individual's relationship with the Collective Unconscious.
             When deconstructing myth in terms of archetypes it is important to consider that the psychological and psychoanalytical context underlying such an analyses is only one means of studying myth and does not exist without its critics. In "the structural study of myth" Claude Levi Strauss argues that shifting the focus of myth from an attempt to explain natural and cosmological forces to one rooted in psychology and sociology becomes "too easy"; for one can easily claim a gambit of psychological forces in explaining myths that cannot be verily disproved.


Essays Related to Jungian Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

1. Jungian Theory

... the Jungian theory of personality. Explain what he meant by the collective unconscious and archetypes. Using a popular theme like the Star war's films describe the Jungian concepts you can uncover in the film. Carl Jung was a world-renowned psychologist who was and is probably best known for his theory about personality and behavior, which disagreed with the work of his friend Sigmund Freud. In Jung's theory he divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ... ego, which can be define as "The central ... ...

  • Word Count: 1204
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2. Family Constellations And The Collective Unconscious

... the unconscious archetypes (McCarthy, 2002). These archetypes are pretty much what the typical personality is, for example, the archetype of the Warrior is one in which the person is confrontational, violent, and wants to be a leader(McCarthy, 2002). The innocent, on the other hand, has a passive demeanor and an unknowing air (McCarthy, 2002). The fact that such symbols and aspects appear in so many different types of people definitely lends credence to the theory of collective unconscious ... (McCarthy, 2002). The Jungian theory says, therefore, that decisions are motivated by unconsci...

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3. History and Science of Dream Interpretation

... which related to individuals but stemmed from what he termed "collective unconscious". He called recurring dream characters such as the child, the mother or the wise old man "archetypes" claiming they were universal and symbolic images contained in the unconscious human mind. Subsequent scientific studies of dreaming do not support either Freudian or Jungian views of dream analysis but rather reveal that our dreams are more ... humdrum. Rather than being a random mix of bizarre images our dreams reflect our everyday concerns. Recent research into dreaming shows that the area of the brai...

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4. Individuation

... information to consciousness, but due to its symbolic nature, we usually fail to understand its meaning. Jung and his followers developed approaches to dream interpretation, creative expression, and the use of imagination to assist in the integration of unconscious contents, and thereby to restore harmony and wholeness to the psyche. From a Jungian perspective, symptom relief is most meaningful when it is part of this larger process of transformation, wherein ... , might be conscious of them at one time but not at another. At the center of a complex is an Archetype or Archetypal image. A...

  • Word Count: 1214
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5. Mother Archetype

... derived from a man by the name of Carl Gustav Jung. Jung was a predecessor of Sigmund Freud. "According to Jungian psychology the archetypes of the collective unconscious are manifested in similar mythological motifs which are universal-(Trachy and Hopkins 166). Jung defines a archetype in many ways. Archetypes appear in conscious as a universal and recurring image, pattern or motif representing a typical human experience. Archetypal images come from the collective unconscious and are the basic concepts of religions ... , mythologies, legends and Arts they emerge through dreams and visio...

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6. A 20th Century artist: Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

... ancient sculpture, non-Western art, and the work of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. By the late 1940s Pollock was among a group of young, mostly New York painters who became known as abstract expressionists. They worked in a variety of styles, but generally shared a commitment to creating large-scale, abstract works, an interest in Jungian psychological theories of the collective unconscious with regards to symbols and archetypes, and a belief that expressiveness was ... achieved, in part, through the physical process of painting. Incorporating and translating philosophy, art history, and...

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7. Poetry

... , That never yet had freeman Right mastery of natural things[.] (34-38) "Right mastery" comes from living out the archetypes, from sustaining oneself on the rhizome of the Gnostic Pleroma, the Collective Unconscious, or Platonic anamnesis, of that spiritual race cast into matter and into human boundaries (bondage to matter). The "vast image out of Spiritus Mundi" (12) is such an archetype. Specialized spiritual knowledge is viewed as an ... heavy strain on the reader's imagination. The twelfth line of the poem makes it explicit that the sphinx-like creature is little more than "a vast im...

  • Word Count: 6460
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8. Acrchtypal Theory

... as far as Plato, but not until the early part of the twenty-first century in the works of Carl Jung, the founder of modern analytical psychology did the term gain academic respect. Jung's work is largely influenced through J.G. Frazer whose work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, is cited in Jung's Psycology of the Unconscious (Rupprecht 1). Jung's original definition of ... mythology, religion, and mass culture" (Potts 4). He later added that "while the conscious representations of archetypes may vary from culture to culture, and individual to individual, the basic templ...

  • Word Count: 2060
  • Approx Pages: 8
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