An archetype is a pattern of character that keeps showing up in stories, myths and people: the hero, the caregiver, the rebel, the wise old guide. Carl Jung used the word for patterns he believed everyone shares. Today it mostly means the 12 types below, and which one you lean toward.
I built a character test around this idea, so I’ve spent more time with archetypes than is probably healthy. Here’s the plain version.
What does archetype mean?
The word comes from Greek: arche (first, original) and typos (pattern, imprint). An archetype is the original pattern that copies get made from.
In stories, it’s why you recognize a character type in the first five minutes.
The grumpy mentor who turns out to care. The joker who hides behind the jokes. You’ve met them in a hundred shows, each time with a different name.
What Jung meant by archetypes
Jung first used the word in his 1919 essay “Instinct and the Unconscious”. He believed that under your own memories sits a deeper layer everyone shares, which he called the collective unconscious, and that archetypes live there. (Wikipedia has a good summary.)
For Jung, an archetype was a tendency that produces images, rather than an image itself. “Mother” is an archetype. Your mom, Molly Weasley and every fairy godmother are images it shapes.
The ones he wrote about most were the Mother, the Child, the Wise Old Man, the Trickster, the Anima and Animus, the Persona (the face you show the world) and the Shadow (the parts of yourself you’d rather not look at). Notice what’s missing: a neat list of 12.
Where the 12 archetypes come from
The list of 12 that most sites call “Jung’s archetypes” comes from a branding book: The Hero and the Outlaw by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson, published in 2001. They built on Jung to help companies decide what their brand stands for. That’s why you’ll see Nike called a Hero brand and Harley-Davidson an Outlaw.
So the 12 are Jung-inspired. I still use them, because it’s the version people recognize and it maps onto characters really well.
Mark and Pearson called two of them the Outlaw and the Regular Guy. Most people now say the Rebel and the Everyman, and so do I.
They also grouped the 12 by what each one wants most:
- Independence: the Innocent, the Explorer, the Sage
- Mastery: the Hero, the Rebel, the Magician
- Belonging: the Everyman, the Lover, the Jester
- Stability: the Caregiver, the Creator, the Ruler
The 12 archetypes, with characters you know
Each archetype wants something, and each has a way it goes wrong. The way it goes wrong is its shadow side, and it’s often the more useful half to know.
The Innocent
- Wants: for things to be good and to work out.
- Weak spot: refusing to see what’s going wrong.
- You’ve seen it in: Ted Lasso, Forrest Gump, Paddington.
The Explorer
- Wants: freedom, and to find out what’s out there.
- Weak spot: restlessness. Never committing to a place, a job or a person.
- You’ve seen it in: Moana, Indiana Jones, Monkey D. Luffy.
The Sage
- Wants: to understand how things really work.
- Weak spot: thinking about it forever and never acting.
- You’ve seen it in: Hermione Granger, Yoda, Sherlock Holmes.
The Hero
- Wants: to prove their worth by doing the hard thing.
- Weak spot: arrogance, and needing an enemy to feel useful.
- You’ve seen it in: Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, Steve Rogers.
The Rebel
- Wants: to break what isn’t working.
- Weak spot: breaking things just because they’re there.
- You’ve seen it in: Han Solo, Arya Stark, Lisbeth Salander.
The Magician
- Wants: to make big things happen and change how the world works.
- Weak spot: manipulation. The ends start justifying the means.
- You’ve seen it in: Doctor Strange, Gandalf, Walter White.
The Everyman
- Wants: to belong and be one of the gang.
- Weak spot: blending in so well you disappear.
- You’ve seen it in: Jim Halpert, Bilbo Baggins, Peter Parker.
The Lover
- Wants: closeness, with people, with beauty, with life.
- Weak spot: losing yourself in someone else.
- You’ve seen it in: Jack and Rose in Titanic, Romeo, Gomez Addams.
The Jester
- Wants: to enjoy life and make other people laugh.
- Weak spot: using a joke to dodge anything serious.
- You’ve seen it in: Chandler Bing, Deadpool, Fred and George Weasley.
The Caregiver
- Wants: to protect and look after people.
- Weak spot: giving until there’s nothing left, and quietly keeping score.
- You’ve seen it in: Samwise Gamgee, Molly Weasley, Marge Simpson.
The Creator
- Wants: to make something that lasts.
- Weak spot: perfectionism, or making something you can’t control.
- You’ve seen it in: Remy in Ratatouille, Willy Wonka, Victor Frankenstein.
The Ruler
- Wants: order, and a kingdom that runs.
- Weak spot: controlling everything and everyone in it.
- You’ve seen it in: Tywin Lannister, Miranda Priestly, Mufasa.
Can you have more than one archetype?
Yes, and almost everyone does. The 12 are a way of talking about people, and people don’t come in 12 sizes.
Most of us lean toward one and have a second or third that colors it. A Sage with a Jester streak is a very different person from a Sage with a Ruler streak. That mix says more than the label does.
The character test gives you both: the classic archetype you lean toward, and a name for your blend, like “The Reluctant Visionary”.
What is my archetype? How to find yours
Most archetype quizzes ask you to rate statements like “I like being in charge.” The trouble is you answer as the person you think you are, or the one you’d like to be.
There’s another way in: the characters you relate to. Researchers at Ohio State found that readers who get lost in a character start taking on that character’s thoughts and feelings as their own. They called it experience-taking.
In one of their studies, people who identified with a character who overcame obstacles to vote were more likely to vote themselves a week later (Ohio State summary; Kaufman and Libby, 2012).
The trick is to pick who you see yourself in, not who you admire. You might admire Steve Rogers and relate to Chandler Bing. Chandler says more about you.
One pick is noise. Six picks start to show a pattern: maybe they’re all the funny one in the group, or all the one who leaves home. That pattern is your archetype showing.
That’s how the character personality test works. You name six characters you relate to, fictional or real, and it reads the pattern across them.
You get your archetype, which of the six you’re closest to, your core traits, your role in the story and how you react in six situations. It’s free and you don’t need to sign up.
Are archetypes real?
Not in a scientific sense. Nobody can prove or disprove that a collective unconscious exists, and that’s the main criticism of Jung’s theory. If you want a personality test with real research behind it, take a Big Five test.
That’s fine if you treat an archetype as a lens and leave diagnosis out of it. “Am I really a Sage?” goes nowhere. “Why do I keep relating to the one who knows everything and does nothing?” is a question you can do something with.
If you want to see which one you lean toward, pick your six.