Archetype

Universal patterns that repeat across cultures

The archetype is the central concept of the analytical psychology Jung founded: a universal pattern of imagery held in the collective unconscious that all human beings share. The mother, the hero, the wise old man, the trickster, the shadow, and the anima and animus are among the best known, and they surface again and again in myths, stories, and dreams across cultures and centuries. The archetype itself is an abstract structure you can't perceive directly; you meet it indirectly, through the symbols of a dream or the motifs of a myth. The yamauba, the crone of the mountains, and Momotaro of Japanese folktales can both be read as concrete appearances of archetypes.

Where dream symbols and archetypes overlap

Most of the symbols that come up often in dream interpretation are read in Jungian psychology as archetypal images, the shape an archetype takes when it becomes visible. A snake sheds its skin and is born again, so it attaches to images of transformation and rebirth, and it plays that same part in myths around the world. Water is the most widely used image for the unconscious: deep water for its lower reaches, rough water for emotional turmoil. Fire carries the energy of change, an old man carries wisdom, a child carries new possibility. What matters here is the order. Water and fire are not themselves archetypes; an archetype, which can never be grasped head-on, borrows a familiar shape such as water or fire in order to appear in a dream. Traditional symbol systems and archetypal theory end up casting similar roles because both have been reaching for the same deep layer of the human mind.

How knowing archetypes changes the way you read a dream

Once you know the concept, dream interpretation gains depth. Suppose an old man you have never met appears in your dream. A symbol dictionary will often say an adviser has arrived; add the archetypal view and it also reads as wisdom of your own, the wise old man, becoming active in you. Being able to take a dream symbol not only as a message from outside but as movement inside yourself is the greatest gain from studying archetypes. One rough guide for deciding whether to read a figure archetypally is whether it left an impression out of all proportion to the part it played. When you can't recall the face or the name and yet the awe, or an unaccountable familiarity, stays with you all day, that texture is said to be the mark of an archetypal image. Because archetypes are abstract, though, forcing them onto the fine details of a particular dream easily turns into a stretch, so it's better to hold the reading loosely.

How the shadow, the anima, and the persona fit together

Among the archetypes, three are read most often as characters in a dream: the shadow (the darker side you'd rather not own), the anima and animus (the inner image of the other sex), and the persona (the social mask). In Jung's individuation, the process of becoming who you are, the persona is what you learn to hold at a distance once you notice it isn't the whole of you, while the shadow and the anima or animus are what you take back as parts of yourself instead of leaving them cut off. The figure chasing you may be the shadow; the person who pulls at you far out of proportion may be the anima or animus; the masked figure may be the persona. Once you can tell the three apart, dream interpretation stops being a swap of symbol for meaning and becomes a way of checking which task you are working on at this point in your life.

The archetypes you'll meet most often

Jung never settled on a final list of archetypes, since on his account there are as many of them as there are typical situations in a human life. Even so, a handful recur through his work and through the analytical psychology that followed, and they serve as the basic vocabulary of the subject.

• The shadow: the sides of yourself that consciousness refuses to accept
• The anima and animus: the inner image of the other sex, mediating between conscious and unconscious
• The persona: the mask assembled to meet social expectations
• The self: the ordering center of the whole psyche and the goal of individuation, appearing in mandalas, circles, and other shapes that suggest wholeness
• The great mother: the nourishing and the devouring faces of the maternal, protective and suffocating at once
• The wise old man: inner wisdom given a human form, arriving as a teacher, a guide, or an elder who hands over one piece of advice
• The hero: the pattern of facing a trial and being changed by it, the shared skeleton of myths and of dreams about getting through something
• The trickster: the figure who breaks the rules and unsettles the order, prying open a way for change
• The child: new possibility and room to grow, common in dreams that come as one stage of life gives way to the next

Read the list as a rough map rather than a closed catalogue. Several archetypes can overlap within a single dream, and one figure can carry two or more of them at the same time.