Newsletter #6, 2009

The Mythological Unconscious

Michael Vannoy Adams

New York, Karnac, 2001, 488 pp.

It has been almost ten years since Michael Adams’s The Mythological Unconscious was first released back in 2001. We are eager to welcome him here to present a lecture and workshop on the same subject, and the re-issue of this book. The current buzz over Jung’s Liber Novus (The Red Book), with its rich mythological contents spilling out of Jung’s personal midlife crisis, is perhaps no small accident of circumstances, as it corresponds with Adams’s own journey to the mythological unconscious.

Whereas Freud postulated the Oedipus complex as the basic underlying myth of the unconscious, Jung took the next step by including a multiplicity of myths to explain the human condition. How different would psychoanalysis have been had its foundational story been that of Telemachus and his father Odysseus instead of that of Laius and Oedipus? It is Adams’s contention that the unconscious is intrinsically “mythopoeic.” Imagination and myth-making are at the core of our existence. This is a difficult realization in a culture that is primarily materialist and eager to rush forward, away from mythic understandings.

Such are the riches of this depth approach that Adams urges psychoanalytic institutes to “provide a multicultural education in mythology.” In this he shows his equally keen interest in cultural diversity. Having started as a Freudian analyst, he admits that he became a Jungian analyst “for love of mythology.”

In a chapter entitled “Dreams and Fantasies, Manifestations of the Mythological Unconscious,” Adams introduces a number of gods that he insists are still alive in the modern psyche. Hermes, Nike, Zeus, Pan and an Aztec god, Tezcatlipoca, all appear in dramatic fashion in the psyches of various individuals, presented through Adams’s own clinical work or that of predecessors like Edward Whitmont, Marie-Louise von Franz and Jung. A seven-year-old girl encounters a frightening goat-god in a dream that Adams explains is likely a manifestation of Pan. He amplifies the mythological history of that god to explain the girl’s dilemma. Likewise he illustrates a number of instances where the ancient god is still a force to be reckoned with. The gods are far from dead. He contends that only with mythological knowledge can analysis of the psyche succeed and individuation be made possible.

In “Hapless the Centaur” Adams extends his thesis that the unconscious and the fantasy principle that resides there can be a saving grace. He cites the case study of a noted addiction therapist whose compassion gave her client a reason to live. However he suggests that the healing came more from an image of spontaneous active imagination than from the compassionate transference that arose between them.

Jung’s technique of amplification will serve as the primary tool throughout this book. Thus Adams amplifies the image of a man-horse that the patient brought into those sessions, a supporting figure that had no basis in reality. Unlike the previous therapist, Adams delves into the mythological history of the centaur, including its association with alcohol, woundedness, and healing. He includes contemporary references which, he says, ought to be added to a Jungian’s vocabulary for the sake of apt interpretation. He cites the film “Rocky” and Peter Shaffer’s play Equus in coming to an understanding of the plight of the client and his capacity to entertain intimate relationships.

In a chapter on “Griffins, Gold, and Dinosaur Fossils: Mythology and ‘Fantastic Paleontology’” Adams argues, as he has previously (The Fantasy Principle, 2000), for the fantasy principle as being of greater value than the material or reality principle. While paleontologist Adrienne Mayor’s research might have been meaningful in explaining how “the protoceratops is the prototype of the griffin,” Adams argues that this leaves out a different kind of evidence from multiple sources of literature over the eons. From the Biblical Leviathan through the Greeks’ Minotaur and Chimera to Melville’s Moby Dick, the monster is much more than a dinosaur or a composite creature made up of physical and provable concrete “data.”

Adams takes this case in the direction of psyche, the mythic imagination and archetypes. He presents the monster as a motif that is fundamental to the human psyche. And with it goes the “treasure hard-to-attain” that it guards and, of course, the “monster-slaying hero.” The griffin IS the unconscious that is terrifying to behold, that resists our efforts, that may have to be slain; but it is also the creature that guards the treasure, and may even be harnessed for our good. The gold is in fact the outcome of our search for knowledge, for psychological understanding.

Another chapter reveals Adams’s capacious knowledge of cultural matters and his deep concern that analytic workers educate themselves better to serve their ever-changing public. In “African-American Dreaming and ’The Lion in the Path:’ Racism and the Cultural Unconscious,” he presents the dream of an African-American woman who is lost and beset by lions that block her access to two mansions; she ends up in a prison or mental institution.

Using both archetypal and cultural interpretations, Adams demonstrates how the history of slavery has become deeply embedded in the psyche of a modern black woman. Her efforts to free herself from her internal bind stop short of expressing the roar – and appropriate rage – of the lion.

In his amplifications Adams reminds us of two cultural icons in recent American history, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X – “personifications of the African-American heroic imagination.” King’s peaceful civil disobedience was in stark contrast to the militant stance of “by any means necessary” professed by Malcolm X. In being unwilling to take a stick to drive a lion away, the dreamer took a stance against violence. Perhaps it was this passivity that led her to confinement in the institution with wounded animals surrounding her.

The author also takes us through three African variations of adaptation to the slave trade – Quashie, Anansy and Rasta. He suggests that the compliant and cunning responses of the first two are not nearly as bold as the Rasta position of courage in the face of injustice. He does not present a conclusion one way or the other regarding his client and so the dream serves mostly as a cultural and psychological lesson. Adams concludes that “cultural ignorance is one of the lions in our path and cultural knowledge one of our heroic tasks as analysts.” p. 153

Adams takes the reader on a wild ride in a chapter entitled “Pegasus and Visionary Experience: From the White-Winged Horse to the Flying Red Horse.” It is a personal, clinical, mythological and historical romp, perhaps befitting the myth of Bellerophon and Pegasus. Adams begins by describing the case of Christiana Morgan, the celebrated, and ultimately tragic, subject of Jung’s “Visions” Seminars of 1930-34, to which Ted Fillery alluded in his presentation to us several months ago. Her story is the subject of Claire Douglas’s book Translate This Darkness. Morgan’s vision cited and shown here is that of a white-winged horse, which has transported her through the heavens but left her crucified upon the ground. However it is not so much Morgan’s fate that concerns Adams but the amplification of the archetypal image of the winged horse that so deeply touched her life.

He adds the appearances of other winged horses in clinical settings and ends his account with his own personal confession about his own groundedness and his childhood fascination with the Flying Red Horse, the logo of Exxon-Mobil Corporation that sits atop the Magnolia Building in Dallas, Texas, a landmark of the city skyline – a powerful symbolic presence.

In a chapter on “The Bull, The Labyrinth and The Minotaur,” Adams presents his own archetypal dream. He calls it the “It’s All Greek to Me” Dream. He elaborates on its images in a didactic but also highly entertaining fashion. He relates the tale of Theseus and his escape from the Minotaur in the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne, and provides numerous stories about each of these images. The labyrinth is explored along with its associated images, the spiral and the cave, all of which appear in this “big” dream.

Along with much scholarly evidence and some personal revelations, he adds such contemporary associations as an episode from the TV show “The Simpsons” and some anecdotes from playwright André Gregory of “My Dinner with André” fame, who has a vision of a Minotaur during a troubling time in his life. The Simpsons episode has Homer dreaming of Bart playing a tennis doubles match with his mother, leading to an uneasy Oedipal situation which their daughter Lisa analyzes! Such digressions are proof of the “Return to Greece” that James Hillman and Joseph Campbell have advocated: the myths – an “inner Greece of the mind” – are present in everyday life.

While such myths illustrate the hero motif, to Adams they are more about the heroic nature of the imagination itself.

As the book winds down Adams takes us into the world of the unicorn, citing a dream interpreted by the Lacanian method. He contrasts this with the Jungian way, neither textual nor reductive but rather imaginal. His contention here, as it is throughout the book, is that the unconscious has a purpose. Following Freud, Lacanians emphasize the semiotics and “semantics of desire.” (Ricoeur) For Adams, Jungians focus instead on the “semantics of individuation.”

In this respect an unbidden image from the unconscious offers more than a hint of past slips but can be a psychopomp into the “unknown.”

As an animal that does not exist in external reality, the unicorn is the very epitome of the “pure” imagination: the apparently purposive capacity of the psyche to produce images neither under the causal, mimetic influence of external reality not at the volitional discretion of the ego. (p. 397)

The final chapter addresses the large question of “‘Destiny’ and the Call to Heroism.” When a graduate student heard Adams tell of his unicorn dream as he was about to release this book, he related one of his own.

In the dream –“Rendezvous with Destiny” – a niece by the name of Destiny shows him two rings on his hands, which contain powerful cosmic scenes, including Merlin, a dragon and a unicorn. The dreamer’s ego-image diminishes the value of the rings, seeing them as plastic and considering himself unworthy of such gifts, thus refusing “the call.” This “big dream” suggested to Adams a call to destiny, which the student felt he could not live up to, given his racist and violent background.

This summons to amor fati – individuation – takes heroic efforts, even if these are only the “heroism of everyday life.” Like von Franz, Whitmont, and Nietzsche, Adams considers that the dragons we must overcome are usually traditional values that must be “transvaluated.”

When Adams responds to the student’s dream by advising him to kill the dragon – a theme that recurs when dragons appear in myths and dreams and how they are often interpreted in Jungian style (regression to the unconscious) – the student strongly dissents, asking “why does everyone want to kill them?”

After reflecting on a film trailer advertisement promoting Marine recruitment with the theme of “killing the dragon,” – ironically in 2000 before the September 11 atta cks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon – the author wisely concedes that perhaps it is not always wise to do so. Perhaps in the end, he confesses, it is the student who must wisely chose to “slay the dragon” (Adams) in order to individuate.

–Murray Shugar