Author Description

We live in a world where cultural conceptions of psychology and mythology are increasingly overlapping, thanks to a centralized system of information sharing. The common thread responsible for this synthesis of ideas is a globally shared popular culture. Regardless of who we are and how we're raised, we consume the same media or, at least in large part, we all have access to it. As information technology rapidly evolves, the alarmingly escalated rate at which we are able to consume this media is changing not just the way we communicate, but the way we think. Our very consciousness is being altered as a result. But this is how it has always been. Whether we study this phenomenon through the lens of personal psychology, cultural anthropology, philosophy, or philology, we can see that ever since man was first able to construct metaphor, the means with which he did so determined how he perceived both his external reality and his internal identity. The focus of this book will not be to analyze how our cultural and personal sense of identity are changing, but to emphasize the ways in which they have always remained relatively the same. The primary classical works I will use as a reference will be CG Jung's study of the collective unconscious and its archetypes. I have drawn from the original German texts wherever possible, but the English translations of the works I'll most often consult are The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Psychology of the Unconscious, and Modern Man in Search of a Soul. My earnest effort will be to honestly present Jung's ideas alongside my own, though this risks re-interpreting his original text in a way that suggests more of a collaboration than is really possible. It is not my intention to in any way appropriate or distort the meaning of these ideas, only to present them in a fun new way for those who have not had the pleasure of studying Jung's work before. In order to harness Jung's ideas and hitch them to a familiar metaphor, I mean