Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life

by D. Stephenson Bond

Overview

Living Myth explores the dilemma of how to live life creatively at a time when the dominant myths of our culture are losing their power to give meaning to our lives. Using C. G. Jung's idea of discovering a "personal myth," D. Stephenson Bond reflects on the psychology of mythic imagination, as a force in both culture and individual life. He argues that meaning is experienced subjectively through the stirring of imagination and fantasy in the individual, which touches the larger impersonal, archetypal patterns. The book offers hopeful insights into the possibilities of cultural renewal and individual meaning through the restoration of the imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781570626845
Publisher:	Shambhala
Publication date:	05/01/2001
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	867,409
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

D. Stephenson Bond is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst-in-training in private practice in North Andover and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He formerly served as a minister in the Disciples of Christ Church.

Editorial Reviews

Since Bill Moyers's public television interviews with Joseph Campbell a few years ago, which were subsequently published as The Power of Myth (Doubleday, 1988), a number of books have explored the importance of myths. According to the current author and other adherents of Campbell and C.G. Jung, myths arise from the collective unconscious, defined as that part of a person, which is attuned to the evolutionary development of the species and which speaks to individuals through dreams and fantasies. Jung's Man and His Symbols (1964) is still the best introduction to this material. Bond offers little new information. A better, more recent choice for public libraries is Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul (HarperCollins, 1992), which covers much the same material in a more interesting and concrete fashion.-- Mary Ann Hughes, Washington State Univ . Lib . , Pullman

Library Journal