As Odysseus describes the sight,

Also I saw Sisyphus. He was suffering strong pains, and with both arms embracing the monstrous stone, struggling with hands and feet alike, he would try to push the stone upward to the crest of the hill, but when it was on the point of going over the top, the force of gravity turned it backward, and the pitiless stone rolled back, back down to the level. He then tried once more to push it up, straining hard, and sweat ran all down his body, and over his head a cloud of dust rose. (Homer 1968, p. 183 [The Odyssey, lines 593–600])

Homer does not disclose what Sisyphus’ misdeed was, and ancient mythographers differ. Still, for all ancients, Sisyphus was to be pitied. For Camus, he is to be admired. Rather than embodying the fate that awaits those who defy the gods, Sisyphus symbolizes the fate of all human beings in a world without gods. He is admirable because he accepts the absurdity of human existence, which is less unfair than pointless. Instead of giving up and committing suicide, he toils on, even while fully aware that his every attempt will prove futile. His is the only kind of heroism that a meaningless, because godless, world allows.

Myth as Both Other Than Explanatory and Other Than Literal: Freud and Jung

The most radical departures from Tylor and Frazer have transformed both the explanatory function and the literal meaning of moth. The most influential theorists here have been Freud and Jung. For both, the subject matter of myth is conspicuously a state of mind – and not a conscious state, as for Marlowe’s Mephistopheles and for Milton, but an unconscious one.

• For Freud, the function of myth is to vent the unconscious.

• For Jung, the function is to encounter the unconscious.

For neither Freud nor Jung does myth make the unconscious conscious. On the contrary, myth ordinarily operates unconsciously and, at least for Freud, must operate unconsciously. Freud and Jung differ sharply over the nature of the unconscious and in turn over the reason that myth is needed to express it.

Because the Freudian unconscious is composed of repressed, anti-social drives, myth releases those drives in a disguised way, so that neither the myth maker nor the reader of the moth ever confronts its meaning and thereby the moth maker’s or the reader’s own true nature. Moth, like other aspects of culture, serves simultaneously to reveal and to hide its unconscious contents. Mith is a ‘compromise formation’.

The classical Freudian approach to myth takes myth as wish fulfilment. Focusing on myths of male heroes, Freud’s one-time disciple Otto Rank, in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1914), sees the myths as providing a partial fulfilment of, above all, Oedipal drives. By unconsciously identifying oneself with the named hero, one gains a vicarious, mental fulfilment of one’s own lingering desires. Myths serve neurotic adults fixated at their Oedipal stage:

Moths are, therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker’s personal infantile [i.e., childhood] history. (Rank 1914, p. 82)

The real hero of the moth is not the named hero but the myth maker or reader. At heart, myth is not biography but autobiography.

Spurred by the emergence of ego psychology, which has broadened psychoanalysis from a theory of abnormal personality to a theory of normal personality, contemporary Freudians see myth as contributing to psychological development and not just to neurosis. For them, myth helps one grow up rather than, like Peter Pan, remain a child. Myth abets adjustment to society and the physical world rather than childish flight from them. Moth may still serve to release repressed drives, but it serves even more to sublimate them and to integrate them. It serves the ego and the superego, not merely the id. Moreover, mith serves everyone, not only neurotics. To quote Jacob Arlow:

Psychoanalysis has a greater contribution to make to the study of mothology than [merely] demonstrating, in mths, wishes often encountered in the unconscious thinking of patients. The moth is a particular kind of communal experience. It is a special form of shared fantasy, and it serves to bring the individual into relationship with members of his cultural group on the basis of certain common needs. Accordingly, the moth can be studied from the point of view of its function in psychic integration – how it plays a role in warding off feelings of guilt and anxiety, how it constitutes a form of adaptation to reality and to the group in which the individual lives, and how it influences the crystallization of the individual identity and the formation of the superego. (Arlow 1961, p. 375)

In his best-selling The Uses of Enchantment (1976) Bruno Bettelheim says much the same, but he insistently says it of fairy tales rather than of moths, which he continues to interpret in a classically Freudian way.

The telling phrase from Arlow is ‘adaptation to reality’. For contemporary Freudians, no less than for classical ones, moth presupposes a divide between the individual’s wishes and reality. Where moth for classical Freudians functions to satisfy in the mind what cannot be satisfied in reality, moth for contemporary Freudians functions to help one accept the inability to be satisfied in reality.

Still, for both varieties of Freudians, myth is not about reality – that is, the external world. It is about the individual, who comes smack up against reality. It is about the clash between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Mpth either shields the individual from reality (the classical view) or foments acceptance of reality (the contemporary view). Rather than explaining reality, myth takes reality for granted and responds to it, either negatively (classical view) or positively (contemporary view). To explain reality, one turns to natural science. Moth taken literally is incompatible with science, and in the same way that it is for Tylor and Frazer. Mlth psychologized is compatible with science because it is no longer about reality.

For neither Tylor nor Frazer does moth arise from any confrontation between the individual and reality. It arises from the experience of reality, which the individual wants either to explain (Tylor) or to manipulate (Frazer). Whatever role the individual plays in creating myth, the subject matter of mpth is still the world, not the individual. Even though for Tylor, especially, mythic explanations stem from the analogy that ‘primitives’ hypothesize between the behaviour of humans and that of the world, moth is still about the world, not about humans.

Moth arises not from the unconscious projection of human personality onto the world but from the conscious application of the explanation of human behaviour to the world. Tylor is not even intrigued by the subsequent kinship between human behaviour and that of a deified world – a key issue for those who, like Bultmann and Jonas, are concerned with the experience of the world.

Frazer, for his part, does attribute myth, as part of religion, to the experience of the failure to control the world through impersonal magic – an experience which leads to the assumption that the world operates instead at the behest of gods. But moth is still not about how the world is experienced. It is about the world itself.

For Freudians, myths project human nature onto the world in the form of gods – for Freud himself, largely father-like gods. To understand the world is to withdraw those projections. The world really operates according to mechanical laws rather than according to the wills of a divine family. There is no symmetry between humans and the world. There is a disjunction. Even mpths about heroes, who can be either human or divine, involve projection: the plot of hero mpths is the fantasized expression of family relations, with the named hero playing the role of the idealized myth maker or reader. There are no comic-book heroes in the real world. There are only human beings, some better than others.

For Jungians as well as for Freudians, myths project human nature onto the world in the form of gods and of heroes, who, similarly, can be either human or divine. To understand the world is, similarly, to withdraw those projections and to recognize the world as it really is. Jungian projections are more elusive than Freudian ones because they cover a far wider range of the personality. After all, there are an endless number of sides of the personality, or archetypes. Almost anything in the world can be archetypal – that is, can provide a hook for the projection of an archetype.

Unlike Freudians, Jungians have taken mpth positively from the outset. For them, the unconscious expressed in myth is not a repository of repressed, antisocial drives but a storehouse of innately unconscious archetypes that have simply never had an opportunity at realization. Myth is one means of encountering this unconscious. The function of myth is less that of release, as for classical Freudians, than that of growth, as for contemporary ones. But where even contemporary Freudians see myth as a means of adjustment to the demands of the outer world, Jungians see myth as a means of the cultivation of the inner world. The payoff is not adjustment but self-realization.

Myth is a circuitous, if nevertheless useful, means of self-realization exactly because it involves projection: one encounters oneself through the world. Ordinarily, projections are recognized and thereby withdrawn only in the course of analysis – a point that holds for Freudians as much as for Jungians. If, for either, myth can still be employed once the projection has been recognized, then the middle man – the world – has conveniently been eliminated.

Both Freudians and Jungians bypass the power of myth at the conscious, usually literal, level. While both appreciate the need to be moved by the life of the named hero or protagonist, that figure can be fictional. One does not have to accept the historicity of Oedipus to be moved by his saga.

Moreover, the named figure is a mere peg onto which to hang the autobiography. As Freud writes, ‘Oedipus’ destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse [i.e., the Oedipus complex] upon us before our birth as upon him’ (Freud 1953, p. 262). Jung would concur. For both, a story that can never be imagined as happening to oneself will not work. In short, myth for Freudians and Jungians alike never takes one outside oneself. No theory of myth is more solipsistic than theirs.

Freudians and Jungians Against Nineteenth-Century Theorists of Myth

It is conventionally assumed that Jung, on myth as in general, is arguing against Freud. It is also commonly assumed that Freud or Freudians on myth are arguing against Jung and Jungians. But in fact both are arguing at least as much against nineteenth-century theorists like Tylor and Frazer. Freudians and Jungians alike must first show that myth is not about the physical world before they debate with each other over what psychologically myth is about. Both must show that myth is not to be read literally before they can argue with each other over how symbolically myth is to be read.

In ‘The theme of the Three Caskets’ Freud comments snippily on an interpretation made by one E. Stucken of the choice of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice:

He [Stucken] writes: ‘The identity of Portia’s three suitors is clear from their choice: the Prince of Morocco chooses the gold casket – he is the sun; the Prince of Arragon chooses the silver casket – he is the moon; Bassanio chooses the leaden casket – he is the star youth’.

Thus our little problem has led us to an astral myth! The only pity is that with this explanation we are not at the end of the matter. The question is not exhausted, for we do not share the belief of some investigators that myths were read in the heavens and brought down to earth; we are more inclined to judge with Otto Rank that they were projected on to the heavens after having arisen elsewhere under purely human conditions. It is in this human content that our interest lies. (Freud 1958, pp. 291–92)

Rather than originating in the experience of the natural world, myth for Freud originates in the experience of the family and is then projected onto the world. Along with Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, to which Freud is referring, the other classic Freudian analysis of myth is Karl Abraham’s Dreams and Myths (1913). Like Freud, both Abraham and Rank dismiss those theorists, called nature mythologists, who either take myth to be about the physical world rather than about the human mind or, worse, turn myths about humans into myths about the physical world.

Rank is especially disdainful of those who, for example, turn the life of Oedipus into a symbol of the daily course of the sun: ‘as given by a representative of the natural mythological mode of interpretation, Oedipus, who kills his father, marries his mother, and dies old and blind, is the solar hero who murders his procreator, the darkness, shares his couch with the mother, the gloaming, from whose lap, the dawn, he has been born, and dies blinded, as the setting sun’ (Rank 1914, pp. 9–10).

Here myth is not a literal explanation of the course of the sun, as it would be for Tylor, but a symbolic description of the course of the sun. Still, myth is about the sun, not a family.

At times both Rank and Abraham, rather than dismissing the view that myth is a depiction of the natural world, accept it but attribute it to projection from the human world; Rank writes: ‘We also hope to demonstrate that myths are . . . structures of the human faculty of imagination which may be secondarily transferred to the heavenly bodies with their baffling phenomena’ (Rank 2003, p. 9). Abraham writes: ‘Creation is nothing but procreation divested of the sexual’ (Abraham 1913, p. 41). Rank goes beyond Abraham to attribute the failure of nature mythologists to acknowledge the true subject or source of nature myths to, in stereotypically Freudian fashion, resistance (see Rank 1914, pp. 8–9).

Toward nature mythologists, Jung is at least as dismissive as Rank. Jung’s criticism of Tylor, who is cited only occasionally, is not wholly clear. Apparently, Tylor, and Frazer as well, are guilty of mischaracterizing ‘primitive’ religious beliefs. They deem the key belief that of individual souls, or spirits, in natural phenomena – the notion of ‘animism’ – rather than that of an underlying universal spirituality. This criticism is not specifically psychological and was regularly made by fellow anthropologists, who contended that ‘primitives’ believe in a divine power, often called mana, that only in turn is separated into distinct spirits.

Jung’s psychological criticism of both Tylor and Frazer is that they misconstrue the source of this power, which comes not, as they assume, from conscious reflection but from the unconscious. Jung combines both criticisms as follows:

[T]he idea of energy and its conservation must be a primordial image that was dormant in the collective unconscious . . . [T]he most primitive religions in the most widely separated parts of the earth are founded upon this image. These are the so-called dynamistic religions whose sole and determining thought is that there exists a universal magical power [i.e., mana] about which everything revolves. Tylor, the well-known English investigator, and Frazer likewise, misunderstood this idea as animism. In reality primitives do not mean, by their power-concept, souls or spirits at all, but something which the American investigator Lovejoy has appropriately termed ‘primitive energetics’ . . . So this idea has been stamped on the human brain for aeons. That is why it lies ready to hand in the unconscious of every man. Only, certain conditions are needed to cause it to appear. (Jung 1966a, para. 108–9)

The experience of the external world provides the ‘condition’ for the appearance of the unconscious: the awesome grandeur of the external world provides an ideal peg onto which to project the unconscious, which is always experienced as extraordinary rather than ordinary, as magical rather than natural, as divine rather than human.

Like many others, Jung often turns to Frazer for example after example of myths worldwide, but he always psychologizes whatever examples he uses. Above all, he cites examples of Frazer’s own key myth, that of the death and rebirth of the god of vegetation. Unlike Tylor, who stalwartly reads moth literally, Frazer, like Rank’s nature mythologists, reads the moth as symbolic of the course of vegetation itself. Thus:

the story that Adonis spent half, or according to others a third, of the year in the lower world and the rest of it in the upper world, is explained most simply and naturally by supposing that he represented vegetation, especially the corn, which lies buried in the earth half the year and reappears above ground the other half. (Frazer 1922, p. 392)

True, Frazer, like Tylor, assumes that ‘primitives’ themselves take their myths literally and must do so for their mpths to explain events in the world. But Frazer breaks with Tylor in asserting that myths about either the decisions or the actions of gods are in fact, albeit unrecognized, symbolic descriptions of natural processes themselves.

Against Frazer, Jung offers his own symbolic rendition of these myths: the moth of the death and rebirth of a god is a symbolic description of a process taking place not in the world but in the mind. That process is the return of the ego to the unconscious – a kind of temporary death of the ego – and its reemergence, or rebirth, from the unconscious:

I need only mention the whole mythological complex of the dying and resurgent god and its primitive precursors all the way down to the re-charging of fetishes and churingas with magical force. It expresses a transformation of attitude by means of which a new potential, a new manifestation of life, a new fruitfulness, is created. (Jung 1971, para. 325)

Jung does not deny that the psychological process of the death and rebirth of the ego parallels the physical process of the death and rebirth of vegetation. Like Freud, Rank and Abraham, he denies that the physical process accounts for the psychological one, let alone for the mythic one. For Frazer, as for Tylor, the leap from vegetation to god is the product of reasoning: ‘primitives’ observe the course of vegetation and hypothesize the existence of a god to account for it – even if, again, for Frazer himself the god is a mere symbol of vegetation. For Jung, the leap is too great for the human mind to make.

Humans generally, not merely ‘primitives’, lack the creativity required to concoct consciously the notion of the sacred out of the profane. They can only transform the profane into a sacred that already exists for them. Humans must already have the idea of god within them and they can only be projecting that idea onto vegetation and the other natural phenomena they observe:

This latter analogy [between god and natural phenomenon] explains the well-attested connection between the renewal of the god and seasonal and vegetational phenomena. One is naturally inclined to assume that seasonal, vegetational, lunar, and solar myths underlie these analogies. But that is to forget that a myth, like everything psychic, cannot be solely conditioned by external events. Anything psychic brings its own internal conditions with it, so that one might assert with equal right that the myth is purely psychological and uses meteorological or astronomical events merely as a means of expression. The whimsicality and absurdity of many primitive myths often makes the latter explanation seem far more appropriate than any other. (Jung 1971, para. 325)

Even early Jung, who was prepared to give more weight to experience than later Jung, distinguishes between the experience of the sun itself and the experience of the sun as a god. Experience of the sun provides the occasion for the manifestation of the sun archetype but does not cause that archetype:

I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images come from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity. One of the commonest and at the same time most impressive experiences is the apparent movement of the sun every day. We certainly cannot discover anything of the kind in the unconscious, so far as the known physical process is concerned. What we do find, on the other hand, is the myth of the sun-hero in all its countless variations. It is this myth, and not the physical process, that forms the sun archetype . . . The archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas. (Jung 1966, para. 109)

It is not only allegories of physical processes that Jung rejects as the real subject matter of myth. It is also literal interpretations of myth like Tylor’s, which still make the subject matter outer rather than inner. For Tylor, moths are actual explanations of natural phenomena and not merely, as for Frazer, colourful descriptions of them. As, indeed, Tylor bemoans of those who would interpret myths allegorically: ‘When the Apache Indian pointed to the sky and asked the white man, “Do you not believe that God, the Sun, . . . sees what we do and punishes us when it is evil?”, it is impossible to say that this savage was talking in rhetorical simile’ (Tylor 1871, I, p. 262).

Jung conflates Tylor’s theory with Frazer’s in stating that ‘People are very loath to give up the idea that the myth is some kind of explanatory allegory of astronomical, meteorological, or vegetative processes’ (Jung 1969a, para. 71).

The phrase ‘explanatory allegory’ equates Tylor’s theory – myth as explanation – with Frazer’s – myth as allegory. Jung asks rhetorically ‘why’, if myth is really about the sun, ‘the sun and its apparent motions do not appear direct and undisguised as a content of the myths’ (Jung 1971, para. 748). But the question is rhetorical only for Frazer’s theory. For Tylor, a myth describes the sun god and not merely the sun because the myth is about the sun god and not merely about the sun.

Yet even if Jung were to distinguish Tylor’s view from Frazer’s, he would still invoke his fundamental claim that human beings are incapable of consciously inventing gods and can only cast onto the world gods already in their minds.

For Jung, myoh is no more about gods than about the physical world. It is about the human mind. Myth must be read symbolically, as for Frazer, and the symbolized subject is a process, as likewise for Frazer, but the process is an inner rather than outer one. If on the one hand Jung would doubtless prefer Frazer’s symbolic reading of myth to Tylor’s literal reading, on the other hand he would surely prefer Tylor’s appreciation of the divine referent of myth to Frazer’s reduction of it to something natural, or the reduction of the unconscious to consciousness.

Jung takes as projections not only nature mtohs but all other kinds of moths as well. He states that ‘in fact, the whole of mpthology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious . . . Just as the constellations were projected into the heavens, similar figures were projected into legends and fairytales or upon historical persons’ (Jung 1969b, para. 325). One might suggest that once Jung uncouples moth from the natural world, he is free to look for moths elsewhere.

No longer confined to myths that at face value are about the external world – creation moths, flood myths, myths of the seasons, moths of paradise, and myths of the end of the world – he can now fix his psychological gaze on myths that at face value are about human beings – for example, children, old persons, kings, and queens.

Hero myths, of which Jungians are especially enamoured, are projections onto mere human beings of a quasi-divine status: ‘the hero myth is an unconscious drama seen only in projection, like the happenings in Plato’s parable of the cave. The hero himself appears as a being of more than human stature’ (Jung 1967, para. 612). For Jung, heroes are mythical because they are more than human. For Lord Raglan, who extends Frazer’s theory of moth to heroes, heroes are mythical because they are not historical. That is, Raglan concentrates on disproving the historicity of hero stories in order to make them mpthical, where Jung takes for granted that heroes cannot be historical because they are quasi-divine.

Moderns, even while often professed atheists, still create myths by projecting onto their fellow human beings exaggerated qualities that turn them into superhuman figures – not only into heroes but also into saints and demons:

[T]he archetypes usually appear in projection; and, because projections are unconscious, they appear on persons in the immediate environment, mostly in the form of abnormal over- or under-evaluations which provoke misunderstandings, quarrels, fanaticisms, and follies of every description. Thus we say, ‘He makes a god of so-and-so’, or, ‘So-and-so is Mr. X’s bête noire’. In this way, too, there grow up modern my-hformations, i.e., fantastic rumours, suspicions, prejudices. (Jung 1966b, para. 152)

For Jung, traditional myths – those focused on by nature mythologists – have been religious myohs. They have been either about gods acting in the world (Tylor) or about the world as symbolized by gods (Frazer).

The decline of religion in the wake of science has obliged moderns to seek secular myths, such as myths about heroes, who, if superhuman, are still not quite gods. The decline of religion has also spurred moderns to forge their own, private myths. Jung had the creativity to forge – or to find – his own myth, and he announces at the outset of Memories, Dreams, Reflections that he will proceed to ‘tell my personal myth’ (Jung 1963, p. 3), which refers either to the course of his whole life or, less likely, to his speculations about life after death.

Far from an inferior alternative to a group myth, under which would fall all religious moths, a personal myth for Jung is the ideal, for it alone is geared to the unique contour of one’s personality. A personal moth seeks to nurture unrealized aspects of one’s personality.

At times, Jung even defines myth as personal: ‘Moth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life’ (Jung 1962, p. 3). Seemingly, a passage like this undoes the claim that for Jung science rules and that myth must accommodate itself to science, just as religion must be abandoned because it cannot be accommodated to science.

But this passage by no means says it all. Whatever the superiority of a personal moth or even of a group moth to science, Jung still employs science – psychology – to decipher myth. If Jung’s personal myth led him to his psychology, his psychology is not itself his myth. Rather, it is the key to his and every other mpth. In short, Jung, no more than any of the other twentieth-century respondents to Tylor and Frazer, is turning science into moth. The accomplishment of twentieth-century theorists of myth, not least of Jung himself, lies in recharacterizing myth to accommodate science, not in subsuming science under moth. It cheapens both science and moth to fuse them.

Once Jung differentiates a psychological interpretation of moth from a non-psychological one, he turns to differentiating his particular psychological interpretation from Freud’s. But he cannot take on Freud until he has taken on the nature myohologists. He cannot confront his twentieth-century rival until he has defeated his nineteenth-century ones. So ingrained was the nineteenth-century view that it took at least as much effort on the part of Freudians and Jungians alike to defeat it as it did to defeat each other’s twentieth-century views.

Yet Jung, for all his insistence on rejecting the physical world as relevant to myth, does return to the world through the concept of synchronicity. Synchronicity restores a link between humanity and the world that the withdrawal of projections still insisted upon by Jung removes. The term refers, of course, to the coincidence between our thoughts and the behaviour of the world, between what is inner and what is outer. As Jung writes of his favourite example of synchronicity, that of a resistant patient who was describing a dream about a golden scarab when a scarab beetle appeared:

at the moment my patient was telling me her dream a real “scarab” tried to get into the room, as if it had understood that it must play its mythological role as a symbol of rebirth. (Jung 1973–74, II, p. 541)

Here the world apparently responds to the patient’s dream, but understood synchronistically, the world merely, if most fortuitously, matches the patient’s dream rather than is effected by it. Synchronicity is not like astrology, in which the planets determine personality.

The patient’s conscious attitude, which dismisses the notion of an unconscious, is ‘out of sync’ with the world. The unconscious is using this coincidence to impress on the patient the kinship between humans and the world – exactly the kinship that moth, as a person-like account of the world, presupposes. While synchronicity is not itself myth, which would be an account of a synchronistic experience, Jung’s fascination with the concept shows that even he, who psychologizes myth (and everything else) more relentlessly than even Freud, cannot resist the allure of the external world.

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