Jungian archetypes: what they are, the 12 and who made them

Jungian archetypes are universal patterns of image and behavior that, according to Jung, we share as a species; Jung never left a closed list of twelve. The “12 archetypes” circulating online today are a later system, put together by the author Carol S. Pearson from ideas of his. The two can coexist, but they are not the same thing, and the difference matters when someone tells you “I’m such an Outlaw” or “you’re such a Caregiver.”

Jungian archetypes: what they are and why there is no official list of 12

Jungian archetypes are inherited patterns of image and behavior, forms and not contents, and Jung never fixed a closed list.

Jung used the word to describe motifs that, according to him, recur in myths, dreams and tales from very different cultures: the protective mother, the wise old man, the trickster, rebirth. What is inherited, he said, is the form, a predisposition to organize experience in a certain way. The specific content is supplied by each culture and each person. In the texts collected in volume 9 (part I) of his Collected Works he expresses this with a Latin expression, facultas praeformandi, which can be translated as a prior possibility of giving form.

On the number, Jung himself was clear. In the essay “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious” (1936) he wrote that there are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life (our own translation, not a verbatim quotation from the Collected Works). A list of twelve does not fit that idea.

Encyclopaedia Britannica describes Jung’s archetypes as instinctive, universal patterns that are expressed in behavior and in images, and calls “much-contested” the conception of the collective unconscious with which he combined them. The searches “Carl Jung archetypes,” “personality archetypes” and “Jungian archetypes” point to the same curiosity, that of recognizing yourself in a figure. What changes is where the figure comes from.

The archetypes Jung did describe: persona, shadow, anima/animus and the self

What Jung described in the most detail are structures of the psyche, among them the persona, the shadow, the anima and animus, and the self, and none of them works like a catalog character.

It is common to find those four presented as “Jung’s fundamental archetypes.” It is a convenient summary, but we did not find that Jung used that expression. Aion (1951, volume 9, part II) devotes its first chapters to the ego, the shadow, the syzygy (the anima-animus pair) and the self, and in paragraph 13 states that the shadow, the anima and the animus are the archetypes most clearly characterized from an empirical point of view. The persona he develops in other texts, such as Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (volume 7).

In Jung, the shadow gathers what a person does not recognize or accept in themselves (Aion, chapter II), and its content changes from person to person. It is not a character on the list of 12. It shares its name with the “shadow” in the test’s results, and we use that word in a different sense here.

A common confusion on popular pages equates the Jester with the trickster. Jung’s trickster is an ambiguous mythological figure, to which he devoted a whole essay in 1954. The Jester of the 12 archetypes describes a motivation, enjoying life and lightening the mood; it is not the same as that figure.

Who built the 12 archetypes: from Carol Pearson to the brand version (and why the test has “Jung” in its name)

The 12 archetypes are Carol S. Pearson’s system, presented in Awakening the Heroes Within (1991), which expanded the six archetypes of The Hero Within (1986).

Pearson tells it on her official site: she first described six archetypes in The Hero Within and then took them to twelve in Awakening the Heroes Within. She presents her work as an update of the ideas of C. G. Jung, James Hillman, Joseph Campbell and Erik Erikson. With that heritage, calling the 12 “Jungian” is reasonable; attributing them to Jung is not.

According to Blandin, Pearson’s system rests on Jung’s theory of archetypes and on Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey, which in turn builds on Jung’s work with myths. Blandin adds that other authors had already published similar ideas about character archetypes, but that she gathered twelve into a single system. Before that book she had published The Hero Within (1986), with six.

Kesstan Blandin, of Storywell, holds the same reading: many people believe the 12 come directly from Jung, and in fact Pearson systematized those roles. Blandin works in the orbit of CAPT and the Myers & Briggs Foundation, which publish the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator (PMAI), so her text is cited with that caveat. In a December 2021 blog post, Pearson reproduced an excerpt of the Storywell article saying that the 12 well-known archetypes come from her original work of the 1980s and that this credit is generally not given to her. The timeline table puts in time order what Jung wrote and what came after.

The 12 archetypes and their names in each version

The same 12 archetypes change names depending on the version, and that mix of names explains why each page seems to talk about a different list.

The 1991 names follow Storywell, which lists the twelve archetypes of the book and puts the later names in parentheses.

“Everyman” is the name the test uses for the archetype the brand version calls Regular Guy/Gal. Across the versions it appears under four names (Everyman, Regular Guy/Gal, Orphan and Realist), and it is one of the places where the lists get most tangled.

Lover, Creator, Magician and Sage carry the same names in almost every version.

How to read your dominant archetype: four core drives, your top 3 and the test

A result from an archetype test works like a profile with a main archetype, a second and a third, and a core drive that shows up more than the others.

The Type of You Jungian Archetype Test has 30 questions: 18 situations with four options and 12 statements answered on a five-point scale, one per archetype. Each of the 12 gets a score from 0 to 100. The highest is your main archetype, and the test also shows the second and the third.

The test groups the 12 archetypes into four core drives, with three archetypes each.

This division into four groups of three matches, in its members, the grouping by motivations that Mark and Pearson (2001) propose, although the test uses its own names for the groups. We know this from an academic article (Xara-Brasil, Miadaira Hamza and Marquina, 2018) that reproduces the scheme of that book, not from the book itself.

In the reading this test uses, within Freedom the Innocent trusts that things can turn out well, the Explorer needs room of their own to look for a path and the Sage feels at home when they understand how things work. In Mastery, the Hero measures up against challenges, the Outlaw questions what no longer works and the Magician sees how to turn one situation into another.

In Belonging, the Everyman wants to fit in without making a big deal of it, the Lover looks for closeness and intensity and the Jester eases tension with humor. In Stability, the Caregiver makes sure nobody goes without what they need, the Ruler organizes resources and rules and the Creator gives concrete form to what they imagine.

They are tendencies and nobody is a single archetype. When the scores of the first and the second are a few points apart, the profile looks more like a blend.

One way to read those groups, and not a rule of the test, is to check which group your main archetype belongs to. If your main one is the Caregiver, for example, that group is Stability, and if it is the Explorer, Freedom. If your second and third archetypes fall in other groups, your profile is spread across several core drives.

A high score on an archetype does not erase the others: it shows which one appears most strongly in the answers you gave. Two people with the same main archetype can have very different second and third ones, and that makes the profile more specific. If you retake the test later and the order changes, that does not necessarily mean something went wrong: the result reflects how you answered that time, and archetypes describe tendencies and not fixed traits.

The test also points, for each archetype, to another that it proposes as a good match: Innocent with Caregiver, Explorer with Jester, Sage with Ruler, Hero with Magician, Outlaw with Creator and Everyman with Lover. It is a proposal of the test, not a research finding.

Archetypes in everyday life: the family group text, work and the shadow

The “shadow” of an archetype, in the sense used here, is what happens when a strength is overused or used at the wrong moment; it is not a defect.

The same archetype can help you at the office and get in your way at the family table. It is possible to recognize yourself in a result and notice, the next day, that in other situations you act differently. That does not contradict the result: a tendency can show up more in some situations than in others.

According to the PMAI’s authors, archetypes rise and fall in a person’s profile depending on circumstances, personal growth, the immediate environment and maturity. That is why we look at them here in concrete scenes. We built the four that follow ourselves from common everyday situations: the holiday dinner group text, the work meeting, Sunday dinner and payday. They are not cases of real people or results of a study, and they serve to practice reading a tendency in a specific moment, without turning it into a label for anyone.

The archetypes in these scenes are examples of tendency and not a diagnosis of anyone. The same scene can be read through several archetypes at once.

Jung’s shadow is something else: it gathers what a person does not recognize or accept in themselves (Aion, chapter II). Here we use “shadow of an archetype” to name the exaggerated version of a strength. Both share the name and the idea that what is uncomfortable also tells you something about yourself, but they are different concepts, and Jung did not describe twelve shadows.

These scenes describe what someone tends to do in each situation. If someone runs very high on the Caregiver and finds it hard to say “no,” that is not necessarily a character problem: it is a strength that, in that situation, is costing them.

What does the science say? Archetypes, the Big Five and Jung’s “8 types”

Archetypes are a tool for reflection and narrative reading, and not a typology validated like the Big Five.

The closest study we found is Faber and Mayer’s, and we read it with caution: the sample is 125 students and the list of archetypes is a different one. On the PMAI, the evidence available is the manual from those who created it. For 12-archetype tests like Type of You’s, no validity studies turned up, and that is why the test is presented as a self-discovery tool.

Jung’s “8 types” are something else. In Psychological Types (1921) he combined two attitudes, extraversion and introversion, with four functions, which are thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition, and described at least eight distinguishable types. It is a theory about how you tend to orient yourself, without mythic figures. The 16 personality types come out of that tradition.

If you are looking for a map of traits with more empirical backing, the Big Five model is one of the most studied. The Enneagram is another system of types.

What to do with your result and when to ask for support

A result from an archetype test is worth more as a question than as an answer, and a small experiment makes it possible to observe what changes.

Three ideas to try, meant to be done over a week:

• A pending sentence. Pick a situation that keeps repeating (the family group text, a meeting) and write in one line what you really want to say. You can send it or not; the exercise consists of putting it into words.
• A day with your second archetype. Choose one small decision and act with the archetype that came out second or third. If your main one is Caregiver and your second is Explorer, for example, ask first for something for yourself in a weekend plan. Notice what changes in the conversation.
• A trusted person’s view. Ask them in which situations they see you overdo your strength. Compare their answer with yours.

If your strongest archetype is the Caregiver and saying no is hard for you, the guide on the people-pleaser pattern goes deeper into it. To bring the result to work, the guide on how to find your talent helps turn it into concrete decisions.

An archetype test is not a substitute for an assessment and is not a way to treat mental health problems. If a situation overwhelms you, with intense anxiety, sadness that won’t lift or thoughts of harming yourself, talking with a mental health professional helps. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, a free service that is available 24/7, according to the 988 Lifeline.