Who is a person?

About this episode

The episode explores Jungian archetypes in the context of African mythology and folklore, focusing on concepts of personhood.

We are still at the very beginning of our year-long exploration of Jungian archetypes as expressed in African mythology and folklore. In the first episode from last week , we defined some foundational concepts we will encounter over and over as we move along. These include the collective unconscious as well as archetypes and stereotypes. We also talked a bit about why we are looking at African myths and folklore through this lens and then laid out a tentative plan for the year. We have a lot of ground to cover, friends, and it is important that we properly learn the contours of the psychic terrain we will be traveling. So, in this episode of the Mythological Africans podcast, we will focus on Jung’s four main archetypes (the Self, the Persona, the Shadow and the Anima/Animus complex), probe (lightly) at personhood in some African contexts, and then outline a few more concepts that will help us along the way. References: * The Collected Works of Carl Jung * Pearson, Carol . Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World (p. 182). HarperOne. Kindle Edition. * Oyeshile, Olatunji A. “Towards an African concept of a person: Person in…

People in this episode

Host: Mythological Africans

Topics covered

• Jungian archetypes
• African mythology
• personhood
• collective unconscious
• archetypes
• folklore

Keywords

• Jungian archetypes
• African mythology
• personhood
• collective unconscious
• archetypes
• folklore

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Collected Works of Carl Jung, Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World, Towards an African concept of a person: Person in Yoruba, Akan and Igbo thoughts, A critical exploration of the ideas of person and community in traditional Zulu thought, Ubuntu and the individuation process: Toward a multicultural

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• The Ruler Archetype in African Myth and Folklore · March 16, 2026 · 17 min
• The Ruler Archetype in African Myth and Folklore · March 9, 2026 · 20 min