Customer Reviews

Essays on a Science of Mythology

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul"

Although Jung was not a child analyst himself he conducted a Seminar on Children's Dreams in 1940, at around the same time he wrote his important paper contained in this book on the psychology of the child archetype. In preparing to write this seminal paper he had observed the spontaneous emergence of the child archetype in the actual dreams of children as reported by parents or remembered by adults. So, it has to be acknowledged that when this book was published in collaboration with C. Kerényi in 1941, Jung was formulating his hypotheses based upon empirical data. I feel his postulates still hold a great deal of weight in light of current trends in the field of analytical depth-psychology. This is an important book for anyone interested in questions of fate and destiny, whether in science, psychology, religion, or art. It is certain to strike a corresponding chord in each reader.

Kerényi begins with the following inquiry: "Which came first: solitude in the primeval world, or the purely human picture of the orphan's fate?" (Kerényi, 1959/1949, 30). This is a question that is of central importance not only to a science of mythology, but to clinical problems experienced every day by psychotherapists who deal in practice with fate and destiny in the lives of patients. In so far as Kerényi and Jung are analyzing the "true orphan's fate," which is to say the fate of the divine child and his or her destiny as a culture hero, or heroine, the mythologem always reveals the "triumph of the elemental nature of the wonder-child" (Kerényi, 1959/1949, 36) over and against the annihilating forces of darkness, violence, and evil in psyche and the world. "The childhood and the orphan's fate of the child gods," Kerényi writes "have not evolved from the stuff of human life, but from the stuff of cosmic life" (Kerényi, 1959/1949, 45). Kerényi and Jung are really on the same page here. Jung's essay on the child archetype should be read in conjunction with Kerényi's companion piece.

Jung's basic postulate about abandonment of the child is that we are dealing with an "autochthonous" revival of a "myth-forming" structural element, a "primordial image" in the collective psyche that is present in the unconscious "independent of all tradition" (Jung, 1969, ¶259, 260). By autochthonous revival Jung means that an archetype is activated by a return to the state of "original psychic distress," or "unconsciousness" that goes back to the darkness of primeval times; it is from this state of original chaos that the abandoned child emerges as a light-bringer to the culture (¶288). The higher consciousness achieved by the orphaned child in his or her fight with primordial darkness is a wisdom "equivalent," Jung says, to "being all alone in the world" (¶288). The orphan of mythology often develops a light of "consciousness" that enables him or her to receive a favorable or fortuitous destiny from the gift-bestowing hands of Mother Nature.

Experience led Jung to believe that the mother always plays an active part in the origin of psychopathology, especially in infantile neuroses whose origin dates back to early childhood and infancy. In such cases the child's instincts are disturbed, and this constellates archetypes, which, in their turn, produce fantasies that come between the child and the mother as alien and often frightening elements. These elements or "complexes" are later projected onto the analyst, amongst which are the archetypes of destiny and fate. In his analysis of children's dreams at the ETH in the winter term, 1938/1939, Jung analyzed the dream of a four-year-old girl, who dreamt of a wedding carriage and an angel (see his book Children's Dreams). There, Jung makes it clear that knowledge about her vision of the future is a form of knowledge that was in her in potential from the beginning. Jung then adds that with this knowledge arrived at through the memory of her dream, she came upon the germ for the ground plan of the development of her personality as a whole, and this development was inborn in her. From the "sea" of the collective unconscious the human personality is born, Jung says and from "that collective region in which all of human destiny is present in images" the "child has to step out of this primordial world, to be able to really enter into life" (Children's Dreams, p. 184). If she can actualize the potential in the archetype of the divine child, her destiny is seeded. Jung is not speaking of mere fantasies of fate and destiny here, he is speaking of the world. The more archaic and "deeper" these symbols are he concludes the more collective or universal, and hence the more "material." In this sense he holds Kerényi to be absolutely right that "in the symbol the world itself is speaking." This is undoubtedly one of the greatest classics in analytical psychology!

Certainly not to "praise great men," which is anathema to me, but to trace and track the "development of psychology." That is why I have observed its serpentine journey throughout history, slinking as far back as Heraclitus, now rising up into the Aquarian Age, right through Pisces, which brings us to the next development in psychology, Archetypal Psychology, as presented by James Hillman, Jung's worthy successor, which leads the "pupil" for "dominating spirit" to "receptive soul" and beyond, or below, to an ultimately gracious union of the two. At the end of this book by the two Carls, Kerenyi says, "Miracle DO happen in Eleusis," and Eleusis, like Utopia, like the Realm of the Mothers, like the Spirit Realm, is DOWN, the very direction in which Hillman points, always, as does Joseph Campbell, e.g., "If you are falling...DIVE!"

Certainly not to "praise great men," which is anathema to me, but to trace and track the "development of psychology." That is why I have observed its serpentine journey throughout history, slinking as far back as Heraclitus, now rising up into the Aquarian Age, right through Pisces, which brings us to the next development in psychology, Archetypal Psychology, as presented by James Hillman, Jung's worthy successor, which leads the "pupil" for "dominating spirit" to "receptive soul" and beyond, or below, to an ultimately gracious union of the two. At the end of this book by the two Carls, Kerenyi says, "Miracle DO happen in Eleusis," and Eleusis, like Utopia, like the Realm of the Mothers, like the Spirit Realm, is DOWN, the very direction in which Hillman points, always, as does Joseph Campbell, e.g., "If you are falling...DIVE!"

This collaboration between Jung and Kerenyi is everything except science.
In the first part, Kerenyi only summarizes folktales and sagas from Iceland till India about the Divine Child. His second contribution should be considered as a preparatory study on his eminent work 'Eleusis'. But the quality of this study lays way behind this latter work.
The contributions of Jung are trivial or a variation on his favourite theme. E.g. "The mythological images belong to the structure of the unconscious and are an impersonal possession; in fact, the great majority of men are far more possessed by them than possessing them." (p.161)
Or, "... it is readily understandable that the primordial image of the hermaphrodite should reappear in modern psychology in the guise of the male-female antithesis, in other words as male consciousness and personified female unconscious." (p.95)

Although the two touch on two, for me, important items, though obviously they don't explore them further.
First, many symbols are based on, as they call them, 'cosmic origins' (p. 16), in other words on the zodiac, thus on nothing. And second, do folktales point in the direction of mythology or merely to a realistic description of a certain type of human fate? (p.34)
I believe that folktales are more like ancient theatre: escape from the harsh reality. The second option is to be preferred.
Reading this book, reminds me of the words of Jean Fourastié, who characterized certain theories as 'délires conceptuels' (conceptual deliriums). I feel that a 'science' of mythology is one of these deliriums, what doesn't mean that mythology has nothing to say. On the contrary, see the above mentionned work 'Eleusis' by Kerenyi. But it is not a science.