Customer Reviews

The Mythological Unconscious

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For a long time, I've read thought leaders like James Hillman complaining that Jungians have lost the mythic dimension that was so important in Jung's own writing, resorting instead to an almost Freudian reductionism. This book, more than any other, helped me understand exactly why myth is important both in therapy and in the world around us.

"The Mythological Unconscious" is written for the professional, but it's certainly accessible by the layman. It's very readable, filled with pointed -- and poignant -- examples and, of course, myth and metaphor. I almost wish Dr. Adams had called this book something like "Myth and the Soul." Maybe then it would find the wide, popular audience it deserves.

I bought this book to read with my wife, as we are both interested in Jungian approaches to understanding how the mind works. While we have finished only one laborious chapter to date, it is clearly not the engaging, wide-ranging book that I had thought from the product literature. In fact every other sentence is a quote from Freud, Jung or other Jungians, making it altogether pedantic and a chore to read. While all scholarship rests on the shoulders of those who have gone before, this author appears to have very little to add to his sources.

While I had thought that Jungians were a bit more open to new ideas and thinking for themselves, this is not true for this author. It is very disturbing, actually, since while the delineation of the unconscious is an important discovery, a vigorous and productive science forges ahead to use the insights of earlier practitioners to find new and deeper insights, even facts. The need to continually refer to the founder of the field some 75 years before speaks more of a cult than of a science that will at any point in the future actually alleviate the human condition. And the tenacious fixation on using pseudo-scientific terms such as "analysis" is eloquent testimony to the unfulfilled hopes of this field, not to mention its envy of the "hard" sciences.

OK, that said, the focus of the book is entirely appropriate- how do we think about the world? Why do we value the internal world of fantasies, superstitions, and spiritual beliefs over the outside real world, and how are they different? Myths and archetypes are a recorded examples of the fantasies that are shared by more than one person, often by whole cultures, like the good king, the bad witch, the magical wizard, and the gifted healer, not to mention god and the soul. The author unfortunately believes that the only proper myth is an old one, so any clinical fantasy presented to him needs to be cross-checked in the database of Greek or similarly old archetypes (ARAS catalogue of the Jungian institute). But are not archetypes being created all the time and just as valid if created today as thousands of years ago? What to say to the inner city kid who dreams of being a star of the NBA, with all the fame and fortune that entails? That he is dreaming of an Odysseus fantasy of great power and success? What possible use is that except to say the he is in a long tradition of being human? It may be a supportive or emapathic thing to say, when coming from a respected friend, but hardly a therapeutic breakthrough.

Type this number in the title bar for the first edition which is cheaper: 1892746964. I do not know what revisions were made to the edition shown, but the first edition seems substantive enough.

The author has a very refined style. That refinement is a result of his own individuation process. It is a soul making book, of course, in the best sense of the word, and the chapter concerning Ariadne will certainly enriches the reader. How do we need our Ariadnes. In either micro and macrocosm. I hope that there are more on the way.