Bahram and Golandam; A Narrative of the Process of Individualization

The relationship between literary texts and psychoanalysis was proposed in the 20th century with the help of Freud's theories, and after him, Carl Gustav Jung played a prominent role in this field and wrote important works about the reflection of people's emotions and thoughts in his creations. According to Jung, human thoughts are partly derived from daily desires and are largely influenced by the collective unconscious and old images (archetypes), and in general, humans are controlled by their unconscious throughout their lives. In this article, the epopee Bahram and Golandam by Aminuddin Safi (the poet of the 9th century) has been analyzed using the descriptive-analytical method and from Jung's psychoanalytic point of view in order to determine the level of collective unconsciousness and its elements in it. According to the obtained results, this folk tale is consistent with the archetype of Jung's individualation and shows the path of character development towards evolution; hence, in this poem, Keshvarshah is a code of humans and Bahram represents his archetype, who goes through the difficult stages of confronting the shadow to connect with the anima, and finally, his connection with Golandam completes the cycle of character transformation. Also, in this system, two archetypes of the shadow and the old man play a more prominent role: the archetype of the shadow due to the persistence and great effort of the king to develop the character, and the archetype of the old man due to his enthusiasm and confusion.