The Mystery of Market Movements: An Archetypal Approach to Investment Forecasting and Modelling

Chapter 10Conclusion

Wer den Zeitgeist heiratet, wird schnell Witwe (Who marries the Zeitgeist will soon be a widow.)

—German proverb

It is almost 100 years since Jung introduced the concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes, which were mainly practically applied as part of his analytical psychology to deal with individual patients, helping them address neurotic behaviour by achieving a holistic balance in the mind. He did, however, occasionally comment on the archetypes' impact on society at large and how they could form the psychological foundation that dictates the zeitgeist of the time epoch. Jung's writings stopped at providing anecdotal evidence and case studies to his observations; there was never any comprehensive empirical testing that could be objectively verifiable to back his claims. Nevertheless, the concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious were broadly accepted as an explanatory model of the mind by the psychology community, and it is only in the past decade that neuroscientific research has started to back the concepts of innate thought patterns, similar to what Jung proposed, although still not in a conclusive form.

The progress in neuroscience makes the proposition of archetypes attractive from the point of further empirical research; however, with the question of causation still looming, it is now worthwhile to look at correlations between assumed thought patterns and their influence on behaviour.

While there were ambiguities in the ...