A Jungian Reflection on the Collective Unconscious and the Hero’s Journey
This reflection explores how parental archetypes and the collective unconscious interact through lived experience, shaping the Hero’s Journey of individuation.
Carl Jung described the collective unconscious as a deep psychological layer shared by all human beings. Within it live universal patterns — archetypes — that shape how we relate, love, survive, lead, and seek meaning. While these archetypes are universal, they become personal through our earliest relationships, particularly with our parents.
Parental Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
In Jungian psychology, parental archetypes emerge from the collective unconscious and become personalised through early relationships. Mother and father figures act as carriers of archetypal patterns, shaping how the psyche understands care, authority, loss, and belonging.
The Mother Archetype: Warrior and Orphan
My mother embodied the Warrior archetype. After the death of my father, she raised six children alone and became a successful farmer. Survival, responsibility, and endurance defined her life. This archetypal stance ensured safety and continuity, but left little space for emotional softness.
Alongside this strength, she also carried the Orphan archetype. Adopted twice in her own life, she knew abandonment and emotional disruption intimately. As a result, she was not emotionally mothering. Care was present, but warmth and attunement were limited.
In response, I embodied the archetype of the Unmothered Child, alongside the Observer. I learned to understand people deeply while remaining emotionally contained. What was sacrificed was the experience of being mothered. What was gained was the capacity to care for others with insight and boundaries — a paradox of care and emotional distance that still lives within me.
The Father Archetype: King and Fallen Hero
My father embodied a strong and life-giving masculine archetype. He was a farmer, a skilled electrician, a natural leader, and a deeply involved father. He loved being a parent and loved openly. Through him, I experienced the King archetype — authority paired with nurturance, strength paired with love.
He was also a Free Thinker, guided more by inner authority than external structures. This shaped my early experience of the masculine as grounded, intelligent, and self-directed.
However, I also witnessed the defeat of the King. Through a long illness with cancer, I watched a strong man become physically weak. This was not a sudden loss, but a prolonged witnessing of decline. Psychologically, this left a deep imprint: strength became linked with loss, and love with impermanence.
Archetypal Repetition and the Search for the Masculine
From a Jungian perspective, when an archetype collapses too early, the psyche may organise itself around expectation rather than trust. This helps explain why many people — myself included — unconsciously seek weak or absent partners. Not because weakness is desired, but because the psyche learned that strong figures fall.
From this experience, the Seeker archetype emerged strongly within me. Loss gave rise to searching: new places, new ideas, new paths. What was gained was independence and curiosity. What was sacrificed was grounding and inner completion.
The Archetypes That Still Live in Me
Through reflection, I can identify several archetypal patterns still active:
- The Warrior, expressed as endurance and responsibility
- The Orphan, expressed as emotional self-reliance
- The Observer, offering psychological insight with distance
- The Seeker, driven by longing and exploration
- The Unintegrated King, longed for externally rather than fully embodied internally
Individuation does not ask us to erase these archetypes, but to integrate them consciously.
The Hero’s Journey of Individuation
In Jungian psychology, healing is not about fixing the past, but about withdrawing unconscious projections and reclaiming inner authority. My Hero’s Journey now involves softening the Warrior, healing the Orphan, grounding the Seeker, and allowing the King to rise within — without expecting defeat.
This is the deeper work of individuation: moving from unconscious repetition toward conscious choice, and from longing toward embodiment.
Closing Invitation (Professional, Not Personal)
Many people carry similar archetypal patterns without language for them. When we begin to recognise these patterns, we take the first step of the Hero’s Journey — the Call to Consciousness .Understanding parental archetypes and the collective unconscious allows unconscious repetition to give way to conscious choice, which lies at the heart of individuation.
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