Welcome to this Jungian life.

Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee,

invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.

I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee,

and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst,

on Cape Cod.

Thank you. Today we are going to talk about myth, and amazingly, something we have not discussed before, although almost nothing could be more central to Jung, his process, his experiences, and his theories. So what is a myth? Well, myths are collective

revelations based on unconscious psychic experience. So consciousness does not

create them. And they teach us. They're teaching tales. They're very strongly aligned with

the religious function culturally and individually. And they teach us that archetypal

energy is superordinate to human power. Myths are to culture, what dreams are to the individual.

And they provide symbols that dynamically activate the

discovery of new possibilities. So we find in mythology, all kinds of experiences, narrative patterns,

transcendence that deal with the universals of life.

Conflict, separation, love, desire, conquest, loss, redemption, and the list goes on and on.

So let's take a look together this week at this vast repository of human experience and see where we go.

Well, the Roman historian Salist is said to have written that myth never happened, but always is.

So that touches on something about the eternal truth that we find in myth.

And I think we all recognize that when we read mythology.

And whether we know it or not, this is how we construct reality. It is how we make meaning.

We add up all our experiences and this happened and then that happened. He said, and I went there and the food was, and what does it mean?

We're always doing it at a superficial,

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