The term bad boy could be seen as a cultural archetype and in the movies James Dean’s 17-year-old character Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause would be a bad boy archetype. A modern Jungian perspective would view an archetype as a primitive mental image inherited from our earliest human ancestors, and is present in the collective unconscious. For Jungians, the collective unconscious is a universal datum. Everyone is endowed with this psychic archetype from birth. It is innate and, therefore, cannot be acquired by conscious effort.
Think of an archetype as the best example of a specific category and Superman as the archetype of a superhero. To discover why you might be attracted to the bad boy read my latest article: better understand your attraction to the bad boy.
Seems too many fall for those guys 😀