Archetypal Patterns of Behavior: A Jungian Analysis of the Mandala Structure in the Dialogues of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abstract Guillemette Johnston , “Archetypal Patterns of Behavior: A Jungian Analysis of the Mandala Structure in the Dialogues of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Jung Journal: culture & psyche, 1:4, 43-68. This study argues that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical work, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, provides a reflection of the process of individuation as described in analytical psychology. Rousseau's Dialogues, a series of fictional conversations inspired by actual occurrences, is viewed in relation to the structural pattern of the mandala, a pattern that Jung saw as offering an archetypal representation of balance in reaction to disturbances of psychic equilibrium. The crisis Rousseau faced while writing the Dialogues involved the merging of introverted thinking with extraverted feeling, bringing conscious ego together with unconscious content. Rousseau articulated this merging through spontaneously creating a literary mandala that joins fiction and reality via three dialogues in which opposin...