ABSTRACT
When we first began to bring a Jungian perspective to our work with organizations, we found a need for a language that was precise enough and rich enough to label the various constellations of behaviors, emotions, perspectives, and assumptions which seemed apparent to us, and which we were inclined to label as ‘archetypal’. Jung provides a language of archetype in his writings: anima, animus, persona, self, old man, trickster, shadow, and so on. This language is useful for many purposes, but we found it unsuitable for distinguishing the various dominant and alternative narratives we found shaping the lives of the organizations we dealt with. We needed a language that could cope with both creative and pathological forms of the patterns we detected. The metaphor of culture presented itself readily enough, and Jung himself had pointed to mythology as containing the imaginal forms of archetypal patterns. We found in the Greek pantheon a set of images and a language to distinguish the diverse narratives, and found in the notion of culture a framework for looking at the organizational phenomena that were of most interest to us.
