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CHAPTER 1 PSYCHOMYTHIC HUMANISM Re-centering Reality “The eye is the first circle.” —R. W. Emerson, “Circles” With humanity emerging from the devastation of World War II and facing the challenges of a reality increasingly under the threat of nuclear annihilation, the second half of the twentieth century was a time of both hope and fear. During this period , as the fragments of Western civilization were gradually being reorganized into a new political world order, a number of important and diverse studies appeared that were strongly influenced by the psychological theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. These works tended to be intellectually eclectic, and far-reaching in scope. Drawing from a wide spectrum of psychological, mythological, philosophical, anthropological, historical, and aesthetic disciplines, these studies sought to present, in the context of vast social fragmentation, a unified and coherent vision of human experience on both an individual and social level. In essence, they sought to rediscover, in T. S. Eliot’s words, “a still point in the turning world,” a meaningful center of human identity. The key to this identity resided, for the most part, in the inner, unconscious realm of the human psyche. In their writings, these “psychomythic humanists” recapitulated, in remarkably similar ways, the unifying thrust of Emerson’s mature Transcendentalism , which sought to answer a similar need in a similar fashion a century before. Among these studies are: Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949); Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949); Mircea Eliade’s, The Myth of the Eternal Return: or Cosmos and History (1949); and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959), and Love’s Body (1966). In the search for unity, all of these 21 works basically attempt to identify and define those primal and universal patterns, commonly known as “archetypes,” that manifest themselves in various aspects of human experience. In his study, Neumann invokes Jung’s classic definition of the term as “the pictorial forms of the instincts ,” the means through which “the unconscious reveals itself to the conscious mind in images which, as in dreams and fantasies, initiate the process of conscious reaction and assimilation.”1 Brown offers a more casual definition. “Freud’s myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde,” he states, “is not a historical explanation of the origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent ; a myth; an old, old story.”2 These works also deal, in one way or another, with some version of what Jung called the “collective unconscious,” which is the source of all archetypes. It is a psychological dynamic, below the level of consciousness , that is common to all human beings everywhere. Jung defines this concept as follows: “Just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so too, the psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness . I have called this substratum the collective unconscious.”3 In his “Foreword” to Neumann’s study, Jung indicates clearly that it is a welcome extension of his own seminal work and that, “It begins where I, too, if I were granted a second lease of life, would start to gather up the disjecta membra of my own writings, to sift out all those ‘beginnings without continuations’ and knead them into a whole.”4 In essence, Neumann ’s work presents a comprehensive application of Jung’s seminal theories to the development of individual as well as collective consciousness. This universal pattern of development is itself a major archetype. While he does not cite either Jung or Freud, Eliade’s study is also concerned with mythic, universal patterns, “what we have called ‘archetypes and repetition,’” through which “archaic societies” seek to destroy “autonomous history” or the conscious progress of time.5 It is primarily a study in anthropology and comparative religion, the implications of which have universal significance concerning humanity’s effort to find its place in the cosmos. Brown’s Life Against Death is subtitled “The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History” and, like the others, has a very broad, even mythic sweep. While relying primarily on Freudian theory, Brown expands that theory to examine the historical evolution of human experience and to look towards its future. As he notes, his study is “concerned with reshaping psychoanalysis into a wider general theory of human nature, culture, and history, to be appropriated by the consciousness of mankind as a whole as a new stage in the...

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