Carl G. Jung

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was born in Switzerland, the son of a Protestant priest who died when Carl was 21. He studied medicine in Basel until 1900, where his interest in psychiatry was awakened by the end of his studies, and led him to work at a psychiatric hospital in Zürich. In 1902 he got his MD with the dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, about a somnambulistic girl of 15 years, who was a medium.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Between 1905 and 1913 he was a lecturer of psychiatry at the University of Zürich. In 1909 he opened a private practice, which he would run until his death.

He sent his 1906 book The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (the ailment later by Eugen Bleuler renamed schizophrenia) to Sigmund Freud, which was the start of a collegial friendship between them. This was turned into dispute and separation, especially with Jung's 1912 book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, (published in English 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious), which questioned Freud's focus on sexual trauma and the Oedipus complex, arguing for his own alternative theories about the psyche.

Jung's writing on mythology is not to be found concentrated to a few books on this subject, as is the case with Freud, but sprayed all over his works. There is rarely a text of his that does not touch on the subject, and just as rarely one devoted exclusively to it.

So, Jung's theories on myth come to us in bits and pieces, spread over all his writing. The job of systematizing has mainly been left in the hands of his pupils and followers. Among them, though, it is equally difficult to find one with the intention to bring together and present Jung's theories on myth in any authoritative and organized fashion. His gospel remains an elusive one, presenting few straightforward answers. That is quite befitting his psychological doctrine, which is in itself rather mythological.

Considerable Influence

Jung's ideas on myth and religion have made far more of an impact than those of Freud, among scholars as well as to an even larger extent on the general public. Where Freud remains little more than a joke in the field of history of religion and the study of mythology, Jung has made a lasting impression through most of the 20th century, to partly fade only in the last decade or so of it. And he is far from forgotten yet.

Apart from his own widely read writing, which deals considerably with myths, mythology, and many elements of religion, he has greatly influenced a number of significant scholars and other writers on these themes. The most important of them are Mircea Eliade (1907-86) and Joseph Campbell (1904-87).

Eliade wrote many books on myths and how they should be interpreted. He also formed the minds of numerous students as the head of the University of Chicago History of Religion department for almost 30 years. Campbell's books have become bestsellers and made deep impressions on the general public as to how myth should be understood. He was the central participant in a 1987 TV series about mythology, which received a huge audience in many countries.

In addition, there is the continued work of Jungian theorists and psychologists more often than not involving their perspective on myth in their writing on the mind of man and the inner workings of society. Notable Jungian theorists dealing extensively with myth are Erich Neumann (1905-1960), Marie-Louise von Franz (1915-1998), and James Hillman (1926-2011).[1]

By the sheer mass of it, Jungian literature on myth has set a standard and its theories have become a paradigm of sorts as to how myths should be understood. The Jungian perspective has widely influenced how mythological material is presented and interpreted.

For most of the 20th century, a substantial part of the literature on myth and lore used a Jungian viewpoint, whether or not that was adequate to the material. Myths were often even translated into the Jungian vocabulary, to the extent that their original content got distorted.

It can be compared to how the missionaries, who collected myths around the world in the 19th century, interpreted these myths through a Christian filter. Especially when they recorded exclusively oral traditions in this manner, they left us with flawed material of primary sources difficult to reconstruct. Our world has since become increasingly integrated, whereby orally transmitted mythology free from outside influence is nowadays almost impossible to find.

Washing off the Jungian influence from much of the literature on mythology of the 20th century is a challenge comparable to doing the same with the Christian influence on the literature of the preceding century.

Opposing Freud

Where Freud was mainly interested in the origin of religion and explaining the functions of rituals, Jung focused on myth and legend, the stories told within religions. To him, these stories were the essence of any religion, and therefore he was keener to explore the origin of myths than of religion as a whole.

Also contrary to Freud, Jung found myth and its meaning within the individual psyche. In spite of myths and their components being shared by all members of a society — and essentially by all mankind — he saw their workings as strictly personal. According to Jung, man is on a quest towards self-realization, and myths serve as clues to this process. Although every person is on this quest, fulfilling it to various degrees, it is a solo venture, each man for himself.

This difference between Freud and Jung can be loosely compared to the generalizations of Mahayana and Hinayana in Buddhism. The former is characterized as a joint effort together with people of the same conviction to find spiritual perfection, while the latter is doing it in solitude. Freud saw the individual as deeply dependent on society and anxious to conform to it, while Jung saw society as little more than a number of individuals of similar nature.

Therefore, to Jung the myths contain messages to the individuals, not the group, no matter how many people are involved in retelling and listening to them. Myths speak to each of us in the same way, but have to be dealt with individually as opposed to collectively.

Jung himself pointed out other differences to Freud, mainly regarding how to interpret dreams and fantasies:

I did not reduce them to personal factors, as Freud does, but — and this seemed indicated by their very nature — I compared them with the symbols from mythology and the history of religion, in order to discover the meaning they were trying to express.[2]

That may seem like a collective perspective and not an individual one, but the general symbols he found were messages for the individual to deal with according to personal needs, in a process he fittingly called individuation.

Jung also objected to the sexual themes Freud mostly found in dream interpretation:

Whereas he will always look for sexual causes, I trace the origin of dreams back to age-old mythological influences. Deriving from our remotest ancestors, there slumber in all of us subconscious memories which awaken at night and seek to compensate the false attitude modern man has towards nature.[3]

The above quotes demonstrate what utter importance Jung put on myths. To him they were little less than manifestations of a worldwide premise from the dawn of man, comparable to the divine "Fiat!" ("Let there be!") by which the god of the Bible created the world.[4] Myths, in his view, were clues to the inner workings of the human mind and its mission, no less.

He expressed it as if certain that he had revealed the very key to how the human mind works. His students were just as convinced of the same. Time has gnawed on this conviction, but still far from discarded it completely. Jung's vision is far too attractive and exciting to be ignored. In that way, it shares the quality of the myths it explores. Whether accurate of false, it is a wonderful story.

Three Basic Jungian Concepts

In the following, I have as much as possible used the original English translations of Jung's texts, since they have been more or less altered in later editions — either by Jung or by new translators. Sticking to the earliest versions was necessary when searching for the timeline of the emergence of his ideas and his terminology for them.

There are three basic concepts in Jung's psychology and analysis of myth: the collective unconscious, the archetypes, and individuation. They are closely connected, describing the human mind as on a quest for self-realization. The collective unconscious is where the archetypes are stored. They emerge to the conscious mind, urging it to realize the existence and function of the collective unconscious. That is the process of individuation.

Already in his first written work, the dissertation from 1902, Jung's interest in the unconscious and the imagery emanating from it was evident. He describes the case of a 15 years old girl who acted out a wild imagination, thinking of herself as a medium, who in her frequent trances expressed the personalities of deceased persons. This girl, Hélène Preiswerk, was Jung's cousin, which he neglected to mention in his dissertation.[5]

Unconvinced of her medial abilities, Jung was still amazed by her fantasy in creating them and making them believable. He regarded it as a form of cryptomnesia,[6] the error of believing that images and ideas are new, when they are actually deeply hidden memories of the past. The visions of the patient were examples of cryptomnesic images from the unconscious. He says about their nature:

It is characteristic of cryptomnesia that the picture which emerges does not bear the obvious mark of the memory-picture, is not, that is to say, bound up with the idiosyncratic super-conscious ego-complex.[7]

It makes him think of Freud's investigations of dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, "which disclose the independent growth of repressed thoughts."[8] But Jung expresses a sense of more to be found in the phenomenon. In the conclusion, Jung writes:

I naturally examined occultistic literature pertinent to the subject, and discovered a store of parallels from different centuries with our gnostic system, but scattered through all kinds of work mostly quite inaccessible to the patient.[9]

That is very close to his later ideas of the archetypes and their seat in the collective unconscious. But it would take him quite some time to get there.

The Collective Unconscious

Neither Jung nor Freud were the first to use the term unconscious (Unbewusste) as a noun, representing a certain entity within the psyche. It was the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling in his book System des transcendentalen Idealismus from 1800.

He discussed the dynamics between the conscious and the unconscious, calling the former the absolutely subjective and the latter the absolutely objective.[10] To Schiller, the unconscious should have priority over the conscious, and he explained:

The objective world is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit; the universal organon of philosophy — and the keystone of its entire arch — is the philosophy of art.[11]

But a book which left much more of a mark on the ideas of an unconscious was Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten from 1869 (translated into English 1884 as Philosophy of the Unconscious).

The massive text had a significant impact at the time, making the concept of the unconscious widely established long before the works of Freud and Jung.

Jung mentions in his memoirs that he read Eduard von Hartmann "assiduously" already in his university years.[12] But the text is most definitely the philosophy of the unconscious, and not the psychology of it. The unconscious of von Hartmann's interpretation is metaphysical, if not to say cosmological, discussed alongside the thoughts of Schelling as well as Kant, Leibnitz, and other philosophers. He still spoke of an unconscious in the psyche of man, but it led him to speculate way beyond the mind:

One of the most important and familiar manifestations of the Unconscious is Instinct, and the conception of Instinct rests on that of Purpose.[13]

This purpose, without which instinct would be pointless, led him on to seeing an aim in nature and a design to it. It took him quite far from the psychological application made by Freud and Jung.

The collective unconscious is a concept of Jung's own invention. His first description of it was in a 1916 lecture, which was the same year translated into French. It was published in English the following year.[14]

In this text, he describes the conflict inside every individual mind between personal aspirations and the collective demands. When one dominates the other, the person suffers. This tension exists in the conscious as well as the unconscious. Jung considers the risk of the collective material taking over, because of its quantity. Individuation is the process by which a personality can develop in spite of the overwhelming collective material in both the conscious and the unconscious.[15]

He does not yet use the expression collective unconscious, but implies it. The English translation has other terms, such as collective psyche and impersonal unconscious, whereof the latter may be what Jung later called collective unconscious.

In a summary at the end of the text Jung expresses the need for dividing both the conscious and the unconscious contents into individualistic and collectivistic, defining the latter: "A content is collectivistic whose developing tendency aims at universal validity."[16] The individualistic content, on the other hand, tends towards differentiation from the collective. He also states:

There are insufficient criteria by which to designate a given content as simply individual or collective, for uniqueness is very difficult to prove, although it is a perpetually and universally recurrent phenomenon.

He was soon to tackle that insufficiency.

The Archetypes

Jung's first treatment of the term archetype was in the 1919 symposium text Instinct and the Unconscious.[17] Before that he had used the expression 'primordial image' (Urbild in German), derived from the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt.[18] In this text, he also talks about the collective unconscious, smoothly bringing them together in one simple formula.

After defining what belongs to the personal unconscious, he talks about another stratum of the unconscious, containing "supra-individual" qualities which were not acquired but inherited, like instincts and impulses. He continues:

Moreover, in this stratum we discover the pre-existent forms of apprehension, or the congenital conditions of intuition, viz. the 'archetypes' of apperception, which are the a priori determining constituents of all experience. Just as instincts compel man to a conduct of life that is specifically human, so the archetypes or categories a priori compel intuition and apprehension to forms specifically human. I propose to designate the sum of such inherited psychic qualities as instincts and archetypes of apprehension by the term 'collective unconscious'.[19]

Jung states that he takes the term archetype from St. Augustine, although briefly discussing its use also by Plato, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer.[20] In a later text he clarifies:

The term "archetype" is not found in St. Augustine, but the idea of it is. Thus in De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII he speaks of "ideae principales, 'which are themselves not formed . . . but are contained in the divine understanding.'"[21]

Augustine in turn connected the concept to Plato's world of ideas, and thought of these principal ideas to "exist nowhere but in the very mind of the Creator."[22] Like Plato's ideas or forms, they are the very molds of anything to be materialized:

The ideas are certain original and principal forms of things, i.e., reasons, fixed and unchangeable, which are not themselves formed and, being thus eternal and existing always in the same state, are contained in the Divine intelligence. And though they themselves neither come into being nor pass away, nevertheless, everything which can come into being and pass away and everything which does come into being and pass away is said to be formed in accord with these ideas.[23]

The similarities to Jung's archetype concept are not hard to spot, but to Augustine these original and principal forms were tools by which God created from his mind, and not existing outside of it.

Individuation

The term individuation I have not found Jung use before 1912, when he did so briefly in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, translated to English in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious. Discussing sacrifice, he calls the individual mask the veil of individuation, and later in a footnote he describes the separation from the mother as an individuation. In both cases he puts the word within quotes.[24]

As mentioned earlier, Jung also used the term in his 1916 lecture "The Conception of the Unconscious," where he describes individuation as a necessary process to avoid drowning in one's unconscious:

Upon close consideration it is astonishing to note how much of our so-called individual psychology is really collective; so much that the individual element quite disappears. Individuation, however, is an indispensable psychological requirement. The crushing predominance of what is collective should make us realize what peculiar care and attention must be given to the delicate plant "individuality," if it is to develop.[25]

Clearly, the concept of individuation had by then rooted in Jung's theories on the psyche and its needs. Five years later, in 1921, he published the book substantially devoted to the process of individuation: Psychologische Typen.

The English translation from 1923 had the subtitle The Psychology of Individuation. In the definitions of terms at the end of the book, he writes about individuation:

In general, it is the process of forming and specializing the individual nature; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a differentiated being from the general, collective psychology.[26]

There is no separate definition of the collective unconscious, but the one about the unconscious explains what he means about the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. He describes the contents of the latter as originating in "the inherited possibility of psychic functioning in general, viz. in the inherited brain-structure." He adds:

These are the mythological associations — those motives and images which can spring anew in every age and clime, without historical tradition or migration.[27]

Archetype, too, lacks its own entry among the definitions, but is described in that about image:

The primordial image (elsewhere also termed the 'archetype') is always collective, i.e. it is at least common to entire nations or epochs. In all probability the most important mythological motives are common to all times and races.[28]

He prefers the expression primordial image as opposed to personal image, explaining it as having an archaic character "in striking unison with familiar mythological motives" based on material from the collective unconscious.

In the definition of intuition, he also describes the archetypes, and here with that term:

These archetypes, whose innermost nature is inaccessible to experience, represent the precipitate of psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line, i.e. the heaped-up, or pooled, experiences of organic existence in general, a million times repeated, and condensed into types. Hence, in these archetypes all experiences are represented which since primeval time have happened on this planet.[29]

The last sentence makes a claim close to the absurd. All experiences since primeval time — that is a lot. But what he implies is that the archetypes are condensations of significant experiences, numerously repeated by generations of humankind. Not just any trivial thing or events that have been so rare that they are long forgotten before repeated.

Apart from in the definitions, Jung uses the word archetype in only two of the chapters. Individuation is used three times, but collective unconscious twenty times, most of them in a chapter discussing the type-problem in poetry.

The poets, at least the major ones and in their principal and most inspired work, "create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream." But they lack conscious understanding of the true meaning of what emerges.[30]

So, by this time, in 1921, Jung was comfortable with the three concepts archetypes, collective unconscious, and individuation, and how to utilize them in his psychology. But he had not yet started making a habit of it. He settled with arguing for their utility when used to understand the psyche.

It would take additional years before he did so himself consistently, without hesitation.

Notes

Robert A. Segal, Jung on Mythology, Princeton 1998, p. 43. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "Introduction to Kranefeldt's Secret Ways of the Mind," transl. R. F. C. Hull from the German book Die Psychoanalyse published in 1930. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, volume 4, Princeton 1985, p. 330. ⟰
Reports from a press conference in Vienna 1928, Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, edited by William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull, Princeton 1977, p. 44. ⟰
Jung had his own relation to Fiat. He regarded God's utterance "Let there be light!" as "the projection of that immemorial experience of the separation of the conscious from the unconscious." Carl G. Jung & Károly Kerényi, On a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, transl. R. F. C. Hull, New York 1949 (originally published in German 1942), p. 119. ⟰
Eugene Taylor, The Mystery of Personality: A History of Psychodynamic Theories, New York 2009, p. 41. ⟰
The term cryptomnesia was first used by the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy in a study of the medium Hélène Smith from 1900 (Des Indes à la planète Mars: Étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie), published in English the same year. Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia, transl. Daniel B. Vermilye, New York 1900, p. 59 and other pages. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena" (originally published in German 1902), Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, transl. M. D. Eder, ed. Constance E. Long, London 1916, p. 86. ⟰
Ibid., p. 82. ⟰
Ibid., p. 93. ⟰
Friedrich von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, transl. Peter Heath, Charlottesville 1978 (originally published in German 1800), p. 208. ⟰
Ibid., p. 12. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, edited by Aniela Jaffé, transl. Richard and Clara Winston, New York 1965 (originally published in German 1962), p. 101. ⟰
Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, transl. William Chatterton Coupland, London 1884 (originally published in German 1869), vol 1, p. 43. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "La Structure de l'inconscient", transl. M. Marsen, Archives de Psychologie XVI, Geneva 1916. An English translation, "The Conception of the Unconscious", was published in Carl G. Jung, Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, 2^nd ed., London 1917. The original German lecture manuscript, Über das Unbewusste und seine Inhalte, was lost until after Jung's death in 1961, when it was found in his personal archives. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "The Conception of the Unconscious", Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, transl. M. D. Eder, ed. Constance E. Long, 2^nd ed., London 1917, pp. 455f. ⟰
Ibid., p. 473. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "Instinct and the Unconscious", transl. C. F. and H. G. Baynes, first published in the British Journal of Psychology X, London 1919. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell, New York 1971, p. 52. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "Instinct and the Unconscious," Contributions to Analytical Psychology, transl. H G. and Cary F. Baynes, London 1928, pp. 275f. ⟰
Ibid., pp. 278f. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious," The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, volume 9.1, transl. R. F. C. Hull, Princeton 1969, p. 4. The essay is an edited version of a text from 1934, which just states that the term archetype "derives" from Augustine. Carl G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality, transl. Stanley Dell, London 1940, p. 53. ⟰
Augustine, Eighty-three Different Questions, qu. 46, transl. David L. Mosher, Washington D.C. 1982, p. 80. ⟰
Ibid., p. 80. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, transl. Beatrice M. Hinkle, New York 1916 (originally published in German 1912), pp. 433 and 554. ⟰
Jung, "The Conception of the Unconscious," pp. 455f. ⟰
Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types or The Psychology of Individuation, transl. H. Godwin Baynes, London 1923 (originally published in German 1921), p. 561. ⟰
Ibid., p. 616. ⟰
Ibid., pp. 555f. ⟰
Ibid., pp. 507f. ⟰
Ibid., pp. 237f. ⟰

Carl G. Jung on Myth and Religion

Jungians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Archetypes of Mythology: Jungian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined, from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

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