Jung on Myth

This chapter offers an in-depth exploration of Jung's ideas about myth. The chapter's principal concern is to show that teaching Jung on myth involves correcting several misconceptions about myth-for example, the misconceptions that Jung's is the only theory of myth, that Jung's theory is the only alternative to a literal approach to myth, that applying Jung to myth means simply finding archetypes, that the more archetypes found the better the application, that for Jung all myths mean the same thing, that for Jung myths are interpretable without any knowledge of the people and cultural context that created them, and that for Jung everything is mythic. Once these points have been clarified, the chapter provides a more sophisticated framework for understanding mythology that makes effective but critically reflective use of Jung's ideas.