Abstract Book of the 10th International Conference on Research in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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What Are Myths For?
Vedanta Jha
ABSTRACT:
In this essay, I will address the question, “What are myths for?” and argue that one plausible purpose is to express the innate human reaction to the Fear of the Unknown (FOTU). To establish this argument, I will analyze the psychological foundations of myths, focusing mainly on Carl Jung’s theories, which view myths as cultural artifacts and expressions of the human unconscious.
Jung, one of the most influential figures in psychology, introduced the concept of the collective unconscious.
The collective unconscious comprises a collection of knowledge and imagery that every person is born with and is shared by all human beings due to ancestral experience. Though humans may not know what thoughts and images are in their collective unconscious, it is thought that subconsciously, the Human mind, or as Jung calls it, “psyche” (Jung, 1921, para 797), can tap into it. (Carducci, 2020) Jung contends that the entirety of mythology could be understood as a projection of the collective unconscious. Myths, therefore, are not just stories or cultural relics but are deeply connected to the fundamental structures of the human mind. (Jung, 1960, p. 152) In this essay, I will first examine in detail how Jung conceptualizes myths, notably how he posits that myths are an expression of the collective unconscious. I will then explore how the Fear of the Unknown aligns with Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. While Jung is not the only theorist of Myth, many other scholars have offered diverse perspectives on the nature and function of myths (Segal, 2011, p89). In this essay, I will primarily focus on Jung’s theories to establish my argument.
Keywords: Mythology, collective unconscious, Jung, Fear of the Unknown, psychological analysis