…myth-making is one of the means whereby the generalized truths of human knowledge finds expression and particularly the disavowed impulses of the mind escape the ‘censor’ of acquired social control and find their way into indirect confession. Myths constitute the dreaming subconscious soul of the race telling its story.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who developed his theories from experimentation, put this on firmer footing. Jung saw the ancient gods as archetypes of human behavior and saw mythology as the personification of subconscious “forces” at work in the human psyche mixed with real events. As such it is cultural. We’ll discuss his psychological theories in more detail in a later class. It is interesting to note, however in passing, that culture is not an externally produced phenomenon but internal created and projected onto the external world.

What does myth mean to us?

The individual mythology of modern men and women is a synonym for their “collective psychology.” Sometimes events in our lives trigger this collective part of our inherited nature, and we step into an unusual state of existence. In short, our lives at times parallel myths, and when that happens, it reeks havoc. We live out a Greek tragedy. Murray Stein speaks of the personal experience of myth in an essay in Facing the Gods:

Besides giving voice to the depth of experience and relating separate pieces of experience into a configuration, the connection of personal experience to myth can produce or consolidate a psychological inflation (assimilation of the ego by the unconscious, often archetypal, content). The individual is unconsciously living a myth rather than a life. More accurately, an unconscious content is living him, rather than he it. …one telltale clue is the individual’s inability to reflect in a novel way on his experience, his thoughts, and behavior patterns. Inflation closes the doors to such reflection; and the person becomes “locked in” to a restricted field of vision.

This “psychological inflation” constitutes the underlying subject of this class. The gods of the ancient Greeks are the archetypes of human existence and the primary forms that govern the psyche. The principal and irreducible language of these archetypes is the metaphorical discourse of myths. 

Discovering Your Personal Mythology

 The intellect has a propensity for storytelling. It’s the way we structure our past experiences and, in some ways, create reality. In this sense, your personal mythology is the story of your life seen looking backward. We are mythical beings, but generally we only realize this in past tense. We view and analyze our lives through the process of storytelling and thus become mythical beings. As Carl Jung said in the prologue to his autobiography: 

Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories.” Whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.

The story of our lives is our myth. People in the later stages of life seem to become more mythical, to enjoy looking back and spinning yarns about what they experienced. One thing to keep in mind is that myths don’t necessarily pertain to the literal part of our lives but how we experience events internally, our perceptions and emotional reactions. These reactions can be radically different from what one might expect based solely on what actually takes place.

(As an aside, I have gone to considerable lengths to developed my own personal mythology. I traveled Greece for ten weeks, kept a journal and turned it into a paperback book. I developed a website for it, and the paperback maybe purchased on Amazon.)

The primary focus of this class is the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The degree to which the student might wish to get into the development of a personal mythology is left up to the student. Reference material for such an activity is contained in any number of excellent books on the subject. In particular, Personal Mythology, The Psychology of Your Evolving Self, by David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner provides a detailed, structured approach. Murray Stein’s In Midlife provides considerable details and insight into what many people experience while going though midlife and how it relates to Odysseus’ ten years of wandering about the Aegean in Homer’s The Odyssey. Hillman’s essays in Oedipus Variations provide insight into the psychotherapeutic process and how the Oedipus myth relates to all of us. I’ll be talking a great deal more about Hillman’s essay in a later class. The components of personality are covered in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s two books, Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman.