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• June 6, 2025
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Are you preparing for the UGC-NET English Literature? Yes! You must understand some of the literary theories such as Carl Jung’s archetypal theory. Wondering why? Obviously! It is part of the UGC-NET English Literature syllabus. Archetypal theory is a literary and psychological framework that focuses on universal symbols, characters, themes, and patterns found across literature, myths, religions, dreams, and cultures. It is most closely associated with Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist, who believed that all humans share a collective unconscious—a set of primal memories and images called archetypes. For UGC NET English Literature aspirants like you, understanding archetypes will be essential for tackling questions coming from various sections of the NET JRF English Literature syllabus. Additionally, you can use archetypes when using your storytelling techniques while teaching.

In this blog, we will explore psychoanalysis theory. You may encounter questions based on the archetypal theory in the UGC NET English Literature exam. Sahitya Classes, known for its focused and strategic approach to UGC NET preparation, ensures that you are well-equipped to handle such topics effectively.

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What is archetypal theory?

Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and criticism, have a distinct history and process. The term “archetype” can be traced to Plato (arche, “original”; typos, “form”), but the concept gained momentum in twentieth-century literary theory and criticism through the work of the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, C. G. Jung (1875-1961). Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious appeared in English one year after the publication of the concluding volume with bibliography of the third edition of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Frazer’s and Jung’s texts formed the basis of two allied but ultimately different courses of influence on literary history.

Jung most frequently used “myth” (or “mythologem”) for the narrative expression, “on the ethnological level”, of the “archetypes,” which he described as patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective unconscious and finding their “most common and most normal” manifestation in dreams. Thus, criticism evolving from his work is more accurately named “archetypal” and is quite distinct from “myth” criticism.

For Jung, “archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos,” but he distinguishes his concept and use of the term from that of philosophical idealism as being more empirical and less metaphysical, though most of his “empirical” data were dreams. Additionally, he modified and extended his concept over the many decades of his professional life, often insisting that “archetype” named a process, a perspective, and not a content, although this flexibility was lost through the codifying, nominalizing tendencies of his followers.

Northrop Fyre’s distinction

At mid-century, Canadian critic Northrop Frye (1912-91) introduced new distinctions in literary criticism between myth and archetype. For Frye, as William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks put it, “archetype, borrowed from Jung, means a primordial image, a part of the collective unconscious, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited response-pattern of the race.” Frye frequently acknowledged his debt to Jung, accepted some of Jung’s specifically named archetypes—”persona and anima and counsellor and shadow” —and referred to his theory as Jungian criticism, a practice subsequently followed in some handbooks of literary terms and histories of literary criticism, including one edited by Frye himself, which obscured crucial differences and contributed to the confusion in terminology reigning today. Frye, however, notably in Anatomy of Criticism, essentially redefined and relocated archetype on grounds that would remove him unequivocally from the ranks of “Jungian” critics by severing the connection between archetype and depth psychology: “This emphasis on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school, where the communicability of archetypes is accounted for by a theory of a collective unconscious—an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism, so far as I can judge.” Frye, then, first misinterprets Jungian theory by insisting on a Lamarckian view of genetic transmission of archetypes, which Jung explicitly rejected, and later settles on a concept of “archetype” as a literary occurrence per se, an exclusively intertextual recurring phenomenon resembling a convention.

Fyre’s Thought Overlap with Jung’s Theorizing

On a general level, Jung’s and Frye’s theorizing about archetypes, however labelled, overlap, and boundaries are elusive, but in the discipline of literature the two schools have largely ignored each other’s work. Myth criticism grew in part as a reaction to the formalism of New Criticism, while archetypal criticism based on Jung was never linked to any academic tradition and remained organically bound to its roots in depth psychology: the individual and collective psyche, dreams, and the analytic process. Further, myth critics, aligned with writers in comparative anthropology and philosophy, are said to include Frazer, Jessie Weston, Leslie Fiedler, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Richard Chase, Joseph Campbell, Philip Wheelwright, and Francis Fergusson. But Wheelwright, for example, barely mentions Jung (The Burning Fountain, 1954), and he, Fergusson, and others often owe more to Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Oedipus Rex, and the Oedipus complex than to anything taken from Jung. Indeed, myth criticism seems singularly unaffected by any of the archetypal theorists who have remained faithful to the origins and traditions of depth, especially analytical, psychology—James Hillman, Henri Corbin, Gilbert Durand, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Evangelos Christou. This article, then, treats the only form of literary theory and criticism consistent with and derived directly from the psychological principles advanced by Jung. Other forms previously labelled “Jungian” are here subsumed under the term “archetypal” because, whatever their immediate specific focus, these forms operate on a set of assumptions derived from Jung and accept the depth-psychological structure posited by Jung. Further, Jung termed his own theory “analytical psychology,” as it is still known, especially in Europe, but Jungian thought is more commonly referred to today in all disciplines as “archetypal psychology.”

The first systematic application of Jung’s ideas to literature was made in 1934 by Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: “An attempt is here made to bring psychological analysis and reflection to bear upon the imaginative experience communicated by great poetry, and to examine those forms or patterns in which the universal forces of our nature there find objectification.” This book established the priority of interest in the archetypal over the mythological.

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Key Concepts of Archetypal Theory:

1. Archetypes: Universal, recurring symbols or character types found in storytelling. Common examples include:

• The Hero (e.g., Odysseus, Frodo, Harry Potter)
• The Mentor (e.g., Gandalf, Dumbledore)
• The Shadow (represents the darker self or antagonist)
• The Trickster (e.g., Loki, Puck)
• The Mother Figure (nurturing, protective)
• The Journey (a symbolic quest or rite of passage)
  2. Collective Unconscious: According to Jung, this is the part of the unconscious mind shared among beings of the same species, populated by archetypes.
  3. Myth and Literature: Archetypal theory argues that myths and literary texts are expressions of these deep, unconscious archetypes. This explains the cross-cultural similarities in stories, such as flood myths or heroic journeys.
  4. Symbolism: Archetypal critics examine the symbolic meaning of characters, settings, and events—like forests symbolizing the unknown or water symbolizing rebirth.

Example in Practice:

• In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet can be seen as an archetypal tragic hero on a quest for truth and justice.
• In The Lion King, Simba’s journey mirrors the hero’s journey: call to adventure, exile, trials, return, and transformation.

Archetypal theory helps us to understand why we still relate to our stories because they echo shared human experiences embedded in our collective unconscious. Therefore, it provides a framework to decode recurring patterns in narratives and explore their deeper meanings.

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