SOURCE: Segal, Robert A. “Campbell as a Jungian.” In Joseph Campbell: An Introduction, pp. 125-35. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987.

In the following essay, Segal discusses whether or not Campbell could accurately be called a Jungian.

Joseph Campbell is often labeled a Jungian.¹ He is certainly not a Jungian analyst and has undergone no Jungian analysis. If he is a Jungian, it is because he shares Jung's view of myth.

Campbell does cite Jung approvingly throughout his writings, far more often than he cites any other theorist of myth. Again and again, he favorably contrasts Jung's understanding of myth to that of not only nonpsychologists—for example, those who read myth literally—but, most conspicuously, Freud. He contrasts Jung's appreciation of the higher, adult meaning of myth to Freud's dismissive reduction of it to its childhood, sexual origins:

Myths, according to Freud's view, are of the psychological order of...