What Are The Jungian Archetypes?
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One of the ideas that most influenced my writing came from Carl Jung's observation that everyone in a dream is you.
The monster is you.
The child is you.
The wise old man is you.
The lover, the villain, the king and the fool are all aspects of the same psyche attempting to communicate with itself.
When I first encountered that idea, it felt obviously true. Not just of dreams, but of stories.
What if every character in a story is really an aspect of the protagonist?
What if the purpose of a story is not simply to entertain us, but to help us understand ourselves?
That question became one of the foundations of writing my first novel Strange Fish.
Stories As Maps Of The Self
Carl Jung described archetypes as universal patterns that exist within all human beings. The Hero. The Shadow. The Innocent. The Rebel. The Caregiver. The Sage. Different cultures give them different names, but they appear everywhere: in myths, religions, fairy tales, films and dreams.
Jung believed these patterns are not learned. They are inherited. They are part of what it means to be human.
What fascinated me was the theory itself, and what it suggested about storytelling.
If these patterns already exist inside us, perhaps great stories move us because they activate something we already recognise. Perhaps we do not learn from stories so much as discover ourselves through them.
That idea changed the way I approached fiction.
Writing Strange Fish
As I worked on Strange Fish, I found myself looking at the characters differently.
The novel follows Jono, but gradually I began to realise that every major figure in the story represented something within him.
Without giving away the plot, Uncle Mike became an expression of Jono's Shadow — the part of himself he fears, resists and must ultimately confront.
The Little One carries elements of Jung's Anima, the mysterious inner feminine that guides us towards wholeness. At the same time, she embodies something of the Innocent Child: vulnerable, magical and deeply connected to wonder.
Other characters revealed themselves in similar ways.
The more I wrote, the more the novel began to resemble a dream. Not a dream in the literal sense, but a psychological landscape in which different aspects of Jono's personality could meet, clash and eventually move towards resolution.
What began as a story about people slowly became a story about a single human being attempting to discover himself.
Which, in many ways, is exactly what Jungian psychology asks of us.
It asks us to meet the forgotten, rejected and hidden parts of ourselves and bring them into relationship. To move towards wholeness.
The story became an exploration of that process.
Why Archetypes Matter
Writers often discover archetypes through lists.
Twelve archetypes.
Twenty archetypes.
Character templates and story structures.
Those can be useful, but I think they miss the deeper point.
Archetypes are not writing tools.
They are psychological realities.
They are names for forces that already exist within us.
The Hero is our courage.
The Shadow is our fear.
The Rebel is our desire for freedom.
The Caregiver is our compassion.
The Sage is our wisdom.
Stories resonate because they allow us to encounter these forces outside ourselves. They turn invisible inner conflicts into visible outer drama.
That is why a good story can feel strangely familiar, even when it takes place in another world.
The Story Beneath The Story
These days, when I read a novel or watch a film, I often find myself asking a simple question:
Who does each character represent?
Not within the plot.
Within the protagonist.
Sometimes the answer is obvious. Sometimes it isn't. But the question almost always reveals something interesting.
It certainly did when writing Strange Fish.
The novel is about identity, belonging and self-discovery, but underneath all of that lies a simpler idea: a young man trying to discover the many different aspects buried inside himself.
Perhaps that is what all stories are.
Dreams we share with one another in the hope of discovering who we are.