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We need story to guide our lives. Mythic Imagination Today explores the fundamental human drive to create meaningful narratives both to guide us as individuals and to preserve and evolve culture more broadly. This drive brings patients to treatment in an effort to make sense of their world and create their own narrative, their own “myth,” in the best sense of the word. Marks-Tarlow gives us a Joseph Campbell type of analysis, updated for our current zeitgeist, including emphasizing the importance of the right-brain and the feminine.
Myths are the universal dreams of a culture. Serving as outer stories for inner experiences, they identify paradigms in development. Just as Freud used the myth of Oedipus to understand a fundamental pattern, we can use myth to learn more about the longings and heartaches of our patients today and gain new understandings. This is crucial, as concepts and symbols become tired and obsolete. An example is the female Oedipus complex, occurring from approximately ages 3 to 6, when the little girl leaves the mother-daughter dyad and enters into a triangular phase, which now includes the father. According to psychoanalysts Nancy Kulish and Deanna Holtzman, much of what is written about the Oedipus complex does not apply to females, in part due to Freud's lack of understanding of primary femininity. Kulish and Holtzman (2008) renamed this complex the Persephone Complex, referencing,
among other factors, the ongoing difficulties with separation-individuation and the expression of aggression in the female during this period. The little girl must separate from, and compete with, the caretaker on whom she depends.
In the myth, Persephone is abducted by Hades, God of the Underworld. Persephone screams for her mother, the goddess Demeter, as she is taken. Demeter desperately searches for her, and eventually with the help of her husband Zeus, Demeter and Persephone reunite. A compromise (resolution) is reached among the gods. Persephone lives as a sex