Vico and Jung: the sense of origins in myths and languages

Abstract

This article examines the similarities between Vico’s and Jung’s ‘visions’ of the world, reflecting on the meaning of origins in the myths and languages of human history. Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious as well as Vico’s fantastic universals make use of symbols that contain within themselves a cosmic and anthropological conception; each symbol has formed the world, crystallising it in an image, eternalising it in an ‘aesthetic’ expression, projecting into it the whole of human feeling.