Mythic Symbols & the Psyche
- K. Estcourt Hughes
- Dec 31, 2025
- 3 min read
When a person knows the myth they are living, even suffering gains context, and the path to a meaningful life begins to reveal itself.
Rome, according to legend, was founded by Romulus—raised alongside his twin brother by a she-wolf after being abandoned as an infant. Thebes, the myth says, was founded by Cadmus, an exiled prince guided by a cow, who slew a serpent and planted its teeth in the earth, from which its first citizens—fierce warriors—sprang fully formed.
Rational thought dismisses these stories easily. There was no wolf, or serpent, or warriors grown from teeth. Rome emerged from migrating Latins and Etruscans, and Thebes from Mycenaean settlers.
And yet...
Something essential lives in those myths. They are powerful mythic symbols that capture the temperament of a place; the way a people understands its own beginnings, its struggles, its character. Romans imagined themselves born of survival and ruthless resolve. Thebans imagined themselves born of exile, confrontation with nature, a hard-won social order.
Carl Jung observed that people carry two narratives about themselves as well. On the conscious level, we understand our lives as a sequence of facts: where we were born, what happened to us, what came next—a timeline.
Beneath this surface story, however, Jung identified deeper, unconscious patterns that shape how someone responds to events in their life. Think of it this way: your life can be read as a linear chain of decisions and events. But it is also organised around recurring patterns—emotional, relational, psychological—and themes that repeat, regardless of the circumstances.
It's often easier to spot these patterns in other people than ourselves...
We might catch up with a friend, for instance, and listen to them talk about a conflict at work. To them, the situation feels new. To us, it has a familiar shape—a repeating form wearing a new face. We recognise the pattern immediately. Yet when the same dynamics play out in our own lives, they feel singular, justified, inevitable.
Certain fears and desires refuse to be outgrown. Certain roles are replayed again and again. And over time, life can become entrenched—enslaved to unconscious beliefs we hold in place with elaborate, reasonable-sounding narratives.
But Jung believed we could break free...
He argued that the psyche knows what it needs for balance, growth, and wholeness—what he called individuation—and that it communicates these needs to the conscious mind in the only language it has available: symbols. These symbols surface most clearly in dreams, but also through fantasy, imagination, art, attraction, aversion, and sudden emotional charge. They are not personal inventions, but expressions of universal patterns Jung called archetypes.
When these symbolic messages are ignored, they do not disappear. They intensify. They repeat. They force themselves into life as conflict, anxiety, or crisis. But when they are taken seriously—interpreted rather than literalised—they offer orientation. They reveal the deeper story trying to unfold beneath the surface timeline.
In this sense, Jung did not believe we are meant to escape our patterns. He believed we are meant to understand them. Because the moment a pattern becomes conscious, it stops operating as fate, and starts functioning as meaning. At that point, life is no longer something that merely happens to us. It becomes a dialogue between who we have been and who we are in the process of becoming.
So, what is your myth? What shape do your monsters take? Which symbols nourish your spirit? What dragons must you face? Somewhere beneath the facts of your life, a story is already forming—one shaped by trials, thresholds, and transformation. To explore myth (personal or otherwise) it is not to indulge fantasy, but to recover orientation. Because when a person knows the myth they are living, even suffering gains context, and the path to a meaningful life begins to reveal itself.
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