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Archetypes and Stereotypes
Myth and symbol tell us a great deal about who we are, where we have come from, and where we might be going. Myths offer a kind of symbolic history of a culture, what it values and devalues, how it assigns meaning to roles, relationships, and events. The concept of the archetype, formulated by psychologist Carl Jung, points up the many common threads that run through mythology and that appear in different form in our personal lives, as dreams, visual images, and in the ways we construct our relationships.
Archetypes have found a new audience in the current fascination with myth as it relates to gender identity and gender relations. Robert Bly, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jean Shinoda Bolen, and others invite us to look to myth and story as a way of understanding what it means to be a man or a woman. The archetypes-the king, queen, magician, trickster, wild man or woman, goddess or god, etc.-offer us insight not only into ourselves but into our partners, our children, our parents. As a form of collective wisdom, mythology can help us sort through the confusing array of signals about gender and relationships that bombard us regularly.
To most Jungians, archetypes are virtually hard-wired into our brains and help determine who we are....