Kerényi and Jung as One Organ

Karl Kerényi and C. G. Jung are not student and teacher, nor master and disciple. In Essays on a Science of Mythology (1949) they are two scholars working on a single subject from two sides of a seam. Kerényi writes the philological recovery of the Kore and the divine child; Jung writes the psychological amplification of the same figures. The book’s structure — Kerényi, Jung, Kerényi, Jung, Kerényi — is not editorial convenience; it is the Lineage’s two wings breathing in counterpoint.

The seam where they meet is Kerényi’s claim that mythology “revealed in its original context as material sui generis” has the same effect as the most direct psychology — “the effect, indeed, of an activity of the psyche externalised in images” (Kerényi 1951, p. 3). Myth, for Kerényi, is already what Jung calls psyche. Jung, reciprocally, reads the Kore and the child-archetype not as literary motifs but as structural figures of the individuating self.

The thread is load-bearing for the Lineage because it demonstrates that the classical-philological wing and the Jungian-core wing are not in competition for the same territory. They are one organ. Kerényi gives Jung the philological rigor that keeps the psychology from drifting into allegory; Jung gives Kerényi the psychological register that keeps the philology from drifting into antiquarianism.

Sources

• karl-kerenyi: mythology revealed in its original context has the effect of the most direct psychology (Kerényi 1951, p. 3)
• carl-jung: the child-archetype and the Kore are structural figures of psyche, not literary motifs (Jung and Kerényi 1949)
• james-hillman: attended Kerényi’s lectures at the Jung Institute in the 1950s and 1960s; Kerényi held out for the Greek view against Christianizing pressure (Kerényi 1944, translator’s preface)