The Jungian analysis of mythology is one which Steven F. Walker makes clear as almost a revolutionary approach to mythology in the sense that it defies all other psychologies. Walker affirms, “...Jungian psychology differentiates itself radically from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychologies that stress the task of interpreting the language of the unconscious” (Walker 3). This feud of image vs. language in the approach to mythology is the cornerstone of Jung’s ‘philosophy,’ per se. Myths, to Jung are essentially projections of our inner selves and with this comes the expansive world of the archetypes which are manifestations of physiological urges. These archetypes are assigned from the “dreamer,” or protagonists perspectives, taking the shape of things which …show more content…
He continues to accept it more and more as he helps Jamie fulfill her bucket list of things to do before she dies. This continues until Jamie dies shortly after they spent a summer together, and soon after we see the true representation of the self; the ideal self of the dreamer. This embodiment of the character’s wholeness is seen 4 year later when Landon visits Jamie’s father and explains to him how he got accepted into medical school and how he changed around his entire character and attitude by becoming a better person all because he fell in love with Jamie. The self, then, in this myth, can be understood as Landon realizing his love for Jamie. He achieved this somewhere during the time fulfilling the bucket list, and the analysis as this being the self is affirmed at the end of the movie wherein Landon narrates that Jamie changed him forever and that while he does miss her, he believes their enduring love is like the wind: he can't see it but he will always feel it. The Jungian approach to mythology can be then seen as very straightforward, a logical progression, growth, or journey towards
In movies, novels, and life, people are named as heroes. The heroes we establish and the heroes we recognize, however, may not meet the criteria for a mythic hero. A mythic hero ventures forth on his journey, and comes forth from the hero’s path to greatness. Joseph Campbell, a mythologist who studied many of the great human myths and religious tales, realized, in studying these myths and tales, that there were certain steps that every hero went through. Campbell called this “The Hero’s Journey”; it is based on Carl Jung's idea that all human beings have an archetype.
David, Adams Leening., ed. The World of Myths: An Anthology. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Everyone in life must find, and know themselves from the stories they tell. In Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business Dunstan Ramsey tells us his life’s story, from a small-town kid, to battling in the war, growing into old age and his struggle to capture and understand his personal mythology. Personal mythology is ones life story and inner self, whether they’re conscious of it or not. It’s shaped and created by experiences, moments, people, beliefs and stories. Throughout his life Dunstan is molded and influenced by different events, people, stories and his inner-self that make him better understand and make his own personal mythology. However, Dunstan’s – like most other’s – personal mythology must be set on course by a trigger event that sends
Paul Tillich’s description of the original understanding of the word myth as an account of an interaction between the human and the divine are that myths are symbols of faith, which tell stories to portray situations of ultimate concern. Myths may be ‘broken’ or ‘unbroken.’ Unbroken myths are myths which are accepted as literal statements of reality. Broken myths are myths which are interpreted as myths, as symbolic statements of reality.
When reading we often harness particular threads of thought or lenses of critique to gain entry into the implied historic or legendary nature of literature. To accurately process a tale in the light in which it is presented, one must consider the text from multiple viewpoints. Taking into consideration the psychological circumstances of the presenter/author/narrator, we can get a view into how our personal experiences can create bias in interpretation. By placing the elements of the story into the web of relationships used to interpret the external world, we bring a view of the text from the external perspective. All of these factors are at play in the relations between the perspective within a text, creating a form of reality with its own historic and mythic properties. Characters have their own histories and structures, expressed or not, and their perception in the fictional world they reside exerts influence outward to the reader of literature. This influence can create a sense of immersive reality that renders the reading experience to be mythic truth, based in facts but not emotion or direct perception, a somewhat distanced portrayal of events. However it can also be an expression of perceptive truth, events are experienced much they would be in real life – confusing and disjointed. To look into these problems of perspective, I will use examples from “The Red Convertible” by Lois Erdrich to demonstrate how Lyman’s narration style is representative of psychoanalytic concepts, showing how he deals with the situations presented in his life.
Sels, Nadia. Myth, Mind, and Metaphor: On the Relation of Mythology and Psychoanalysis. n.p. 2011. Web. 25 Mar 2014.
Throughout the years, certain writers were able to set off a deep sympathetic resonance within readers by their usage of archetypal patterns. One of those patterns is known as the hero's journey, which Joseph Campbell gave an understandable idea of in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. According to his book, while comparing world's mythology, he found that no matter how far cultures are from each other, they will still have the same structure of hero's journey in their legends (Voytilla vii).
In his research on mythology, Eric Csapo examines its large role in the ancient Mediterranean. He begins with a rejection to begin his argument with a definition of myth. He states that “it [the definition] is rather always the final precipitate of an already elaborate theory” so he starts at the basis of any theoretical interpretation, he asks what we mean by “myth.” Csapo immediately addresses the flaw of selectivity in the vocabulary used to describe a story. Most commonly the words myth, folktale, and legend are confused and misappropriated. One delineation he discusses is that myths, in theory, are based on ritual and as a product of humans, are received as true accounts of the past. He continues with the discrepancy of the word truth that anthropologists struggle with. This said, Csapo ultimately rejects these confining definitions for their cross-cultural differences and ends with the notion that myth is a social ideology that stresses the reception over the content.
Myths relate to events, conditions, and deeds of gods or superhuman beings that are outside ordinary human life and yet basics to it” ("Myth," 2012). Mythology is said to have two particular meanings, “the corpus of myths, and the study of the myths, of a particular area: Amerindian mythology, Egyptian mythology, and so on as well as the study of myth itself” ("Mythology," 1993). In contrast, while the term myth can be used in a variety of academic settings, its main purpose is to analyze different cultures and their ways of thinking. Within the academic setting, a myth is known as a fact and over time has been changed through the many different views within a society as an effort to answer the questions of human existence. The word myth in an academic context is used as “ancient narratives that attempt to answer the enduring and fundamental human questions: How did the universe and the world come to be? How did we come to be here? Who are we? What are our proper, necessary, or inescapable roles as we relate to one another and to the world at large? What should our values be? How should we behave? How should we not behave? What are the consequences of behaving and not behaving in such ways” (Leonard, 2004 p.1)? My definition of a myth is a collection of false ideas put together to create
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who developed many theories concerning the unconscious mind. Jung’s theories state that the unconscious part of a human’s psyche has two different layers, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is unique to every individual; however, the collective unconscious “is inborn.” (Carl Jung, Four Archetypes, 3) The collective unconscious is present in everyone’s psyche, and it contains archetypes which are “those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration” (Jung, Archetypes, 5); they are templates of thought that have been inherited through the collective unconscious. Jung has defined many different archetypes such as the archetype of the mother, the archetype of the hero, the archetype of the shadow, etc. These Jungian archetypes are often projected by the collective unconscious onto others. If the novel A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is examined through a Jungian archetypal lens it is possible to discern different archetypes projected by the protagonist’s unconscious self to illustrate the effects of the collective unconscious on character and plot analysis.
The Jungian approach was brought about by Carl Jung. He believed in the concept of individuation. This is the process of discovering what makes a person different form everyone else. The Jungian approach looks at one’s self through three aspects. These three aspects are the shadow, the persona, and the anima. This is said to be seen through the idea of an archetype. Jung’s concept of archetype is viewed through a symbol, character, situation, or image that evokes a deep universal response (Guerin). Archetypal literary criticism construes a text by focusing on recurring myths, prototypes and symbolisms in the narrative.
One modernist author, Herman Broch, discusses his approach to mythology in his essay “The Style of the Mythical Age.” His focus is on understanding and using archetypes as a way of analyzing mythology. He says, “Myth is the archetype of every phenomenal cognition of which the human mind is capable,” (102). For Broch, Modernist literature is a return to the mythic; myth is the only way in which the world may be understo...
Thury, Eva and Margaret K. Devinney. “Theory: Man and His Symbols.” Introduction to Mythology: Contemporary Approaches to Classical and World Myths. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 519-537. Print.
Carl Jung is the father of archetypal criticism and creator of the term collective unconscious. Jung (1875 – 1961) was born in Switzerland and learned from Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalytic critic, before breaking off and creating his own literary theory. Because of his shift to the Archetypal theory, also called mythic criticism, Jung was repelled by the psychoanalytic community, until he came up with the idea of a collective unconscious. “Jung’s ideas caused him to be banished from the psychanalytic community for the next five years. During this time, he formulated his own model of the human psyche, which would become his most important contribution to psychology and literary criticism (Bressler).” The collective unconscious is the common knowledge of themes and archetypes that every human has gained from ancestral memory. This is the bases for Archetypal criticism, the reason for humans being able to recognize archetypes and recurring patterns in literature. Archetypal literary works relate to the beliefs, knowledge, and desires of readers through recognizable themes and archetypes (Bressler 149). Archetypes are universally recognized patterns, characteristics, or objects that invoke similar emotional responses from every person. Archetypes give literary works deeper meaning because
In Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” , there is a re-occurring theme of the uncanny that is commented on by both Sigmund Freud and Ernst Jentsch, who try to explain the uncanny in different ways by highlighting events and imagery that they believe to play a key role in creating it. I however, would argue that the uncanny is a more universal theme in the story and likewise, it’s source will be much more general. In the course of this paper, I intend to prove that the source of the uncanny is the fact that the reader doubts the reality they are presented within the text in the same way that one would doubt the reality that is perceived by a schizophrenic. This is due to the fact that the narrator suffers from schizophrenia and a possible dissociative personality disorder. Furthermore, the events of the short story only occur within the twisted mind of the narrator and represent a series of psychical manifestations that were most likely imagined as a defense mechanism to deal with the traumatic loss of his father and siblings.