Myths and Psychology.

What is the relationship between myths and psychology? How can they help us and why are they necessary?

There are many currents of thought, generally very scientific and rational, that consider myths as mere ways of answering life's questions. Answers were answered in that way because they could not be answered in any other way. And, as science developed, they were devalued, and are considered obsolete and useless today.

Other authors, including Carl G. Jung, consider myths to be an extremely important part of the human psyche. For Jung, myths are symbols that represent archetypal issues of human societies.

In different cultures, different myths reproduce and manifest similar stories, and this finding is what led Jung to consider that it is not that a myth is created by a rational and deliberate action of responding to something, but rather that they largely emerge from the root of contents from the Collective Unconscious.

If we see it from this perspective, myths are essential to understand and frame basic existential human issues, such as birth, death, the passage from one cycle to another, polarities, and their possible transcendence, among others.

Through mythology, we can understand many of the issues that happen in our lives, and frame them in a matrix that we share with others. The lack or emptiness of myths and symbols today is, according to Jung, the cause of most major conflicts and problems for human beings.

The human being without the myth is alone, dealing with and having to solve his own issues that were interpreted and framed by our ancestors since time immemorial. It is to largely ignore our history and what connects us with others.

For Joseph Campbell, an American mythologist who had an exchange with Jung, myths are the dreams of society. By this, he means not only that they are productions in which the unconscious intervenes, but that they are also part of who we are. Dreams can manifest personal matters or collective matters, and mythological elements appear in the latter. Myths are the creations of peoples, those that link us with those who lived long before us, and what allows us to link with the earth and with the world in which we live.

Not knowing or denying them isolates us. Much of what we live through, the transitions we experience, the trials or losses we face, have been experienced by many before. And those experiences leave their sediment, they are transmitted to us and constitute a fundamental part of our psychic universe.

Knowing the mythology of our culture and that of others allows us to recognize where we come from, why we consider or are distressed by certain situations, which makes us understand that much of it comes from elsewhere. The mythology of other cultures allows us to understand what unites us, beyond geographical limits.

Myths are, from this perspective, intimately linked to Psychology. And knowing them implies an essential part of the path of self-knowledge.

 

Thank You

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