The term 'personal myth' occupies a generative, if tensioned, position within the depth-psychological corpus. Its locus classicus is Jung's own autobiographical confession in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, where he announced that he was undertaking to tell his 'personal myth' — not factual autobiography, but the living symbolic narrative by which a psyche orients itself. This gesture was not merely rhetorical: it followed directly from Jung's crisis of mythlessness documented in Symbols of Transformation, where the completion of that work confronted him with the question of what myth he himself was living. The term thus carries two registers simultaneously: the individual's unique symbolic self-understanding, and a critique of modernity's severance from mythic orientation. Campbell amplified the concept toward praxis, arguing that discovering one's personal myth means activating imagination to find 'that which your own unconscious wants to meditate on.' Hollis, writing from a clinical Jungian vantage, insists we are never without myth — only ever in service to either soul-consonant or soul-inimical imagos. The tension between the personal and the collective runs throughout: Campbell and Campbell-influenced commentators treat the personal myth as derived from collective symbolic reserves; Neumann and Giegerich resist collapsing transpersonal myth into personal narrative. Hillman, characteristically, relocates myth away from individual psychology altogether, though his work on pathology-as-mythology remains a persistent interlocutor.
In the library
17 substantive passages
"what is the myth you are living?" I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth... So in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know "my" myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks
This passage establishes the foundational Jungian formulation: the discovery of one's personal myth is not optional enrichment but an ethical and therapeutic necessity — the 'task of tasks' — arising from the encounter with mythlessness.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
"Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only 'tell stories.' Whether or not the stories are 'true' is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth."
Peterson cites Jung's opening to Memories, Dreams, Reflections to demonstrate that the personal myth is framed not as objective history but as subjective symbolic truth — a fable that is nonetheless the individual's most authentic utterance.
Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
Hardly had I finished the manuscript when it struck me what it means to live with a myth, and what it means to live without one.
Jung identifies the precise biographical moment — the completion of Symbols of Transformation — at which the necessity of a personal myth became undeniable, revealing mythlessness as a modern psychological condition demanding remedy.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
"So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and this I regarded as my task of tasks." It's my belief that there is no longer
Campbell transmits Jung's account of self-mythological inquiry as a universal imperative, framing the personal myth not as Jung's idiosyncrasy but as a template for modern individuation practice.
Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004thesis
Hollis's chapter title encapsulates his core clinical claim: that the personal myth is not a luxury of self-reflection but a psychological necessity for authentic living, the absence of which produces suffering.
Hollis, James, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001thesis
he began the work of discovering his myth. He found that his dreams were becoming very important to him and very rich; he began writing about his dreams in a little journal.
Campbell describes Jung's methodological approach to uncovering personal myth through dreamwork and active imagination, presenting it as a reproducible psychological practice accessible to any individual.
Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004supporting
we are never without myth. The only question is: do the charged imagos to which our psyche is in service support the teleology of our own souls, or are they inimical?
Hollis reframes the personal myth not as something to be found from scratch but as already operative — the question is whether the governing imagos align with or obstruct the soul's deeper trajectory.
Hollis, James, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001supporting
all these myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life.
Campbell articulates the constructive dimension of personal myth: the individual selects from the collective reservoir of mythic images those that resonate, weaving them into a singular life-form.
Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004supporting
the way to find your myth is to find your zeal, to find your support, and to know what stage of life you're in.
Campbell offers a practical heuristic for accessing personal myth, grounding it in vocational passion, relational support, and developmental timing rather than abstract self-analysis.
Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004supporting
a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.
This passage — citing Campbell — establishes the structural chiasm between collective myth and personal dream, positioning personal myth as the individual's interior counterpart to the social mythological function.
Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting
a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.
Campbell's formulation of the public/private myth dialectic provides the theoretical infrastructure for understanding personal myth as the individualized face of a universally operative symbolic process.
Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting
each of us individually as we embark upon a similar quest that Jung took, to discover a myth of expanding consciousness for ourselves.
Peterson extends the personal myth concept to recovery culture, arguing that the Twelve Steps function as a contemporary vehicle for the same individuation-through-myth that Jung undertook privately.
Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting
all myths move within us, some more dominant than others, some appearing in the guise of our 'outer world', all weaving the tapestry of the individual scheme of one's fate.
Greene, integrating Jungian and astrological frameworks, presents personal myth as the dynamic interweaving of multiple mythic patterns within a single fate, resisting any reductive single-myth identification.
Jung simply by describing his own psychological ideational processes as 'mythologizing'
Hillman observes that Jung's self-description as mythologizing — rather than merely theorizing — implicitly enacts the personal myth concept, making mythic engagement inseparable from psychological self-understanding.
the psyche needs to know the meaning of its existence — not just any meaning, but the meaning of those images and ideas which reflect its nature and which originate in the unconscious.
Jung grounds the necessity of personal myth in a fundamental psychic need: not generic meaning, but meaning arising from images native to one's own unconscious — the functional definition of personal myth.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting
Our myth, however, insists that ego is strengthened and full personality achieved away from familial ties and pressures.
Hillman uses the concept of myth critically to expose the unacknowledged mythological assumptions governing Western psychology's valorization of individual independence, implicitly challenging naïve personal-myth narratives.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989aside
The myth, being a projection of the transpersonal collective unconscious, depicts transpersonal events
Neumann's insistence on myth's transpersonal character implicitly resists the personalization of myth, setting up a theoretical tension with the personal myth concept's emphasis on individual symbolic narrative.
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019aside