The Bridge Between
Jung’s Interpretation of Mythology as Symbols of the Unconscious
Some time ago, I wrote an article in which I summarized Carl Jung’s theory of the psyche and some of its implications. What does that have to do with mythology? Quite a bit actually. In his book, Theorizing about Myth, Robert Segal has a section entirely dedicated to Jung’s theory of mythology, which will be my guiding light here. Seeing as I appreciate the Jungian perspective, and our topic of this month is mythology, I thought it a happy meeting of the two worlds. The goal is to come to a better understanding of Jung’s claim that “myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes.”1
Jung’s claim is quite a mouthful, and at face value, it might sound like a lot of psychological gobbledygook. When one is attempting to articulate the innermost workings of the unconscious, that tends to be the case. What Jung is contending against is that mythology is merely an explanatory allegorizing of physical processes. In this regard, other psychologists have taken the subject matter of myth to be allegorical explanations of physical processes that could not yet be comprehended. With the proliferation of science and technology, furthering our understanding of such physical processes, this perception of mythology would become obsolete. Mythology would in fact become merely “myths” in the modern sense of the word.
Jung is of course more perspicacious about both the subject matter and function of mythology. He does not discount the symbolic purpose of allegorizing physical processes, but claims that they are not the origin of mythology. Instead, the allegories are the byproduct of a psychological process that takes place in us through our encounters with the physical world. It is the experience of the physical world whereby the unconscious attempts to reveal itself through symbols, thus the need for mythology. For it is the very purpose of mythology to reveal the unconscious.
Understanding Jung’s breakdown of the psyche into the conscious, the unconscious and the collective unconscious is important for the distinction between dreams and myths; dreams are an expression of the personal unconscious, while myths are an expression of the collective unconscious. If you are not familiar with Jung’s breakdown of the psyche, I recommend reading the article I wrote mentioned above to help clarify that framework. As far as mythology is concerned, Jung states that “the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.”2 The archetypal similarities across disparate mythologies are one of Jung’s demonstrations of the existence of the collective unconscious.
The problem we encounter with attempting to articulate the unconscious is that, according to Jung, it is not entirely able to be articulated or fully understood. Nevertheless, Jung does not believe this is a reason for discouragement, for albeit interpreting the unconscious is a seemingly impossible task, mythologizing is the method he thinks most suitable for the effort:
“The protean mythologem and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly and, in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept; for the symbol not only conveys a visualization of the process but - and perhaps this is just as important - it also brings a re-experiencing of it.”3
The “processes of the psyche” Jung alludes to is the death and rebirth of the ego as it repeatedly emerges in and out of the unconscious; a process that mirrors the death and rebirth of a god created as an allegory by the primitive man to explain the physical processes of, for instance, the harvest. The symbolic nature of mythology is not to explain physical processes, however, but to express the deeper processes of the human psyche. These symbols point not to the material world, but to archetypes that are inherent in each of us, and are better understood through the experience of them rather than by the explanation of them.
Borrowing from Rollo May’s book, The Courage to Create, it is this process, the submergence of the ego into the unconscious, that we achieve a sort of heightened consciousness: “Unconsciousness is the depth dimension of consciousness, and when it surges up into consciousness in this kind of polar struggle the result is the intensification of consciousness.”4 The role then of the unconscious, for May, is its essential role in the creative act; whereby consciousness, having labored in effort to create something true or beautiful, cedes itself to the unconsciousness that the former might be acted on by the latter.
Having given that brief framework of Jungian thought, along with May’s complementary notion of the unconscious and its role in creativity, what are we to derive from these perspectives? From my understanding, it is for us to arrive at a greater appreciation of mythology which, serving as a bridge to the collective unconscious, connects us with not only our own desires but those of all men. For that is what Jung claimed is the origin of mythology: a projection of the unconscious desires of men’s hearts onto the inexplicable workings of nature. It is a collective project, on the part of men from all ages and places, to symbolically represent the human condition, thus allowing us to consciously experience the seemingly inarticulate workings of our unconscious psyche.
“A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is always ambiguous. A dream never says "you ought" or "this is the truth." It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means he is either too much given to fear or too exempt from it; if he dreams of a wise old man, it means he is either too much of a pedant or else in need of a teacher. In a subtle way both meanings come to the same thing, as we realize when we let a work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist. To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it shaped him. Then we also understand the nature of his primordial experience. He has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the collective psyche, where man is not lost in the isolation of consciousness and its errors and sufferings, but where all men are caught in a common rhythm which allows the individual to communicate his feelings and strivings to mankind as a whole.”
~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 161
Robert A. Segal, Theorizing About Myth, p. 67
C.G. Jung, The Structure of the Psyche, Collected Works 8, Paragraph 325
Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works Volume 13, “Alchemical Studies,” section 199
Rollo May, The Courage to Create, p. 65