Myth as a universal language of the psyche

Myth endures because it speaks in a language older than reason the language of image, symbol, and archetype. Carl Jung described myths as the “primordial images” of the collective unconscious, patterns that emerge across cultures because they express psychic truths shared by all humanity.

The myth of Persephone’s descent, for instance, recurs in countless guises

• The seasonal cycle

• The experience of depression

• The archetypal journey into shadow.

Myth expresses in story what the psyche experiences in silence.

James Hillman deepened this view by suggesting that myth is not simply about something but is itself a mode of psyche. For Hillman, to speak mythically is to engage the soul’s imagination, to enter into a field where literal meaning gives way to symbolic resonance. Myth is not reducible to metaphorical “lessons”; it is the psyche speaking to itself in images, giving form to what would otherwise remain ineffable.

Joseph Campbell, similarly, saw myth as a “map of the human heart,” offering orientation across the stages of life. From the call to adventure to the return myth provides a structure through which individuals can understand their own struggles, losses, and triumphs as part of a larger archetypal pattern. Myths situate personal experience within a collective drama, allowing the individual to feel both less alone and more connected to the depths of existence.

In therapeutic contexts, this universality is crucial. A client struggling with grief may find resonance not in abstract theories of “stages of loss” but in the image of Inanna descending into the underworld, stripped of all she possesses before returning renewed. Another may see their own survival mirrored in Hansel and Gretel’s resourcefulness, or their entrapment reflected in the Minotaur’s labyrinth. These stories function as mirrors and guides: they validate suffering while pointing toward transformation. In this way, myth is not decorative but essential a symbolic system that articulates what psyche already knows.

The Therapeutic Function of Story

Stories are not only reflections of experience; they actively shape the way human beings understand themselves and their world. In psychology, narrative theory suggests that identity is formed through the stories we tell about our lives. When those stories are fragmented, distorted, or silenced by trauma, the sense of self becomes equally fractured.

Therapy, in this view, is not simply the removal of symptoms but the restoration or re-imagining of story.

Myth amplifies this process by offering larger, archetypal narratives into which personal experience can be woven.

Where clinical categories often reduce a person to a diagnosis depression, anxiety, trauma myth expands the field of meaning. A descent into depression may be lived as Persephone’s journey into Hades, a necessary passage through darkness that holds the seeds of renewal. A struggle with destructive impulses may be reframed as the battle with one’s own Minotaur, a confrontation with the beast in the labyrinth of the psyche. These stories do not deny suffering; they legitimise it, turning private pain into part of a larger, meaningful drama.

The therapeutic function of story, then, is twofold.

• First, it provides a container an image that can hold overwhelming experience without collapsing it into chaos.

• Second, it offers direction a sense that suffering has a place in the larger pattern of transformation. As Jung observed, “the Gods have become diseases,” meaning that without myth, archetypal energies manifest as pathology. Restoring the story restores the god, re-imagining illness as a symbolic encounter rather than a purely clinical deficit.

In my own practice, I have seen how clients resonate more deeply with metaphor than with explanation. To frame anxiety as a dragon that must be approached with courage, or addiction as a sorceress who enslaves, provides a language of engagement rather than judgement. Story enables dialogue with the psyche. It gives clients a way to imagine their suffering, to interact with it, and ultimately to transform their relationship to it.

Myth is medicine precisely because it refuses to reduce human experience to symptoms or statistics. It heals by expanding meaning, by affirming that every descent has an underworld, every ordeal a pattern, and every loss the possibility of renewal.

What Myths intrigue or fascinate you? I started studying fairly tales in 2016 and suspect this is a long haul self designed study programme. I use fairy tales in my work and see them as linguistic form a tarot they blend well with Hypnosis, Shamanism and of Course Jungian process work.

All the best Alexia