Archetypal Patterns in Poetry

October 2012

In an article, “On the relation of analytical psychology to poetic art,” Dr. C.G. Jung has set forth an hypothesis in regard to the psychological significance of poetry. The special emotional significance possessed by certain poems—a significance going beyond any definite meaning conveyed—he attributes to the stirring in the reader’s mind, within or beneath his conscious response, of unconscious forces which he terms “primordial images,” or archetypes. These archetypes he describes as “psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type,” experiences which have happened not to the individual but to his ancestors, and of which the results are inherited in the structure of the brain, a priori determinants of individual experience.

From Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological studies in imagination, by Maud Bodkin, Vintage Books, New York, 1958; first published in 1934