Dreaming the Myth Onwards

Dreaming the Myth Onwards shows how a revised appreciation of myth can enrich our daily lives, our psychological awareness, and our human relationships. Lucy Huskinson and her contributors explore the interplay between myth, and Jungian thought and practice, demonstrating the philosophical and psychological principles that underlie our experience of psyche and world. Contributors from multi-disciplinary backgrounds throughout the world come together to assess the contemporary relevance of myth, in terms of its utility, its effectual position within Jungian theory and practice, and as a general approach for making sense of life. As well as examining the more conscious facets of myth, this volume discusses the unconscious psychodynamic "processes of myth", including active imagination, transference, and countertransference, to illustrate just how these mythic phenomena give meaning to Jungian theory and therapeutic experience. This rigorous and scholarly analysis showcases fresh readings of central Jungian concepts, updated in accordance with shifts in the cultural and epistemological concerns of contemporary Western consciousness. Dreaming the Myth Onwards will be essential reading for practicing analysts and academics in the field of the arts and social sciences.

"Dreaming the Myth Onwards is a timely and thoughtful collection of essays by a distinguished group of Jungian scholars and analysts. The articles stimulate, provoke, and challenge us to review our cliches about the relation of myth to modernity – a most useful exercise indeed, and terribly relevant to where we are headed in the 21st century." - Murray Stein, Ph.D., author of Jung's Map of the Soul"This book will come as a revelation to some readers and as a relief to others. As a most remarkable and astonishing array of perspectives and differing styles of thinking, all offered in the name of C. G. Jung… it is about much more than Jungian mythological perspectives. It is also about image, imagination, psychological narrative, and the theory and practice of Jungian analysis… a kaleidoscopic richness of Jungiana!" - David L. Miller, Ph.D. Watson-Ledden Professor, Emeritus, Syracuse University, New York, USA, Core Faculty Member, Retired, Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, USA"While reading Dreaming the Myth Onwards with great interest, the following sentence in one of Jung's letters came to mind: 'The systematic elaboration of my ideas which were often just thrown out, is a task for those who come after me' (Letter to Jolande Jacobi, 24th September 1948). To be sure, the contributors to this book take such a task very seriously, but they achieve more than this. Inspired by Jung's ideas, they "dream" and also "think" them onwards, and put forward creative ideas about the interpretation of myth and modernity, together with some new readings of Jung's most original theories." - Mario Jacoby, Ph.D., author of Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut

Lucy Huskinson is Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Wales, Bangor, and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Australia; the Philosophy Program, La Trobe University, Australia; and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK. Her first book is Nietzsche and Jung: The Whole Self in the Union of Opposites (Routledge, 2004).