What Jung Actually Said, and What This Is Not

This scheme is regularly described as Jungian, and the description needs qualifying. C. G. Jung proposed that the collective unconscious contains archetypes, inherited structuring forms that shape the images produced by dreams, myth and religion; the ones he wrote about at length are the Shadow, the Anima and Animus, the Persona, the Self, and figures such as the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Child and the Trickster. He did not propose a list of twelve, and he explicitly held that archetypes as such are unrepresentable forms whose number cannot be fixed, since they are known only through the indefinitely many images they produce. The twelve-archetype set is Pearson's construction, drawing on Jung and on Joseph Campbell but not derived from either, and its most widespread use is commercial: it reached its present ubiquity through marketing and brand strategy, where its four-quadrant map of consumer motivations is its main selling point.