Dreaming the Myth Onwards

New Directions in Jungian Therapy and Thought

Lucy Huskinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415438377
• eBook ISBN: 9781134071432
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Dreaming the Myth Onwards shows how a revised appreciation of myth can enrich our daily lives, our psychological awareness, and our human relationships. Lucy Huskinson and her contributors explore the interplay between myth, and Jungian thought and practice, demonstrating the philosophical and psychological principles that underlie our experience of psyche and world.

Contributors from multi-disciplinary backgrounds throughout the world come together to assess the contemporary relevance of myth, in terms of its utility, its effectual position within Jungian theory and practice, and as a general approach for making sense of life. As well as examining the more conscious facets of myth, this volume discusses the unconscious psychodynamic "processes of myth", including active imagination, transference, and countertransference, to illustrate just how these mythic phenomena give meaning to Jungian theory and therapeutic experience.

This rigorous and scholarly analysis showcases fresh readings of central Jungian concepts, updated in accordance with shifts in the cultural and epistemological concerns of contemporary Western consciousness. Dreaming the Myth Onwards will be essential reading for practicing analysts and academics in the field of the arts and social sciences.

Chapter 1
Introduction: ordinarily mythical

Lucy Huskinson

Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language… The most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own psychic well-being.

(Jung 1951a: 271)

This is a collection of essays about myth. At a cursory glance, some essays may appear more closely linked to ‘myth’ than others. This is because I have extended the idea of myth beyond its common conception, which is, I believe, mistakenly reductive.

There are many theories and ideas about myth and I do not profess to give the definitive explanation here, far from it. To do so would be to inflate my own personal myth to the level of objectivity, thereby succumbing to the illusion Jung speaks of in the opening quotation. I do think it important, however, to outline my understanding of myth, not simply to shake myth free from common conception—which, as I shall show, it naturally eschews—but because it is the thread that binds the following chapters in sequence, enabling the book to be read as a coherent mythical story.

In this introduction, I delineate different aspects of myth as I envisage it. Close to the end of its writing, I became aware that my explanations are constellated in binary pairs, which is itself an expression of a collective myth of the West since Plato, which I have inherited. The reader of this book ought to bear in mind, therefore, that its conception is preconditioned by a particular mythological stance. The aspects of myth that I shall expound are (1) its personal and collective designations; (2) its dual function of describing an understanding of the world, and revealing how we might change this understanding; (3) its expression in different post-Jungian models as either one grand narrative (to which I give the name the integrative model) or multiple narratives (to which I give the name the pluralist model); and finally (4) its dynamic composition conceived as image and image-making process.

Roots of living myth

In my reading, myth is not merely an archaic story of human relationship (within the self, between each other, the gods or the natural world) that expresses universal truth of the human condition. Myth is also a living story that is developing within you, the reader, at this very moment. Myth refers as much to the extraordinary feats of embroidered characters as it does to the more familiar and subtle routines and patterns of our personal experiences. It is perhaps precisely because of their magnitude and extraordinariness that such epic stories have left a strong impression on us and have become known as the prototype of mythic adventure, while, the more mundane aspects of our personal lives become relegated—and even pitted in opposition to ‘myth’—to the level of banality or to a disparaging notion of ‘reality’. I am not suggesting that every moment of one’s waking life comprises one’s mythical ethos; such a position renders myth meaningless—for every experience is equalized, leaving no room for the imaginative and creative dialogue of contrary narratives, which is the prerequisite of psychological development. Rather, at the risk of being branded a primitive thinker, I want to reclaim aspects of our ordinary lives as the stuff of myth. The aspects to which I refer are those experiences that enable imaginative and creative dialogue within ourselves and from ourselves to others. Myth, as I see it, is a narrative that shapes and affects us, it is the order in which we make sense of ourselves and it reveals to us, through this ordering, how we might develop into something different.

Today we tend to lose sight of myth as an everyday phenomenon. We hold ourselves in poor regard, as unworthy loci of meaning. We thus search for meaning outside of ourselves, locating it, for example, within myths of the past, or in institutions of faith and materialism; or we try to alter ourselves artificially—through drug-induced states—to produce meaning and to enable its containment. This tendency of feeling out of place within ourselves exemplifies a lack of rootedness of being, a tendency that is frequently lamented in discourses of continental philosophy and also by Jung. Thus, Heidegger, who asserts that we have lost our home in the world, seeks Bodenständigkeit [‘rootedness to earth’], by which he meant to convey (in addition to national affiliation and a regional sense of belonging) a metaphysical relation or profound attunement to the earth as a place of dwelling. Bodenständigkeit is a relationship to the earth that acknowledges its hidden and concealed dimension; only when we are rooted to the earth as the source and ground of our being, can we find meaning within ourselves. Nietzsche similarly calls for rootedness of being: ‘Here we have our present age…bent on extermination of myth. Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots [Wurzeln], be it among the most remote antiquities’ (1872:136). Jung aligns himself to these ideas. In close parallel to Heidegger, Jung asserts: ‘He who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness […to the] earth ground of his being’ (Jung 1927/1931:103), and later, echoing Nietzsche—as he so often does—Jung contends: ‘[The] man who thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, like one uprooted, has no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him or yet with contemporary human society’ (Jung 1951b:xxiv). Myth is that which sustains our rootedness to the world, and the vehicle through which we find meaning within ourselves. Our myths are the roots to our being and our relationship with the world.

Myth is not an ancient relic or closed narrative that applies only to days of yore; and neither, I contend, is myth merely a matter of our being affected by ancient narratives through their timeless applicability to human behaviour, though this of course is part of it. Myths are personal stories that are constantly evolving, and working themselves out through us. Myth is a narrative pattern that gives significance to our existence, and given that we are creatures of individuality and collectivity, ‘myth’ refers to both our collective and our personal stories. The boundaries of myth can be extended even further, beyond the collective realm, to include that of the transcendent, thereby suggesting that myth is autonomous and seeks conscious expression in us, through our stories. This latter speculation speaks of the ineffable, and could easily be considered a mythical story—one among many—of my psychological devising, rather than an a priori justification for the nature and origin of myth. Whether the transcendent is itself a myth or a source and composite of myth is, however, not a matter of dispute for Jungians, who readily accept its influence. The nature of the transcendent, however, is a matter for dispute for post-Jungians and later I shall address an implication of this disagreement for an understanding of the nature of myth.

Personal and collective myths

In my academic experience, myth as personal narrative is often eclipsed by analyses of traditional, epic stories of times long past. This tendency is reflected in Jung’s work in terms of the numerous mythical stories examined throughout its corpus and the unremarkable, fleeting allusions to one’s ‘personal myth’. This is not to say that Jung values the personal myth any less; on the contrary, Jung maintains that, ‘therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story’ (1961:138). Furthermore, Jung took it on himself:

[To] get to know ‘my’ myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks, for—so I told myself—how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it?

(1951b:xxv)

It would seem that Jung was successful in his task of tasks, for later, at the age of 83, he decides it is time ‘to tell my personal myth’, ‘my fable, my truth’. Naturally, we find this proclamation in the prologue to his autobiography (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961), which is by definition a narrative of life story and an attempt to communicate personal myth.

Strictly speaking ‘personal myth’ is a category error. The individual does not encounter a myth for himself or herself alone, which would be tantamount to him or her encountering a unique myth. To speak of a personal myth is to speak of an individual, original subjective colouring or variation of a myth that has been encountered before. Nihan Kaya expresses this point nicely in the following chapter, in citing Rollo May: ‘No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.’ We are not so dissimilar from each other in our patterns of behaviour to warrant the discovery—individually or collectively—of a wholly new myth. Indeed, Jung argues that it is because we are all linked by a common ancestral life, which continues within each one of us, that a personal myth is not an individual matter: myth, for Jung, has ‘sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth’. In this sense, myth cannot be created; it is not a conscious or individual construct. What I refer to as ‘personal myth’ would in Jungian terms ‘find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations’ (Jung 1951b:xxv). In this sense then, myth is a discovery of the collective within the individual. Myth is construed through imagery, but this imagery is not to be conceived as static narrative applicable for all time. Rather, it is dynamic, and is continually reshaped according to the living experiences and subjective orientation of its recipient—a point Susan Rowland encapsulates in her chapter with the words, ‘a novel changes with every reading’. Myth is a story of human behaviour, which is continually retold in line with the developing behaviours of the human race, society, or individual personality with which it is concerned.

Myth is the story of your own life, which is itself rooted within a collective narrative of basic human behavioural patterns. Our mythical stories are personal narrations of our psychic situations. Our complexes, transferences and countertransferences, our childhood experiences and memories, our dreams and fantasies all provide fuel for the storylines and characters of our myth. One might go a step further, as did Freud, and maintain that the instincts—which constitute our psychic makeup—are themselves entities of myth (Freud 1933:127). We could say that myth, as a narrative of the instincts, determines individuality. Indeed, while a Jungian might emphasize myth as the link between the individual and the collective (as that which roots us to our ancestral life and contemporary society), a Freudian might emphasize myth as a prerequisite of self-consciousness, as ‘the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology’ (Freud 1921:136). Freud (and Jung would no doubt agree) sees the ‘magnificence’ of myths ‘in their indefiniteness’, which is to say that the value of myth lies in its subjective expression and dynamic nature, as opposed to abstract or closed stories of historical narrative. Myth as a narrative of instincts gives rise to new possibilities, new stories and situations, evolving in response to the old. Myth is thereby seen as a continuing life story, which is therapeutically valued in its capacity to heal and transform impotent, unworkable life experiences into ones that are productive and enriched. Myth is therapy insofar as it enables us to function according to new structures of meaning.

As an evolving account of human behaviour, myth narrates the past, present, and future experiences of psychological development. I take the past narrative of a person to comprise the facts of his or her past experiences, which are ungraspable and recorded accurately only in the unconscious. The present narrative, in contrast, describes the current psychic disposition of a person. This subsequently determines how a person understands and makes sense of his or her life, which is to say how he or she remembers and interprets his or her past experiences. This narrative is filtered through the complexes and transferences that have grown in response to these experiences. Finally, the future narrative describes the potential development of the psyche and how the person can learn to approach the world differently and reinterpret his or her place within it. While the present narrative is an interpretation of the past narrative, the future narrative is a potential redressing and compensation of the present narrative. The future narrative describes the movement away from old and defunct ways of understanding; it suggests a resolution—if only partial—of the complexes and transferences that influenced the present narrative and its understanding of the past. The future narrative is thus a new storyline, which can replenish and overcome the failure of the old. The future narrative is the promise of a greater understanding of one’s life story, which is tantamount to the ego realizing that it is not the sole actor and narrator of the story. And this enables the many voices of the psyche their expression. The healing capacity of myth is harnessed when we recognize that myth is not wholly personal—ego centred or narcissistic and of personal construct—but is a narrative of the collective and is thus a discovery of the personal within the collective.

Regressive and progressive myths

I have schematized the nature of myth chronologically, in terms of a developing psychological life story of past, present and future narrative. Of course, one’s life story cannot be dissected in so clear-cut a fashion as my depiction suggests—just as Jung’s depiction o...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Chapter 1 Introduction: ordinarily mythical
• Part 1 Directing onwards
• Part 2 Changing faces of myth
• Part 3 Myths at play
• Part 4 Psychic revisions: towards a new mythology
• Index