Carl Jung, Essay Example

Carl Jung said that every human has lost touch with important elements of themselves, internalizing portions of our personality that eventually need to be resurrected. Through dreams and imagination, we’re able to become fulfilled. Joseph Campbell coined the term “monomyth,” referring to a hero’s traditional journey through supernatural world, ultimately returning to his starting point. The English story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the German story “Cinderella” and the French story The Little Prince represent different elements of these theories, and in some cases stray from them.

Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland represents Carl Jung’s archetype of the wise old man. The caterpillar sleepily smokes his hookah and addresses Alice in an unhurried voice. He rudely asks Alice, “Who are you?” (Carroll 55) upon their first meeting. In this sense, Carroll’s caterpillar is clearly a rude old man – and possibly we’ll find out that he’s wise. Alice responds to the caterpillar by saying, “I – I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then” (Carroll 55). Alice is expressing Jung’s theory that we have several portions of ourselves that we are not always in contact with. It seems that Alice has lost touch with her different selves in only a few hours. The caterpillar challenges Alice to find these inner selves by sternly questioning who she is over and over. Alice gets annoyed at this and fires back at the caterpillar by saying, “I think you ought to tell me who you are, first” (Carroll 56). Since Alice is just a little girl, and at this time in the story, just as small as the caterpillar, it seems that her masculine forces are coming out a bit as she stands up to the caterpillar and his nastiness. Jung terms this archetype “animus.”

When Alice turns to leave, the caterpillar calls her back, saying that he has “something important to say!” (Carroll 56) and then when Alice does return, the caterpillar tells her, “Keep your temper” (Carroll 56). The caterpillar furthers his role of the wise old man by offering what he feels is sound advice, even though it’s simply infuriating Alice. When Alice expresses that she doesn’t like being so small, the caterpillar crawls away, saying over his shoulder, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter” (Carroll 61), referring to the mushroom that will help Alice change her size. Even though the caterpillar speaks what can be considered a lot of nonsense (in keeping with Carroll’s overall theme of the entire book), he does offer Alice what turns out to be very useful knowledge.

Alice’s constant growing to enormous heights and shrinking to a size as small as a blade of grass seems to represent her process of finding her inner self and of figuring out exactly how she feels comfortable, keeping with Jung’s idea of individuation. When she’s large and is accused of being a serpent by the pigeon, Alice denies it. The pigeon asks her, “Well! What are you?” (Carroll 62) to which Alice responds, “I-I’m a little girl” (Carroll 62). Carroll writes that she said this “rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through, that day” (Carroll 62-63). Due to all of the changes she has continually gone through since the start of her day, Alice is questioning every bit of who and what she is, down to not even knowing if she’s a little girl any longer.

In the very first paragraph of the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” Jung’s wise old man archetype is again introduced in the form of Cinderella’s dying mother. Cinderella’s mother tells her, “Dear child, be good and pious. Then the dear Lord shall always assist you, and I shall look down from heaven and take care of you” (Cinderella 93). Her daughter followed these orders and “remained good and pious” (Cinderella 93). Cinderella’s father remarries and brings two stepdaughters to the family. Cinderella’s new stepsisters represent a new Jung archetype, the villain or tyrant. The stepsisters had “beautiful and fair features but nasty and wicked hearts (Cinderella 93), and they turned Cinderella into the house slave.

When Cinderella is banned from going to the ball because she doesn’t have appropriate clothes to wear, birds brought her a dress and shoes to wear and she proceeds to the ball. While Cinderella doesn’t go to a traditional fantasy land as in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the ball represents her own personal fairy tale, since it’s a world that’s she’s never allowed in. This follows Joseph Campbell’s traditional hero’s journey into a supernatural world of wonder. Cinderella’s dream come true is furthered when the prince dances with her . Completing Campbell’s monomyth, Cinderella wins her victory when the prince chooses her to marry. On the day of Cinderella’s wedding, pigeons pluck eyes out of the evil stepsisters. “They were punished with blindness for the rest of their lives due to their wickedness and malice” (Cinderella 99).

De Saint-Exupery’s main character in The Little Prince gives up his dream of being an artist when he is only six years old. He says, “I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them (de Saint-Exupery 6). It seems that, from a very young age, the narrator’s inner self was repressed thanks to criticism from adults. Throughout his life, the narrator constantly feels like he can’t find anyone to relate to, and even when he is a grownup himself, he still doesn’t respect other adults.

The narrator becomes a pilot and crashes his airplane one day, meeting de Saint-Exupery’s title character, the little prince. The little prince has come from another planet and asks the narrator to explain all sorts of things to him, turning the narrator into a sort of teacher and drawing the true adult out of him. When once the narrator was a child told to repress his emotions, he is now an adult repressing his adulthood, but he seems to be growing into both roles. The little prince tells the narrator about his own planet, retelling ridiculous stories about seemingly made-up lands, that the narrator believes but no other adult ever would. It seems that through his conversations and experiences with the little prince, the narrator is able to reconcile his conflicting inner selves.

Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Cinderella and the narrator in The Little Prince have all internalized important parts of themselves, all which eventually must be resurrected so that the characters can become and remain happy in their lives. Luckily, they are able to fulfill their true selves through dreams, imagination and sometimes accepting the ridiculous. Campbell’s traditional hero’s path is shown most distinctly through Cinderella’s character, except that her stepsisters are punished instead of rewarded.

Each story is wholly representative of their perspective cultures by way of the characters’ personalities, the meter of writing by the author and considering that all three stories are standards of their respective cultures. Each story has at least one basic Bastian element as another, such as Alice’s and Cinderella’s experiences with Jung’s archetypes or Alice’s and the narrator of The Little Prince’s internalization of the simultaneous child and grownup.