One of my favourite books designed a Magazine Layout for Demian, a book I read while I was doing my A levels and introduced me to Carl Jung. I always thought his ideas were extremely underrated in modern science and while we use psychoanalysis still the emphasis is mainly on Freud's perspective and Jung does not get mentioned often even though I personally think the idea of the collective unconscious is fascinating. Jung's archetypes are translated perfectly into literature since we see the figure of the wise old man, the mother, the hero or the shadow often appear as an integral part of story-telling. To my disappointment when I tried to link the shadow archetype to the Dark Personality Traits I found that there were little to no academic sources utilising Jung's ideas at all. Hesse's novel details a dualistic worldview and expresses the struggle between light and dark, the cleanliness of childhood and the impurity of adulthood lacing it with gnostic symbols as we see the protagonist come of age guided by these forces. The more you know...
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