ARCHETYPAL CARTOGRAPHY AND LITERARY PRACTICES: THE ROLE OF SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE IN THE INDIVIDUATION PROCESS

Abstract

This article investigates the role of literary, cultural, and symbolic practices in the formation of self-awareness and world consciousness, in light of analytical psychology. It begins with the observation that modernity and contemporaneity, marked by instrumental rationality, the acceleration of information flows, and the fragmentation of symbolic references, have produced an impoverishment of subjective experience and a significant increase in psychic suffering. In this context, it argues that symbols, archetypes, and narrative structures—especially the hero's journey—constitute fundamental devices for the organization, integration, and elaboration of human experience. Drawing on the contributions of Carl Gustav Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Northrop Frye, Giorgio Agamben, and Yuval Noah Harari, it analyzes how literary and cultural narratives operate as symbolic cartographies of the individuation process, articulating reason, emotion, imagination, and ethics. This paper also discusses how contemporary literary practices, organized in networks, symbolic communities, and glocal aesthetics, preserve and update the cultural plasticity of archetypes, offering possibilities for reconstructing symbolic experience and favoring narrative experiences capable of sustaining emotional development, psychic integration, and the ethical construction of the subject within contemporary social life.