Jungian Archetypes: Your Key to Creativity and Inner Wholeness

Jungian archetypes can be a door to creative aging and soul wisdom, qualities we celebrate as important elements of life for older women. Click on a photo to go to that month.


January The Winter Mother	February Mother Light	March Hope & the Feminine	April Mother Rain

The way we dress is just one more aspect of creating an artful life and celebrating our wholeness and creativity as mature wise women.

This section of Fashion After 50 explores feminine symbols and archetypes as sources of power.

Perhaps some of these dimensions of the maiden-mother-crone crone archetype and aspects of femininity will resonate for you.

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Jungian Archetypes Are an Invitation to Soul and Self

My inquiry into archetypal images of womanhood and aging is shaped by the theory of Estelle Lauter and other contributors to Feminist Archetypal Theory (1985, University of Tennessee Press), as well as by traditional Jungian theory and theorists.

Lauter examined hundred of images of women by women artists.


May Dance & Spring SymbolsMother	June Feminine Makeover	July Value of Storytelling	August The Truth Seeker

She found that contemporary women artists did not always conform to previous Jungian interpretations.

Earlier Jungian theorists suggested two dominant categories -- the nurturing and inspiring mother or the terrible and destructive mother.

Lauter asked whether we should get ride of the notion of archetype altogether if, “The archetype is, presumably nothing more than a tendency to form images in response to recurrent shared experiences of mothers or being mothered” (p. 59, Visual Images by Women, in Feminist Archetypal Theory.

Feminists Expand Lexicon of Archetype Symbols

She concludes that the greater variety of motherhood images in the work of contemporary woman artists enriches our understanding of this uniquely female experience.

Through this variety of Jungian archetypes, Lauter writes, “Presumably we come to know and respect the deepest patterns of our experience” (p. 59).

Like Winter Mother, Lauter holds the promise of new life by re-visioning Jungian theory.


September Liminal Space & the In-Between	October Crone Re-Emerges	November Crone Character & Healing	December Croning Ritual

She writes, “The concept of the archetype could, in feminist hands, function as a force against the reification of any one cultural construction of reality. It is the never-to-be-exhausted tendency to imagine that is the ultimate justification of cultural pluralism” (p. 62).

Please share your thoughts about Jungian archetypes and your late-life journal to wholeness.

These pages, however, are my own ideas and interpretations based on my understanding of Carl G. Jung and other Jungian writers.