ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates C. G. Jung’s use of the term “myth” an as element integral both to the shaping of individual and collective human life, and to the shaping of ideas. It shows that Jung’s treatment of myth to be at once a radical and a traditional variant of myth’s long history. Jung tells, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, of how he began a habit of debating with himself. Later this becomes a sense of being challenged by the voices of others within himself. In Jungian psychology, personal myth is an autobiographical formation presented in a dialogical relationship with the theoretical side of his psychology, which is necessarily conceptual and thus transcendent of the contingencies of autobiography. According to the Sigmund Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex, the myth treated in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex has resonated down through the centuries because it represents an inner drama of the origins of every man.
