Reflections on Carl Jung and the Protagonist’s Journey

A five-part series exploring Jung’s concept of individuation.

The more I study Carl Jung, the more I discover his ideas about psychology have a direct relevance to screenwriting (specifically) and stories (generally). This five-part series focuses on Jung’s notion of individuation, the achievement of one’s self-actualization through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious. This movement toward a state of what Jung called “wholeness” is an enlightening way to think about the Protagonist’s journey.

In Part 1, we explore Jung’s theory of individuation which he described as the “psychological process that makes of a human being an ‘individual’… a ‘whole’ man.”

In Part 2, we consider the idea that the unconscious, the stuff of an individual’s Authentic Self, naturally seeks to emerge into the light of consciousness, and how we, as writers, can think of a Protagonist’s transformation as a reflection of this dynamic.

In Part 3, we delve into Jung’s notion that “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious,” including those negative aspects of the psyche known as the shadow.

In Part 4 , we look at Jung’s idea that “whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event,” which led us to the notion of a character’s narrative imperative, their inevitable fate insofar as Plotline intersecting with Themeline, the interweaving between the two — event/response — playing out as Transformation.

In Part 5, we reflect on the concept that who we may become is who we already are, the potential for our future self lies within our present self.

One caveat: While most Hollywood movies feature a Protagonist going through a positive metamorphosis (Unity Arc), that’s not always true. Sometimes they go through a negative one. Sometimes they refuse to change. Sometimes the Protagonist doesn’t change, but acts as a change agent with others.

But it is almost inevitable that transformation is at work in a movie. What Jung articulates in his take on analytical psychology, as we have seen in this series, is directly relatable to screenwriting and storytelling in general.

My book The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling explores these ideas more deeply as exhibited in over three hundred film and TV examples.