archetype

archetype [Gr. arch =first, typos =mold], term whose earlier meaning, "original model," or "prototype," has been enlarged by C. G. Jung and by several contemporary literary critics. A Jungian archetype is a thought pattern that finds worldwide parallels, either in cultures (for example, the similarity of the ritual of Holy Communion in Europe with the tecqualo in ancient Mexico) or in individuals (a child's concept of a parent as both heroic and tyrannic, superman and ogre). Jung believed that such archetypal images and ideas reside in the unconscious level of the mind of every human being and are inherited from the ancestors of the race. They form the substance of the collective unconscious. Literary critics such as Northrop Frye and Maud Bodkin use the term archetype interchangeably with the term motif , emphasizing that the role of these elements in great works of literature is to unite readers with otherwise dispersed cultures and eras.

archetype an original which has been imitated; (in Jungian theory) a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.

archetype, a primary symbol, action, setting, or character-type that is found repeatedly in myth, folklore, and literature. Religious mystics have at various times proposed that there is a universal symbolic language of dreams and visions; and in the 20th cent. this notion was encouraged by the speculative anthropology of J. G. Frazer and the psychology of Jung, who claimed that human beings shared a ‘collective unconscious’ for which archetypal images, whether in dreams or in imaginative literature, provided evidence. Archetypal criticism (see also myth criticism) under Jung's influence has sought to trace the recurrence of such symbols and types as the Earth Mother, the Quest, the Paradisal Garden, and the Trickster. Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) was an early example. The wider significance of archetypes in literature was explored by Frye.