ABSTRACT
The point of Jungian analysis is that consciousness must learn how to relate to and interpret mythic energies projected from the unconscious. If the discovery of the unconscious can be seen to chart the progress of individualism, such individualism took on acute forms in Puritan America where institutionally-sanctoned "authenticity" reigned as a difficult ideal. Preparing the way - through their acute self-consciousness - for a discovery of the unconscious, Puritan divines outlawed any manifestation of the unconscious that originated within, rather than through the rigidly defined forms of dogma. For Ralph Waldo Emerson attempted to articulate that very awareness of the unconscious which the Puritans avoided. If the "attributes" of God allowed accomodation of potentially unknowable Godhead to finite seventeenth-century consciousness, in the nineteenth century attention was displaced to the "attributes" or "manifestations" of the "God within" - to archetypes and myths emerging from the unconscious.
