Sometimes when I read or reread the works of C. G. Jung, I feel as if I am climbing a mountain with no view of the top, so I keep plodding. At other times, I feel like I am being dragged deep into the core of myself; again, I have no view of the bottom, but I continue to descend. We have all felt at one time or another this feeling of moving up or down, at the same time that we feel lost.
But as Jung himself noted more than once, when he felt like he did not know where he was headed, he let himself be guided by the unconscious, by a feeling or impulse to see where it led. He had the courage to risk not knowing. I take my inspiration from him in moments like these. When we shift our attitude towards a mythic perspective, we can gain a grounded sense that is absent when we live in a mythless landscape.
He had the courage to risk not knowing.
I have also discovered that a little Jung can go a long way. By that I mean rather than taking on an entire essay for study, one can take a fraction and create from it many analogies, associations and correspondences, a process that Jung himself was fond of using. What it offered him was a sense of accord between things, ideas, people, dreams, nature, embodiment as psychic realities.
Living Without Myth
Jung had a keen sense of how exploring the soul can lead to unknown discoveries that provokes others. They fertilize our imaginal involvement. I want to begin with a few pages that are often overlooked: his “Foreword to the Fourth Swiss Edition” of Symbols of Transformation. I am attracted to it because of his concern over personal myth, an interest which grew after he finished this study: “Hardly had I finished the manuscript when it struck me what it means to live with a myth, and what it means to live without one” (CW 5, p. xxiv).
His realization that he did not know his own myth feels like the beginning of another full volume. He speculates further that those “who think they can live without myth. . . is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him. . .” (p. xxiv). Such alienation from self and others crops one’s connectedness with history itself.
The devastation accrues as one sinks into “a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth” (p. xxiv). I love watching Jung think through a problem or dilemma as he writes about it. The act of writing is an act of discovery, and we discover his insights along with him. His next step will be propelled by a suspicion that grows from his newly recognized awakening.
The act of writing is an act of discovery, and we discover his insights along with him.
He links the above observation to one of his favorite subjects: meaning. “So I suspected that myth had a meaning which I was sure to miss if I lived outside it in the haze of my own speculations” (p. xxiv). The reader will notice here and in other assertions Jung makes, chilling parallels with our current national maladies of tribalism whose goal is separation and division.
Myth and Community
We glimpse something of the grounding, communal benefits of living in a myth; it protects us by discouraging our tendency to fabricate reality by imposing our own fantasies on it and calling it truth. We recognize the passionate pattern for power, prestige and personal gain that can unfurl from one alienated from any significant participation in a shared collective myth.
We glimpse something of the grounding, communal benefits of living in a myth; it protects us by discouraging our tendency to fabricate reality by imposing our own fantasies on it and calling it truth.
However, knowing the value of a myth to knowing what our own myth is may require loss and sacrifice—of baked-in prejudices and preconceptions that have fueled our vision of the world and our place in it. Mythmaking is then, participatory, rather than isolating. “I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge” (p. xxv).
Following Mythic Threads
He knew that this ignorance discarded a crucial connection to treating his patients—the subjective domain of their lives. His search for his own myth, in turn, would free Jung from living according to theories about life, not life itself. So he begins, “bit by bit” he tells us, to draw “connecting links that I should have known before if I was to join up the fragments of my book” after 37 years (p. xxv).
Through slow, deliberate steps, Jung begins discerning the connection between his patients’ symptoms that comprise what he refers to as “the Ariadne thread to guide us through the labyrinth of symbolistic parallels” to “establish the meaning of the archetypal context” (p. xxv). I mention here how Jung will often revert to a mythic narrative as the best metaphor for deepening the work of soul with his clients.
As a reader, I can appreciate and participate in this meshing of threads leading to the gold of meaning through symbols within an archetypal context. And while he recognizes the value of anatomy and other fields of inquiry, they do not touch “knowledge of the soul that is ill” (p. xxvi). Now we are at the heart of the matter. I encourage you to return to this “Foreword” as a rich field to amplify your own sense of mythic consciousness as well as the myth that fuels your psychic energy.
The psyche is both complex and contextual. Both content and context would be helpful to identify when we explore myths, both personal and collective. We must read with two eyes, the one that seeks outward meaning and the other that realizes value within. A fuller awareness of our plotted lives will then show us the road forward.
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Works Cited
Jung, C. G. “Foreword to the Fourth Swiss Edition” The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 5. Symbols of Transformation (2nd ed.). Edited by Gerhard Adler. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton University Press, 1967.
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