The Archetypal Word Association Technique: Identifying an Individual’s Psyche (Personality)
Boon Hock Lim
Ban Meng Lee
Guo-Hui Xie
Abstract
In this short paper, the authors have chosen to focus on Word Association Test method first used by C. G. Jung (1905) as an approach to uncover suppressed (or repressed) ideas strongly tinged with feeling tone which influence an individual’s explicit or overt behavior. In other words, it was applied to unearth the individual’s basic desires. In their proposal, the authors use the words associated with five archetypal categories, i.e., (i) archetypal settings and symbols; (ii) situational archetypes; (iii) color archetypes; (iv) number archetypes; and (v) character archetypes, from which an examinee can choose the words that come into mind without deliberate thinking, found in the Archetypes List: Pre-AP (Pre-Archetypal) English. With the words selected by an individual, they are freely associated with each other to create an overall archetypal statement that is then used to relate them to the individual’s psyche in order to understand his/her personality.