Jung on Mythology

For Jung mythmaking is about the human psyche. It is one of the ways the unconscious part of our psyche expresses itself, a way in which the collective unconscious strives to become conscious. This makes myth so important to Jung. He sees consciousness as the ultimate goal of human development, of the individuation process. Myths and the archetypes that come to life in them become his keys to the realms of the unconscious, in particular the collective unconscious. Myth is the language of the unconscious Jung explores to gain access to its mystery.

According to Jung, human beings project onto the “external” world what is in their “inner” world. The whole of mythology could be seen as a sort of projection out of the collective unconscious. Just as the constellations where projected into the heavens, similar figures were projected into legends and fairytales.

The universality of motifs found in human myths demonstrates the uniformity of psychic events in time and space. Here Jung deviates from Freud’s view that reduces the content coming from unconscious parts of our psyche (the subject matter of myths, dreams and fantasies) to mere personal factors. Jung uses the remarkable similarity among myths worldwide to establish a psychic domain beyond the personal: the collective unconscious.

For Jung the meaning of myths is the expression of archetypes. As archetypes are by nature unconscious, they express themselves only indirectly, through symbols. Symbols however can only convey part of what an archetype strives to express; every archetype harbors an inexhaustible array of meanings that are hinted or glimpsed at rather than clearly defined through words or images.

The difficulty with the interpretation of myths is thus twofold: myths are encrypted symbolically (their meaning is symbolic rather than literal) and the symbols we use to discover and disclose their meaning are imperfect and utterly inadequate.

Jung compares the distinction he makes within psychology between the unconscious and the conscious (between archetypes and symbols) with Kant’s distinction between the unknowable, noumenal reality (things-in-themselves) and the knowable, phenomenological one (things-for-us). The unconscious is unknowable to us, we can only know it in a things-for-us/what-we-make-of-it way. Jung thus dismisses Freud’s “deciphering” of the unconscious through the conscious and claims that although myth - being the primordial language natural to our psychic processes - is the best medium for revealing the unconscious, “no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery”.

And then there is the difficulty of interpretation. Any meaning a myth conveys is per definition a meaning to an audience, manifesting in a language this audience knows, into a meaning that is their (subjective) meaning. A myth is not merely a myth in its own right; it is a myth for someone.

Jung says that the archetype is a psychic organ present in all of us. He sees myths and the archetypes beyond as fashioned out of a worldwide human unconscious which explains the similarity (identity) of myths all over the world and through human history.

The Origin of Myth.

Robert Segal organizes Jung’s interpretation of the origin of myth in steps

away from Freudian theory and

towards Jungian definitions of archetypes and the collective unconscious.

To account for the similarities among myths worldwide (step a.) Jung believes that, although every society creates myths on its own (independent invention vs. diffusion), every society inherits myths. He does not mean that myths or their contents are inherited, but that humans have an inborn disposition (the history of the brain-structure), a psychic structure identical to all men, to produce similar thought-formulations which he later calls the archetypes of the suprapersonal or collective unconscious.

Jung figures that myths can arise autochthonously and yet be identical because they are fashioned out of the same worldwide human unconscious, whose contents are infinitely less variable than are races and individuals (step b., the source of the similarities).

Over the whole of the psychic realm we encounter certain motifs, certain typical figures, which seem to be built into the very structure of man’s unconscious. We could see them as blue-prints of human experience; Jung calls them archetypes.

He sees the human psyche not as a self-contained and wholly individual phenomenon, but also as a collective one.

The collective part of the psyche, the collective unconscious in Jung’s terms, informs the individual psyche. It’s content is conveyed through archetypal images which seek to express themselves in consciousness through symbols.

For Freud, human experiences give rise to the creation of myths. Jung on the other hand believed that myths are part of the human condition; humans do not invent myths to fulfill a need. How could they, from where would the human psyche draw the capacity to adopt a standpoint outside sense perception??

With this in mind the ability to create myths must be a peculiar and intrinsic quality of living matter, an innate way the human psyche expresses itself (step c.: the external world is not the (only) source of myth).

For Jung, human experience provides the occasion for the expression of already existing, available mythical material.

Myths represent typical psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul. Projected onto outer sense experiences they connect inner, psychic events to the reality we perceive as outside, making this reality easier to assimilate. The unconscious (drama of the psyche) becomes accessible to man’s consciousness by way of projection; mirrored in the events of nature (step d., myth as the projection of the unconscious onto the external world).

At first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Freud, who thought the unconscious to be of an exclusively personal nature, was aware of its archaic and mythological thought forms. Jung however sees the personal unconscious as a superficial layer that rest upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience but is inborn. The collective unconscious is identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in all of us.

The contents of the personal unconscious are chiefly the feeling-toned complexes; they constitute the personal and private side of psychic life. The contents of the collective unconscious on the other hand are known as archetypes. We are dealing with archaic or primordial types, that is, with universal images that have existed since the remotest times.

So, where myths for Freud originate in (personal) experience, for Jung they surface out of the collective unconscious. The archetypes strive to express themselves and manifest through projection into the material world (step e., myth as the projection of the collective unconscious).

Jung claims that there is no way humans could consciously have invented the idea of for instance divinity or heroism, so they invented the myths expressing divinity and heroism. Myths merely articulate the archetypal experience of the phenomenological reality as divine or heroic (noumenal).

In that sense the archetypal experience shapes our human experience of the material world, not the other way around.

Archetypes are in Jung’s view grounded in the peculiarities of the living organism itself and are therefore direct expressions of life, deposits so to say of ever-repeated and ingrained typical experiences of our species.

Where Freud depreciates the unconscious and claims that myth prevents psychological development (because the Freudian personal unconscious is seen as a product of the repression of unacceptable sexual impulses), Jung believes myth encourages growth by expressing deeper dimensions of the unconscious for the development of consciousness. Jung claims that archetypes possess a numinous quality, a feeling value that has great creative potential.

It is important to note that for Jung the dissociation between conscious and unconscious was seen as a separation of ego from the source of all life. In other words: for Jung the connection and co-operation between conscious and unconscious, unconscious and conscious, is spiritual, essential and life-giving.

Jung rejects Freud’s focus on sexual instinct and their repression (to interpret products from the unconscious) as too narrow. Freud, in his view, tries to reduce myth motifs to personal psychology, and fails to consider the whole of the human psyche; the personal and the collective psyche beyond.

Although a myth is a consciously created story, the archetype which is the motif or image in the story, is the unconscious raw material of this myth. (step f.)

The archetype itself does not proceed from a physical fact; it is projected onto the world to give man an impression of a unconscious psychic happening, a vision of how the psyche experiences physical fact.

The function of myth.

Myth for Jung serves multiple functions. The most important is a psychological one: to reveal the collective unconscious to the conscious mind (a.). For Jung, the unconscious seeks to communicate its presence to consciousness as clearly as possible. It does not, as Freud claims, elude detection.

Because the unconscious “speaks” in another kind of “language” than the conscious, myth serves as an intermediary: a means for the unconscious to communicate its symbolic meaning.

Jung writes, “herein lay the vital importance of myths: they explained to the bewildered human being what was going on in his unconscious and why he was held fast” (by the drama of it). The myths told him: “this is not you, but the gods, so turn back to your human avocations, holding the gods in fear and respect.”

With myth, the external world and its functioning becomes personified and with that shift in perspective it gains meaning and relevance. With a mythical dimension reality is experienced to operate responsively and has purpose (the purpose of gods or our souls).

Myth in that sense not only provides information about the unconscious, but also gives humans a means to “look” beyond the confines of the conscious, and invites them to connect to the “greater” psyche beyond. This is the second function of myth Segal mentions (b.); the encountering of the unconscious.

Myth introduces a numinous side to one’s own personality, a transpersonal dimension to our world, that our rational mind cannot perceive with mere words and concepts. Myths and fairytales re-establish the connection between conscious and unconscious.

A symbol, functioning as a supra-ordinate third level or tertium, can express in a living-truth way the processes of the psyche thus re-uniting the two psychic halves by “reconciling their conceptual polarity through its form and their emotional polarity through its numinosity”.

Jung’s concept of numinosity refers to unusual, non-ordinary or heightened modes of psychological awareness (a feeling-value) and is essential to the dynamic change and growth within his model of the Self.

The myth, or more specific the archetype it harbors, is the underlying organizing principle which renders constellations of collective unconscious impulses into recognizable and meaningful gestalts. It manifests through the ability to organize images and ideas in a way that may take the form of the “numinous”, which is in Jung’s vision enriching and expanding the Ego’s perception (later in this essay I daringly refer to this kind of myth as a psychological myth).

Any connection/communication with the unconscious means an extension of man beyond his limited ego-self. For Jung this is definitely a step in the direction of individualization; the conscious dialectic relationship between ego (center of the conscious personality) and Self (the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche). A myth can be seen as a symbolic expression of this Ego-Self relationship (axis).

Here of course is also the link to spirituality, the relationship between man and (his) Self, the central source of life, or in other words God.

I think Jung recognized that myths are in a way man’s gateway to his divine nature, the wholeness we seek to become conscious of. Primitive man unconsciously projected his inner world onto his external word. This doesn’t work for more conscious, knowledgeable moderns. They need to re-discover their divinity by consciously experiencing their inner psyche in what they project into their outer world. In that sense modern man is not naïve enough anymore to accept myth as reality and needs to learn instead to accept the archetypal qualities in himself and the world around him. The spiritual connection between man and his gods has changed; man can no longer project his inner psychic world into the heavens; he needs to integrate his inner psychic world into consciousness by accepting it as part of who he is. Spirituality has become about the human psyche, we now realize it is about how man relates to his Self.

This makes the function of myth more than explanatory, it becomes existential. Myth served to connect human beings to the external world. It made humans feel at home in the universe; an essential, meaningful part of a greater whole (function c. making life meaningful). Still mythological ideas with their extraordinary symbolism reach far into the human psyche and strike a true answering chord in our inner intuitive being even when our reason may not understand it.

Although modern myths still provide meaning, Jung notices that the external world lost most of its projected meaning as a result of de-deification, which renders it impersonal and mechanical. Meaning now seems to lie almost entirely within humans and their ability to intuit the meaningfulness that is (in Jung’s view) inherent in the world. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli introduced the concept of synchronicity to describe this latent meaning which is independent of our consciousness. Synchronicity is the experience of the world as meaningful, myth an account of that experience.

Jung suggests the study of mythology is useful in the interpretation of dreams and fantasies, especially for psycho-therapists (function d. Abetting therapy). The attempt at an identification of archetypes expressed by particular symbols in the products of a person’s unconscious mind gives this client a broader view of his confused situation and helps him to integrate the strange contents of his dreams, associations or fantasies into his conscious life. In therapy it is often of particular importance to be able to transform a disturbing actual, non-changeable situation by transforming the way a client looks at it. Myths offer an perspective from a sphere of irrational experience that is known to make sense and proven to be useful.

Furthermore myth and mythical figures serve as model for “correct” behavior (function e.) and exemplars to be imitated by people who aspire something these archetypal characters represent.

Myths and dreams.

Jung takes dreams as the analogue to myths; both myths and dreams arise from the collective unconscious, connect unconscious to conscious and encourage us to pay attention to what arises. Jung considers dreams a more pristine manifestation of the unconscious (coming from the personal unconscious, not ordered and generally unintelligible and irrational) and therefore their interpretation requires less reconstruction than the interpretation of myths. Only archetypal dreams, identified by their mythical content, originate from the collective unconscious as myths do. Myths however are closer to the unconscious than dreams.

Kinds of myths.

Segal’s chapter about the kinds of myths doesn’t reveal much about any differentiation Jung made in kinds of myths. It describes Jung’s thoughts about the myths of the child and the myth of the hero. Both symbolize in Jung’s view the course of human psychological development, each in its own way of course.

I would conclude that they are the same kind of myth; the myth representing psychological life, or maybe “psychological myths”.

Archetypes form units of meaning that can be apprehended intuitively. Psychology, as one of the many expressions of psychic life, operates with ideas which in their turn are derived from archetypal structures and generate a somewhat more abstract kind of myth. A myth thus created is a living and lived myth, “satisfying and indeed beneficial to a person of a corresponding temperament” (in so far as they have been cut off from their psychic origins by neurotic dissociation).

This kind of myth typically represents the relation between Ego and the unconscious: the possible synthesis of the conscious and unconscious elements of knowledge and action and the possibility of a shifting of the center of personality from the ego to the Self.

Another “kind” of myth Segal mentions here is the personal myth (or private myth); the individual myth, distinct from the group myth. As Jung describes the psychological development in terms of the changing relation between Ego and Self, themes of myths in personal dreams (and other manifestations of the individual psyche) give us a source of information as to where a person stands in his/her individuation process.

The creation myth could be considered another kind of myth. They convey man’s need to explain his world with its natural phenomena. Also his concern for the basic things of his own existence and of the existence of the whole cosmos. Myth is (primitive) man’s way to make the external world all right, or at least inhabitable. In that sense the creation myths are/were the deepest and most important of all myths. They are more abstract and impersonal in style than other myths and carry a certain solemnity for they describe the creation/birth of the whole world, universe even, and not merely of an individual.

Wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image and eventually create a myth. The creation myth is an example of such a projection.

We could call this kind of myth an explanatory myth or even an existential myth.

In Jung’s vision however, the creation of the world also symbolizes the creation of ego consciousness, making a creation myth fit into our former category of “psychological” myths.

For Jung all myths are psychological; many religious myths, for instance the Christian myth about Jesus, are about man’s life-long quest for individuation.

He is concerned about the rupture between faith and knowledge, a symptom of the spit consciousness of modern man. A myth dies if the living truth it contains ceases to be an object of belief. It needs a new interpretation.

Jung claims that it is his practical experience that psychological understanding immediately revivifies the essential Christian ideas and fills them with the breath of life. In this way our scientific knowledge and understanding coincides with the symbolic statement of the myth and bridges the gulf between knowing and believing.

Actually, this is my personal experience too. I grew up with little belief in the Christian myth, but started to appreciate it when I learned to perceive its symbolic meanings and recognize its archetypal patterns.

Another kind of myth I can come up with is the historical myth. Myth is a historical document. It serves as a picture of the universe which, although completely removed from reality, corresponds exactly to man’s subjective fantasies about it in a particular social group, at a particular time, at a particular place.

Myths and primitives.

Mythological thinking of ancient man can be compared to similar thinking in children. At birth for instance, humans are entirely unconscious; the consciousness of the distinction between oneself and the external world only slowly emerges.

Primitive man did not yet distinguish himself from the world; he projected himself onto it and with that created myths about a world of gods.

Jung says that primitives experience myths rather than invent them. If we see our small children experience their mythical worlds this could well be true. I admit that I experience the mythic worlds of my dreams, only in retrospect realizing that I “invented” them myself.

Primitive man impresses us strongly with his knowledge of nature which is essentially the language and outer dress of his own unconscious psychic processes.

The human psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths. Our unconscious is an acting and suffering subject with an inner drama which our primitive forefathers rediscovered by means of analogy in the processes of nature, both great and small. We moderns need to rediscover the unconscious by allowing ourselves to consciously listen to what it tries to convey to us. In order to find our way back to our true nature, and to nature in general, we need to consciously revive our traditional myths as living myths (dream them onwards) or create altogether new ones.