In the field of psychology, Carl Jung theorized that people worldwide shared collective and unconscious characters who take on universal or mythic characters, referring to these characters as archetypes.
At the Money Coaching Institute, Deborah Price has deployed Jung’s work on archetypes to better understand the patterns and practices of people in regard to money.
Price developed a system of eight archetypes which may be active or passive, to varying levels, in every individual:
- Victim
- Innocent
- Martyr
- Fool
- Creator/Artist
- Tyrant
- Warrior
- Magician
To determine which archetypes are active or influential in your money patterns, you can take a short quiz, choosing the words that seem to best reflect your feelings and attitudes toward money.
Once your gain a general outline of your money archetypes, you can dive deeper into understanding each of these mythic personalities and see how they may affect your money choices on a day-to-day basis.
You may feel that a range of adjectives from every Money Type partially describes you, and that your money patterns are fragmented depending on the context of the situation, as well as upon where you are in the chronology of your life. You may recognize that your money types have changed over time, and that some previously strong characteristics have receded into the background or shadows.
Discovering your active and passive (or shadow) Money Types may help you reconcile the connection between money in the outer world to your desires and feelings in your unique inner world.
While narrowing down all money behavior to a mere eight archetypes may seem simplistic, in fact, it can be very useful, when trying to change our money patterns, to simplify our understandings of our money behaviors by applying the metaphors of archetypes to them.
As Price explains, uncovering and understanding our unconscious patterns and reactions around money can help to bring money into the light and allow us to control emotion while taking concrete steps to improve our relationship with money.