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In September, 2012, participants gathered at the Petros M. Nomikos Conference Centre on the island of Santorini for the second Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche conference. This volume is a collection of papers by the seven contributors, five of
them Jungian analysts, one a writer and film director, and one a writer and artist. As I read the book, I imagined the papers, stories, poetry, film, and dreams being read, chanted, performed, seen, heard, and felt near the edge of the massive caldera formed by a volcanic eruption 3,500 years ago. What better place to ‘delve into analytical psychology and its connection to the psychology of the ancient Greeks?’ (Rutter, p. xix).
A fundamental axiom of analytical psychology is that archetypes cannot be known in themselves, but only in the images, symbols, and patterns of behaviour which reveal them. As Jung states, ‘archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree’. The form of an archetype, he continues, ‘might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own’ (CW 9i, para. 155). In other words, archetypes represent a predisposition towards the crystallization of certain consistent patterns in the ‘mother liquid’ of the individual and collective psyche. But these kaleidoscopic structures are neither rigid nor static. The myths of ancient Greece, in all their richness and variety, constantly evolved to mirror the Greeks ‘shifting experience and emerging consciousness’. Today, thousands of years later, can we still find meaning in these archetypal stories? Do the figures of Apollo and Hermes, Demeter and Persephone, Herakles and Odysseus, still animate us today?
The papers in this book demonstrate that they do. But the forms of the individual contributions are as plastic and fluid as archetypal images themselves. The book begin