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Is Greek Myth Misogynistic?

The Gorgon Medusa
Medusa: monster or victim?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Models, monsters, or victims? From Pandora and Medusa to Penelope, discover what Greek myth really says about women.

Greek mythology has captivated the Western imagination for almost three thousand years. Its stories of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels continue to inspire novels, films, paintings, and psychological and cultural theories. Yet, for all the reverence, modern readers are often struck by another recurring theme. Women seem repeatedly silenced or blamed, if not outright punished, pursued, or abducted.

The ancient Greeks undoubtedly lived in a patriarchal society. Political power, military glory, and public life belonged overwhelmingly to men, and many myths reflect the assumptions of the society that produced them. But Greek mythology is far too rich and varied to be reduced to a single attitude towards women. Some women serve as models of virtue, others as warnings against vice or excess; some are victims of gods and men, while others possess a power that rivals or even surpasses that of their male counterparts.

The women of Greek myth are queens and captives, wives and mothers, maidens and sorceresses, heroines and monsters. Together, they reflect the full spectrum of the Greek imagination. To understand what these stories are really saying about women—and about the civilisation that created them—we need to return to the myths themselves.

Pandora: The First Woman

Hesiod’s account of Pandora is among the earliest, and clearest, expressions of ancient Greek misogyny.

Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it, in a fennel stalk, to mankind. Not content with punishing Prometheus, Zeus set about also to punish mankind. He ordered Hephaestus to mould the first woman out of earth and water, and each of the other gods to endow her with a ‘seductive gift’. He named this living snare Pandora [Greek, ‘All-gifted’] and sent her off to Epimetheus with a jar of evils in dowry.

Prometheus had forewarned his slow-witted brother not to accept any gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus took Pandora in and soon married her. After the wedding, Pandora remembered the jar. Although she had been told not to open it, her curiosity got the better of her. As she unsealed the lid, she released every evil into the world, bringing man’s golden age to its close. Aghast, she hastened to replace the lid, but all the contents of the jar had already escaped—all, that is, except for hope.

Like Eve in Genesis, Pandora carries the blame for the fallen world in which we live. Like Eve, she is overwhelmed by the urge to do the very thing that had been forbidden to her. But whereas Eve succumbs to temptation, Pandora is herself the temptation. She is created not as a helpmeet, but as a punishment. As Hesiod puts it, in the simplest, most direct Greek, she is kalon kakon, ‘a beautiful evil’.

Nor is Pandora alone. Helen’s beauty launches a thousand ships and destroys a city. Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon upon his return from Troy. Phaedra’s forbidden desire destroys Hippolytus. Again and again, women appear as the catalysts of male suffering.

If these were the only women in Greek mythology, the charge of misogyny would be difficult to deny. But, of course, they are not.

Penelope: The Faithful Wife

Penelope embodies the ancient ideal of womanhood. For twenty years, while Odysseus wanders the seas, she waits for him in Ithaca. Besieged by over a hundred suitors who assume her husband to be dead, she preserves both her marriage and the kingdom through patience, intelligence, and deception. By day she weaves a funeral shroud for her father-in-law Laertes; by night she unpicks her work, delaying the choice of a new husband until Odysseus finally returns to slay the suitors. 

Unlike Helen, Clytemnestra, and Phaedra, Penelope preserves rather than destroys her household.  Unlike Pandora, who unleashes chaos, Penelope restores order. She is not merely faithful but resourceful, matching Odysseus’ own cunning with a quieter, domestic intelligence.

Although an archetype, Penelope is not an exception. We might also think of Nausicaa, Alcestis, and Antigone. When King Alcinous offers Odysseus his daughter’s hand in marriage, Odysseus, thinking of Penelope, politely declines. Nausicaa graciously accepts his refusal, asking only that he remember her as the one who saved his life.

In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus contrasts the chicanery of Orpheus in seeking to cheat death to be reunited with Eurydice with the willingness of Alcestis to lay down her life for her husband Admetus when not even his elderly parents would do so. Alcestis was allowed to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.

The goddesses, too, command profound respect. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and strategic intelligence, defies Zeus to champion Achilles; Artemis fiercely guards her independence; while Demeter’s grief at the loss of Persephone brings famine upon the earth. Male gods may rule Olympus, but they do not always have the final word.

Medusa: Monster or Victim?

No figure better illustrates the changing fortunes of women in Greek myth than Medusa. According to Ovid, when still a fair maiden, she was violated by Poseidon in a temple dedicated to Athena, who punished not Poseidon but Medusa, by turning her beautiful braids into snakes. Henceforth, anyone who met Medusa’s gaze would be turned into stone.

The treatment of Medusa by the Olympian gods is an epitome of rape culture: assaulted by Poseidon, who thought he had every right, and then blamed and punished for it by Athena in a case of one woman turning upon another to get in with the patriarchy. In fact, Athena and Medusa are not so different. Both represent a pole or extreme of how to deal with the threat of female autonomy, authority, and sexuality. A woman can be either a virgin or a mother, and if she is neither, she must be a whore or a monster.

Ovid’s origin story for Medusa is almost certainly a later elaboration of the original myth, which sits in the Perseus cycle—in which Medusa is presented as one of the three Gorgon sisters. Nonetheless, it captures the modern imagination: suddenly Medusa becomes another victim, and Perseus’ triumph acquires an unsettling moral ambiguity. Is this the defeat of an evil monster—or the final destruction of a blameless victim?

Medusa is both monster and victim. In this ambiguity or ambivalence, she is not alone. Helen oscillates between seductress and pawn, while Medea is at once a betrayed wife and an avenging murderess. Circe begins as a terrifying enchantress, before turning into Odysseus’s advisor and benefactor.

Philomela: The Silenced Voice

Ovid’s Metamorphoses reads almost as a catalogue of sexual assaults on women. Medusa, Daphne, Philomela, Io, Europa, Callisto…

Under the spell of Eros, Apollo fell head over heels for Daphne, and relentlessly pursued the sworn virgin. As he was about to catch up with her, she cried out, and her river god father Peneus turned her into a laurel tree. From then on, Apollo took to wearing laurel in his hair, whence the laurel wreath and our word ‘laureate’, as in, ‘Nobel Prize laureate’.

King Tereus raped his wife’s sister Philomela and then cut out her tongue. Unable to speak, she wove her ordeal into a tapestry and sent it to Procne, who in revenge killed her son by Tereus, cooked the boy, and served him up to his father. The sisters then presented Tereus with the boy’s severed head. As he pursued them with an axe, they prayed to be turned into birds: Philomela became the nightingale, and Procne the swallow.

Ovid’s pages are populated not only by dangerous women, but by women in danger. This growing sympathy may reflect Ovid’s own sensibilities, the influence of Greek tragedy, or changing attitudes over the centuries. Whatever the case, these women emerge not merely as symbols or warnings, but as fully human figures, capable of inspiring both horror and compassion.

The Greeks and Their Myths

Women in Ancient Egypt enjoyed many more rights than in classical Athens, for instance, the right to initiate divorce or dispose of property. In the art of the period, women are often depicted supporting or clasping their husband, and husband and wife referred to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, suggesting a relationship of near equality. In contrast, in classical Athens, women were regarded as chattel and were, in some respects, worse off than slaves. Aristotle, whose influence remains unsurpassed, regarded women as ‘deformed’ or ‘deficient’ males who lacked the deliberative capacity to rule. He even claimed that women had fewer teeth than men—when he could simply have looked into the mouth of Pythias, his wife (or perhaps his daughter; both bore the same name).

It would be surprising if the myths of the Greeks did not reflect their assumptions. Myth, however, is neither history nor ideology. It is less concerned with recording events or prescribing conduct than with exploring a culture’s deepest hopes, fears, and contradictions. Pandora expresses a fear of female autonomy and agency. Penelope embodies an ideal of fidelity and resourcefulness. Medusa explores the uneasy boundary between monster and victim. Philomela confronts the reality of violence and gives voice to the silenced victim. Athena, Artemis, and Demeter exercise an authority that surpasses even that of Agamemnon or Achilles. Rather than presenting a single image of womanhood, Greek mythology unfolds an entire panoply of female archetypes.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into the The Meaning of Myth.

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Odysseus, Homer, and the Story That Shaped the Western Imagination

Odysseus and Calypso
Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus and Calypso (1883). Offered eternity, Odysseus chooses home.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

‘Tell me, Muse, of the man of many twists and turns…’ Few openings in literature are more famous—or revealing. The Greek is simpler still: andra, ‘the man’. Not the warrior, nor the king, nor the conqueror. Simply the man. It is an extraordinary way to begin. Homer could have sung of the Wooden Horse, the sack of Troy, or the countless heroes who fought and fell beneath its walls. His earlier epic, the Iliad, opens on overpowering passion: ‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles…’ One poem begins with wrath; the other with a person. One asks how a hero should fight and die; the other how a human being should live. Perhaps that is why, after nearly three thousand years, the Odyssey still feels so astonishingly alive.

Homer himself never seems to tire of Odysseus. He gives him more epithets than any other character: ‘the man of many sorrows’ (polypenthes), ‘the man of many devices’ (polymetis), ‘the man of many twists and turns’ (polytropos), and a score more. No single description suffices. Odysseus is king and sailor, warrior and diplomat, husband and father, beggar and storyteller, trickster and survivor. The first epithet Homer picks out for him, polytropos, has defeated generations of eminent translators. It has been rendered, among others, as ‘much-wandering’, ‘complicated’, ‘resourceful’, ‘versatile’, and ‘of many twists and turns’. All capture something of Homer’s meaning, but none exhaust it. Whereas Achilles burns with a single, blinding excellence, Odysseus is of many parts. He changes with circumstance without ceasing to be himself.

Nowhere is this more delightfully illustrated than in the adventure with the Cyclops. Trapped inside the cave of Polyphemus, with no hope of overcoming the giant by force, Odysseus reaches for his greatest weapon: not his sword, but his wits. When asked his name, he replies, ‘Nobody.’ It is one of the oldest jokes in literature, and has scarcely aged. When the blinded Cyclops bellows that ‘Nobody’ has attacked him, his neighbours abandon him to his fate. Yet there are hidden depths to the comedy. Although Homer gives Odysseus more names than anyone else, the man’s greatest triumph comes from altogether surrendering his name. He survives by becoming Nobody. Only when his ship has safely put out to sea does he make the mistake of shouting his true name back across the waves. For one irresistible moment, the old heroic code reasserts itself—inviting Poseidon’s vengeance and prolonging the homeward journey by ten more years.

Here, perhaps, we arrive at the deepest difference between Homer’s two great heroes. Achilles is the supreme warrior, swift-footed and godlike, the embodiment of an aristocratic world in which honour is won on the battlefield and a glorious death is preferable to an obscure life. Faced with the choice between longevity and everlasting fame, he chooses fame without hesitation. Odysseus belongs to the same heroic age, yet already points beyond it. He fights not to die gloriously, but to live. His greatest victories are won not by brute strength but slippery guile. A civilisation founded upon Achilles would always risk being at war. A civilisation founded upon Odysseus might one day know peace and prosperity.

Again and again, Homer shows us what Odysseus longs for. Not glory. Not pleasure. Not even immortality. Home. When Calypso offers him eternal youth and everlasting life, he refuses. He knows that Penelope has grown older during his absence, and that she cannot offer him the eternal youth of an immortal goddess. Yet he pines for her all the same. He longs for Telemachus, for the columns of smoke rising above Ithaca, for the domestic life he left behind. Homer gives us one unforgettable image of the meaning of home. When Penelope, still testing the stranger before her, orders a servant to move their marriage bed, Odysseus protests that the bed cannot be displaced. For it was he who, long ago, fashioned it around the living trunk of an olive tree. Home, Homer suggests, is something like that, something living and deeply rooted, something that binds and shapes us. If Achilles seeks to transcend the human condition, Odysseus embraces it.

Perhaps that is why we feel so close to him. Homer never presents Odysseus as an invulnerable hero. He is brave, but he is also afraid; ingenious, yet capable of foolishness; resilient, yet often overwhelmed by grief. Indeed, the first time we meet him he is not fighting monsters but sitting alone on Calypso’s island, gazing across the sea towards Ithaca. Later he weeps again as the bard Demodocus sings of Troy, unable to hear his own story without reliving its pain. Homer never hides his hero’s tears, because he understands that strength and sorrow are not opposites but companions.

Perhaps this is also why Homer has a soft spot for him. We might admire Achilles, but we love Odysseus. Achilles may dazzle us, but he would also kill and dismember us, whereas Odysseus would sit down and tell us a story. Homer delights in his resourcefulness—which is, of course, a reflection of his own—but lingers just as tenderly over the moments of recognition that punctuate the poem. None is more moving than the meeting with Argos. Twenty years have passed since Odysseus sailed for Troy. The old hunting dog now lies neglected on a dung heap outside the palace, blind, flea-ridden, and too weak to stand. Yet as Odysseus approaches, disguised as a beggar, Argos lifts his head. He knows. His tail gives a final wag. Then he dies. Odysseus cannot embrace him. To reveal himself would be to risk everything. He can only turn away and brush a tear from his cheek.

We think of Odysseus as one of Homer’s two great heroes. Yet, he scarcely resembles the archetypal hero of myth. Lord Raglan famously identified twenty-two recurring features of mythical and legendary heroes, among them a miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, royal destiny, victory over monsters, a mysterious or sacrificial death… Figures such as Moses and Oedipus satisfy most of these criteria. Odysseus fulfils only eight. By the standards of comparative mythology, the greatest hero in Western literature turns out to be strangely incomplete. Which is, of course, precisely the point. He is no miracle child, no predestined saviour, no invulnerable demigod. He is simply a man—of exceptional intelligence and resilience, certainly, but recognisably human throughout.

For all its monsters, enchantresses, storms, and marvels, the Odyssey is not ultimately a poem about adventure. It is a poem about home: about memory, fidelity, identity, and belonging. Odysseus does not journey merely to recover his kingdom. He journeys to recover himself. This is why the Odyssey still speaks to us.

Or perhaps that is only part of the explanation. For many tales have been told of exile and homecoming. Many heroes have endured suffering, temptation, and loss. This raises another question. Why did this particular story become one of the foundational stories by which an entire civilisation came to understand itself?

The answer cannot simply be that the Odyssey is a great poem. Great stories abound. Homer became much more than a great storyteller. He became the educator of Greece. Long before Socrates knocked about, generations of Greeks had learnt from Homer what courage looked like, what honour demanded, what it meant to be a husband, a father, a king, a host, a guest—even what it meant to be human. His poems furnished the imaginative material from which philosophy itself would arise.

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates often begins an investigation with a Homeric commonplace. Plato himself repeatedly challenged Homer, even proposing, in the Republic, to banish poets (meaning mainly Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides) from his ideal city. Yet, Plato quotes Homer so frequently that he seems unable to think without him. Even as he seeks to supplant Homer as Greece’s teacher, he continues to converse with him. Aristotle is more admiring, praising Homer as the unsurpassed master of epic poetry. The three greatest philosophers of antiquity differed profoundly in temperament and outlook. Yet all three remained rooted in Homer, each responding to him in his own way.

That is what distinguishes a foundational story from a work of literature, however great it might be. It does not merely entertain or even inspire. It furnishes the imaginative world within which a civilisation comes to understand itself. Successive generations may react to it, reinterpret it, or seek, like Plato, to transcend it—but always from within it.

Every civilisation seems to possess one or two such treasures. India has the Mahabharata, Persia, the Shahnameh, the Hebrew world, the stories of the Bible. Remarkably few people, though they may keep a copy, read these vast works from cover to cover. Many Europeans and Americans who revere Homer have never read the Iliad or Odyssey, just as many Indians, though familiar with the Pandava brothers, have never pored over the hundred thousand verses of the Mahabharata. We do not choose these stories any more than we choose our native language. We inherit them. They become part of our mental landscape, furnishing our images, our ideals, and our sense of what it means to be brave, faithful, cunning, or wise.

They are as the sacred fire tended by the Vestal Virgins in ancient Rome: seldom approached, yet somehow reassuring simply because it continues to burn. Quietly, they illuminate the language, values, and images through which successive generations come to understand themselves. Because they are so rich, they are never exhausted. Each age returns to them with new questions and finds new answers.

The history of the Odyssey is, in part, a history of these returns. James Joyce transformed Odysseus into Leopold Bloom, erring not across the wine-dark sea but through the sooty streets of Dublin. Derek Walcott carried the Odyssey to the Caribbean, discovering in it a language for exile, colonialism, and homecoming.

The Odyssey is an ancient poem about one man’s journey home. Perhaps that is why we have never stopped returning to it.

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If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of how myths become enduring sources of meaning, shaping not only our imagination but the civilisations we inherit.

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Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil. – Nietzsche

Splitting is a very common ego defense mechanism; it can be defined as the division or polarization of beliefs, actions, objects, or persons into good and bad by focusing selectively on their positive or negative attributes. This is often seen in politics, for example, when members of the Labour Party portray members of the Conservative Party as narrow-minded and self-interested, and conversely when members of the Conservative Party caricature members of the Labour Party as self-righteous hypocrites. Other examples of splitting are the deeply religious person who thinks of others as being either blessed or damned, the child of divorced parents who idolises one parent and shuns the other, and the hospital in-patient who sees the doctors as helpful and dedicated and the nurses as lazy and incompetent. An example of splitting in literature can be found in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The main protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is mystified by adulthood. To help cope with his fear of becoming an adult, he thinks of adulthood as a world of entirely bad things such as superficiality and hypocrisy (‘phoniness’) and of childhood as a world of entirely good things such as innocence, curiosity, and honesty. He tells his younger sister Phoebe that he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play, and himself as the ‘catcher in the rye’ who stands on the edge of a cliff, catching the children as they threaten to fall over (and presumably die/become adults).

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

In contrast to JD Salinger, Miguel de Cervantes uses splitting to great comical effect as his main protagonist, the self-styled Don Quixote de la Mancha, guides us through a world that he has repopulated with heroes and villains, princesses and harlots, giants and dwarves – with the heroes being the greatest, the villains the most cruel, the ladies the fairest and most virtuous, and so on. ‘Take care, your worship,’ cries Sancho Pancha, Don Quixote’s peasant-turned-squire, ‘those things over there are not giants but windmills.’ Splitting diffuses the anxiety that arises from our inability to grasp the nuances and complexities of a given situation or state of affairs by simplifying and schematising the situation and thereby making it easier to think about; it also reinforces our sense of self as good and virtuous by effectively demonizing all those who do not share in our opinions and values. On the other hand, such a compartmentalization of opposites leaves us with a distinctly distorted picture of reality and a restricted range of thoughts and emotions; it also affects our ability to attract and maintain relationships, not only because it is tedious and unbecoming, but also because it can easily flip, with friends and lovers being thought of as personified virtue at one time and then as personified vice at another (and back and forth). Splitting also arises in groups, when members of the in-group are seen to have mostly positive attributes, whereas members of out-groups are seen to have mostly negative attributes – a phenomenon that contributes to groupthink. Finally, it is worth noting that both fairy tales and the Church feature a number of sharp splits, for example, heroes and villains, good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, and saints and sinners; and that the greatest characters of literature, such as the Achilles or the Odysseus of Homer and the Anthony or the Cleopatra of Shakespeare, contain large measures of both good and bad, with the one being intimately related to the other.

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Psychiatrist, Mystic, Visionary

When Jung met Freud
On their first meeting in Vienna, Jung and Freud exchanged for 13 hours straight.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Article substantially revised on 1 August 2026.

Carl Jung transformed psychology by exploring symbols, myths, dreams, and the hidden depths of the unconscious. Breaking with Sigmund Freud, he developed some of the most influential—and controversial—ideas in modern psychology, including the collective unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, and individuation.

An Extraordinary Family

Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 to Paul Jung, a poor rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, and Emilie Preiswerk, a melancholic who claimed to be visited by spirits.

His paternal grandfather, after whom he was named, was a physician who was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Goethe, and rose to become Rector of Basel University and Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of Free Masons.

His maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, was a theologian who had visions, conversed with the dead, and devoted his life to learning Hebrew in the belief that it was the language spoken in Heaven (actually, it’s Greek).

When Jung was just three years old, his mother had a nervous breakdown and spent several months in hospital. In his memoirs of 1961, he wrote: ‘From then on I always felt mistrustful when the word ‘love’ was spoken. The feeling I associated with ‘woman’ was for a long time that of innate unreliability.’

Jung’s father was kind but weak-willed, and, in Jung’s mind, too accepting of the religious dogma in which he had long lost all faith.

Childhood Years

Jung was a solitary child who imagined that he had two personas, that of a schoolboy of his time, and that of an authority from the past.

He once carved a tiny mannequin into the end of a wooden ruler, which he kept together with a painted stone in a pencil case in the attic. He periodically returned to the mannequin, bringing to it scrolls inscribed in a secret language of his own making.

Needless to say, he was bullied at school. At the age of 12, he received a blow to the head. He lay on the ground for much longer than necessary, and thought, ‘Now you won’t have to go to school anymore.’

For the next six months, he avoided going to school by fainting each time his parents tried to make him—an episode that gave him an early insight into hysteria.

Medicine, Psychiatry, and the Shadow

In 1895, inspired by a dream, Jung went to the University of Basel to study natural science and medicine. His father’s premature death one year later prompted his mother to comment, rather eerily, that ‘he died in time for you’.

During his studies, he had a dream in which he was battling against dense fog, with a tiny light in the cup of his hands and a giant black figure chasing after him. When he awoke, he realised that the black figure was his own shadow, brought into being by the light that he was carrying: ‘…this light was my consciousness, the only light that I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest.’

This dream helped to inspire Jung’s concept of the ‘shadow’, which comprises those aspects of ourselves that we reject or repress. For Jung, the more we deny the shadow, the more power it gains over us. To become more fully ourselves, we must reckon with our shadow.

After presenting a paper on The Limits of the Exact Sciences, Jung spent two years recording the séances of a young medium, his cousin, Hélène Preiswerk. He submitted his observations in the form of a doctoral thesis entitled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.

As he neared the end of his studies, a reading of Krafft-Ebing’s textbook of psychiatry led him straight into psychiatry. The preface alone had such a profound impact on him that he had to stand up to catch his breath: ‘Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found.’

He was taken on at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zürich as an assistant to Eugen Bleuler, the man who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’. Bleuler set him to work on Galton’s word-association test, and in 1906 he published Studies in Word Association, which, he claimed, provided hard evidence for the existence of unconscious complexes.

Freud and the Collective Unconscious

Jung sent a copy of Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud, and on their first meeting in Vienna, the pair exchanged for 13 hours straight—with or without toilet breaks, history does not record.

Jung needed a father as much as Freud needed a son, and Freud anointed Jung his ‘son and heir’. But Jung became increasingly dissatisfied with Freud’s assumptions that human motivation is entirely sexual and that the unconscious mind is exclusively personal.

For Jung, sexuality was but one aspect of a broader life force, and beneath the personal unconscious lay a deeper layer that contained the entire psychic heritage of humankind. This ‘collective unconscious’ had been pointed to by his childhood dreams and experiences and by the delusions and hallucinations of his patients, which contained symbols that recurred in myths and legends from all over the world.

Whereas the personal unconscious contains the repressed memories unique to each individual, the collective unconscious is common to all human beings. It is the deepest and oldest layer of the psyche, and the source of humanity’s common symbols and images.

In his book of 1912, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung replaced Freud’s concept of libido with a much broader concept of undifferentiated psychic energy, which could crystallize into universal symbols such as the hero’s slaying of the dragon, which represents the struggle of the ego for deliverance from parental dominance.

These universal symbols, or archetypes, include such recurring figures as the Hero, the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Trickster, and the Shadow. Archetypes arise from the collective unconscious and recur in dreams, myths, and folk tales from all around the world.

For Jung, life’s purpose was individuation, which involves integrating the conscious and the unconscious by pursuing one’s personal vision of the truth, and, in so doing, realizing one’s fullest potential as a human being. For Jung, the aim of life was neither perfection nor happiness, but wholeness.

If this meant falling out with Freud, then so be it. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung and Freud broke off their relationship.

Carl Jung 1909 portrait
Carl Jung in 1909. ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’

Confrontation with the Unconscious

Jung spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that verged upon psychosis and led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.

By then, he had had five children with Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a rich industrialist. Despite being happily married, he felt that he needed a muse as well as a homemaker, observing that ‘the pre-requisite of a good marriage … is the license to be unfaithful’.

The marital strife that resulted from his affairs, notably with a former patient called Toni Wolff, contributed to his troubled state of mind, and Emma tolerated Toni as much from a concern for Jung’s sanity as from a desire to salvage the remnants of her marriage.

As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘a matrix of mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’.

Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Herakles before him, he journeyed to an underworld where he conversed with Salome, a mysterious young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard and the wings of a kingfisher. Although Philemon and Salome were products of his unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. Jung later recorded many of these visions and conversations in what became known as The Red Book, which was not published until 2009.

In Philemon, Jung at long last found the father figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the ‘wise old man of Zürich’.

As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the prima materia for a lifetime’s work’.

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I revisit Jung in The Meaning of Madness and Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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