Reference
Carl Jung
The idea of archetypes as recurring patterns rather than invented characters is his.
Jung proposed that certain character patterns recur across cultures with no plausible route of transmission between them, and that the recurrence points at something shared in how people are put together rather than at borrowing between storytellers. He called these patterns archetypes, and the layer he placed them in the collective unconscious.
Two things are worth being straight about. Jung never published the neat list of twelve that circulates under his name; that arrangement came later, and mostly from Carol Pearson. And the theoretical machinery around the collective unconscious is not an empirical finding in the way a measured effect is. What survives comfortably is the narrower observation: these patterns do recur, reliably enough to be worth naming.
Referenced work
- The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works Vol. 9, Part 1) reference
Elsewhere
Listed here because we name Carl Jung in our writing. We are not affiliated with them and this page is our summary, not theirs.