At a time when the place and significance of myth in society has come under renewed scrutiny, Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious contributes to shaping the new interdisciplinary field of myth studies. The editors find in psychoanalysis a natural and necessary ally for investigations in myth and myth-informed literature and the arts. At the same time the collection re-values myths and myth-based cultural products as vital aids to the discipline and practice of psychoanalysis. The volume spans a vast geo-cultural range (including ancient Egypt, India, Japan, nineteenth-century France, and twentieth-century Germany) and investigates cultural products from the Mahabharata to J. W. Goethe's opus and eighteenth-century Japanese fiction, and from William Blake's visionary poetry to contemporary blockbuster television series. It encompasses mythic topics and figures such as Oedipus, Orpheus, the Scapegoat, and the Hero, while mobilising Freudian, Jungian, object relations, and Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches.

Two acclaimed authors deliver an attack on talk therapy, from its Freudian underpinnings to contemporary practice, and expose the failure of this "pseudoscience" that still holds enormous sway over the American mind.

The mythological patrimony is an excellent example of the unconscious creative ability that brings reason both to the existence of myth as well as to its symbolic function. Reconsidering the connection between literature and psychoanalysis, this study starts from the Jungian archetypal theory up to the Freudian unconscious and its ability to produce symbols, and provides the tools for a reading of the phenomenon of the literary reworking, in the modern age, of meaningful themes and mythological figures. Therefore, revising and rewriting the myth means thinking again about one’s cultural memory, attempting to re-propose in a new dimension the ever present questions that have not found an answer and which the figures of the myth symbolise across the time. The attention focuses on figures like the elementary spirits of Romantic imagery, in particular on that of the Wasserfrau, up to the analysis of a twentieth-century reinterpretation of the myth of Undine. Moreover the Medea myth is reconsidered starting from the contradiction implicit in this figure – and in that of every Mother Goddess – in order to then explore the most problematic and conflicting aspect of this image of womanhood, the infanticide, which over time becomes the symbol of the denial of the maternal principle.

At least three major questions can be asked of myth: what is its subject matter? what is its origin? and what is its function? Theories of myth may differ on the answers they give to any of these questions, but more basically they may also differ on which of the questions they ask. C. G. Jung's theory is one of the few that purports to answer fully all three questions. This volume collects and organizes the key passages on myth by Jung himself and by some of the most prominent Jungian writers after him: Erich Neumann, Marie-Louise von Franz, and James Hillman. The book synthesizes the discovery of myth as a way of thinking, where it becomes a therapeutic tool providing an entrance to the unconscious. In the first selections, Jung begins to differentiate his theory from Freud's by asserting that there are fantasies and dreams of an "impersonal" nature that cannot be reduced to experiences in a person's past. Jung then asserts that the similarities among myths are the result of the projection of the collective rather than the personal unconscious onto the external world. Finally, he comes to the conclusion that myth originates and functions to satisfy the psychological need for contact with the unconscious--not merely to announce the existence of the unconscious, but to let us experience it.

First published in 1975, Myth and Literature considers three points at which the concept of myth has entered modern literary imagination: the use of myth – or atleast their understanding of myth -- as a creative opening by modern writers, its exploration by critics as an interpretive device, and the analogy between certain ‘sense-making’ functions of ‘myth’, ‘fiction’ and literature itself. All three of these roles show the gradual movement from a point of precise demand to a diffuse and variable concept which is more pervasive because less distinct. The paradox of myth is shown to lie in its simultaneity of its corruption with the growth of its power over the modern literary mind. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.

Ancient gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, and fabulous creatures are alive and well within our unconscious. Sigmund Freud speaks of "endopsychic myths" and "psycho-mythology"; C.G. Jung, of the "mythopoeic imagination" and the "mythforming structural elements" of the psyche. James Hillman contends that "the essence of the psyche is myth." Michael Vannoy Adams provides persuasive examples of how myths appear in our dreams and fantasies and does so with erudition, wit, and eloquent clarity. Adam's authoritative study, now appearing in a second, expanded edition, has won high praise from fellow analysts. Ginette Paris called The Mythological Unconscious "a treasure trove of the imagination," and Beverly Zabriskie cited its "balance of charm and scholarship, humor and gravitas, which simultaneously amuses and enlightens."

This Very Short Introduction explores different approaches to myth from several disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. In this new edition, Robert Segal considers both the future study of myth as well as the impact of areas such as cognitive science and the latest approaches to narrative theory.