Myths and legends

I have now got to chapter 6 - Myths and Psychology - of the very short introduction to myths by Robert Segal which, as well as continuing the cataloging noticed at reference 1, also includes some interesting material about Freud, Jung, consciousness and unconsciousness. I share a few snippets and comments.

In a passage about the Oedipus story we have: '... myth thus constitutes a compromise between the side of oneself that wants the desires satisfied outright and the side that does not even want to know they exist ...'. Which strikes me as a neat enough formulation of the matter. In the same vein, we are told that myths often express common conflicts between the forces of the superego, the id and the ego.

In many ways, dreams do the work of myths, with the difference that dreams are private and internal, while myths are public and sometimes acted out in ritual, dance or drama.

The hero myth, often in the form outlined by Otto Rank (illustrated above left), can be viewed as a transposition of the Oedipus story, a safer version.

Fairy tales and folk tales are more homely versions of myths, possibly involving giants and ogres, but not usually heroes or gods.

In a passage about Jung we have: '... every child's managing to forge consciousness is for Jung a supremely heroic feat ... Creation myths symbolise the creation of the conscious out of the unconscious ... The ideal is a balance between consciousness of the external world and consciousness of the unconscious ...'.

There are female goddesses in this account, but they are not very up to date, tending to be about fertility and maternity. Earth mothers rather than domestic goddesses (see references 3 and 4), let alone CEO's.

The unconscious is sometimes talked of as if it were a force in opposition to the ego. Rather than the neurological view of consciousness as the visible top of the mainly invisible iceberg of neural processing, processing which mostly does all kinds of mundane stuff like processing signals from the eyes and the ears rather than the more tricky, id-stuff of Freud. The icing on the cake, rather than the war between the raisins and sultanas.

Segal seems more interested in what he sees as the agricultural, fertility myth of Adonis than in the sexual, Freudian myth of Oedipus - with the more Freudian complication that Adonis is also in eternal thrall to the mother. While in the works of Freud himself, very little is to be seen of Adonis at all, with little more than '... Divine figures such as Attis, Adonis and Tammuz emerged, spirits of vegetation and at the same time youthful divities enjoying the favours of mother goddesses and committing incest with their mother in defiance of their father ...' in 'Totem and Taboo'. With thanks to the search feature of acrobat.

PS: Robert A. Segal is chair of religious studies in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, King's College, at the University of Aberdeen. He is from the US. He is a member of the editorial board of Religion. He has published widely on method and theory in the study of religion, and in particular the influence of early 20th century theorists including Jung, Frazer, William James and E. B. Tylor. He has also published research on psychoanalysis, mythology and gnosticism. I am unclear what religion he practises himself - although none looks a bit unlikely given his travels through religious academia in North America.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/raynes-park.html.

Reference 2: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/staffnet/profiles/r.segal.

Reference 3: http://www.roseanneworld.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.nigella.com/.