4 Freud’s and Jung’s twentieth-century view of myth

The psychologizing of myth

In Paradise Lost (1667) Milton combines riveting descriptions of hell and paradise as places “out there” in the world with characterizations of them as states of mind. On the one hand hell, into which Satan and his retinue land after their fall from heaven, is a lake of fire, the light from which only makes the place darker. The beach is itself on fire and offers no respite from the heat:

At once as far as Angels’ ken he [Satan] views

The dismal Situation waste and wild,

A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round

As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible

Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

That comes to all; but torture without end

Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed

With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d:

Such place Eternal Justice had prepar’d

For those rebellious, here thir Prison ordained

In utter darkness, and thir portion set

As far remov’d from God and light of Heav’n

As from the Center thrice to th’ utmost Pole.

(1.59–74)

On the other hand hell is a state of mind. Satan, upon awakening in hell, actually boasts that both heaven and hell are the product of mind and can therefore be established anywhere at will:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,

Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat

That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom

For that celestial light? Be it so, since he

Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid

What shall be right: …

Farewell happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings

A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

(1.241–55)

Later, Satan says the same, but now in self-doubt rather than arrogance, because he recognizes what he has lost and recognizes that, as evil, he turns everything into hell:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly

Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.

(4.73–75)

It is not just Satan the character who makes hell and paradise mental states. As author, Milton writes of Satan that

from the bottom stir

The Hell within him, for within him Hell

He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell

One step no more than from himself can fly

By change of place.

(4.19–21)

What for Milton is true of hell is also true of paradise. On the one hand it is a place “out there,” lovingly and lushly described:

Beneath him with new wonder now he [Satan] views

To all delight of human sense expos’d

In narrow room Nature’s whole wealth, yea more,

A Heaven on Earth: for blissful Paradise

Of God the Garden was, by him in the East

Of Eden planted; Eden stretch’d her Line

From Auran Eastward to the Royal Tow’rs

Of Great Seleucia, built by Grecian Kings,

Or where the Sons of Eden long before

Dwelt in Telassar: in this pleasant soil

His far more pleasant Garden God ordain’d;

Out of the fertile ground he [God] caus’d to grow

All Trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste;

Thus was this place,

A happy rural seat of various view:

Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gums and Balm,

Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rind

Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true,

If true, here only, and of delicious taste.

(4.205–251)

On the other hand the archangel Michael, having consoled Adam with knowledge of the virtues that human beings can acquire only in the wake of the fall—faith, patience, temperance, love, and charity—concludes the following:

then wilt thou not be loath

To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess

A paradise within thee, happier far.

(12.586–587)

The psychologizing of the world is to be found even earlier than Milton, perhaps most famously in the description of hell by Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In any one self place; for where we are is hell,

And where hell is, there must we ever be.

(1604 ed., 1.553–555)

Among modern theorists of myth, Jung is especially eager to trace the psychologizing of the world all the way back to ancient Gnostics and in turn to medieval alchemists. But for him, as for Freud, the twentieth century is distinctive in its separation of the psychological from the physical: the separation of the mind from the world, of the inner from the outer. By contrast, Milton somehow combines the two. Rather than reducing hell and paradise to states of mind, he somehow makes them at once physical places and states of mind. That position, as we shall see, is distinct from at once the nineteenth-century position, where myth is just about the physical world, and the twentieth-century one, where myth, at least for Freud and Jung, is just about the mind.

For Freud and Jung, the psychologizing of the world has not meant the reduction of the world to the mind, as in idealism. Nor has it meant the reduction of the world to a human creation, as in constructionism. On the contrary, it has meant the differentiation of the world “out there”—a world independent of humans—from the imposition upon it of elements belonging to humans rather than the world. Projections onto the outer world, which had taken the form of gods, have by now largely been withdrawn. The outer world has come to be recognized as a natural rather than a supernatural domain, to be explained by impersonal scientific laws rather than by the decisions of gods.

For both Freud and Jung, the rise of science has spelled the fall of religion. Unlike Freud, Jung laments that the loss of religion as an explanation of the world has simultaneously meant the loss of an effective means of tending to the unconscious. But Jung no less than Freud praises the triumph of the scientific explanation over the religious one.

Both Freud and Jung disentangle myth from religion, to which it had been tied. Religion minus myth had provided the gods. Myth had provided the biographies of the gods: stories of how the gods were born, how they grew up, and how they acquired and used their powers. Once myth had been psychologized, it was no longer about the physical world but was instead about the human world, specifically about the mind. Myth was no longer in competition with science and so could survive the demise of religion. Furthermore, there could now be secular myths, which were not even literally about gods—myths about nationalism, for example. In short, Freud and Jung, as twentieth-century theorists of myth, made myth safe, not for science but from science.

For Freud and Jung, the subject matter of myth is not, as for Milton, both the world and the mind but the mind, and not the conscious mind, as for Milton, but the unconscious one. For Freud, the function of myth is to vent the unconscious. For Jung, the function is to encounter the unconscious. For neither Freud nor Jung does myth make the unconscious conscious. On the contrary, myth ordinarily operates unconsciously and, at least for Freud, must operate unconsciously. Freud and Jung differ sharply over the nature of the unconscious and in turn over the reason that myth is needed to express it.

Freudians against nineteenth-century theorists of myth

It is conventionally assumed that, in the case of myth as in general, Jung is arguing against Freud. It is also commonly assumed that Freud or at least Freudians on myth are arguing against Jung and Jungians. But in fact both are arguing at least as much against nineteenth-century theorists like Tylor and Frazer as against each other. Before they can argue with each other over what psychologically myth is about, Freudians and Jungians must first show that myth is not about the physical world. Before they can argue with each other over how symbolically myth is to be read, Freudians and Jungians must first show that myth is not to be read literally.

In “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913) Freud comments on an interpretation made by nature mythologist E. Stucken of the choice of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice:

He [Stucken] says, “The identity of the three suitors of Portia is clear from their choice: the Prince of Morocco chooses the gold casket: he is the sun; the Prince of Arragon chooses the silver casket: he is the moon; Bassanio chooses the leaden casket: he is the star youth.”

Thus our little problem leads to an astral myth. The only pity is that with this explanation we not have got to the end of the matter. The question goes further, for we do not share the belief of many investigators that myths were read off direct from the heavens; we are more inclined to judge with Otto Rank that they were projected on to the heavens after having arisen quite otherwise under purely human conditions. Now our interest is in this human content.

(Freud 1958, p. 292)

Along with Rank’s 1909 The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, to which Freud is referring, the other classic Freudian analysis of myth is Karl Abraham’s Dreams and Myths, also originally published in 1909. Both Abraham and Rank dismiss those theorists, called nature mythologists, who either take myth to be about the physical world rather than about the human mind or, worse, turn myths about humans into myths about the physical world. Rank is especially disdainful of theorists who turn myths about family life into symbols of natural processes—turning the story of Oedipus, for example, into a symbol of the triumph of light over darkness: “as given by a representative of the natural mythological mode of interpretation, Oedipus, who kills his father, marries his mother, and dies old and blind, is the solar hero who murders his procreator, the darkness; shares his couch with the mother, the gloaming, from whose lap, the dawn, he has been born, and dies blinded, as the setting sun” (Rank 1914, pp. 9–10). Rather than originating in the experience of the physical world, myth for Rank originates in the experience of the family and is then projected onto the world.

At times both Rank and Abraham less dismiss the view that myth is a depiction of the natural world than account psychoanalytically for the depiction. According to Rank, “We also hope to demonstrate that myths are … structures of the human faculty of imagination which may be secondarily transferred to the heavenly bodies with their baffling phenomena” (Rank 2003, p. 9). According to Abraham, “Creation is nothing but procreation divested of the sexual” (Abraham 1913, p. 41). Rank goes beyond Abraham in attributing the failure of nature mythologists to acknowledge the true subject or source of nature myths to resistance.¹

Jung against nineteenth-century theorists of myth

Scorn for hapless nature mythologists is scarcely limited to Freudians. Jung is at least as dismissive. For example, Frazer, who epitomizes the nineteenth-century approach to myth, deems the subject matter of myth physical processes. For Frazer, the chief myths of all religions describe the death and rebirth of vegetation, a process symbolized by the myth of the death and rebirth of the god of vegetation. Thus “the story that Adonis spent half, or according to others a third, of the year in the lower world and the rest of it in the upper world, is explained most simply and naturally by supposing that he represented vegetation, especially the corn, which lies buried in the earth half the year and reappears above ground the other half” (Frazer 1922, p. 392).

Like Tylor, the other exemplar of the nineteenth-century approach, Frazer assumes that primitives themselves take their myths literally and must do so for their myths to explain events in the world. But Frazer breaks with Tylor in contending that myths about the decisions or actions of gods are in fact, albeit unrecognized by “primitives,” symbolic descriptions of natural processes themselves.

By contrast to Frazer, Jung interprets the myth of the death and rebirth of a god as a symbolic expression of a process that takes place not in the world but in the mind. That process is the return of the ego to the unconscious—a kind of temporary death of the ego—and its re-emergence, or rebirth, from the unconscious: “I need only mention the whole mythological complex of the dying and resurgent god and its primitive precursors all the way down to the re-charging of fetishes and churingas with magical force. It expresses a transformation of attitude by means of which a new potential, a new manifestation of life, a new fruitfulness, is created” (Jung 1971, p. 193).

Jung does not deny that the psychological process of the death and rebirth of the ego parallels the physical process of the death and rebirth of vegetation. He denies that the physical process accounts for the psychological one, let alone for the mythic one. For Frazer, the leap from vegetation to god is the product of logic and imagination: “primitives” observe the course of vegetation and hypothesize the existence of a god to account for it—even if, again, for Frazer, the god is a mere symbol of vegetation. For Jung, the leap is too great for the human imagination to make. Humans generally, not merely “primitives,” lack the creativity required to concoct consciously the notion of the sacred out of the profane. They can only transform the profane into a sacred that already exists for them. Humans must already have the idea of god in their minds and can only be projecting that idea onto vegetation and the other natural phenomena that they observe:

This latter analogy [between god and natural phenomenon] explains the well-attested connection between the renewal of the god and seasonal and vegetational phenomena. One is naturally inclined to assume that seasonal, vegetational, lunar, and solar myths underlie these analogies. But that is to forget that a myth, like everything psychic, cannot be solely conditioned by external events. Anything psychic brings its own internal conditions with it, so that one might assert with equal right that the myth is purely psychological and uses meteorological or astronomical events merely as a means of expression. The whimsicality and absurdity of many primitive myths often makes the latter explanation seem far more appropriate than any other.

(Jung 1971, pp. 193–194)

Even early Jung, who, perhaps under the influence of Freud, was prepared to give more weight to experience than later Jung was, distinguishes between the experience of the sun itself and the experience of the sun as a god. The experience of the sun provides the occasion for the manifestation of the sun archetype but does not cause that archetype:

I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images come from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity. One of the commonest and at the same time most impressive experiences is the apparent movement of the sun every day. We certainly cannot discover anything of the kind in the unconscious, so far as the known physical process is concerned. What we do find, on the other hand, is the myth of the sun-hero in all its countless variations. It is this myth, and not the physical process, that forms the sun archetype… . The archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas.

(Jung 1966 [“On the Psychology of the Unconscious”], p. 69)

It is not only allegories of physical processes that Jung rejects as the real subject matter of myth. It is also literal interpretations of myth like Tylor’s, which still make the subject matter outer rather than inner. For Tylor, myths are actual explanations of natural phenomena and not merely, as for Frazer, colorful descriptions of them. As indeed Tylor writes in exasperation at those who would interpret myths allegorically, “When the Apache Indian pointed to the sky and asked the white man, ‘Do you not believe that God, the Sun, … sees what we do and punishes us when it is evil?’ it is impossible to say that this savage was talking in rhetorical simile” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 262).

Jung conflates Tylor’s theory with Frazer’s, such as when he writes that “People are very loath to give up the idea that the myth is some kind of explanatory allegory of astronomical, meteorological, or vegetative processes” (Jung 1969 [“On Psychic Energy”], pp. 37–38). The phrase “explanatory allegory” conflates Tylor’s theory—myth as explanation—with Frazer’s—myth as allegory. Jung asks rhetorically “why,” if myth is really about the sun, do “the sun and its apparent motions … not appear direct and undisguised as a content of the myths” (Jung 1971, p. 444)? But the question is not in fact rhetorical. Tylor, even if not Frazer, would answer that a myth describes a sun god and not merely the sun exactly because the myth is about the sun god and not merely about the sun. Yet even if Jung were to distinguish Tylor’s view from Frazer’s, in reply to Tylor he would still invoke his fundamental claim that human beings cannot consciously invent gods. Humans can only project onto the world gods already in their minds. But why should he so limit human creativity, whether through reasoning, as for Tylor, or through sheer imagination? We are not told.

In any event myth for Jung is no more about gods than about the physical world. It is about the human mind. Myth must be read symbolically, as for Frazer, and the symbolized subject is a process, as likewise for Frazer, but the process is an inner rather than outer one. If on the one hand Jung would prefer Frazer’s interpretation over Tylor’s for reading myth symbolically rather than literally, on the other hand he would likely prefer Tylor’s interpretation over Frazer’s for appreciating the divine rather than merely natural referent of myth.

Jung interprets as projections not only nature myths but all other kinds of myths as well. He declares that “in fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious… . Just as the constellations were projected into the heavens, similar figures were projected into legends and fairytales or upon historical persons” (Jung 1969 [“The Structure of the Psyche”], p. 152).²

Hero myths, of which Jungians are especially enamored, are projections onto mere human beings of a divine or quasi-divine status: “the hero myth is an unconscious drama seen only in projection, like the happenings in Plato’s parable of the cave. The hero himself appears as a being of more than human stature” (Jung 1967, p. 391). Moderns, while often professing atheism, still create myths by projecting onto their fellow human beings exaggerated qualities that turn them into superhuman figures:

[T]he archetypes usually appear in projection; and, because projections are unconscious, they appear on persons in the immediate environment, mostly in the form of abnormal over- or under-evaluations which provoke misunderstandings, quarrels, fanaticisms, and follies of every description. Thus we say, “He makes a god of so-and-so,” or, “So-and-so is Mr. X’s bête noire.” In this way, too, there grow up modern myth-formations, i.e., fantastic rumours, suspicions, prejudices.

(Jung 1966 [“On the Psychology of the Unconscious”], p. 95)

Once Jung differentiates a psychological interpretation of myth from a nonpsychological one, he must differentiate his particular psychological interpretation from Freud’s. But he cannot take on Freud until he has taken on the natural mythologists. He cannot confront his twentieth-century rival until he has, to his satisfaction, defeated his nineteenth-century ones. So ingrained was the nineteenth-century view that it took at least as much effort on the part of Freudians and Jungians alike to defeat it as it did to defeat each other’s twentieth-century view.

Yet Jung, for all his insistence on rejecting the physical world as relevant to myth, does return to the world through the concept of synchronicity, developed with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Synchronicity restores a link between humanity and the world that the withdrawal of projections still insisted on by Jung removes. Synchronicity refers to the coincidence between our thoughts and the behavior of the world, between what is inner and what is outer. Synchronicity is not itself myth, which would be an account of a synchronistic experience. Whether synchronicity succeeds in bringing myth back to the physical world is another issue. But Jung’s fascination with the concept shows that even he, who psychologizes myth (and everything else) more relentlessly than even Freud does, cannot resist the allure of the external world.

Notes

1See Rank 1914, pp. 8–9. On nature mythologists, see also Rank 1992, pp. 224–225; 1932, pp. 214–215; Rank and Sachs 1916, pp. 37–42.

2For Jung, heroes are mythical because they are more than human. For Lord Raglan, who extends Frazer’s theory of myth to heroes, heroes are mythical because they are not historical. That is, Raglan concentrates on disproving the historicity of hero stories in order to make them mythical, where Jung takes for granted that heroes cannot be historical because they are quasi-divine. See Raglan 1936, pt. 2. See also chapter 6 of this book.

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