Myth and the Unconscious
Carl Jung

Myths are the conscious mind’s strategy for making visible and comprehensible the internal forces and conflicts that dominate our actions

Jung and Freud believed that we never see the Unconscious and its contents; rather, we see only projected and, therefore, refined images that symbolize the things it contains.

Freud saw the images that appears to us in dreams and in such imaginative works as novels and myths as tamed projections of the Unconscious’s ungovernable terrors.

 

Carl Jung, ‘analytical (archetypal)psychology’
The individual and collective psyche, dreams, and the analytic process

Jung’s influential idea is that of a ‘collective unconsciousness’ a racial memory, consisting of ‘primordial images’ or archetypes.

‘Eternal mages’ - The universalized symbols and mages that appear in myth, religion, and art as highly polished versions of the archetypes.

Archetypes: Jung describes as patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective unconscious and finding their ‘most common and most normal’ manifestation in dreams. (Collected 8:287)

Jung often insisted that ‘Archetype’named a process, a perspective and not a content.

Archetype is recognized as the ‘tendency to form and reform images in relation to certain kinds of repeated experience,’ which may vary in individual cultures, authors, and readers (Lauter and Rupprecht 13-14)

 

 

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