Archetypical Reviewing and Criticizing of Aeneid in Virgil

One of the significant events of literary criticism is archetypical criticism. Archetypes include potential and elementary images and ideas that are in collective unconscious of human. In Jung’s view, these elements are product of collective experience that repeated in all generations’ lives. Aeneid is a mythical poem that is rooted in Romans collective unconscious. This work can be analyzed from different approaches like archetypical criticism. Archetypes such as “hero”, “animus”, “Old Wise”, and “shade” and their manner of manifest on every character of story are analyzed as the main issue of this research. Results show that Aene is hero archetype who passes successfully three stages of searching, debuting, scapegoat to reach individuality stage which is selfhood, the ultimate of individuality process. Archetype of Animus is overhang on “Didon” and “Camille” psyche. Venus is Old Wise archetype who helped the hero all over the poem and finally, fights against “Tornus” who is his internal shade and then dominates him. Research methodology is content analysis in framework of literary criticism. Therefore, the aim of current research is archetypical criticism of Aeneid by Virgil based on Jung ideas.