5 Greek myth and psychoanalysis

“Psychoanalysis” does not mean only Freudian psychology, which, to distinguish itself from the version worked out a hundred years ago by Freud himself, is now called just psychoanalysis. But I will use this term even more broadly, as equivalent to depth psychology, which means the variety of psychology that recognizes an unconscious. The most famous psychoanalysts of myth are Freud and Jung.

By no means do all or most varieties of psychology or even of therapy recognize an unconscious. For example, humanistic or existential psychoanalysis, while retaining the word psychoanalysis, dismisses the notion of an unconscious. Its most celebrated proponent, Jean-Paul Sartre, takes the appeal to an unconscious into account for behavior as an evasion of responsibility, as “bad faith.”1 Contrary to existential psychoanalysis, the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner simply sidesteps the issue of an unconscious and limits itself to the relationship between what goes into the head and what comes out: stimulus and response, or input and output.2 The mind is considered an unknowable black box. Its existence is not denied, just circumvented.

The psychologizing of myth

It was in his most famous book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), that Freud first analyzed myth. And what myth does he discuss? Fittingly, that of Oedipus. While Freud analyzes myths throughout his writings, though never so fully as Jung, the key myth for him is that of Oedipus. His interpretation takes up only a few pages of his hefty book, and is followed by a briefer discussion of a more disguised version of the enactment of the Oedipus complex, that of Hamlet.3 (On Freud on myth, see chapter 2 of this book.)

Rank’s Freudian hero myths

In Dreams in Folklore (1911), written with D. E. Oppenheim, Freud interprets dreams in folklore, but none of the pieces of folklore considered is a myth. The classical Freudian analyses of myth are Karl Abraham’s Dreams and Myths (1909) and Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (also 1909). Both Abraham and Rank follow the master in comparing myths with dreams and in deeming both the disguised, symbolic fulfillment of repressed, overwhelmingly Oedipal wishes lingering in the adult myth teller, hearer, or reader. But Rank’s work is by far the richer and sprightlier of the two. He considers more myths and analyzes them in more detail. Most of all, he presents a common plot, or pattern, for one category of myths: heroes, specifically male heroes. Rank provides a manifest pattern that he then translates into latent terms. At the same time he boldly implies that all myths can be seen as hero myths. Rank later broke irrevocably with Freud, but when he wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, he was an apostle and soon emerged as Freud’s heir apparent. Freud himself even wrote a section of the work.4

For Rank, heroism covers what Jungians call the first half of life: the period from birth to young adulthood. This period involves the establishment of oneself as an independent person in the external world. The attainment of independence expresses itself concretely in the securing of a job and a mate. The securing of either requires both separation from one’s parents and mastery of one’s drives. Independence of one’s parents means not the rejection of them but self-sufficiency. Similarly, independence of one’s drives means not the rejection of them but control over them. It means not the denial of drives but the rerouting of them into socially acceptable outlets. When Freud says that the test of happiness is the capacity to work and love, he is clearly referring to the goals of the first half of life, which for him apply to all of life. Classical Freudian problems involve a lingering attachment either to parents or to drives. Either to depend on one’s parents for the fulfillment of desires or to fulfill them in anti-social ways is to be fixated at childhood.

Rank’s pattern, which he applies to over 30 hero myths, roughly parallels the pioneering pattern of Johann Georg von Hahn (1876), of which he was apparently unaware. Rank’s goes from the hero’s birth to his attainment of a “career”:

Literally, or consciously, the hero, here always male, is a historical or legendary figure like Oedipus. He is heroic because he rises from obscurity to, typically, the throne. Literally, he is an innocent victim of either his parents or, ultimately, Fate. While his parents have yearned for a child and sacrifice him only to save the father, they nevertheless do sacrifice him. The hero’s revenge, if the parricide is even committed knowingly, is therefore understandable: who would not consider killing one’s would-be killer?

Symbolically, or unconsciously, the hero is heroic not because he dares to win a throne but because he dares to kill his father. The killing is definitely intentional, and the cause is not revenge but sexual frustration. The father has refused to surrender his wife—the real object of the son’s efforts: “as a rule the deepest, generally unconscious root of the dislike of the son for the father, or of two brothers for each other, is referable to the competition for the tender devotion and love of the mother” (Rank 1914, p. 74). Too horrendous to face, the true meaning of the hero myth gets covered up by the concocted story, which makes the father, not the son, the culprit. The pattern is simply “the excuse, as it were, for the hostile feelings which the child harbors against his father, and which in this fiction are projected against the father” (Rank 1914, pp. 68–69).5 What the hero seeks gets masked as power, not incest. Most of all, who the hero is becomes some third party—the named hero—rather than either the creator of the myth or anyone stirred by it. Identifying himself with the named hero, the myth teller, hearer, or reader vicariously revels in the hero’s triumph, which in fact is his own. He is the real hero of the myth, which, properly deciphered, is not biography but autobiography.

Literally, the myth culminates in the hero’s attainment of a throne. Symbolically, the hero gains a mate as well. One might, then, conclude that the myth fittingly expresses the Freudian goal of the first half of life. In actuality, it expresses the opposite. The wish fulfilled is not for detachment from one’s parents and from one’s anti-social instincts but, on the contrary, for the most intense possible relationship to one’s parents and for the most anti-social of urges: parricide and incest, even rape. Taking one’s father’s job and one’s mother’s hand does not quite spell independence of them.

The myth teller, hearer, or reader is an adult, but the wish vented by the myth is that of a child of three to five: “Myths are, therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker’s personal infantile history” (Rank 1914, pp. 68–69). The fantasy is the fulfillment of the Oedipal wish to kill one’s father in order to gain access to one’s mother. The myth fulfills a wish never outgrown by the adult who either invents or uses it. Psychologically, that adult has never grown up. Having never developed an ego strong enough to master his instincts, he is neurotic: “There is a certain class of persons, the so-called psychoneurotics, shown by the teachings of Freud to have remained children, in a sense, although otherwise appearing grown up” (Rank 1914, p. 63). Since no mere child can overpower his father, the myth maker imagines being old enough to do so. In short, the myth expresses not the Freudian goal of the first half of life but the fixated childhood goal that keeps one from accomplishing it.

To be sure, the fulfillment of the Oedipal wish is symbolic rather than literal, disguised rather than overt, unconscious rather than conscious, mental rather than physical, and vicarious rather than direct. By identifying himself with the named hero, the teller, hearer, or reader of the myth acts out in his mind deeds that he would never dare act out in the world: “the myth is constituted as compensation for disowned psychic realities and the justifiable projection of these upon superhuman gods and heroes who may still be permitted that which has become shocking to man” (Rank and Sachs 1916, p. 38). Even the Oedipal deeds of the named hero are disguised, in that the heroic pattern operates at or near the manifest, not the latent, level.6

Still, the myth does provide fulfillment of a kind and, in light of the conflict between the neurotic’s impulses and the neurotic’s morals, provides the best possible fulfillment. Rank contrasts the neurotic, who has repressed his impulses and so needs an indirect outlet for them, to the “pervert,” who acts out his impulses and so presumably has no need of any halfway measure like myth (see Rank 1914, p. 93).

As brilliant as it is, Rank’s theory can be criticized on multiple grounds. One can grant the pattern while denying the Freudian meaning, which, after all, reverses the manifest one. Or one can deny the pattern itself. Certainly, the pattern fits only those hero myths, or the portions of them, that cover heroes in the first half of life. Excluded, for example, would be Paris, Telephus, Perseus, Heracles, and Amphion and Zethus. Rank’s Roman heroes are Romulus and Remus.

Rank’s pattern does not even fit all of his own examples, including that of Oedipus, the would-be paradigmatic case. Oedipus does not, on the literal level, quite kill his father intentionally. Yet far from oblivious to departures from his scheme, Rank, in defense, appeals to loose ends on the literal level to suggest a coverup. Oedipus, having been told at a banquet that his father is not the king of Corinth, asks the oracle who his real parents are. When, in reply, he is told that he is fated to kill his father and to marry his mother, he somehow forgets the uncertainty that drove him to the oracle and reverts to his innocent assumption that the king and queen of Corinth are his real parents. He flees Corinth to try to ensure that he evades his would-be fate. This illogical reaction, Rank would suggest, disguises Oedipus’s recognition of who his real parents are and of his real mission in leaving Corinth for Thebes.

Why, for Rank, is there any disparity between the literal level of the myth and the pattern it purportedly typifies? It is for the same reason that there is a disparity between that pattern and the Freudian meaning that it purportedly harbors: even the pattern, not just the meaning of it, bears too wrenching a truth for both the creator and the user of the myth to confront consciously. Still, Rank assumes that the myth is close enough for the pattern to be said to hold.

Rank actually presents two wishes that a hero myth supposedly fulfills. In addition to the sexual, Oedipal wish, the part of the pattern called the “family romance” fulfills a non-Oedipal, nonsexual wish: the wish to replace one’s present, ordinary parents with the strongest man and the most beautiful woman in the world. Rank never recognizes the incompatibility of these contrary wishes. Like Freud, he takes for granted that the wishes work in tandem since both get rid of the father. But the Oedipal aim is to get rid of the royal real father; the non-Oedipal aim is to get rid of the lowly foster father.

Despite the title of Rank’s book, the emphasis is on the hero’s Oedipal conflict with his father, not on his birth and so on the relationship with his mother.7 But the title is prescient because Rank came to regard birth rather than the Oedipus complex as the key trauma and as the key source of neurosis.8 (On post-Freudian Rank, see chapter 3 of this book.)

Jung on myth

Where for Freud and Rank heroism is limited to the first half of life, for Jung it is to be found in both halves, though in the second half even more.9 For Freud and Rank, heroism involves relations with parents and instincts. For Jung, heroism in even the first half involves, in addition, relations with the unconscious. Heroism here means separation not only from parents and anti-social instincts but even more from the unconscious. It means the formation of consciousness. Every child’s managing to forge consciousness is for Jung a supremely heroic feat. In the first half of life the object of consciousness is the external world.

The goal of the uniquely Jungian second half of life is likewise consciousness, but now consciousness of the Jungian unconscious rather than of the external world. One must return to the unconscious, from which one has invariably become severed. But the aim is not thereby to sever one’s ties to the external world. On the contrary, the aim is still to return to the external world. The ideal is a balance between consciousness of the external world and consciousness of the unconscious. The aim of the second half of life is to supplement, not abandon, the achievements of the first half. Daring to return to the unconscious without becoming overwhelmed by it is at least as much a heroic feat as that in the first half of life.

Just as classical Freudian problems involve the failure to establish oneself in the outer world, in the form of working and loving, so distinctively Jungian problems involve the failure to re-establish oneself in the inner world, in relation to the unconscious. Freudian problems stem from excessive attachment to the world of childhood. Jungian problems stem from excessive attachment to the world that one enters upon breaking free of the childhood world: the external world. To be severed from the internal world is to feel empty and lost.

Jung’s Greek heroes, in contrast to Rank’s, are heroes of the second half of life. They are adults who undertake an adventure of some kind. Among them are Odysseus, Prometheus, Hermes, Cadmus, and most of all Heracles. They are a mix of gods and humans. For psychoanalysts, the difference between gods and humans does not matter. Once psychologized, gods become either humans (Freud) or human traits (Jung).

Freud and Jung

Freud (1856–1939) and Jung (1875–1961) were a generation apart. Freud was Austrian and Jewish and was trained as a neurologist. Jung was Swiss and Protestant and was trained as a psychiatrist—a specialty that for him made him more qualified than Freud to decipher the mind. Jung was never a disciple of Freud. When the two made contact, Freud was world famous, but so, through his word association tests, was Jung, if not yet so acclaimed. They never collaborated, but they did exchange views for about a decade.

Freud and Jung were both pioneers, but not in postulating an unconscious, which had been postulated since the days of yore.10 They were pioneers, though not even here the sole pioneers, in studying the unconscious scientifically. Neither denies the existence of consciousness. Rather, they deny its importance. They deny that most ideas and feelings are conscious. Some ideas and feelings are wholly conscious, but most are only partly so and some not at all so. “Unconscious” for both means that of which one is unaware, not just at the moment but forever. The only way to become even partly conscious of what is unconscious is through therapy.

From the start, Jung refused to accept Freud’s preoccupation with sex. In turn, Freud refused to accept Jung’s preoccupation with religion. Freud viewed ideas and actions as the mechanical expression of instincts—or, more precisely, of drives, which, unlike instincts, can manifest themselves in varying forms. Whether or not strictly a materialist, Freud focused on the mental effects of frustrated sexual fulfillment.

Jung saw sex as a symbol and scorned Freud’s focus on actual sexuality. Jung was a dualist of a muddled kind, though not of a Cartesian kind. For him, the mind and the body interact. Certainly, his focus is not on the fulfillment, direct or indirect, of instincts or drives but on self-discovery. Where for Freud myth in particular is a way of venting unconscious wishes without becoming aware of them, for Jung myth is the opposite: it is a way of becoming aware of unconscious sides of the personality, albeit never fully. For Freud, myth would fail if one became aware of its real meaning. For Jung, myth would succeed if one ever did become aware of its real meaning. For Freud, myth perpetuates neurosis. For Jung, myth helps preclude neurosis.

While long coming, the break between Freud and Jung peaked with the publication of Psychology and the Unconscious (1912, tr. 1916). Here Jung explicitly repudiates Freud. Thereafter Freud ignored Jung. In turn, thereafter Jung began every work trying to refute Freud. The struggle between them was Oedipus-like.

The key difference between Freud and Jung is that for Freud the unconscious is the product of repression, where for Jung the unconscious is naturally unconscious. Repression is like a prison. It is an artificial container of what was originally conscious. The contents of the Freudian unconscious are called “complexes.” A complex is a cluster of ideas and emotions associated with a particular subject. It was Jung who identified and named the concept, which was initially used as well by Freud (Oedipus complex) and Adler (inferiority complex and superiority complex) but was eventually ceded by Jungians to Freudians. It was also Jung, not Freud, who coined the term “Electra complex” to characterize the female counterpart to the Oedipus complex. After the break with Jung, Freudians discarded the term and used “Oedipus complex” and “Oedipal stage” for girls as well as for boys.

The contents of the Jungian unconscious are called archetypes. Jung did not coin the term, which goes back to the Poimandres, the first tractate of the Hermetic Corpus.11 Where a complex is about another person, above all a family member, an archetype is a side of one’s own personality. Where the subject of an Oedipus complex or Electra complex is one’s parents, the subject of an archetype is oneself. To claim that a myth is about the Oedipus complex of the main character is to claim that the myth, rightly fathomed, is the fulfillment of the male character’s desires toward his parents. To maintain that a myth is about the father or mother archetype is to maintain that the myth, correctly understood, is about the father-like or mother-like sides of either a male’s or a female’s own personality. Archetypes no less than complexes get projected onto other persons, but they are not really about others.

Freud and Jung alike parallel myth to dream. Even if dreams are private rather than public, and even if dreams are experienced while asleep rather than while awake, the strong parallel holds. Jung actually allows for private myths. For both Freud and Jung, myths and dreams are means by which one encounters the unconscious. But for Freud, myths and dreams are what are called compromise formations. They are a middle ground between the outright denial of sexual wishes and the outright fulfillment of them. They are a compromise between the unbending inclinations of the superego and the id. The outright fulfillment of wishes would presuppose an awareness of them, which myths and dreams are concocted to prevent.

For Jung, myths and dreams are not compromises of any kind. Just as for Freud, so for Jung, they must be translated from the literal, surface level into a symbolic, underlying level. But where for Freud levels are like clothes, with each outer layer covering up the layer beneath, for Jung levels are like translations from the language of consciousness into the language of the unconscious. For Freud, the literal level is created as a barrier to deciphering the unconscious. For Jung, the literal level is merely the level on which consciousness operates. The unconscious enlists myths and dreams to try to reach consciousness, not to try to keep consciousness from reaching it. There is no cover up. Where for Freud interpretation is like deciphering the Enigma code, for Jung it is like deciphering the Rosetta stone. Yet for neither is deciphering the unconscious easy.

The Freudian unconscious is simply called the unconscious. It is composed of complexes, of which the Oedipus and Electra complexes are the best known. Jung renames Freud’s unconscious the “personal unconscious” because it is created by every person. It is created by the end of the Oedipal stage, or ages three to five. To the personal unconscious Jung adds what he names the “collective unconscious.” It is inherited genetically. Its collective nature refers not to the common content—the content of the personal unconscious is similarly the same for all—but to the common origin: one does not create it oneself. In contrast to the Freudian unconscious, the collective unconscious contains nothing anti-social or otherwise objectionable—save for a single archetype, the evil side of humans that Jung names the “shadow.” The collective unconscious is unconscious because it is “made that way.”

The Jungian goal, like the Freudian one, is to become as nearly conscious as possible of the contents of the unconscious. The collective unconscious is harder to “access” than the personal unconscious is precisely because it is inherently unconscious. Still, myth, religion, and dream are among the means of becoming aware of it, though only unconsciously so. Short of therapy, one still assumes that what one is encountering is in other persons and in the world out there, not in oneself. Therapy, for Freudians and Jungians alike, enables one to withdraw projections and to become conscious of the unconscious, if never fully so.

Campbell’s Jungian hero myths

Though commonly called one, Joseph Campbell was never a straightforward “Jungian.” Campbell differs most with Jung over the origin and function of myth. Where for Jung the archetypal contents of myth arise out of the unconscious, only in some works of Campbell’s do they do so. Even then, sometimes the unconscious for Campbell is, as for Freud, acquired rather than, as for Jung, inherited. Other times the contents of myth emerge from the imprint of either recurrent or traumatic experiences. In all of these cases, as for Jung, each society creates its own myths—whatever the source of the material it uses. Other times, however, Campbell, antithetically to Jung, is a diffusionist: myths now originate in one society and spread elsewhere.

For Jung, myth functions to enable humans to encounter the unconscious. For Campbell, myth serves additional functions as well. Campbell comes to declare repeatedly that myth serves four distinct functions: to instill and maintain a sense of awe and mystery before the world; to provide a symbolic image for the world such as that of the Great Chain of Being; to maintain the social order, by giving divine justification to social practices like the Indian caste system; and most of all to harmonize human beings with the cosmos, society, and the parts of themselves.12 Jung, ever seeking a balance between the internal and the external worlds, would doubtless applaud many of these functions for keeping humans anchored to the outer, everyday, conscious world. But he is more concerned with reconnecting humans to the inner, unconscious world, with which they have invariably lost contact.

Despite these conspicuous differences, Campbell stands close to Jung and stands closest in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which remains the classic Jungian analysis of hero myths. Campbell, to be sure, states that he became even more of a Jungian after writing Hero (see Campbell 1988a, p. 121), but he is likely basing this characterization of Hero on his reliance on the pioneering Freudian anthropologist Géza Róheim, who, however, strays from Freudian orthodoxy in a manner that Campbell adopts and carries still further toward Jung.

Jung, as noted, allows for heroism in both halves of life, but Campbell does not. Just as Rank confines heroism to the first half of life, so does Campbell restrict it to the second half. Rank’s scheme begins with the hero’s birth. Campbell’s scheme, or “monomyth,” begins with the hero’s adventure. Where Rank’s scheme ends, Campbell’s begins: with the adult hero ensconced at home.

Rank’s scheme ends with Oedipus’s killing his father and succeeding him as the king of Thebes. What follows in Sophocles’s play falls outside Rank’s focus, which is on the hero’s success, not subsequent fall and guilt. When Freud writes that “the poet … brings to light the guilt of Oedipus,” the guilt refers to Oedipus’s deeds, not to his discovery of them. The play “is … compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found” (Freud 2001, vol. 4, p. 263). Bernard Knox (1957) argued that Freud misconstrues Sophocles because the play is less about Oedipus’s fated deeds than about his insistent discovery of them. In other words, Freud and in turn Rank concentrate on the first half of life.

Rank’s hero must be young enough for his father and in some cases even his grandfather still to be reigning. Campbell does not specify the age of his hero, but the hero must be no younger than the age at which Rank’s hero myth ends: young adulthood. While some of Campbell’s own examples are of child heroes, they violate his scheme, according to which heroes must be willing to leave behind all that they have accomplished at home. Even more, they violate his Jungian meaning, according to which heroes must be fully developed egos ready to encounter the unconscious from which they have long been severed. Campbell’s heroes should, then, be in the second half of life. Campbell does acknowledge heroism in the first half of life and even cites Rank’s monograph, but he demotes youthful heroism to mere preparation for adult heroism.13

Rank’s hero must be the son of royal or aristocratic parents. Campbell’s need not be, though often is. Where Rank’s heroes must be male, Campbell’s can be female as well, though Campbell inconsistently describes the hero’s initiation from an exclusively male point of view. Finally, Campbell’s scheme dictates human heroes, even though many of his examples of heroes are divine. Rank’s pattern, by contrast, allows for divine as well as human heroes.

Where Rank’s hero returns to his birthplace, Campbell’s marches forth to a strange new world, which the hero has never visited or even known existed:

This extraordinary world is the world of the gods, and the hero must hail from the human world precisely to be able to experience the distinctiveness of the divine one.

In this exotic, supernatural world the hero encounters above all a supreme female god and a supreme male god. The maternal goddess is loving and caring: “She is the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero’s earthly and unearthly quest” (Campbell 1949, pp. 110–111). By contrast, the male god is tyrannical and merciless—an “ogre” (Campbell 1949, p. 126). The hero has sex with the goddess and marries her—the reason the hero must here be male. He competes with the male god and then kills him—the reason the hero must again here be male. Yet with both gods, not just the goddess, he becomes mystically one and thereby becomes divine himself.

Where Rank’s hero returns home to encounter his father and mother, Campbell’s hero leaves home to encounter a male god and a female god, who are neither his parents nor a couple. Yet the two heroes’ encounters are remarkably akin: just as Rank’s hero kills his father and, if usually only latently, marries his mother, so does Campbell’s hero, in reverse order, first marry the goddess and then kill the god.

The differences, however, are even more significant. Because the goddess is not the hero’s mother, sex with her does not constitute incest. Moreover, the two not only marry but also become mystically one.

Despite appearances, the hero’s relationship to the male god is for Campbell no less positive and so no less non-Freudian. Seemingly, the relationship is blatantly Oedipal. Campbell even cites Róheim’s analysis of indigenous peoples’ myths and rituals of initiation, which evince the son’s fear of castration by his father and the father’s prior fear of death at the hands of his son:

Róheim, however, departs from a strictly Freudian interpretation.14 The sons seek not sex with their mothers but reunion with them. They seek to fulfill not their Oedipal desires but their even earlier, infantile ones—a booming echo of the post-Freudian Rank. Their fathers oppose those desires not because they want to keep their wives for themselves but because they want to break their sons’ prenatal ties to their mothers. If the fathers try to break those ties by threatening their sons with castration, they also try to break the ties by offering themselves as substitutes for their wives. The fathers selflessly nourish their sons with their own blood, occasionally dying in the process.

Campbell adopts Róheim’s more harmonious interpretation of the clash between sons and fathers and carries it even further.15 Since Campbell’s hero is in the second half of life, he is not, like Róheim’s initiates, seeking separation from his mother—for Róheim, as for the renegade Rank, the central experience of life. He is seeking reintegration with her. Furthermore, he is seeking reintegration with his father as well. He is not really fighting with his father over his mother. For again, the two gods are neither his parents nor a couple. The hero is seeking from the god the same love that he has just won from the goddess. To secure it, he need not give up the goddess but need only trust in the god, who is symbolized by the father: “One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy” (Campbell 1949, p. 130). The father sacrifices himself to his son.

When Campbell writes that initiation rituals and myths “reveal the benign self-giving aspect of the archetypal father,” he is using the term in its Jungian sense (Campbell 1949, pp. 139–140). For Freudians, gods symbolize parents. For Jungians, parents symbolize gods, who in turn symbolize father and mother archetypes. The hero’s relationship to these gods symbolizes not, as for Freud, Rank, and Róheim, a son’s relationship to other persons—his parents—but the relationship of one side of a male’s personality—his ego—to another side—his unconscious. The father and the mother, on which Campbell concentrates, are but two of the archetypes of which the collective unconscious is composed. For Campbell, following Jung, myth originates and functions not, as for Freud and Rank, to satisfy neurotic urges that cannot be manifested openly but to express normal sides of the personality that have just not had a chance at realization.

By identifying himself with the hero of a myth, Rank’s myth teller, hearer, or reader vicariously lives out in his mind an adventure that, if ever directly fulfilled, would be acted out on his parents themselves. While also identifying himself or herself with the hero of a myth, Campbell’s myth teller, hearer, or reader vicariously lives out in the mind an adventure that even when directly fulfilled would still be taking place in the mind. After all, parts of the mind are what the myth teller, hearer or reader is really encountering.

Having managed to break free of the secure, everyday world and go off to a dangerous new one, Campbell’s hero, to complete the journey, must in turn break free of the new world, in which the hero has by now become ensconced, and return to the everyday one. So enticing is the new world that leaving it proves harder than even leaving home was. Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, and the Lotus Eaters thus tempt Odysseus with not just a long comfortable life but a carefree, immortal one.

Though often misconstrued, Jung no less than Freud opposes a state of sheer unconsciousness. Both strive to make the unconscious conscious. While they differ over the origin of the unconscious and over its capacity to become conscious, the ideal for both remains consciousness. Jung opposes the rejection of ordinary, or ego, consciousness for unconsciousness as vigorously as he opposes the rejection of unconsciousness for ego consciousness. He seeks a balance between ego consciousness and the unconscious, between consciousness of the external world and consciousness of the internal one. For Jung, the hero’s failure to return to the everyday world would spell his failure to resist the allure of the unconscious, just as, we shall see, Adonis does.

Breaking with Jung, Campbell seeks a state of pure unconsciousness. Campbell’s hero never returns to the everyday world but instead surrenders to the unconscious. Yet Campbell himself demands the hero’s return to the everyday world. How, then, can his hero really be spurning it? The answer is that the world to which Campbell’s hero returns is not really the everyday world but the strange new world, which turns out to pervade the everyday one. No separate everyday world exists. The everyday world and the new world are really one:

The hero need never have left home after all.

To maintain that the everyday world and the new world are one is to maintain that no distinctive everyday world exists. Campbell thus dismisses as illusory the “values and distinctions” of the everyday world. If no everyday world exists, then the hero’s apparent return to it is a sham. If no everyday world exists, then the ego, which provides consciousness of it, is itself a sham as well.

Jung rejects the everyday world, the object of ego consciousness, as the sole reality, not as a reality. While he seeks to integrate the everyday world with the new one, ego consciousness with the unconscious, he denies that it is possible to fuse them, at least without thereby dissolving both the everyday world and the ego itself.

Campbell’s hero returns home only to save others: “The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds” (Campbell 1949, p. 193).

If there is no separate everyday reality, then there can be no return to it. But even if there is a separate everyday reality, there is no reason to return to it except to apprise others of the fact. Consequently, Campbell’s chief heroes include the selfless Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Aeneas.

Like Rank’s theory, Campbell’s can be faulted on various grounds. As with Rank’s theory, one might grant the pattern but deny the meaning. Or one might question the pattern itself. Since it obviously applies only to myths about heroes in the second half of life, it excludes all of Rank’s hero myths or at least all of Rank’s portions of them. Whether it even fits Campbell’s own examples is not easy to tell because Campbell, unlike Rank, provides no set of hero myths to accompany the whole of his pattern. He cites scores of hero myths to illustrate individual parts of his pattern. They include the Greek heroes, successful or failed, Actaeon, Adonis, Ariadne, Daphne, Eurydice, Heracles, Jason, Odysseus, Phaethon, Prometheus, Psyche, and Theseus. But he never applies his full pattern to even one myth.

One might question even so seemingly transparent a confirmation of Campbell’s pattern as the myth of Aeneas, which Campbell names as an example of his pattern (see Campbell 1949, p. 130). Aeneas’s descent to Hades and return does fit Campbell’s scheme snugly, but Aeneas’s larger itinerary does not. Rather than returning home to Troy upon completing his journey, he proceeds to Italy to found a new civilization. Similarly, Odysseus’s descent to the underworld fits Campbell’s pattern, but his larger journey, which Campbell cites (see Campbell 1949, p. 58), does not. Odysseus, unlike Aeneas, does return home but, also unlike Aeneas, arrives with no boon in hand. His return is an entirely personal triumph. Since Campbell distinguishes a myth from a fairy tale on exactly the grounds that the triumph of a mythic hero is more than personal (see Campbell 1949, pp. 37–38). Odysseus’s story would thereby fail to qualify as a myth.

Freud and Jung as twentieth-century theorists of myth

It is conventionally assumed that, on myth as in general, Freud and especially Jung are arguing against each other. But on myth both are in fact arguing at least as much against nineteenth-century theorists like the pioneering anthropologists E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer.16 As I classify modern theories, nineteenth-century theorists pitted myth against science. Myth originated and functioned to do for “primitive” peoples what science now did for moderns: account for all events in the physical world. The kinds of myths studied were those about the external world. One could not consistently hold both kinds of explanations. Moderns, who were defined as scientific, were therefore logically obliged to abandon myth. The rise of science spelled the death of myth.

Twentieth-century theorists, by contrast, reconciled myth with science. Myth, they argued, was anything but the outdated counterpart to science, which might still be wholly or largely modern. Whatever myth was, it was not a literal explanation of the physical world. Moderns, still defined as scientific, could now retain myth. Theorists like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade17 maintain that myth, while still about the world, is not an explanation of the world, in which case its function diverges from that of science. Here would also fall Walter Burkert.18 Theorists like the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann and the philosopher Hans Jonas19 maintained that myth is not to be read literally, in which case the subject matter of myth is not the physical world.

Most radical among twentieth-century theorists are Freud and Jung, for whom neither the subject matter nor the function of myth is like that of science. They remove myth as far as possible from any parallel to science. For theorists like Tylor and Frazer, they hold the strongest contempt. From myth, one learns not about the world but instead about oneself. (For more on Freud and Jung as twentieth-century theorists, see chapter 4 of this book.)

Frazer and Jung on Adonis

To see the difference between the nineteenth-century approach to myth and the psychoanalytic approach, let us compare Frazer with Jung on Adonis. One could alternatively compare Tylor with Freud, but Tylor analyzes no whole myth, and Freud’s grievance is against the nineteenth-century approach to myth generally.

The myth of Adonis, for which the main sources are Apollodorus and Ovid,20 describes the miraculous birth of a preternaturally beautiful human out of a tree, the fighting over him by goddesses, and his annual sojourn in Hades with one of those goddesses. For both Apollodorus and Ovid, his birth results from his mother’s incestuous yearning for her father. Adonis’s split schedule may become routine, but it is not therefore natural. For Apollodorus, it stems from love and jealousy on the part of Aphrodite and Persephone. Nor is Adonis’s eventual death natural. He is killed and in various versions is even murdered—by either a spurned lover, Artemis, or a bested rival, Ares.

Frazer discusses Adonis in all editions of The Golden Bough.21 He locates the potted gardens of Adonis, a feature of the cult, in the first of his two—in truth, three—pre-scientific stages of culture: the stage of magic. Since at this stage humans believe that impersonal forces rather than personalities cause events in the physical world, Adonis here cannot be a personality. Without personality there is no myth, so this first stage is pre-mythic as well as pre-religious. Greeks would be planting seeds in shallow, earth-filled pots not to persuade a divine personality to grant growth but, by the magical law of imitation, to force the impersonal earth itself to grow. Mimicking the growth of crops would ensure their actual growth. The plants would shoot up quickly, but then just as quickly they would die—like the personality Adonis. Magic, like all subsequent stages of culture, originates and functions to secure food. If our forbears had had science, they would have used it instead of magic or religion.

In Frazer’s second stage, that of religion, Adonis is an outright personality. He is the god of vegetation. In fact, Frazer distinguishes religion from magic on precisely the grounds that now divine personalities rather than impersonal forces cause events in the physical world. As the god of vegetation, Adonis could, most straightforwardly, be asked for crops. Or the request could be reinforced by ritualistic and ethical obedience. Just as there is now religion, so too is there now myth: the biography of Adonis. Information from that biography would help worshipers figure out how best to get Adonis to grant crops. Frazer himself writes that rites of mourning were performed for Adonis—not, as in the next stage, to undo his death but to seek his forgiveness for it (see Frazer 1922, pp. 393–394). For Adonis has died not, as in the next stage, because he has descended to the underworld but because in cutting, stamping, and grinding the grain—the specific part of vegetation that he symbolizes—humans have killed him. Yet Adonis is somehow still sufficiently alive to be capable of punishing humans, something that the rituals of forgiveness are intended to avert. Since, however, Adonis dies because vegetation itself does, the god is here really only a metaphor for the element that he supposedly controls. As vegetation goes, so goes Adonis.

Frazer declares the existence of three stages of culture: magic, religion, and science. Beginning with the second stage, these stages arise in reaction to the failure of the preceding stage and are supposed to be mutually exclusive. But Frazer actually devotes the bulk of the second (1900), third (1911–1915), and abridged (1922) editions of The Golden Bough to a stage that comes between religion and science and, more, that manages to unite the seemingly incompatible stages of magic and religion. In this in-between stage myth flourishes most fully. The cause of the state of vegetation remains the god of vegetation—the legacy of the stage of religion. But now it is the physical condition, not the decision, of the god that determines the condition of vegetation. When the god is strong, not to say alive, the crops are alive. When the god is weak, not to say dead, the crops die.

The legacy of magic in the combined stage is that humans seek to revive the dead or ailing god by imitating the death and in turn rebirth of the god. The myth of the god is the script of the ritual, which operates by the magical law of imitation. The king plays the part of the god in the play. Rather than being killed, he simply plays the role of the dead and in turn resurrected god. The rebirth of the god means the rebirth of vegetation.

Adonis’s death means his descent to the underworld for his stay with Persephone. If in Frazer’s stage two as vegetation goes, so goes Adonis, now in the combined stage as Adonis goes, so seemingly goes vegetation. Frazer assumes that whether or not Adonis wills his descent, he is too weak to ascend by himself. By acting out his rebirth, humans facilitate it. Strictly, the employment of the law of imitation does not, as in the first stage, compel but only bolsters Adonis, who despite his present state of death is somehow still hearty enough to revive himself, just not fully. He needs a catalyst, which the enactment provides. In this stage gods still control the physical world, but their effect on it is automatic rather than deliberate. To enact the rebirth of Adonis is to spur his rebirth and thereby the rebirth of vegetation (see Frazer 1922, p. 377).

Yet even if Adonis chooses to descend to the underworld, he is not choosing the death of crops, which is just the automatic consequence of his sojourn below. Similarly, even if he chooses to return, he is not thereby choosing the rebirth of crops, which likewise simply follows automatically from his resurfacing.

In all three of his pre-scientific stages Frazer reduces Adonis to the mere personification of vegetation, in that even where Frazer does deem Adonis an independent personality—in the second stage and the combined stage—the only aspect of Adonis’s life that he considers is that which parallels the natural course of vegetation: Adonis’s death and rebirth. Yet Adonis’s final death should terminate, not perpetuate, the change of seasons. How, given his finale, he can still be either the god of vegetation or a symbol of the god of vegetation, Frazer never explains.

Unlike Frazer, Jung mentions Adonis only in passing,22 but he does mention him as an instance of the archetype of the eternal child, or puer aeternus.23 That archetype as well Jung discusses only in passing, but he does devote many pages to an allied archetype, the Great Mother.24 As examples of Greek or assimilated Great Mother gods, Jung names Demeter, Cybele, Semele, Gaia, and the Fates. Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest disciples, wrote a book on the puer archetype, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (1970), but she deals largely with cases other than that of Adonis.

From a Jungian point of view the myth of Adonis serves as a warning to those who identify themselves with the puer archetype. Where for Freud and Freudian Rank an adult stuck, or fixated, at the Oedipal stage is psychologically a child, for Jung an adult in the grip of the puer archetype is psychologically an infant and, ultimately, a fetus. The life of a puer in myth invariably ends in premature death, which psychologically means the death of the ego and a return to the womb-like unconscious.

As an archetype, the puer constitutes a side of one’s personality, which, as a side, must be accepted. A puer personality just goes too far: the puer archetype becomes the whole of his personality. Unable to resist its spell, he surrenders himself to it, thereby abandoning his ego and reverting to sheer unconsciousness.

The reason a puer personality cannot resist the puer archetype is that he remains under the spell of the archetype of the Great Mother, who initially is identical with the unconscious as a whole. Unable to free himself from her, he never forges a strong, independent ego, without which he cannot in turn resist any smothering woman he meets. His surrender to the puer archetype means his surrender to the Great Mother, to whom he yearns to return. A puer “only lives on and through the mother and can strike no roots, so that he finds himself in a state of permanent incest.” Jung even calls him a mere “dream of the mother,” who eventually draws him back into herself (Jung 1967, para. 392).

Biologically, a puer can range in age from late adolescence to middle or even old age. Psychologically, however, he is an infant. Where for Freud a person in the grip of an Oedipus complex is psychologically fixated at three to five years of age, for Jung a puer is fixated at birth. Where an Oedipus complex presupposes an independent ego “egotistically” seeking to possess the mother for itself, a puer involves a tenuous ego seeking to surrender itself to the mother. A puer seeks not domination but absorption—and thereby reversion to the state even before birth.

Because an archetype expresses itself only through symbols, never directly, the aspects of the mother archetype that a child knows are only those filtered through his actual mother or mother substitute. A mother who refuses to let her child go limits him to only the smothering, negative side of the mother archetype. A mother who, however reluctantly, finally lets her child go opens him up to the nurturing, positive side of the archetype.

Approached properly, the puer archetype provides an ego that has severed itself from the unconscious a re-entry into it. Taken rightly, the puer dimension of a person evinces itself in moments of playfulness, imagination, and spontaneity—moments that complement the rationality and sobriety of the ego. Taken to excess, the puer personality amounts to nothing but these moments. Taken rightly, the puer is childlike. Taken to excess, it is childish.

Although the puer personality arises in infancy, it manifests itself most dramatically at adolescence. A puer personality is even called an eternal adolescent. A puer is impulsive, dreamy, irresponsible, and self-centered. He makes great plans but never acts on them. If he works at all, he works only sporadically and only when interested. A puer avoids commitments and refuses to be tied down. He craves excitement and seeks risks. Scornful of the mundane, everyday world, he waxes spiritual and otherworldly. Sexually, he is promiscuous. The difference between a puer personality and a normal adolescent is that a puer remains an adolescent for life. In fact, it is normally at adolescence that the son finally breaks away from the mother. Rites of passage serve precisely to force a break. Still, the puer personality is infantile rather than adolescent. It arises in infancy, not adolescence, and at adolescence merely expresses its infantilism in adolescent form.

Jung pits the puer archetype against that of the hero.25 A hero succeeds where a puer fails. Strictly, there are two stages of heroism. In the first half of life an ego is heroic in managing to liberate itself from the unconscious and establish itself in society. A hero manages to secure a fulfilling relationship and a job. A puer fails to do either. In the second half of life a now-independent ego is heroic in managing to break with society and return to the unconscious without falling back into it. Because a puer never establishes an independent ego, he never faces the possible loss of it. Where a real hero is like Daedalus, a puer is like Icarus. Because a puer is a failed hero in the first half of life, he is necessarily a failed hero in the second half as well. Indeed, for him there is no second half.

Nevertheless, Jung does not oppose the development of the puer archetype any more than he does the cultivation of any other archetype. He opposes the domination of one’s personality by any one archetype, including that of the hero. He espouses balance among archetypes. That ideal has been attributed by some to the political balance among the cantons in Jung’s native Switzerland.

Adonis is a quintessential puer because he never marries, never works, and dies young. He never grows up. His puer personality spans the period from infancy to adolescence. He must first break out of a tree to be born. His mother, transformed into the tree, is reluctant to let him out. Like any other mother, she might be overjoyed at his conception. But unlike normal mothers, she wants to hoard him. In Ovid’s version (10.503–518) Adonis himself has to find an exit.

Adonis’s mother has herself proved unable to break out of her father, the only male who has ever aroused her. Even if her incestuous desire results from a curse, the curse is punishment for her indifference to other men, for which a prior attachment to her father is likely the latent cause. In any event her desire is not really for intercourse with her actual father but for absorption in the father archetype. After all, she too has never severed herself from the unconscious and therefore has never grown up. Not coincidentally, she is incapable of raising Adonis, whom others, whatever their motives, must raise instead. She is under the sway of the puella archetype.

No sooner does Adonis emerge from the tree than, in Apollodorus’s version (3.14.4), Aphrodite thrusts him back—not, to be sure, into the tree but into a chest. She thereby undoes the birth that had proven so arduous. She tells no one because she wants Adonis all to herself. When Persephone, to whom Aphrodite has entrusted the chest without revealing its contents, opens it, she similarly falls in love with Adonis and refuses to return him. Each goddess, just like Adonis’s mother, wants to possess him exclusively. Although Zeus’s decision leaves Adonis free for a third of the year, Adonis readily cedes his third to Aphrodite. Never, then, is he outside the custody of these archetypal mother figures.

Seemingly, a Jungian interpretation of the myth faces the same contradiction as Frazer’s: Adonis annually breaks free of the mother yet eventually dies permanently. Like Frazer, a Jungian might dismiss Adonis’s final death as an aberration and instead stress his perennial liberation from the mother. In that case Adonis would be a hero rather than a puer. Jung himself identifies Adonis with Frazer’s annually reborn corn (grain) god: “The corn-god of antiquity was Adonis, whose death and resurrection were celebrated annually. He was the son-lover of the mother, for the corn is the son and fructifier of the earth’s womb” (Jung 1967, para. 430 n. 79).

Yet a Jungian interpretation need not ignore Adonis’s final demise, which is reconcilable with his recurrent revival because the annual cycle of death and rebirth can symbolize not Adonis’s annual liberation from the mother but the opposite: his annual return to the mother, even if that return ends in release. Where a normal child needs to be born only once to liberate himself from the mother, Adonis, as a puer, continually returns to the mother and so must be born again and again. His final death is simply his permanent rather than temporary return to her. It is the culmination of his past returns rather than a break with them. Previously, he had been strong enough to resist the mother temporarily. Now he can no longer do so.

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