Analysis of the Story of “Thinking of Imaginary Person as a Crescent” in Masnavi-e- Manavi based on Jungian Components of Individuality

With the advent of new literary criticism and its approaches, reading literary texts based on various worldviews became possible and the range of interpretations became wider which in turn helped readers to understand the meaningful similarities between different texts. According to Jung, archetypal criticism and elements of social unconscious have been embedded in human psyche and reflected in human mind and language. The concepts created by Jung, including ancient archetypes like persona, the wise old man, the shadow… and purposeful nature of human psyche leads to the process of individuation. One of the theories that is useful in analysis of these texts is the process of individuation by Carl Jung which examines stages of individual's evolution through scientific method.. Rumi and Jung are both trying to paint the human's path to reach perfection. The present study tries to extract archetypes from "The story of the Caliph Omar and the man who thought he saw the new moon" using data analysis and reorganize it by contraposition of elements from story by archetypes and then analyzing it using the process of individuation by Jung. This study was done as a library research with analytic-descriptive approach.