The Vienna School vs. the Postmodern playground

Yesterday after packing the car to leave tomorrow i spent the afternoon reading Herbert Silberer's "Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts," which I picked up synchronistically at Caliban's the other day. Silberer was part of Freud and Jung's set in Vienna, and his work with alchemical symbolism predated and influenced Jung's own mounmental theories. The book is an intepretation of an old alchemical parable, called the Parabola, through Freudian dream interpretation and then integratively through alchemical and spiritual symbolism, showing how the analytical pshyco-sexual interpretations can not do justice to material that seeks at its heart to rise the spirit above the gross matter of the individual mind.

Perhaps more interesting than the material itself is the ease with which Silberer refers to a variety of world mythologies, and almost takes for granted that the readers (his intended audience being Freud's set), are already familiar with the process of deconstructing the texts of mythology and folk-lore as if they were the dreams of an individual, including referencing the quote that "dreams are private myths and myths collective dreams" to someone else other than Joseph Campbell and predating the esteemed mythologist! Despite the continuation of this process in Jung and Campbell's work, the idea of interpreting cultural texts as exemplery of the collective psyche seems to have fallen into disfavor (if it was ever in favor), and psychology chooses to focus more and more on the depths of the individual psyche, leaving cultural criticism to the literary critics. This work however points to an older use of this technique that predated psychoanalysis as the aim of the Vienna school, that collected stories, myths, folklore, whether by the Brother's Grimm or adventurous anthropologists, in order to deeper understand the human psyche on a whole. Indeed Freud could not have given such prominence to the Oedipal complex if he was only looking at one person's (or his own) psyche, and not the preponderence of such themes in world mythology surrounding the dismemberment of the parent/ god figures.

Perhaps the closest we come to such "collective psychology" today is found in movie or book reviews, and then only in mortification over the snarkiness and self-referentiallity of the post-modern paradigm (I was wholly disgusted by a recent review of Shrek the Third in the New york times, which could only comment on how the movie was a parable for the ongoing battle between Disney and Dreamworks). Even modern myth-makers like George Lucas, whose original Star Wars trilogy was an homage to his friendship with Joseph Campbell and based directly off Campbell's writing on the hero's journey, have fallen prey to cutesy characters and in-jokes designed solely to hook a young crowd that can not relate their experiences to a deeper mythological spectrum than pop-stars and punch-and-judy style pratfalls. Many of the children in Sophie's after-school program talked incessently of World of Warcraft, which though like Harry Potter and Narnia are fantastic in scope, and many older RPG video games like the Final Fantasy series referenced mythological names and themas, this kind of mythology is only a surface aesthetic, and further removes children from looking closer at the deeper themes and dramas of the original source material. Pretending you are a sword-swinging elf does not replicate the psychological depth implied by the heroic labours of Hercules (and not the Disney version) nor Theseus's struggle through the labyrinth, which are in themselves only metaphors for rising above the twisted and dangerous depths of the individual mind.