A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving through an Archetypal Jungian Lens Carl Jung was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who developed many theories regarding the unconscious mind. Jung's theories state that the unconscious part of the human psyche has two different layers, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is unique to each individual; however, the collective unconscious “is innate”. (Carl Jung, Four Archetypes, 3) The collective unconscious is present in everyone's psyche, and contains archetypes which are "those psychic contents that have not yet been subjected to conscious elaboration" (Jung, Archetypes, 5); they are thought patterns inherited through the collective unconscious. Jung defined many different archetypes such as the mother archetype, the hero archetype, the shadow archetype, etc. These Jungian archetypes are often projected by the collective unconscious onto others. If the novel A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is examined through a Jungian archetypal lens, it is possible to discern several archetypes projected by the protagonist's unconscious self to illustrate the effects of the collective unconscious on character and plot analysis. Tabitha Wheelwright embodies the mother archetype. Which shows us how, upon reflection, John sees it with a divine quality; it mythologizes it. Jung's theory states that: “Parents are the first great bearers of projection, and children unconsciously project omnipotence and omniscience onto them. These are what Jung called archetypal projections. Parents become gods, invested with powers that people attribute to the divine. “Dad can do anything!” He is the strong one... in the center of the card... if he is not accepted first. Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is one of many novels that can be analyzed through a Jungian archetypal lens to show how the unconscious projection of archetypal images influences how a person views the actions of others and their behaviors. In this novel the narrator John Wheelwright projects different archetypes onto different people depending on their role in his life. This shows us how the novel A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is not objective because as a reader you see all the events and characters through John's eyes. Everything you read is tainted by the archetypal images of John's unconscious self that are projected onto different characters and situations. This brings the reader to the question of how do you know that Owen Meany's story is true and that all the characters are portrayed truthfully..