archetypal fantasy of ego development

• 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.