Jung’s Archetypes and Their Role in Your Personal Journey

Jung’s four primary archetypes encompass the main stages of making successful personal journeys.

Each of us has some kind of journey we have set out on. It may be a major one, like obtaining the long sought after college degree or a smaller one like becoming more social around others. Perhaps we’d like to alter difficult emotions like anger or fear or maybe we’ve decided to pursue that long dreamed of writing career. The theory of Carl Jung provides hints regarding how to reach our goals.

Jung’s Archetypes and How They Influence Our Journey

For many individuals visualization is a very powerful tool for taking the steps to achieve their goals. While many techniques exist, Carl Jung provided a conceptualization of commonalities we all share that allows for a method of visualizing each step toward reaching a goal. These commonalities are roles or characters found in what he termed the collective unconscious, a shared level of experience within the human race brought down through heredity.

The structure of the collective unconscious is made up of archetypes or “psychic, innate dispositions to experience and represent basic human behavior and situations,” (Carl Jung Resources, 2011). According to Jung, there are certain archetypes all humans…