L'aspect des archetypes dans le recit Benoitien autour de L'atlantide

Carl Gustav Jung, who sheds light on the human psyche with his important studies in the field of analytical psychology, developed Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious and deeply influenced the world of psychology with the view that the individual has not only a personal but also a collective unconscious. The first example, meaning like the original model, that is the theory of the collective unconscious, which consists of archetypes that we can consider as the latent images of the past, is also frequently used in the field of art and literature later on. For as much as works of art that bear the traces of the creative power of the human spirit, create a very favorable space for archetypes. In this context, the works turn into a powerful field of study for archetypal criticism, which is intertwined with many disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and psychoanalysis. The archetypal criticism method gives us the opportunity to approach the literary work from a very different window, contributing to the analysis of the language of images that the author unwittingly uses and to make the work more understandable. In this study, we aimed to analyse Pierre Benoît's l'Atlantide which contains many mythical elements based on la Dame de l'Ouest and la Châtelaine du Liban with less mythical elements. It is important to mention that the writer is one of the important writers of 20th century French literature. We tried to deal with the appearances of archetypes and to analyse these mythical images on a semantic plane, in the context of the hero's journey archetype approach, which is based on Jung's archetypal theory and Joseph Campbell's "departure-stage-return" formula, including his novels.