One World, One Archetypal Universality

The Opening and Closing ceremonies of Vancouver Olympic Games presented splendid and excellent performances which pleased our ears and eyes. Their successes lies in making all the audiences with different cultural backgrounds and races experience the same feeling with no quarrels and wars. As the saying goes "only the nation is the world". Why this phenomenon could happen? This paper will make an integrated research to explore these psychological and cultural phenomena from the perspective of archetype.This paper will make an archetypal analysis for the cultural elements showed in the Opening and Closing ceremonies of Vancouver Olympic Games, based on Jung's archetype and his collective unconsciousness and Frazer's The Golden Bough in order to reveal the universality in the human psyche. Jungian collective unconsciousness broadens Freud's theory of human psyche from the personal unconsciousness to the collective unconsciousness which provides theoretical support for his archetype. He believes that archetype is the content of the collective unconscious which is born with us and is not reflected in the conscious. The archetype is, in fact, psychological inheritance from primordial time. It is such primitive impetus that drives people with different cultural backgrounds with the same psychological identification. The metaphor to explain the archetype is that the archetype is the "photo" of the collective unconscious and the collective unconscious is the "film" of the archetype. Frazer found that there was some universality controlling human's behavior from all over the world by doing a great amount of synchronic and diachronic researches on primitive ritual, mythology and custom. Based on Frazer's anthropological research, Jung raised his idea about archetype.This paper tries to make the conclusion that the universal archetype can be found in the human psyche through the combination of the archetypal theory with cultural practices.This paper consists of four chapters. Chapter One gives the brief introduction of the concept and varieties of the archetypes and the development of the archetypal theory as well as the Olympic Games and the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.Chapter Two and Three are the main bodies of this paper which make the further research on the human psyche through analyzing respectively the images and rituals of the Opening and Closing ceremonies of Vancouver Olympic Games with archetypes.Chapter four is the conclusion that it is the primitive impetus that makes people with different cultural background form the universal mode in the human psyche.