It is over 25 years ago that I wrote my thesis. And recently I started to re-read it. And while reading it I feel gratitude to my younger self.
I researched four children’s films from four different countries and cultures and looked for the presence of what Carl Gustav Jung has called the archetypes. Jung was a pupil of Sigmund Freud but disagreed with Freud on essential points. After Jung broke with the Freudian school, he developed theories that together are called the Jungian Psychology.
One of the most controversial theories he has launched is the theory about the existence of archetypes. Archetypes are images that, according to Jung, are present in the collective unconcious of every human being. They are present there through centuries of tradition, generation after generation. Jung says: “It seems as if the collective unconscious — as far as we can afford to judge it — consists of something like mythological motifs and images.”
It is precisely for this reason that myths are the essential exponents of the collective unconscious. All over the world and in different times of history, the archetypes have surfaced in different guises. The different shapes result from the environment and from historical circumstances. We can say that the archetypes are universal at their core, but that their external form is determined by culture-specific circumstances.
And in my thesis, I looked at exactly that. Are archetypes recognizable in children’s movies? And to what extent is there a universal visual language based on archetypes in the children’s films I studied? I watched children’s films from Burkina Faso, China, Israel and the Netherlands and started looking for differences and similarities.
What strikes me while reading my conclusions, is the sentence: “While comparing the four films we see that the child in each film is motivated by a longing for unity. The unity of his or her family and his or her community.” While comparing my findings to the child-archetype that is described by Jung, I understand that this longing is archetypical to the child.
Read more: https://medium.com/@barbaraglobalstorytellers/listening-to-the-child-archetype-3379ce7ae9ed