Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung on Myths and Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious: Unnoticed Similarity

Abstract

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology are different in many ways and some of their differences are extremely crucial. It is widely believed that one of the most obvious examples of this intellectual confrontation is the difference between Freud’s and Jung’s views on mythology. Proponents of this view believe that Jung was much more interested in mythological issues and his theory of myth became much deeper and more developed than Freud’s one. In particular, it is believed that Freud focused exclusively on the individual’s psyche, while Jung allegedly reached the true origins of mythmaking in the collective unconscious, which is the sediment of the vast historical experience of mankind. The article shows that such statements do not reflect the real situation but just the point of view, which Jung began to spread after his break-up with Freud. In fact, the founder of psychoanalysis had a steady and deep interest in mythology. The manifestation of this interest was the formation of “psycho-analytics” of myth – a specific area of research, which in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement was joined by several first psychoanalysts, including Franz Riklin, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, and Jung himself. It is essential that both Freud and Jung, before and after the break-up in 1913, have been and remain the supporters of the consideration of a man and culture through the prism of certain biological concepts of that time. Those are the principle of inheritance of acquired properties (Lamarckism) and the idea that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogeny (“biogenetic law”). Based on Lamarckian-biogenetic assumptions, both Freud and Jung saw the origins of mythology in the collective historical experience of mankind. The article demonstrates that the image of Oedipus and the associated motives of incest and parricide play almost the same role in Freud’s (and Freudian) model of mythmaking as the archetypes of the collective unconscious in Jung’s (and Jungian) concept of myth.