View Article |
A study of archetypal patterns in selected Malaysian folk tales
Menon, Yasodhara J1.
This article examines the Malaysian folk tale The Two Beauties, otherwise popularly known as Bawang Merah Bawang Putih, with the aim of identifying if archetypal patt erns exist in Malaysian folkloric literature. Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology claims that fairy tales and folk tales from all around the world contain imprints which he terms as archetypal patt erns. These imprints, according to Jung, reside in the dimension of the psyche which is the collective unconscious. Jung maintains that the existence of the archetypes and the collective unconscious prove that each individual carries in the psyche, from the moment of conception, a set of primordial images that enables us to think, act and respond in a universal way. Based on this theory, he subsequently concludes that man is a homogeneous being. Thereby, another objective of this article is to find out if the analysis of the selected Malaysian tale corresponds to Jung’s theory and the outcome of this objective is discussed in relation to the Malaysian context. The end result of the article validates the fact that archetypal patt erns do exist in Malaysian folk tales. It puts forth the idea that although the world is inhibited by a diversity of people, each individual is born with a similar mental mapping in the form of images, ideas and emotions thereby corresponding to the theory of human universality.
Affiliation:
- University of Malaya, Malaysia
Download this article (This article has been downloaded 581 time(s))
|
|
Indexation |
Indexed by |
MyJurnal (2021) |
H-Index
|
2 |
Immediacy Index
|
0.000 |
Rank |
0 |
|
|
|