Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Archetypes can be employed consciously or unconsciously in literary works and as they represent some psychological phenomena they can be investigated after they are identified for better understanding of art. Literature comes from our unconscious psyche, and the unconscious is a rich source of archetypes. Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1929- )concept of “translation,” which refers to translation of the unconscious content in the form of verbal images whose final result is the literature of fantasy, requires a Jungian reading of her works, as such a reading does the exact opposite, and, in other terms, translates the elements in the works of literature to the psychic content they represent. This paper applies the theories of Carl Gustav Jung to one of the Earthsea cycle novels, “Tehanu” (1990).