ABSTRACT

A mythical sensibility is integral to the depth psychological approach to the psyche’s religious function. The dynamics of the archetypal level of the psyche, at which therapists work when they deal with both infantile material and religious experience, are sometimes closer to the imagery of myth than to any of the sciences based on logic and numbers. Jung (CW 9, i, 259) pointed out the existence of ‘myth forming’, deep structural elements in the unconscious, so that mythologems reflect the dynamics of the psyche. When the myth in which we live is unconscious, we are like a fish in water; the myth creates the atmosphere in which we live and is taken for granted. Our fundamental attitudes are then derived from it. Because the content of myth is derived from the psyche at the same level as that which gives rise to dreams and visions, similar methods are useful in understanding all of them. In Campbell’s words: ‘mythology is psychology misread as cosmology, history and biography’ (Campbell, 1969, p. 33). Myth seems to be so universal and essential that, according to Jung (CW 5, 30): ‘one could almost say that if all the world’s traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again’. The religious approach to the psyche is itself part of a mythical tradition whose roots are found in antiquity, but which is emerging in refreshed form. This re-emergence seems to be driven partly by the cultural need for a new understanding of divinity and partly by the evolution of consciousness. To assume a distinct form, it has had to wait for advances to be made in the technical aspects of psychotherapy.