As he insinuates himself into the labyrinth, Theseus unravels the thread, moving toward the monster—his family’s monstrous, forgotten past⁷— where, in the otherness of the Minotaur’s “hybrid face,” he discerns “his own face reflected back to him” (Doll, 2017, p. xiii). For Doll (2017), this movement signifies the “regress” of currere: psychic movement “back into . .. buried material of shame, suffering, and memory” (p. xv). In Jungian terms, currere moves toward the shadow self that troubles the ego—the personal unconscious individually lived and expressed, and yet rooted in the collective unconscious. Currere unfolds, Doll suggests, as a “labyrinthine journey” toward “our personal monster” (p. xiii)—an aspect of the self-made monstrous “by the demands to bury what is not socially acceptable” (p. xv). The monster’s lair, from the perspective of Greek mythology and Jungian thought, is a realm of chthonic forces: “human nature’s instinctive drives and dark, rejected propensities,” figured in myth as creatures and deities of the earth or underworld (Fontelieu, 2020, para. 3). Chthonic beings and their territories embody not only disavowed and fearsome memories and impulses but also arcane knowledge and creative energy that can renew the self. They unveil, paradoxically, “a fertile and divine source of abundance” (Fontelieu, 2020, para. 3). “The underworld waits,” Doll (2017) explains, “as our dreams and memories wait . .. to be stirred into awareness” (p. 7). Currere—in a mythopoetic register—leads us on an anfractuous passage into this chthonic domain; and however darkened the path or troubling the figure of our shadow self, the regression of currere provokes its own countermovement. When we are open to what the monster portends, encountering the dreadful monster of our psychic past “awakens”⁸ the self, enabling us to discover the self’s abundance, richness, and complexity.

The story of Theseus and the Minotaur, in its chthonic associations,⁹ expresses the dual and mutually animating movements of Doll’s currere. The monster Minotaur represents “the depths of the desires of the hidden self” in their terrifying excess—the monster “feeds on the children of Athens” (p. xiii), Doll (2017) explains—yet the Minotaur is also an “ocean of power and thrilling force that gives life meaning and makes art possible” (Powell, 2012, as cited in Doll, 2017, p. xiii).¹⁰ This dynamic of opposing forces resonates deeply in Doll’s writing. Like Theseus, she pursues the entwining thread of “mythic dichotomies” (p. xiii) so that she might “see anew what has been forgotten or repressed” (p. xv); doing so, she sets forth a theory and practice of currere profoundly attentive to the “two-ness in everything” (p. 142). “There is the past that is present, the other that is the self, the shock that becomes recognition,” Doll explains: “Always two” (p. 142). The individuation of currere emerges then from mythopoetic care for this “two-ness”—openness to relational specificity enacted through one’s singularity. As we meet the monster along the thread of our being, Doll teaches us, the monster “puts us in a different mind” (p. 100), inviting us to expand the fabric of our inner world and the places we inhabit. Engaged with chthonic forces, Doll’s mythopoetic currere conjures dynamic, two-way movements: inner and outer, cohering and dispersing, regressing and emerging. In the remainder of this essay, I elaborate Doll’s theoretical contribution to currere studies in these terms and offer close readings of chapters from The Mythopoetics of Currere that reflect the complex two-ness of her mode of inquiry.

Though currere is fundamentally interior work, Doll makes clear that this mode of study is never solely so, as it requires, as well, a purposeful analysis of the self’s entanglement with history, culture, the world. “Currere is Pinar’s major (seminal) contribution to curriculum studies,” Doll (2017) explains, “for its re-cognizing the self as an organizing entity that reaches out to reconceptualize the world” (p. 63). She elaborates, stating that as an “organizing entity,” the self is structurally complex, divided against itself in its conscious and unconscious dimensions, ego and shadow. The organizing dynamism of the self thus provokes and blocks self-communication, requiring of the student of currere both a regressive turn to inner experience in its chaotic fluidity and a writerly emergence from that regressive “flow” (p. 62). In one of several remarkable close readings of Pinar’s theory, Doll characterizes this act of writing as “a necessary second stage” of currere in which one conceptualizes the “remembered self with words” (p. 62), as her own writing in this regard, issuing from her own resurrection of ghosts, advances currere as imaginative, mythopoetic journeying between inner and outer worlds.

In Section One of the book, “Dreams and the Curriculum of the Remembered Self,” Doll charts the movement of the mind in its perceptual contact with a “primitive self” (Pinar, 1994, as cited in Doll, 2017, p. 62) that cannot be wholly disclosed and yet that must be sought if personal meaning is to exceed the telling of selfsame stories. She explores memory and dreams to foster a necessary mode of “dwelling” in the “unfamiliar wellspring” of subjectivity (Doll, 2017, p. 4), entering the otherness of this psychic terrain with myth as her guide, given that “the psyche is mythic” and “myths are psychic stories” (p. xiii).

The chapter “Memory and Currere” is an exemplary demonstration of the mythopoetic foundations of Doll’s curriculum theory and the two-ness of her practice of inquiry. The chapter explores the story of Odin from Norse mythology—specifically, Odin’s journey to Mimir’s well where he pledges an eye to drink from this well of wisdom and receive the mystic vision it imparts. Mimir is a giant whose severed head has been reanimated as the oracle of the well, his name denoting “memory”—in Old Norse, “the rememberer, the wise one” (Simek, 1993, p. 216). Mimir’s well is located beneath and nourishes the Yggdrasil tree, the tree of life or “the great ash tree of the world” (Doll, 2017, p. 3). For a draught from the well, Odin makes the payment Mimir demands, sacrificing his own right eye. Odin’s offering up the right eye is a mythopoetic detail that Doll (2017) contemplates in terms of “Left/Right symbolism,” noting that the right eye, governed by the left brain, “controls logic, intellect, reason, and power” (p. 4). Surrendering the eye of rationality and literalism to the “Well of Memory,” Odin seeks intuitive and imaginative capacities diminished, Doll carefully reveals, by the excesses of reason. Receiving Odin’s eye in the watery realm of memory and wisdom, letting “the sacr...