Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious by Sanja Bahun

Author:Sanja Bahun
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429916458
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

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. Writes Rank: “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). Writes Abraham: “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; on nature mythologists, see also Rank, 1992, pp. 224–25; Rank & Sachs, 1916, pp. 37–42).

Toward nature mythologists, Jung is at least as dismissive as Rank. Campbell’s contempt is for what he idiosyncratically assumes is the literal interpretation of myth by religion, especially Western religion. Jung’s criticism of Tylor, who is cited only occasionally, is not wholly clear. Apparently, Tylor, and Frazer as well, are guilty of mischaracterising “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, which only in turn is divided 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, 1917/1926/1943, pars. 108–109)

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