ABSTRACT
In Sigmund Freud, Joseph Campbell admired the Promethean fervor, the single-mindedness of his meditation upon the unconscious, and the honed skills of the detective, determined to analyze the most stubborn and irresistible quirks in human nature. Freud is quoted more than Carl G. Jung in most of Campbell’s published works—with a few exceptions—and in the culminating pages of The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, the last book he completed before his death. Freud and Jung influenced literature, and literature influenced them; and Campbell’s forte was the analysis of literature, but with, always, an emphasis on psyche. Heinrich Zimmer, a friend of Jung of many years standing, was the man who had introduced Jung to the profundities of Indian art, and to the very concept of the “Mandala,” so important in Jung’s later formulations of the psyche. All myths were, as Campbell said, “the masks of god,” the ever-changing transformations of the luminous ground of being.
