Jung's Psychology in the Light of his ‘Personal Myth’

Abstract

The central argument of this paper is that Jung conceived his archetypal psychology as a locus of therapeutic deep-self narratives that in principle afford each and every one a chance to look for a satisfying personal myth that consoles us and gives meaning and depth to our lives as it imposes an archetypal pattern upon our historical existence which might otherwise seem intolerably defective and meaningless. In his memoirs he created a universal, ‘archetypal model’ of his own life, which he narrated as if it were a mythical story of a hero confronting the powerful forces of the Collective Unconscious in his search for the Holy Grail of psychic and spiritual renewal. Jung's depth-psychological mythification of man signified an escape from the pathogenicity of historical time to the timeless glamour of personal myth.