[Marianne]

I love this, what Stephen wrote: “One is the awareness that mythologizing is always going on, under the surface, both in our individual psyches as well as the collective psyche of the greater society – but these are unconscious processes: we are generally not aware of them.” This seems befitting for everything going on also with the “I Can’t Breathe” Mythblast.

I want to include a mention and quote here and also in the reference section, if I may: a book by archetypal psychologist (and as I regard him, mythologist also) James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology. As for mythologizing, he calls it psychologizing, and wrote, “There are Gods in Our Ideas.” He states,

Archetypal psychology the fundamental ideas of the psyche to be expressions of persons–Hero, Nymph, Mother, Senex, Child, Trickster, Amazon, Puer, and many other specific prototypes bearing the names and stories of the Gods. These are the root metaphors. They provide the patterns of our thinking as well as of our feeling and doing. They give all our psychic functions–whether thinking, feeling, perceiving, or remembering–their imaginal life, their internal coherence, their force, their necessity, and their ultimate intelligibility. These persons keep our persons in order, holding into significant patterns the segments and fragments of behavior we call emotions, memories, attitudes, and motives.When we lose sight of these archetypal figures, we become, in a sense, psychologically insane: that is, by not “keeping in mind” the metaphorical roots we go “out of our minds”–outside where ideas have become literalized into history, society, clinical psychopathology, or metaphysical truths. Then we attempt to understand what goes on inside by observing the outside, turning inside out, losing both the interiority of all events and our own interiority as well.

Yet “psychologizing” is only 1/4 of a mythic/polytheistic psychology. For Hillman, the four stages of what he calls soul-making are: 1) Personifying or Imagining Things, 2) Pathologizing or Falling Apart, 3) Psychologizing or Seeing Through, and 4) Dehumanizing or Soul-making. Hillman also makes sure to tell us that a polytheistic psychology (that drives away from egocentric monotheistic ideology) is not a religion, but a psychology that stays with “the soul’s native polycentricity.”

This idea of mythic psychology coincides with Campbell’s thought:

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import – what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today.There’s no real conflict between science & religion … What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC … and the science of the 20th century AD.

–Joseph Campbell, from Thinking Allowed: Understanding                                                                                    Mythology, with Joseph Campbell (and host Jeffrey Mishlove)

So, we “lose our minds” when we lose our myths, pretty much as Campbell said, as has been stated in the forum Mythblasts that in our day the myths are not commonly recognized or even known so much.