Review of The Mythological Unconscious

Book review on The Mythological Unconscious (By Michael Vannoy Adams; Reviewed by Dennis Patrick Slattery) which includes some interesting quotes from Jung and useful references to the labyrinth and spiral. Here is the excerpt which intrigued me:

For students of mythology, especially, but not exclusively, chapters on the Centaur, Pegasus, the Bull, the Minotaur, the Unicorn and the Griffin envisioned in myth, literature and dream provide some provocative bridges between the poetic, mythic and personal imaginations. These figures, often given their own chapter, constitute the bulk of the book's content. Without stating it directly, Adams' study is concerned with the richness of the imaginationís ability and propensity to engage in what Aristotle called a mimetic action. Mimesis was understood as a making, a forming and shaping into a coherent form some construction or image, from what had been suggested or confronted in daily life, or had been imagined out of whole cloth by one's individual imagination. Part of the suggestion here is that the unconscious may not only be mythological but poetic at ground level.

By keeping the reader closely involved with these mythic images, Adams describes how the psyche seeks a confluence of experiences that graze around a central image to make sense of experience, be its source imbedded in dream, literature, mythology or waking life. He quotes Jung half way through his discussion: "symbols function to transform libido, or psychic energy." (This is what he means by "symbols of transformation.") (p.236) Given the metamorphic nature of symbols, their strength seems to rest in their power, Jung continues, "to act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a lower to a higheríform." (p.236) Such a transformation suggests that the energy of libido can be raised to a mythic or symbolic level. Jung's interest in the transformative nature of symbols suggests that energy from libido is altered, refined, shaped into a higher form of consciousness, which may be termed symbolic.

In fact, the symbolic nature of the psyche reaches into the heart of Adams' explorations, which use individual dreams, including his own, as major texts throughout the study. Here he is careful to make some clear distinctions between mythological and archetypal dreams. His idea is that all mythic dreams are archetypal, but not all archetypal dreams are mythological. (p.245) He takes this opportunity to point out a common error regarding archetypes, an error worth noting. Again, and this is one of the strongest qualities of his study, he returns to Jung's own words for us to contemplate: "It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form, and then only to a very limited degree." (p.246) Adams underscores Jung's insistent distinction: archetypes are not images. An image becomes archetypal only when it functions as the specific content of an archetype, but the image that serves this purpose only occasionally is not the archetype. While the archetypes are more akin to "constant forms," the archetypal image is are "particular contents of these forms." This difference is well-known to Jungians, but for many entering the deep waters of Jung's Collected Works, it is a difference worth repeating.

This important distinction Adams leverages into the foreground of his study and keeps it there. The distinction offers rich possibilities for investigating the nature of poetic form in poetry, mimesis as the heart of poetic action, and the nature of poetic coherence in a narrative. It also allows one to muse that perhaps poetry, as much if not more than dreams and mythic images by themselves, takes up the material world in language in such a way that it leads psyche back to these primordial forms. Such may be poetryís archetypal fundament and its most intimate association with the paradoxical world of mythology.

Also central to his study, in addition to the images mentioned above, are the shapes or structures of the labyrinth and the spiral, which he investigates through Freud and Jung, as well as the thought of James Grotstein. What emerges from his discussion is a provocative connection between, for example, the labyrinth and the interior of the body. A strength of the study resides in the manner in which Adams will offer several major thinkersí interpretations of the same theme; the overall effect is a large and sustained comparative approach to psyche and myth, all finding their common ground in the unconscious. "For Freud (and at least some contemporary Freudians), the mythological unconscious is ultimately an anatomical unconscious." (p.268) One can easily make some connections between Freud and Joseph Campbell's work on mythology and the organs of the body through what Adams evoked here in psyche's anatomical unconscious. Campbell's fundamental belief that mythology has its genesis "in the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other." (The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988, p. 39)

He also treats the spiral well through both his own insights and those of Jung: "According to him[Jung] the analytic process is not linear but circular (or cyclical), or, more accurately, spiral, and finally centripetal." (p.279) The spiral is the sine qua non archetypal image for psychological development. In Dante's Commedia, for instance, this image is essential for the pilgrim's progress through the territories of Inferno and Purgatorio, both of which consist of continuous spiral movements as they lead to the central image of the Griffin in Paradiso. This same spiraling assumes the form of the whirlpool generated by the white whale in Melville's epic Moby-Dick as it pulls the Pequod with its entire crew down into the realms of the unfathomable Pacific ocean, leaving only Ishmael, swirling and spiraling at the margins of the whirlpool, finally popping to the surface and rescued to tell the tale of the hunt to us.