The figures

An index of the archetypes.

Each entry traces a figure's essence, the traits through which it shows up in healthy expression, and the shadow it casts when held badly.

A note on scope

Jung never closed the list. "There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life," he wrote, warning that any attempt at an exhaustive enumeration would be a futile exercise (CW 9i, §80). So why ten?

The ten gathered here are Jung's own — not the twelve brand personalities of later marketing literature. Four are structural: the Self, the Persona, the Shadow, and the Anima/Animus, components Jung argued belong to every psyche. Six are archetypal figures he returned to across the corpus: the Hero, the Trickster, the Wise Old Man, the Great Mother, and the Divine Child. A canon by emphasis, not by exhaustion.

On other lists

This index presents the archetypes Jung himself named and developed in the Collected Works. It does not present the twelve-archetype framework popularized by Carol S. Pearson and Margaret Mark in The Hero and the Outlaw (2001), which is a branding and marketing model derived from — but not equivalent to — Jung's writings.