Parallel Myths

While Bierlein doesn’t devote a great deal of text space to Joseph Campbell, Campbell’s presence looms large in any discussion of myth. His credibility as the contemporary scholar of mythology gives him more than enough rhetorical ethos to make him a key figure. Campbell’s 1988 series of interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS were a cultural watershed moment. Campbell, and his accompanying books The Power of Myth (published posthumously in 1988) and the seminal The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), brought myth back into the public imagination and reminded his audience why these stories have persisted for so many centuries. Although some specialists in the fields of folklore studies and anthropology have accused Campbell of “selection bias” (only choosing stories that support his thesis), the fact remains that Campbell, influenced by many scholars in the field, such as Jung, Freud, Bastian, and Frobenius, successfully reintroduced myth to the mainstream and revitalized it for an audience that not have thought about it for years.

Myth works in the realm of the imagination, so it makes sense that the studies of myth and psychology would intersect broadly; and Jung’s theories of archetypes and the “collective unconscious” are the ideal psychological lens through which to examine the power of myth. The son of a minister, Jung incorporated religion and faith into his work (unlike Freud, who believed that science transcended religion). He saw God not as a myth in the sense of being false but rather as an expression of the divine in human consciousness. He saw parallel myths as evidence that these characters and their stories—as well as the lessons they imparted—are ingrained in all human beings from birth, and that all people share in their deepest subconscious a reservoir of images and narratives that are vital to a full, spiritual life. Not restricting himself to psychology, Jung branched out into other fields such as Gnosticism and alchemy. Bierlein explains: “Throughout his studies of all of these, he saw a consistent pattern of more or less identical archetypes at work” (294). While Jung did not discuss his own religious beliefs in great detail, his work has been co-opted by many Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox theologians who value his scholarly imprimatur on their faith. Faith and morality are often closely linked, and one of the primary functions of myth is to open a door to the mysteries of the divine and allow those moral teachings to infiltrate our lives.

Although Freud and Jung had a falling out during their lifetimes, they both believed in the importance of dreams as windows to the unconscious. Freud believed that dreams were individual projections of the subconscious triggered by repressed childhood memories (he viewed Jung’s theories of collective projections as too spiritual and therefore unscientific). While Freud’s theories may have been less esoteric than Jung’s, he still incorporated mythic stories into his work, the myth of Oedipus in particular. Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex—the idea that all men as infants have an erotic love for their mothers and seek to supplant their fathers—is a theoretical “truth” that dovetails perfectly with the Greek story. Unlike Jung, who saw myth as an end in itself, as a path and a modality by which humans can live their fullest lives, Freud saw myth as a “transitional” phase, a phase to be ultimately replaced by the superior worldview of science.