ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a fresh perspective on a highly significant but neglected area of analytical psychology: Carl Gustav Jung’s Conception of the Personal Myth. The personal myth is an evolving lifelong and life-wide project that seeks to find a middle way between the extremes of fatalism and agency. It includes ideational and cultural material and is mythopoetic in conception. It entails coming to terms with one’s distinctive life pattern and bringing it to its fullest possible expression. Perhaps the ambivalent nature of Jung’s reactions is best captured by his argument, made in 1930, that Adler’s individual psychology cannot be considered psychoanalytic and, in the following paragraph, that everyone interested in psychoanalysis should study Adler’s writings. In 1934, Jung compared Adler and Freud and argued they both explain neurosis, from an infantile angle and place the therapist in the position of an expert.
