MYTH AND PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY: THE MANIFESTATION OF COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS MOTIFS IN THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PROTAGONIST

Abstract

This thesis examines how mythic motifs rooted in the collective unconscious become legible within stream-of-consciousness narration and thereby shape the psychological portrait of a novel’s protagonist. Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, narrative theory and myth studies, the paper argues that the ostensibly idiosyncratic flow of subjective impressions is structured by trans-personal patterns—archetypes, ritual schemas and cyclical temporality—that surface as images, affective surges and intrapsychic dialogues. The aim is to clarify the mechanisms by which such motifs are encoded in interior monologue and free indirect discourse, and to show how they regulate memory, desire, moral conflict and identity formation. Methodologically, the study combines hermeneutic close reading with psychoanalytic and narratological modeling across a small, illustrative corpus of modernist and late-modern texts. The discussion demonstrates that hero-journey sequences, shadow confrontations, anima/animus visitations, sacred-time recursions and trickster displacements reorganize the protagonist’s cognition and self-narration, especially at thresholds of crisis and decision. The conclusion highlights implications for literary analysis and for psychology of reading, proposing that stream-of-consciousness fiction functions as a privileged laboratory in which culturally shared mythic programs become phenomenologically available as individual thought.