“The most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress.”

—  C.G. Jung

The Psychology of the Child Archetype [Das göttliche Kind] (1941), 1963 translation, II, 1 : The Archetype as a Link with the Past; also in Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part I, p. 160
Context: Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language. (Indeed, language itself is only an image.) The most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being. The archetype — let us never forget this — is a psychic organ present in all of us. A bad explanation means a correspondingly bad attitude toward this organ, which may thus be injured. But the ultimate sufferer is the bad interpreter himself.

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C.G. Jung 257
Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytic… 1875–1961

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