2.2.1.2: Jungian Archetypal

Jungian Archetypal theory posits that literary characters follow archetypal patterns which are embedded in the human brain from birth, and people unconsciously seek these archetypes within literary plots and in characters.

Where Freud’s limited knowledge about literature led to limited applications of his theories, Jung’s sensitivity to the creative process of writing and the power of storytelling are reflected in his insights about literature. Although Jung was friendly with Freud early in his career, having met him in 1906, Jung intellectually parted with Freud on the basis of Freud’s sexual-centric analysis techniques and Freud’s belief “that sexual trauma was the cause of all repression” (Ellwood 42). He and Alfred Adler resigned from The International Psycho-Analytical Association “in protest against Freud’s insistence on the primacy of infant sexuality” (Richter 651), infant sexuality referring to oral, anal, and phallic stages or sexual development which take place between ages 0-3 years old (638).

Where Freud saw the creative writing process as a form of neurosis, Jung saw the need for separation of medical classification from creativity, writing, “Whatever the psychologist has to say about art will be confined to the process of artistic creation and has nothing to do with its innermost essence” [emphasis added] (Jung “Relation” 657). Additionally, he responded to Freud’s Oedipus Complex with the Electra Complex, which argued that daughters crave the entirety of their father’s affections at the cost of alienating their mothers. Though many modern psychologists find both theories unproven, they continue to serve as helpful constructs for character analysis. Electra, the daughter of King Agamemnon (the brother of Menelaus) and Queen Clytemnestra (the mortal sister of Helen of Troy), becomes enraged at the murder of her father by the hand of her mother and her lover. She convinces her brother, Orestes, to plot revenge by killing their mother and her lover. In carrying out the revenge, Electra has objectified her father as her idealized male.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Orestes and Electra by Menelaos, student of Stephanos. Palazzo Altemps, Rome. The statue captures a moment of mourning for their father, evidenced by the siblings’ sheared hair. (CC BY SA 4.0 Wikimedia Commons)

What her idolatry ignores is her father’s sacrifice of her younger sister, Iphigenia [IF-ih-GEE-nia], to the goddess Artemis so he could gain her favor to set sail for the Trojan War. At the war's conclusion, having been absent from his family for the ten-years-long war, he returns with a slave–a surrogate wife–the Trojan princess Cassandra. While she outwardly welcomes her husband and his “prize,” Cassandra, Clytemnestra, who has for many years mourned her youngest daughter harbors deep resentment. Having ruled the kingdom alone, she takes revenge on Agamemnon and Cassandra–an innocent victim, like her own daughter–and plots their dual murder. The causal events leading to the cycle of murder and revenge are often ignored or minimized in simple psychoanalytical analysis of Electra, but to gain a full view of the character’s motivation, it serves to do a full family history, as any good psychoanalyst would do.

Finding more value in influences like Nietzche, Jung departed from psycho-sexual theories and instead developed theories about the subconscious and its influence upon the conscious mind. Where Freud compartmentalized the human psyche into the Id, Ego, and Superego, Jung desired to know the “ultimate nature of the sovereign psyche . . . on occasion veering toward the margins of madness,” and in 1921 he published his research in Psychological Types. The book introduced key psychological terms, including extravert and introvert and the core archetypes, “the Wise Old Man, the Great Mother, the Hero, the Maiden, the Shadow, [the Anima and the Animus], the Marvelous Child who is the hoped for individuated self—[who] are all really facets of the self, fragments one can become or repress, or better configure harmoniously into a mandala, or balanced pattern, out of the center of which the new self arises victorious” (Ellwood 44). Jung argued that the psyche’s “goal, individuation, meant becoming who the person really is inwardly, not the persona fabricated by convention and expectation. The pilgrimage to the real self is long and winding, but may be enlivened by encounters with denizens of the well populated intermediate ranges” (44). Examining religious and folkloric cultural influences, Jung found evidence of the archetypes and their formative capacity in the psyche’s conscious and unconscious (dream state) evolution. His proposal of a “collective unconscious,” a set of memories either culturally exclusive or universal to all humankind, was likely his most challenging to existing psychological theories. The theory saw the mind as empowered with “mental energies” that ignited pre-imprinted, suppressed knowledge of ancestral roots, culture, even species that are awakened through literature and stories, and Jung used myths and their cosmic themes to validate these assertions (Ellwood 44).