Psychology of the Unconscious (1915) by Carl Jung—Reviewed by Miguel A. Faria, MD

According to Swiss psychoanalyst and philosopher Dr. Carl Jung, modern as well as primitive man pondered the world with two types of thinking: Directed thinking, which primitive man used for survival skills and modern man for technological progress, is conscious thinking that requires effort and is used for solving problems. Fantasy or Non-directed thinking, used extensively by primitive man and men of ancient civilizations, requires little effort, leads to dreams, mythology, child-like fantasies, wishful thinking, artistic concepts, and maybe unconscious and symbolic.

Jung drew extensive parallels between the fantastic mythological thinking of primitive men and the similar make-believe world of children and concluded that “the infantile thinking in the child’s psychic life, as well as dreams, is nothing but a re-echo of the pre-historic and the ancient.” Jung agreed with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who he quoted extensively in his work, that “in dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity” and that during dreaming and even fantasy thinking “the atavistic relic of humanity manifests itself within us.” [p. 28]

Taking a page from biology, Jung concluded that as ontogeny (embryology of the individual) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary history of the group), ontogenesis (psychology of the individual) recapitulates philogenesis (the collective thinking of the group). Moreover, “the conscious fantasies tell us of mythological or other material of undeveloped or no longer recognized wish tendencies of the soul.” This material includes sexual fantasies and even sodomy, which is expressed in mythology (although it has now been forgotten or has become taboo), includes phallic symbols, rape stories, animal symbols, marriage by capture, goat men (satyrs), which are but theriomorphic representations of deities and “sodomitic inclinations of humanity.” [p. 33]

Using and essentially psychoanalyzing the writings of an American diarist, a young lady dreamer named Miss Frank Miller, Jung affirms that when people speak through their unconscious, they tell their most important, intimate things of themselves. He gave a kaleidoscopic view of the world psychoanalyzing the young lady’s writings and making thereby interesting observations about a life of fantasy interposed with the various mythological creations of the world, e.g., Milton’s Paradise Lost, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, andthe Book of Job. [p. 43-45] Miller’s traveling reminiscences and fantasy writings are personal “introversion” [p. 50-51], and Jung noted her tendency for easy “autosuggestibility” [p. 47], not leaving out her hidden eroticism, e.g., “brine, wine, and damsel fine.” [p. 52] Miss Miller’s fantasy world is due to denial of her libido, connected to her father due to “the original sin of incest [that] weighs heavily for all time upon the human race” [p. 62-63]—half of it due to the “commotion of sleepless nights absolutely and entirely due to the sexual problem”; the other, more productive half, to “intellectual sublimation.” [p. 64-65]

Jung tells us about the recurring theme of the deeds and plights of heroes and legendary figures, e.g., Judas’s betrayal and fate, “damned or not.” [p. 37-38] Job lost all he had due to Satan, but he was innocent and did not fall victim to temptation. He avowed his innocence. [p. 59-61] He made sometimes tenuous connections, e.g., Anaxagoras’ cosmos was created from a world wind of chaos [p. 57, 61], which is in accordance with Leibnitz’s dum Deus calculat, fit mundus (“Divine thought created the world”). [p. 58]

Jung also discussed Goethe’s Faust and made what I think is an unfair comparison: “Job is not conscious of the conflict within his own soul…whereas Faust openly confesses the torments of his soul.” [p. 68] But is an unconscious thought the equivalent to a conscious evil deed? I think not. Moreover, Jung presents God in the Book of Job as both creator and destroyer—Behemoth and Leviathan, as the power of nature unchained: “God is to be considered as the representative of a certain sum of energy (libido).” [p. 71]

Intellectual sublimation can be productive in two ways: “creative thought which from itself produced its object,” and the creative almost mystic satisfaction attained through “don d’amour (“the gift of love”). [p. 62-63] But this is not easy because most people do not like to work as a pleasurable activity or do not have the intellectual capacity required to create. While non-directed thinking requires no effort, directed thinking does. Intellectual creation requires directed thinking and work done voluntarily.

Moreover, as previously stated, even those intellectually inclined are burdened with fantasy thinking, and according to psychoanalytic thought, despite the passage of eons of time, the problem of the primeval father figure and the original sin of incest has not been solved, a concept with which Jung appears to agree with Freud, despite their disagreement as to the concept of the libido. Freud ended narrowing the libido to mostly sexual drive or desire; whereas for Jung, the libido is a universal concept that in the final analysis permeates all aspects of energetic life.

For Jung, attitudes of the libido “lead us unto life.” Those with poor libido are guilty because the struggle against it is in vain. Nothing remains for mankind but to work in harmony with its will. And he, once again, cites Nietzsche, “Zarathustra teaches us this impressively.” [p. 72] The libido is the driving force of life that has the power to put into motion our life’s endeavors. For Jung the libido is vital energy required for work and creation, and it may or may not be sexual. In the pre-sexual stage of development, the libido of a child is simply nourishment and nutrition.

Nevertheless, at this point in his career, Jung seemed to strive to develop Jungian psychoanalysis in accordance with Freud as much as possible, especially in clinical practice. He agreed with Freud that unconscious conflict arising from the libido lead to anxiety, which may be relieved by transference via psychoanalysis or religion. But we must remember that Jung’s use of the term libido is very general and very subjective. Freud’s libido is much more focused on repressed sexual desires.

Freud does not disagree with Jung when the latter stated that religious people may obtain relief with the evangelical command to cast one’s anxiety upon the Redeemer, who is sinless and forgives your sins, both conscious and unconscious. Thus, turning over “the burdening complex of the soul to the Deity” is recognition of the conflict and like in the transference of psychoanalysis is “a conditio sine qua non for the psychoanalytic condition of recovery.” [p. 75] Jung is much more forgiving of religion, particularly the Christian religion for the alleviation of psychopathological conditions than Freud.

Jung wrote that society does not thrive in dissoluteness, therefore Christianity was needed as a moral restraint on animal instinct. Savages had not only infantilism but also brutality in their way of life. In the primitive state of nature, life, as the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted in Leviathan (1668), was “nasty, brutish and short.” Nutrition and survival were paramount. Civilization came about, and, according to Jung, Imperial Rome unchained the libido, a condition that resulted in the prevalence of violence. Now modern society has come about, and the rules of behavior have repressed man’s libido, and the result has been widespread psychoneuroses. Neither Jung or Freud has found a solution to this societal problem.

Yet, Freud chastised man for his religious attitude and his necessity to seek comfort from religious instruction as he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930):

[H]is religion, that system of doctrines…that explains this riddle of the world with an enviable completeness and that assures him that a solicitous Providence is watching over him and will make up to him in a future existence for any shortcomings in this life. The ordinary man cannot imagine this in any other form but that of a greatly exalted father, who understands the needs of his sons or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never rise above this view of life. [p. 23]

For his part, Jung stated that religion has given many believers redemption from sin as well as a moral code to follow, which was necessary at the time of the advent of Christianity. The competing faith, Mithraism, which Jung discussed throughout his book in various contexts, lost because it was inferior to Christianity. Although both religions brought redemption and promised salvation, Mithra sacrificed the bull, while Christ sacrificed himself on the cross, “the tree of life.” [ p. 75-86]

In Chapter IV of Part I in his book, Jung continued his analysis of Miss Frank Miller’s unconscious thoughts as he extracted them from her travelogue. While traveling from Geneva to Paris, Miss Miller wrote a poem, “The Moth to the Sun,” to which Jung attributes great significance. The analogy of the proverbial moth flying dangerously close to the light is obvious. Jung believed that Miss Miller was the moth herself although she was not aware of it. Miss Miller’s repressed sexual eroticism was sublimated into the sun and into God, the sources of light. On the other hand, Goethe’s Faust succumbs to the temptation of the devil because he did not recognize the tremendous force of his libido driven by violent passions. [p. 87-93]

Literature and mythology are inextricably entwined with Jung’s psychological analysis of the unconscious. He came back again and again to discuss religion, cults, and mysticism, as they relate to the human collective psyche, and he noted that the motif of mystery cults is one of becoming one with God, which is an ancient theme. Mystic ecstasy likewise is an emotive motif stemming from sexual libido, directed to light, fire, the sun, God—symbols of the father, but it may use other means of expression. For example, the myth of the phoenix that rises from its own ashes, arose from the myth-sun motif. The sun rises in the east and sinks into the ocean in the west, giving rise to the journey of the mythological sun-hero, who like the sun has a cyclic mission of death and rejuvenating. The mythological sun-hero accomplishes his tasks and is killed (sacrificed), only to be resurrected. He becomes the “well-beloved.” He becomes the dying god, like Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, and Christ, who like the sun, dies only to come back again rejuvenated—the sol Invictus. The sun-hero has gone back to the mother’s womb, rejuvenated, and returned to the world. [p. 97-101]

According to Jung, these mythological fantasies arise in the unconscious, when passions are repressed, and hidden desires are projected into mythology. Jung’s studies of the modern Romantic literature (e.g., Goethe’s Faust, the works Nietzsche, particularly Zarathustra, and Byron’s poetic works), and the mythology that has come to us from primeval times showed that the power of goodness and order is forever threatened by the power of unchained passions. The animal passion of the libido, to Jung, is like an all-engulfing surge of water projected mythologically into the all-destroying flood, and out of all this destruction a new and better creation is allowed to emerge from the deep. [p. 102-126]

Next, in the first three chapters of Part II of Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung discussed he “Genetic Theory of the Libido” and “the Transformation of the Libido as a Possible Source of Primitive Human Discoveries.” [p. 157-190] Although Jung worked hard to obtain supporting and corroborating evidence in Freud’s psychoanalytic theories for his own works, it becomes quite evident at this point that two divergent theories of psychoanalysis have emerged from the two men.

 Despite Jung’s effort to find evidence to the contrary, for Freud every desire, every libidinal drive is ultimately sexual. For his part, Jung asserted that the libido is general energy, drive or desire, and yet in trying to accommodate Freud, he conceded that sexual libido was the strongest. Jung insisted on bringing mythology deep into the picture, and the mother incestuous libido became in Jungian psychology the ancient cult of mother earth, and the cultivation of the earth was transformed into the fertilization of mother earth [p. 173] Freud’s Oedipus complex, as the center piece of his sexual theory of the unconscious and repressed desires as the source of psychoneuroses, became in Jungian psychology only one of the many pieces embedded in the unconscious.

Coming together with Freud, the epochal fire-making act arose out of the need to supply a symbol for the sexual act. Two sticks rubbed together cause fire, just as rubbing the female genitalia aroused sexual passion. Friction in sex, the sexual libido, then let to the discovery of fire. [p.184] But Jung did not end there, he further added that the myth of Prometheus is found in other cultures, particularly the Hindu mythology, expanding to the role of the libido. The hands and mouth are important in autoeroticism, but the Hindu Upanishad also revealed that speech and light arose out of the metaphysical inner light, which Jung affirmed was also libido: “Light and sound entering the psyche become one: libido.” [p. 182-183]

Differing from Freud, Jung asserted that at ages 3 to 5, the libido is nutritional, rather than sexual. Onanism is a “secret pilfering or crafty imposition” which also signifies the “concealed fulfillment of a forbidden wish.” [p. 187] something done mysteriously necessarily in concealment is presumably forbidden—e.g., rubbing of two sticks, or the sexual act. Jung seemed to disagree on masturbation, in contradiction to mainstream psychiatry: “With onanism, one has the greatest in one’s hands; one only needs only to fantasize, and with that to masturbate, then one possesses all the treasures of the world…without hard labor and wrestling with reality.” And thus, we have Aladdin’s rubbing of the lamp, regression for easy pleasure. [p. 188]

In Chapter IV of Part II, Jung addressed “The Unconscious Origin of the Hero.” [p. 191-232] The personification of the libido is a conqueror, the hero or demon. Like the sun, he goes through cycles, experiences sorrow and joy, plunges from the zenith of his conquests to the nadir of his despair, from blazing splendor to darkness and night.

The terrible mythological sphinx is the daughter of Echnida, the terror goddess who conceived the sphinx from an incestuous and bestial intercourse. The sphinx, in turn, became the symbol of incest, and it is the sphinx to whom the wandering hero, Oedipus, solves the riddle and wins his mother unknowingly as his wife, also gaining a kingdom and torment. [p. 204] The unconscious memories of the heroes led to mythological motifs. Heroes, such as Jesus and Mithra, renewed themselves via sacrifice and are therefore sun-gods. Some heroes frequently appear in pairs, such as Jesus and John the Baptist, Moses and Joshua, Gilgamesh and Eabani (Enkidu), the Dioscuri (Castor is mortal, Pollux immortal, later they were transformed into the Christian physicians, Saints Kosma and Damien). The life force of these heroes, in Jungian psychology, is the libido. These heroes are tightly intertwined with their mothers (or sisters substituting for mother figures), who are often the heroes’ lovers and bring about their downfall as well as salvation: Attis is the son and lover of his mother Cybele. Incest libido leads to ceremonial castration in the Attic-Cybele cult, dismemberment in the Dionysus-Hera and Osiris-Isis mystery, and death in the Adonis-Ishtar (Aphrodite) myth. Jung has not forgotten Miss Miller, and he thoroughly analyzed her fantasy-introjection creation written in her “hypnagogic poem” featuring her own creation (unconscious personality) sun-hero, the Indian Chiwantopel, who much resembles the hero of Longfellow’s Indian epic, “The Song of Hiawatha,” which Jung also later analyzed.

In Chapter V of Part II, Jung elaborated on his ideas on the “Symbolism of the Mother and of Rebirth.” [p. 233-306] The only reality in the vitality of life is the libido, which frequently has a bisexual nature, a male (phallic) or female (uterus) characteristic, such as a tree can be represented as male or female. In the realm of mythology and the unconscious “there is no fixed significance to things.” Unlike Freud, Jung wrote that the longing for the mother and “the fundamental basis of the ‘incestuous’ desire does not aim at [sexual] cohabitation [with the mother], but at the special thought of becoming a child again, parental protection, of coming into the mother once more in order to be born again.” [p. 251] Nevertheless, the goal of union with the mother and rebirth (immortality) are most readily attained via cohabitation.

Jung discussed the issue of repressed incestuous desires in the New Testament [John iii, 4] when Nicodemus does not understand the term of being born again. Nicodemus asks, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” Jesus replies, “Think not carnally or thou art carnal, but think symbolically, then art thou spirit… Thou thinkest of thy incestuous wish for rebirth, but thou must think that thou art born from the water and that thou art generated by the breath of the wind, and in this way thou shalt share in eternal life.” [p. 252-254]

Through baptism (birth from water) and spiritual birth (via descent of the Holy Ghost), man becomes a child again and is born into a circle of brothers and sisters. [p. 254] “Christianity was accepted to escape the brutality of antiquity, but as soon as it was repudiated, licentiousness appeared.” [p. 258] It is a step backwards in the modern world. And yet, Jung tried to be in line with Freud as to express some antipathy toward religion. While admitting that “the religious myth despite misleading symbols, nevertheless, gives man assurance and strength.” But showing himself subject to the ambivalence that Freud has discussed as part and parcel of psychoanalytic thought, Jung also asserted that man must show moral autonomy, of perfect freedom, when man could without compulsion wish that which he must do and this from knowledge, without delusion through belief in the religious symbols. [his italics, p. 262] For Jung, the psychoanalytic cure for belief and disbelief is to replace belief with understanding so that we can keep the [mythological] symbols while “remaining free from the depressing result of submission to belief.” [p. 263] But moral autonomy, perfect freedom, and understanding are a tall order for fallible “normal” and neurotic men who live in a world that both Jung and Freud described respectively, as a “place of terror” [ p. 261] and “full of hostilities of men towards each other…where passions of instincts are stronger than reasoned interests.” [Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 86]

The mythical tree is the tree of life of paradise, which is also found as the pine tree of Attis, the tree of life of Mithra. Christ was crucified on a wooden cross, the tree of life for the salvation of mankind, and this pious act also gave him resurrection. But the original sin for Jung “caused men to wish to go back into the mother, that is the incestuous desire for the mother” to be reborn and become a child again (immortality). [p. 266.] We must remember the sun’s “night journey in the sea,” death in the west, rebirth in the east.

According to Jung, dragons and serpents are representations of anxiety corresponding to the repressed incest wish, as in the cases of Horus-Isis and Gilgamesh-Ishtar. But by overpowering these symbolic representations of the “terrible mother,” the heroes become equal to the sun and reproduce themselves, and like the sun, win the power of rejuvenation. The nimbus is the head ornament of the sun. Gilgamesh and Mithra believed that they had reached eternal life not by overpowering the mother but by sacrifice of the incest wish, “the animal nature” of the bull. Citing eastern mythology as well as Plato’s idea of the world soul as envisioned in Timaeus, the highest degree of freedom from desire and attainment, which is symbolized by being enveloped or enclosed within oneself as the fetus in the womb, is divine blessedness. [p. 298] The god-hero wants to reenter the womb for his renewal and immortality.

In a later chapter, Jung expounds on dragons and serpents, and the hero battling the dragon allows him to take some of its qualities, such as invulnerability. Nevertheless, the dragon psychologically is “the son’s repressed longings, striving for the mother.” [p. 402]

In Chapter VI of Part II, “The Battle for Deliverance of the Mother” [p. 307-340], Jung returns to analyzing Miss Miller’s fantasy hero, Chiwantopel, who is a projection of her own wish-fulfilling, unconscious desires and introjection fantasies. This tragic hero is compared to Longfellow’s literary hero Hiawatha in this and in Chapter VII, “The Dual Mother Role.” [p. 341-427] In fact, the two heroes turn out to have many similarities with both mythological and psychoanalytical components.

In the dialogue between Brutus and Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Jung interpreted Cassius’ childish complaints and irritability as infantile “because he has freed himself insufficiently, or not at all, from the childish environment of his parents” and is actually identified with the mother. [p. 319-321]

The repeated mythological motif of the penetrating arrows, which survives in Christian stories, such as the death and martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, is the result of man’s repressed and unrecognized desires which “fester like arrows in our flesh.” [p. 321-323]

We learn the meaning of several images, most having multiple representations. The devil, for example, “like most evil things, represents sexuality.” [p. 310] The horse and the ass represent priapic animals [p. 311], but the horse may also represent the wind (a libido symbol) as well as fire and light. [p. 312] The rising and setting sun symbolizes death and renewal of the libido. [p. 314] Shooting arrows, like sun rays, have phallic meaning. [p. 324-329] Plowing is a phallic, sexual symbolic act. By ploughing it, the soil is fertilized just like coitus brings forth children. [p. 373] The significance of the snake symbol referred throughout the book, according to Jung, as with many other symbols, may be manifold and depends on time and circumstance. In youth, repressed sexuality; in the age, thoughts of death. The snake may also creep into the mother’s womb for renewal. It may also represent the repressed libido of the temptress. It may even represent death. [p. 407-415, 480]

In Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” Jung finds a rich source of mythological and psychoanalytical material, and he also brought into the narrative Hiawatha’s mother Wenonah and his grandmother Nokomis, who actually fell to Earth from the moon. Wenonah becomes impregnated by the West Wind, and we learn that is how she conceived the hero Hiawatha. [p. 351-366] The epic of Hiawatha parallels the story of Buddha-Maya and Gilgamesh-Ishtar. [p. 364-365] Thus, wrote Jung: “A hero is he who may produce himself through his mother. Likewise, Christ returned to the tree of life (the wooden cross) as a baptism of fire to be reborn. [p. 356] “Death agony is birth agony.” [p. 357] But Christ’s death “transforms him into bread and wine, which we partake of in grateful memory of his great deed.” [p. 372]

Nurturing of the hero, as nourishment of the individual, is important and should not be ignored because of the preoccupation with sexual needs, although the two drives may be superimposed with one another. Regression to the mother via transference permits re-entering the presexual stage of development, permits protection and procures nutrition, through the mother. Fasting may be employed to subdue sexuality, “expressing symbolically the resistance against sexuality” and again re-entering the presexual stage. [p. 369]

In the final Chapter VIII, “The Sacrifice,” Jung summarized the narrative of Miss Miller’s “hypnagogic poem” of unconscious fantasy as follows: “Chiwantopel is a hero of words not deeds. He has not that will to live which breaks the magic circle of the incestuous. His identification with Miss Miller and her wishes for the parents brings on the end that is the devouring of the daughter’s libido by the mother.” [p. lxiv]

Chiwantopel was riding his horse, suddenly the hero and his horse, are stung by a green serpent that darted from the bushes. His horse dies first but he also soon succumbs, and so his wanderings and longings come to an end. His death is a fulfillment of a wish. Jung wrote: Man wishes to keep his childhood and eternal youth, rather than to die and suffer corruption in the grave.” Chiwantopel paradoxically died because “idle dreaming is the mother of the fear of death, the sentimental deploring of what has been and the vain turning back of the clock.” [p. 434]

As previously stated, Jung cited various pieces of literature throughout his Psychology of the Unconscious, not only to analyze the unconscious thoughts of man, but also to give us a distillate of his knowledge of man. We should conclude with some of his own thoughts— e.g., man fears the demands of life:

Man has an envy of one’s own youth, that time of freedom which one would like to retain through a deep-rooted dislike to all duty and endeavor which denies an immediate pleasure reward. Painstaking work for a long time and for a remote object is not in the nature of child or primitive man. [p. 444]

Although he referred then specifically to children’s fantasies and the non-directed thinking of primitive man, Jung later alluded to agreement with Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, to attitudes of common man in general:

Indolence is the beginning of all vice, because in a condition of slothful dreaming the libido has abundant opportunity for sinking into itself, in order to create compulsory obligations by means of regressively reanimated incestuous bonds. The best liberation is through regular [his italic], which is a salvation only when it is a free act and has in itself nothing of infantile compulsion. [p. 455]

Thus, instead of fantasy thinking and longing, man should direct himself to living his life in reality and immerse himself in his regular work. In man’s longings and infantile fixations, “primitive figures of fantasies and religious myths stream up from the unconscious.” [p. 456] Despite the rigors imposed by society and domesticity, man should also pursue love, and Jung adds, “It is well-known that the most useful and best men owe their ability to a powerful libido.” [p. 518]

Although this book wonderfully seems to deal more with mythology than psychiatric clinical practice, Jung does use the former to explain the meaning of his emerging Jungian psychology:

Just as sexualism of neuroses is not to be literally but as regressive fantasy and symbolic compensation for a recent unachieved adaptation, so is sexualism of the early infantile fantasy, especially in the incest problem, a regressive product of the revival of the archaic modes of function, outweighing actuality. [p. 463]

He also uses mythological material to explain sociological happenings as well as support his Jungian psychology:

It is the sexual libido which forces the growing individual slowly away from his family. If this necessity did not exist, then the family would always remain clustered together on a solid group. Hence the neurotic always renounces a complete erotic experience in order that he may remain a child. Fantasies seem to arise from the introversion of the libido. [p. 460]

For Jung it is “psychologically illuminating” that although Jesus surrounds himself with women named Mary throughout his life, he repelled his mother, and later said that those who love their parents more than Christ are not worthy of him. [Matthew x: 35; p. 525] Jesus, in short, places love of God above love of family.

The sun’s “night journey into the sea,” provide ample primeval material for both the exploration of the psychological unconscious of man and the mythological hero’s journey:

The course of the invincible sun has supplied the mystery of human life with beautiful and imperishable symbols; it became a comforting fulfillment of all the yearnings for immortality, of all desires of mortals for eternal life. 

Man leaves the mother, the source of libido, and is driven by the eternal thirst to find her again, and to drink renewal from her; thus, he completes the cycle and returns again into the mother’s womb. [p. 427]

In a later segment, analyzing poems by both Nietzsche and the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin, Jung gave in beautiful words an idea of man’s “retrogressive longing,” which paradoxically he also calls apocalyptic: “the maternal city in the land of eternal youth, surrounded by the verdure and flowers of imperishable spring.” [p. 448]

In conclusion, ancient symbolic images, latent in the human mind, are the source of the mythological figures, deities and wandering heroes; frequently they ride horses, face villains, slay giants, dragons and serpents, etc. The themes recur, as “regression to the memories of humanity condensed in the unconscious” [ p. 503] in all cultures. This mythological material remains generation after generation in the unconscious mind of humanity. Jung does not yet say so in this book, but these recurring themes anticipate his term, “collective unconscious.” The personality type of those heroes who carried out their “night journey in the sea,” like the sun—i.e., sun-heroes—likewise anticipate the Jungian psychological “archetypes.” The products [of the collective unconscious] “always contain the same old problems of humanity, which rise again and again in new symbolic disguise from the shadowy world of the unconscious.” [p. 391]

Reviewed by Dr. Miguel Faria

Miguel A. Faria, M.D., is Associate Editor in Chief in neuropsychiatry; history of medicine; and socioeconomics, politics, and world affairs of Surgical Neurology International (SNI). He is the author of numerous books, including Controversies in Medicine and Neuroscience: Through the Prism of History, Neurobiology, and Bioethics (2023). His most recent book is The Roman Republic, History, Myths, Politics, and Novelistic Historiography (2025) published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.

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