when we conceive our life story as a Battle for Deliverance from the Great Mother – as Jung called it – we are engaged in heroics; these heroics reflect in such concepts as ego development, ego strength and personal identity … an archetypal fantasy held together by a captivating plot: the development of Ego, an Everyman, with whom we each can identify … an ontogenetic recapitulation of the heroic battle of deliverance from maternal uroboric claustrophobia
The relationship between archetype and genre has been worked out most famously by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, where the four classical genres of literature are each given a season in the year, so that literature follows a cycle of the corn god. Actually Frye’s system, though fourfold, remains still within the single myth of the Great Mother, the God-Hero her son, and the cycle of nature.