C.G. Jung and the Archetypes

Carl Gustav Jung's idea of the archetype is now invoked for brand personalities, screenwriting manuals, tarot guidebooks and online quizzes, yet it rests on essays that most of its users have not opened, scattered across several volumes of his Collected Works. This book reads those texts in the order in which Jung wrote them, and keeps apart what he claimed and what was later attributed to him.

Sixteen chapters follow the idea from its sources in Plato, Augustine and Kant, through Jung's clinical work and the problems of his evidence, to the figures he actually described: persona and shadow, anima and animus, the Great Mother, the divine child, the wise old man, the trickster, rebirth and the Self. One chapter carries out an archetypal reading of a published dream series step by step and states the limits of the method.

The closing chapters follow the concept into the hands of Joseph Campbell, screenwriters and brand consultants, ask why Jung himself never drew up a list of twelve types, and ask which parts of the theory survive the objections of biology, developmental psychology and the history of science. Quotations are few and sourced to the Collected Works, and a short reading list points to further study.