Contemporary psychology and old mythologies have more in common with each other than you might think.
Psychology is not solely the science of the mind. It’s a form of knowledge enmeshed with our mythical understanding of deeper questions of significance. In our secular age, many people no longer turn to sacred books to understand who and what they are. Psychology is where many find meaning. Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves through psychology fulfil many of the same functions served in the traditional belief practices of mythology. Falling somewhere between a social science, a natural science and a human science, it isn’t simple to determine which type of knowledge the study of the mind is supposed to pursue. Psychology aspires to the status of the physical sciences, but it tries to explain much more, and ends up revealing much less.
Today, the term mythology connotes uncorroborated legend. But that’s not entirely accurate. Mythology is really a set of beliefs buttressed by practices, or rituals, that together console our desire for explanation. As the Romanian theorist Mircea Eliade wrote in 1957: “Myth never quite disappears from the present world of the psyche … it only changes its aspect.” And in our time its aspect is to be found in psychology.
Mythology remains important in Western culture. Take, for instance, the role model of the hero, of Hercules and Aeneas, of contemporary revolutionaries, martyrs and dictators. These ideal figures exemplify models of human achievement. Similarly, notions of salvation, progress and ethics are so constitutive of our notions of reality that they’re often communicated through the format of mythology. There’s a surfeit of cultural products that fulfil the function of myth whereby characters and stories give us the means to understand the world we live in. In the imaginary world we enter through novels, to the weightless experience of desire that’s consumerism, we inhabit the broad spaces of meaning-construction. Through superhero comic books, to the obscure immanence of modern art, from visions of
