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Now, this topic of living your own, personal myth–finding it, learning what it is, in writing on it–first occurred to me when I read Jung’s autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In one passage, he described a crisis in his own life. In 1911–12, Jung was working on his seminal book The Symbols of Transformation. He . . . → Read More: Jung: What Myth Do I Live By? There is no need to rehearse the demonstration by psychoanalysis of the parallelism of dream and myth, and the consequent theory of the possibility of mythology developing spontaneously, along traditional lines, wherever mankind may be nesting. “Anyone who really knows what a dream is will agree,” writes Geza Roheim, “that there cannot be several ‘culturally . . . → Read More: Mythology is dreamlike in that it is a spontaneous product of the psyche However, it is of first importance not to lose sight of the fact that the mythological archetypes (Bastian’s Elementary Ideas) cut across the boundaries of these culture spheres and are not confined to anyone or two, but are variously represented in all. For example, the idea of survival after death seems to be about conterminous . . . → Read More: Mythological archetypes cut across boundaries of culture spheres. This recognition by Durkheim of a kind of truth at the root of the image-world of myth is supported, expanded, and deepened by the demonstration of the psychoanalysts that dreams are precipitations of unconscious desires, ideals, and fears, and furthermore, that the images of dream resemble–broadly, but nevertheless frequently to the detail–the motifs of folk . . . → Read More: Mythology is psychology, misread as cosmology, history, and biography For it is simply a fact–as I believe we have all not got to concede–that mythologies and their deities are productions and projections of the psyche. What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination? We know their histories: we know by what stages they developed. Not only . . . → Read More: Mythologies and their deities are productions and projections of the psyche. “But if we are to grasp the full value of the material, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources – the unconscious wells of fantasy – and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary, . . . → Read More: Campbell: myths are not exactly comparable to dream “Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind” . . . → Read More: Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream |
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