LIT 229 Module Four 1 Introduction Myth and… .docx

LIT 229 Module Four 1
Introduction: Myth and…
Given its nature as the wellspring of our knowledge about
ourselves and the world, myth
should be found in all our ways of knowing, and it is. The
phrase “ways of knowing” is
shorthand for those collections of beliefs, assumptions,
discourse, values, and practices that
offer their own approaches for understanding the world and our
place in it. This description
of ways of knowing sounds much like myth because myth itself
is a way of knowing. The
point here is not to overlay myth onto all ways of knowing but
to illuminate the relationship of
myth to them. For this module, we will analyze the role of myth
in three prominent ways of
knowing: psychology, religion, and science. These three operate
on a deeper layer than
particular genres for myth like art, literature, and film (will
explore the latter two later) and
thus promise to illuminate myth by their own lights.
Myth and Psychology
At the heart of psychological ways of knowing sits a story. It

is—like our most profound and
provocative stories—erotic, strange, traumatic, and Greek.
Oedipus is the son of Laius and
Jocasta, the king and queen of Thebes. A prophecy declares that
the young Oedipus will
grow up to commit the most horrible crimes imaginable—the
murder of his father and incest
with his mother. Desperate to forestall these events, King Laius
binds the boy’s feet
(Oedipus means “swollen foot”) and leaves him to die on a
mountainside. As fate literally
would have it, shepherds find the boy, rescue him, and take him
to the king and queen of
Corinth, who raise him as their own. Oedipus eventually hears
the prophecy himself from the
Oracle at Delphi and leaves his known family at Corinth and
heads, fatefully, to Thebes. On
the way there, he quarrels with a man who refuses to give way
on the road, eventually killing
the man. Unknown to Oedipus, this man is Laius, his father.
Upon arriving at Thebes, he
answers the riddle of the Sphinx, who is terrorizing the city,
and is rewarded with the throne
of the dead king and his wife Jocasta, who is Oedipus’s mother.
Upon hearing that the
prophecy had indeed been fulfilled, Jocasta commits suicide,
and Oedipus blinds himself
and goes into exile.
2 LIT 229 Module Four

Freud Gives Birth to a Way of Knowing
In this myth, Sigmund Freud saw the central drama of the
human psyche and by extension a
primal feature of the new discipline of psychology. He writes in
his Interpretation of Dreams
that Oedipus’s:
destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—
because the Oracle laid the
same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate
of all of us, perhaps, to
direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first
hatred and our first
murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that
this is so. (295)
Without delving too deeply into Freud’s Oedipus complex, we
can see that the myth provides
a story—Freud would say the story—for human thought and
behavior by doing what any
good story does, namely, creating tension through conflict and
then releasing it through
some kind of resolution. The tension is created when the infant
becomes aware of his
gender difference from his mother and similarity to his father,
and that awareness connects
to his emotional and physical dependence upon his mother,
which Freud understands as
erotic. The father, then, becomes a competitor for the mother’s
love, but because he is
stronger, he always wins. The infant’s desire is for the mother,
but jealousy and fear are

directed at the father who competes with the infant for the
mother’s love. These emotions
are surging in the what Freud called the id, the unconscious area
of the psyche that
operates according to pure pleasure, but the turbulent features
of the id cannot be sustained
in the ego, the aspect of the psyche that operates according to
the reality principle, much
less the superego, where societal norms come to bear. Tension
abounds within and without
as the child deals with these contradictory impulses. It can be
released by two mechanisms:
repression, which offers only a temporary solution since the
emotions reappear elsewhere in
other forms such as dreams; and identification, where the child
founds his identity in the ego
and superego and thus conforms to the reality principle and
society’s norms (Freud 53).
Freud’s application of the Oedipus myth as a way of knowing is
a unique phenomenon in
Western culture, exposing, as it does, the process of using one
myth to answer most
questions about human nature and behavior. While Freudian
analysts are increasingly hard
to find (not least because they are expensive and treatment lasts
for years), Freud’s theories
are psychology’s creation myths, and almost all practicing
psychologists employ some
version of Freud’s “talking cure” to move from repression to
identification.

The Student Becomes the Master
It might appear that no one could engage myth as deeply as
Freud, but a meeting he had in
1906 produced a collaboration with another psychologist who
took the application of myth in
a vastly different but equally profound direction. Carl Gustav
Jung was 30 when he met with
Freud in Vienna, and they talked for most of the day without
pause. Jung would agree with
Freud about the importance of the unconscious to the
development of the human psyche,
but instead of seeing it populated with repressed desires
generated by the id, Jung saw a
deeper level of the unconscious that was made of archetypes or
symbols shared by all
human beings in what he termed the collective unconscious.
Jung also would modify Freud’s
Oedipal complex to apply to female infants in what he termed
the Electra complex.
Though the archetypes consist of many images, a few are
especially potent in Jung’s
psychology: the persona, the shadow, the anima, the animus, the
great mother, the wise old
man, the hero, and the self. Even though you may not recognize
some of these names, it
should be clear that they all have mythological qualities. One
useful but incomplete way to
understand archetypes is to do what we are doing in this class:
reading a lot of myths,

looking for common images, and attaching meaning to them that
is consistent with their use.
By moving the psychological applications of mythology beyond
one myth (Oedipus) and one
location (the individual psyche), Jung expanded the influence of
mythology upon psychology
(and vice versa) far beyond Freud.
Much like Socrates and Plato, Freud and Jung inaugurate a new
way of knowing. Unlike
Socrates and Plato, Freud and Jung ground their model in myth.
While there are obviously
entire realms of psychological knowledge that have different
relations or even little relation to
myth, the most common practice in therapy remains
mythological, and that is to tell the
psychologist your story and have the psychologist tell it back to
you. Psychology’s
connection to mythology remains strong.
Myth and Religion
The relationship between myth and religion is sometimes
difficult to untangle. At its deepest
level, religion is about experiencing awe and even fear in the
face of the unknown universe
and connecting that experience to a sense of place in the world.
That description is very
much like that of Campbell’s mystical function of myth.
Religion is also about connecting our
disparate experiences into a way of seeing or knowing that
makes sense and provides
meaning and direction for our lives, echoing again Campbell’s
other functions of myth. On
the more practical and experiential level and in terms of the

practice of a particular religion,
myth typically recedes into the background to do its work,
especially in Western religions for
reasons we have already seen having to do with Plato. Oral
cultures have no reason to hide
their myths, since they are founding stories of the people and
continue to serve all four
functions. Whether implicit or explicit, the relationship between
myth and religion is deep and
broad. Rather than attempt to cover this entire landscape, we
will focus instead on a
particular practice, that of ritual, in part because ritual that has
a unique relationship to myth.
We could describe that relationship in terms of a script (myth)
and a play (ritual). The script
tells the story usually with one narrator; the play acts out the
story with the characters having
their own roles. Scholars have enjoyed arguing about which
comes first, and the myth and
ritual school has argued for the primacy of ritual, like the script
being recorded after the
actors work out the play. For our purposes here, we can view
myth and ritual as two sides of
a singular event, one involving a telling, the other involving a
showing. After focusing on
ritual in terms of religion, we can now focus on one theory of
ritual to see its relation to myth.

Three Stages of Ritual
Arnold van Gennep was, like many anthropologists of his time,
actually a folklorist
concerned with understanding the "folkways" of primal cultures.
The idea here was to draw
upon the particulars of ethnographers in the field who were
collecting information on myths,
rituals, and social dynamics, then inductively create a theory
based on those specifics. Van
Gennep's theory was simple and powerful. He wrote in The
Rites of Passage that such rites
have three stages: separation, initiation, and return. Separation
involves removing the
inductee from his everyday world, which is safe, predictable,
and knowable, because change
cannot occur when everything stays the same. Initiation
involves introducing the inductee to
a new world, one that is unsafe, unpredictable, and unknown
and requires the participant to
find his own way, thereby developing individual traits of power,
courage, and self-reliance,
among others. Return involves reintroducing the inductee to his
original community where
he is now a full-fledged member by virtue of his rite of passage
and where he can benefit the
community by his lessons learned in the initiation.

The Monomyth and Ritual
Joseph Campbell recognized the value of van Gennep’s theory
and saw it played out
consistently in the hero myths he had read. Applying this
understanding of ritual, Campbell
developed his own theory of the monomyth, the basic pattern of
nearly every heroic journey.
While Campbell goes into great detail about the various
elements of the monomyth, as you
can see in this accompanying image, the foundational structure
is that of separation from the
known, crossing the threshold into the unknown, and returning
to the known.
While not every myth is enacted in a ritual and not every ritual
is scripted by a myth, the
dynamic between the two, and between myth and religion itself,
is deep and profound.
Myth and Science
In the Eastman story that we read in Module One, the dismissal
of myth as “fable and
falsehood” could just as well have come from a scientist as a
missionary. The beginnings of
the move from muthos to logos, effected by Plato, was actually
inaugurated by philosophers
before Socrates who were the first scientists. It is for these
reasons that myth is popularly
understood as the opposite of science or “mere falsehood.”
The Scientific Method

While we want to be careful not to overlay myth onto ways of
knowing that are not
mythological (it would be anti-scientific to do so, for one), we
can look at the functionality of
both to observe similarities. Fortunately, one of the features of
the scientific way of knowing
is precision in the method, which is as follows (Crawford):
http://orias.berkeley.edu/hero/index.htm
Table 4.1
At the formal level, we can already begin to see that the method
has the features of a quest.
Scientists would be quick to point out that the quests are
usually small (the particular
behavior of a molecule in a specific environment) and often
inconclusive (a null hypothesis).
Still, there is something existential about the process, especially
if we interpret the steps
symbolically with an eye toward the four functions of myth.
Define
• Define a question
Observe

• Gather information and resources
Explain
• Form an explanatory hypothesis
Test
• Test the hypothesis by performing an experiment and
collecting
data in a reproducible manner
Analyze
• Analyze the data
Interpret
• Interpret the data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting
point for a new hypothesis
Publish
• Publish the results
Retest
• Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
The Structure of Scientific Ways of Knowing
A more profound relationship exists between myths and
scientific paradigms. In his

influential book titled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
historian and philosopher of
science Thomas Kuhn explored why there were such strong
disagreements between social
scientists and natural scientists. He came to the following
conclusion:
Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to
recognize the role in
scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.”
These I take to be
universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time
provide model problems
and solutions to a community of practitioners. Once that piece
of my puzzle fell into
place, a draft of this essay emerged rapidly. (Kuhn viii)
A paradigm is a pattern or a model, and looking back through
the history of science, Kuhn
saw not one model but many. His point is painstakingly made
and far too subtle to explicate
here, but we can see briefly how a paradigm is related to myth.
First of all, if we return to the
scientific method and look more closely, we can see that while
it is an excellent tool for
providing answers, it also contains some unanswered questions.
For example: Where do our
questions come from? What counts as data and why? Why do we
choose a particular
hypothesis and not another, and how many possible hypotheses
are there? What beliefs
and assumptions guide our analysis and interpretation of the
data? What assumptions and
beliefs do other scientists bring to our hypothesis? For Kuhn,

these questions remain in the
background and are usually unasked, much less answered.
Kuhn's book is an attempt to ask
and answer those questions, and the result is that science
operates under paradigms, a
particular set of scientific practices informed by the beliefs of a
scientific community existing
at a particular point in time. As is evident from this brief
description, a paradigm looks and
acts quite a bit like myth.
Finally, the science of cosmology is a direct competitor of myth
for understanding how the
world came to be and for finding our place in it. That is why
“the myth of the Big Bang” is one
of the creation myths mentioned in the text. The formal and
functional similarities are
striking.
Before he died, Joseph Campbell saw great mythological
promise in the new knowledge
created by the sciences. In fact, he believed that scientific
discovery would provide the basis
for a new mythology, a new paradigm that would advance
human consciousness.
Conclusion

Psychology, religion, and science—arguably our most profound
ways of knowing today—all
have strong connections to and resonances with myth. We
should also note that if we
include myth as another way of knowing, we can see that the
way we know ourselves and
the world resonates with our beginnings in oral culture because
we still draw upon narrative
in one form or another to carry our deepest beliefs and orient
ourselves in the cosmos.
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1968. Print.
Crawford, Susan, and Loretta Stucki. “Peer Review and the
Changing Research Record.” Journal of American
Society for Information Science 41.3 (1990): 223–28. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Ed. James Strachey. New
York: Norton, 1962. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York:
Modern Library, 1950. Print.

Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1960. Print.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Man and His Symbols. Garden City:
Doubleday, 1964. Print.
Jung, Carl Gustav. The Theory of Psychoanalysis. New York:
Johnson Reprint, 1970. Print.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Print.

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