The Power of Myth

The Power of Myth is a work by Joseph Campbell (1988).

Core claims

• The Power of Myth does not explain mythology to a general audience so much as it performs the very function Campbell attributes to myth itself — it converts tertiary religious meaning (inherited symbols drained of affect) into something approaching originative experience through the medium of conversation as ritual.
• Campbell’s famous injunction to “follow your bliss” is not hedonistic advice but a secularized restatement of the Jungian individuation imperative, stripped of clinical framing and relocated in the aesthetic-shamanic register Campbell derived from James Joyce rather than from depth psychology proper.
• The book’s most radical and least examined move is its insistence that meaning is not what myth delivers — that “mythology is psychology misread as cosmology, history and biography” — which places Campbell closer to Zen emptiness and Hillman’s anti-literalism than to the Jungian quest for wholeness with which he is routinely associated.

Related questions

• How does Campbell’s distinction between the symbol of “engagement” and the symbol of “disengagement” compare to Hillman’s critique of literalized archetypal images in Re-Visioning Psychology, and do they arrive at compatible or fundamentally opposed conclusions about the function of the image?
• Campbell insists that myth delivers not meaning but “the experience of being alive,” while Edinger in Ego and Archetype treats mythic symbols as precise diagnostic indicators of the ego-Self axis — can these two positions be reconciled, or does Campbell’s aesthetic emphasis dissolve the clinical precision Edinger depends on?
• In what ways does Campbell’s reliance on Joyce’s “creative mythology” as the post-traditional path forward anticipate or diverge from Jung’s own late alchemical writings, particularly Mysterium Coniunctionis, where the opus is explicitly described as an individual creative act rather than a collective inheritance?

See also

• Library page: /library/myth-and-religion/campbell-power-of-myth/

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