archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Innocent (Pearson)

The faith that the world is good, held a little past the evidence.

Carol Pearson’s name for the stance of basic trust with which, on her account, every heroic journey begins (1986; kept in her twelve, 1991). A stage in an authored developmental scheme, not Jung’s child; renamed Idealist in the 2020 revision of the indicator.

Pearson’s Innocent is the attitude of basic trust: trust in the world, in the people who run it and in oneself. On her account everyone starts here, and it is the stance that lets a child learn from others and an adult keep faith with a hope. Its weakness is the same trust kept up against the evidence, including the readiness to believe whatever authorities say about oneself. Its governing story is paradise and the fall: Eden, the golden age, the loss of an original safety and the wish to regain it.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Little lamb, who made thee?Does thou know who made thee,Gave thee life, and bid thee feedBy the stream and o’er the mead;Gave thee clothing of delight,Softest clothing, woolly, bright;Gave thee such a tender voice,Making all the vales rejoice?Little lamb, who made thee?Does thou know who made thee?

Public domain · Blake, The Lamb (1789)

A child asks the lamb who made it and the question arrives already answered, a world so securely given that wondering is itself a comfort.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 5 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Forrest Gump

    Mark and Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw, ch. 4, 1994

    A film hero whose plain sweetness comes through decades of upheaval unspoiled, named by the authors as an Innocent story.

  2. Jung’s example

    The Pillsbury Doughboy

    Mark and Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw, ch. 4, 1965

    An advertising figure the authors use for warm, wholesome comfort, the kitchen as a place where nothing goes wrong.

  3. a later reading

    Frodo Baggins

    Stifler, course reading of Pearson’s The Hero Within, 1954

    A course analysis of the film trilogy starts the hobbit at the Innocent stage, before the road moves him on.

  4. a later reading

    Luna Lovegood

    Hobbs, guest blog on Pearson’s site, 2003

    Pearson’s own site reads this Harry Potter character as the series’ Idealist, the name the 2020 instrument gave the Innocent.

  5. a later reading

    Santiago

    Butler-Bowdon on Pearson, The Hero Within, 1988

    The shepherd-boy of the fable, offered in a summary of Pearson as a picture of trust regained only by making the whole journey.

The wider sky

Where the Innocent (Pearson) has been seen

27 exemplars across 11 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town!Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among:Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor.Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

Public domain · Blake, Holy Thursday (Songs of Innocence) (1789)

The charity children are all radiance and song, and only the closing warning about the angel at the door shows what the bright picture rests on.

She trusts the kitchen light, and the bread it warms.

Nothing has gone wrong yet, or something has and no one has said.

Eden is a place you may be sent back to, if you are good.

The deep layer · what was written

Innocent (Pearson): the entry

Definition

Pearson’s Innocent is the attitude of basic trust: trust in the world, in the people who run it and in oneself. On her account everyone starts here, and it is the stance that lets a child learn from others and an adult keep faith with a hope. Its weakness is the same trust kept up against the evidence, including the readiness to believe whatever authorities say about oneself. Its governing story is paradise and the fall: Eden, the golden age, the loss of an original safety and the wish to regain it.

The Innocent is a stance inside a sequence, not a figure of the unconscious. In The Hero Within (1986) it is where the developmental journey begins, before disillusion turns it into the Orphan. In Awakening the Heroes Within (1991) it is the first of four archetypes of “preparation”, with the Orphan, the Warrior and the Caregiver, which in Pearson’s scheme build the ego, and it is paired with the Orphan as one of the two archetypes of childhood. In Mark and Pearson’s brand version (2001) it is a brand identity promising simplicity and goodness, grouped with the Explorer and the Sage as figures of a longed-for better world. Since 2020 the inventory built on the twelve has called it the Idealist.

History

The Innocent appears first in The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By (Harper & Row, 1986). It has no chapter to itself. Chapter 2, “From Innocent to Orphan”, treats the two as a single passage and opens with Wordsworth’s ode on the lost glory of childhood, and the introduction places the Innocent at the head of the sequence (expanded edition, 1989, pp. xxvi–xxvii and 25ff.). In the preface to the 1989 edition Pearson wrote that, rewriting the book, she would say more about the Innocent’s positive contribution (p. xvii). Awakening the Heroes Within (1991) gave it a chapter, chapter 6, whose notes draw on William Irwin Thompson’s mythology of the fall, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade and Marion Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection. Mark and Pearson’s The Hero and the Outlaw (2001) kept the name for brands. The shared history of the lineage is set out in the framework rows for Pearson’s six, Pearson’s twelve and Mark and Pearson’s brand archetypes.

The one renaming came from the instrument. A 2010 analysis by its publisher found several scales performing poorly, and after a four-year revision the 2020 release renamed three of them (Pearson, 2020). The 2021 manual gives the order of events: Orphan became Realist first, and Innocent was then renamed Idealist to make a complementary pair and to name the adult form of the archetype rather than a child’s (Blandin, Marr and Pearson, 2021, pp. 9–12). Pearson’s own pages now list “Innocent” as the former name and a subtype of the Idealist.

Pearson names her sources in the 1986 preface: Jung’s idea of the archetype, the “post-Jungian theorists” Hillman and Campbell (her description), the developmental psychology of Perry, Kohlberg and Gilligan, feminist theory, process therapy and the New Age movement (1989, pp. xix–xxii). The Innocent’s paradise imagery comes from myth and literature. She does not derive it from any passage of Jung.

The debate

The obvious comparison is Jung’s child, and the two are often run together. They make different claims. Jung’s child is a motif of the unconscious, a symbol of futurity and of the self, marked by miraculous birth, abandonment and invincibility (CW 9i ¶259–305). Pearson’s Innocent is a conscious attitude, observable in how people live and, she suggests, even in how they carry themselves, and it is a phase to be passed through and returned to. Pearson was plain that her list was not the classical one:

The archetypes identified here are not the typical ones usually included by Jungians as critical to the individuation process. — Carol S. Pearson, The Hero Within (expanded ed., 1989), p. xxvii

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Ann Moseley (1999) drew the same line from the literary side: Jung’s archetypes are unconscious contents, Pearson’s belong to conscious life. The Innocent’s longing is nearer Mario Jacoby’s paradise (1980) than the divine child, and Pearson’s 1991 chapter on the Seeker cites Jacoby directly.

Within Pearson’s own scheme the Innocent is not quite the beginning: her 1991 chapter on the Fool says the Fool comes before even the Innocent. The renaming exposes a tension in the figure. The instrument team reported that respondents, answering as adults and often at work, did not identify with a childlike Innocent (Blandin, Marr and Pearson, 2021, p. 10), and Pearson and Marr had earlier suggested, as reported by du Toit and Coetzee (2012), that the Innocent and Orphan scored lowest because dependent traits are unwelcome at work. “Idealist” solves the measurement problem by changing the figure from a child’s trust to an adult’s optimism. Rob Meyerson (2025) calls the brand framework pseudoscientific when it is presented as Jungian or scientific; the objection applies to the brand Innocent in full.

Empirical status

Narrow. The Innocent is one of the twelve scales of the inventory built on Pearson’s list. Its line runs from a thirty-six-item self-scoring questionnaire in The Hero Within (1989 edition, pp. 197–201), through the Heroic Myth Index (Form E, 1990, printed in the 1991 book, whose reliability results were available only from Pearson’s consultancy, Meristem), to Hugh Marr’s 1995 dissertation and the Pearson–Marr indicator, published by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type from 2001. The Innocent was its least consistent scale: an alpha of 0.57 in the original manual (Pearson and Marr, as reported by du Toit and Coetzee, 2012) and 0.51 in a South African student sample (Els, 2004). The renamed Idealist scale reached 0.75 in 5,000 records analysed for the 2021 manual, which also found Idealist scores rising with age to about forty (Blandin, Marr and Pearson, 2021, pp. 15, 20–21). These figures come from the authors and publisher, on a convenience sample. The manual reports no test–retest study of the current form and no comparison with any other archetype measure, and Faber and Mayer (2009) observe that such scales assume archetypal models without testing for them. Nothing here shows that the Innocent is an archetype in Jung’s sense, and the site does not present the scale as validated.

Appearances

Pearson’s own touchstones are the Eden story and its fortunate fall, golden-age myths, and Wordsworth’s ode, which opens the chapter in The Hero Within. Ann Moseley (1999), applying the six to a novel, read the young Cécile Auclair of Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931) as the Innocent. A guest series on Pearson’s site reads Luna Lovegood of the Harry Potter novels as the Idealist (Hobbs, 2023). Tom Butler-Bowdon’s popular summary of The Hero Within gives Santiago of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist as an Innocent. The brand version has made “Innocent” a standard label in marketing guides, where the twelve are often attributed to Jung; they are Pearson’s. Every one of these is a reading made after the fact, in Pearson’s vocabulary.

Sources

Leaving

We built a ship upon the stairsAll made of the back-bedroom chairs,And filled it full of sofa pillowsTo go a-sailing on the billows.We took a saw and several nails,And water in the nursery pails;And Tom said, "Let us also takeAn apple and a slice of cake;"--Which was enough for Tom and meTo go a-sailing on, till tea.

Public domain · Stevenson, A Good Play (1885)

A ship built from nursery furniture sets out on the strength of play alone, trust at the point of departure, before anything has gone wrong.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey✦ ChildAbandoned, invincible, the beginning and the end.Return to the void