THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS IN THE NOVELS OF PAULO COELHO

Abstract

The Brazilian author Paulo Coelho is a winner of Guinness Book of World Records and the world ambassador of psychological literature. The present paper intends to study the selected works of Paulo Coelho in the light of the reputed American mythologist and psychoanalyst Joseph Campbell’s theory on Emanations which is depicted in his seminal work The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell’s thoughts revolving around mythology, metaphysics, and psychology, forming the structural principles of literature, do essentially evolve a story pattern. Campbell like Freud and Jung regards dreams highly significant, as dreams provide a thoughtstructure and express the unconscious. Campbell’s psychoanalytical theory largely bears on that of Jung. For Campbell myths and dreams have their origin in the unconscious wells of fantasy, though they may differ on some aspects. He considers the mythic heroes as archetypes representing the collective unconscious and, also as the versions of those archetypes both in spiritual and psychological terms. The paper intends to develop the mythical and psychological bearings in the novels of Coelho as it describes the adventure, quest, and transformation of the hero, supernatural power, occult rituals, destiny, and the interpretations of dreams in the Jungian terms, besides retaining their fictional element. Coelho’s novels The Pilgrimage, The Alchemist and The Zahir very well exemplify that how can a literary writer translate the myths which contain the eternal values afresh in terms of the existing realities through the use of the modern psychology.