Archetype

Archetype is a very typical or perfect example of someone or something, such as of a particular kind of person, thing or system etc. It may also be a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology. It is also a term in psychoanalysis in Jungian psychology for a primitive mental image supposed to be present in the collective unconscious of modern humans inherited from the earliest human ancestors.

The literary theory of the archetype derives from the school of comparative anthropology at Cambridge University, of which the basic work is J G Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890-1915). This book traced the elemental patterns of myth and ritual. It claimed that the pattern recur in the legends and ceremonial of the most diverse cultures.

The other side of the theory derives from the depth psychology of C G Jung, who applied the term “archetype” to “primordial images”, the “psychic residue” of repeated types of experience in the lives of our very ancient ancestors. Jung said that these are inherited in the “collective unconscious” of the human race and are expressed in myths, religion, dreams, private fantasies and works of literature.

This term is in vogue in literary criticism, especially since the appearance of Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934).

It is applied in criticism to narrative designs, character types, or images which are considered identifiable in a wide variety of works in literature, myths, dreams, and even ritualized modes of social behaviour.

Some archetypal critics has rejected Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Northrop Frye said that Jung’s theory is “an unnecessary hypothesis”.

Major archetypal critics are Maud Bodkin, G Wilson Knight, Robert Graves, Philip Wheelwright, Richard Chase and Joseph Campbell.

Northrop Frye developed the archetypal approach of criticism into a radical and inclusive revision of the traditional grounds both of theory of literature and the practice of literary criticism.

Nearby pages
Archfiend, Archi, Archibald Alison, Archibald Campbell, Archibald Campbell of Argyll